passion for place, but it governs Frenchmen, Germans, and Irishmen quite as much as Indians, and for the same reason. Everywhere in the world except in England place gives dignity as well as money, brings its owner within the great corporation which is not harassed by policemen, or overlooked by rulers, or treated with contumely by the masses of mankind. Thirst of money alone is not the motive, for Frenchmen and Germans will accept starvation wages from the State; it is the hunger for distinction. This hunger is intensified in the Indian by his desire to rise to an equality with the white man, and in his eagerness to gratify it he will push aside every obstacle, and never rest until every office is at his disposal. With their eagerness, their early developed brains, and above all their numbers, the Indians will, in the present state of English opinion, prove irresistible, and will, I venture to predict, constitute within fifty years the whole Imperial Service-which, I for the last time repeat, is the Indian Empire. The process has begun already. It is just possible that English feeling may change, for no other democracy entertains it, Americans and Frenchmen, for instance, entirely believing in their right to govern; but it is more probable that it will continue, and, if it does, logic will prove irresistible. If the Englishman by virtue of the superior morale of his race has not a moral right to govern and administer India irrespective of the opinion of her peoples, then he has no right to remain there when she bids him go, no right of any kind to office if an Indian can beat him at the tests set up. The compromises suggested by Service Commissions and the like are ridiculous as well as unfair. If, as the last one suggested, Indians ought to have one-sixth of all civil offices, they ought to have all if they can win them, and all military appointments too. being nothing, morale nothing, and intelligence all in all, there is no escape from the conclusion, and no hope that, in their new conception of their duty, Englishmen will resist it. In other words, Asia will shortly regain her own, and the work of governing India will be transferred from European and Christian to Asiatic and Mussulman or Pagan hands. The whole work of the conquest will be undone, and the coldly impartial caste who now rule so disagreeably and so thoroughly well will be superseded by men who have every temptation to be, and will be, Indian Pashas. They will seek, as every race naturally does, to enjoy and to exercise power according to their own ideas, and not according to ours, and, being their own superiors, their own judges, and their own public opinion, they will succeed. How their new position will transmute itself into formal independence am careless to inquire, but in all probability the abler and nobler among them will insist that to refuse military careers to the people of a whole continent is most unjust-which, if all men are equal and morale does not signify, is true—and will replace the British soldiers

I

by native armies, or, as they already suggest, by millions of volunteers. Then the end will have arrived; there will be nothing left to fight for when the great Insurrection occurs and we are asked to go; and India will re-emerge as she was, shortly to be reduced to the condition in which we found her. There will not have been time to complete the one grand work of civilization which the Imperial Service has begun the substitution of the idea of government by law for the idea of government by human volition. It will take three centuries more at least the space of time between Elizabeth and Victoria-for that idea to filter in its full strength down to the Indian masses, to wake them out of their torpor, and induce them to compel their rulers to suppress their passion for doing as they please. India, therefore, will fly in pieces; the ancient hostilities of race, and creed, and history, none of which have we had time to extinguish, will revive at once; and life will again be made interesting as of old by incessant wars, invasions, and struggles for personal ascendancy. The railways, the only things we have built, will be torn up, the universities will be scouted by military rulers, the population will begin to decline, and, in short, for one word expresses it all, India will once more be Asiatic. Within five years of our departure we shall recognize fully that the greatest experiment ever made by Europe in Asia was but an experiment after all; that the ineffaceable distinctions of race were all against it from the first; and that the idea of the European tranquilly guiding, controlling, and perfecting the Asiatic until the worse qualities of his organization had gone out of him, though the noblest dream ever dreamed by man, was but a dream after all. Asia, which survived the Greek, and the Roman, and the Crusader, will survive also the Teuton and the Slav.

MEREDITH TOWNSEND,

THEOLOGICAL ROMANCES.

W

HEN writing about "Romance and Realism" in the CONTEMPORARY REVIEW, last November, I ventured to say that every kind of novel was legitimate, except the tedious kind. Even for theological novels there seemed to be room. There is indeed room, and a great audience. "The New Antigone," a novel with a Catholic mission, was a good deal in vogue last winter, and this May most people have been discussing "Robert Elsmere." The most noted man in England has added to its fame, to its natural and deserved reputation. "Robert Elsmere " is indeed a vast and crowded picture of our distracted age, which is not only on the verge of several revolutions, but is conscious of its future

"Seeing all its own mischance

With a glassy countenance."

Doubtless" Robert Elsmere" will survive as an historical document, and it is also a tale which has many passages of unusual force, which possesses in the first volume scenes of unusual and refined humour, which has pages of great power and poignancy, and which contains one picture of character that would have interested Henri Beyle, the character of Mr. Langham. As to the theological purpose, Mr. Gladstone has written much; and perhaps one is hardly the critic to deal with it. For it must be confessed that a lover of novels, who likes them because they make him forget our eternal "problems" for an hour, comes to books like "Robert Elsmere" with a prejudice, a prejudice which his readers must discount. The novel with a religious purpose is a possible genre, one admits that, in Mr. Morley's words, with " sombre acquiescence." As the working man in Miss Kendall's "From a Garret," being unable to purchase treacle, “thought he could fancy a bit of bread neat," so, perhaps,

one might occasionally "fancy" the discussion of Christian evidences "neat." But mixed up with flirtations, thought-reading, social questions, scenery, tea-parties, and other materials of fiction, theology seems hardly in its proper place. Yet, as a matter of fact, people's lives are made up of all these and other "factors," as the author of "Robert Elsmere " likes to call them, and there is therefore warrant enough for combining them in a novel. People who read fiction, as many do, for the purpose of forgetting their woes, have an easy remedy. They need not read those stories about struggling consciences at all. By very considerable exertions I managed to avoid the perusal of "John Inglesant;" as the Scotch proverb advises, I "jouked and let the Jaw go by." Anybody may evade the new theological romances in the same way. For the authors who advocate their ideas in this form there is a perfect defence. If they do not set forth their opinions in novels, nobody will read them, or nobody worth mentioning. The worst of this condition of affairs is, that excellent writers, not gifted with skill in narrative, or with that skill not fully developed, are driven into attempting narrative. They must preach in fiction, or preach to empty pews. When Charles Kingsley and Charles Reade wanted to enforce a doctrine, they put it into a story; but then they were born story-tellers. Hypatia" would be better without the never-ending monologues of the speculative Jew, but still, we have the Goths, and that delightful scene where they catch Hypatia's murderers in the court-yard. It is otherwise when an author who has many gifts, but not the narrative gift, is compelled to clothe his or her ideas in the garments of romance. For example, speaking of "Robert Elsmere," it is hardly possible to praise the book, without some slight reserve, as a novel. One very promising artistic feature it has, there is in it far too much material. This is the best indication that an author may one day produce a novel which shall be a novel indeed, and good as a work of art. The material here is pressed down and running over. The first romance of another new and not unpopular author had the same effect. "Dawn," without being a work of art, had the material for a dozen works of art, and so has "Robert Elsmere." In addition to the social and political problems, there is the stuff of a novel of society, and the stuff of a novel about remote country people and their ways, and the stuff of a tale of university life, and there are signs that Mrs. Ward could write, or might write, a good ghost story. It is as if Mrs. Ward had broken into a hidden cave, full of the wealth stored by bandit romancers, and had made too indiscriminating a selection from the spoils of fiction. All this, besides its present acknowledged interest, is of good promise for the future, when experience shall have taught the art of "blotting," as our ancestors put it, and when some fairy adds the gift of narrative style. This, perhaps, can be

improved, but can hardly be improvised. Many people possess it, who have none of the knowledge, and not very much of the intellect, of the author of "Robert Elsmere." At present her style, like that of another very ingenious lady, the author of "The Phantom Lover," is too much the style of the essayist. Scientific expressions occur, though certainly not so frequently as in George Eliot's later stories, and there is a visible research of adjectives.

Like Mr. Langham, in "Robert Elsmere," I confess to a habit of reading a good many books at once. Among the books I have taken, in slices, with "Robert Elsmere," is "The Antiquary," by an author whom one of Mrs. Ward's characters accuses of longueurs. But, as the young French reviewer said about Mr. Swinburne's "Erechtheus," the longueurs of Sir Walter are delicious longueurs. The pictures of the little things of life are set by him in a happy atmosphere and air of humour, which one misses in the somewhat frequent and lengthy descriptions of tea-drinkings that delay the history of" Robert Elsmere." Not that the author is without humour, and that of the best kind. I remember nothing in modern fiction more true, natural, and amusing than the description of the self-sacrificing Catherine, when she is persuading herself that it is her duty not to marry; and the indignation of her sister Rose, at being "the third part of a moral motive," and the womanly excitement of her mother, and the match-making old Mrs. Thornburgh; and the indignation of Catherine at having her little romance watched by so many spectators, even before she knows that the curtain has risen. One may cry, like the other old man at the première of the "Précieuses Ridicules":"Courage, madame, voilà la bonne comédie !" All this is capital, and might be, perhaps, even better if the author were a little less fond of Catherine. For, as another admired lady frankly admits about one of her own heroines, Catherine "was a very dull woman." She was of the salt of the earth, indeed-she and the many good Englishwomen like her-but, in hours of ease, if such hours are any longer to exist in daily life, Catherine would not have added to the gaiety of nations. Nor am I sure that her foil, Rose, is quite a success, though Mr. Gladstone thinks so. She is meant for a "wilful English rosebud, set with thorns," but the thorns are rather large and prickly. Her gaiety does not seem very gay, hence there is a weakness in her pathos, when she is in love with that exanimate Mr. Langham. Lucy Roberts, in Mr. Trollope's novel, "Framley Parsonage," was, perhaps, a more successful picture of this kind of girl. But Lucy lived and loved before Culture, which had a terrible hold on Rose, and damped her pretty flippancies. One seldom finds a lady who is a humorist in "one strait gown of vair" (though, unlike Mr. Swinburne's heroine, Rose had plenty "" more to wear"); one seldom finds a lady who is a humorist playing the fiddle. Nor does