But Mrs Stowe’s novels have not only that grand element – conflict of races; they have another element equally grand, which she also shares with Scott, and in which she has, in some respects, surpassed him. This is the exhibition of a people to whom what we may call Hebraic Christianity is still a reality, still an animating belief, and by whom the theocratic conceptions of the Old Testament are literally applied to their daily life. Where has Scott done anything finer than the character of Balfour of Burley, the battles of Drumelog and Bothwell Brigg, and the trial of Ephraim MacBriar? And the character of Dred, the death scenes in the Swamp, and the Camp Meeting of Presbyterians and Methodists, will bear comparison – if we except the fighting – with the best parts of Old Mortality. The strength of Mrs Stowe’s own religious feeling is a great artistic advantage to her here; she never makes you feel that she is coldly calculating an effect, but you see that she is all a-glow for the moment with the wild enthusiasm, the unreasoning faith, and the steady martyr-spirit of Dred, of Tiff, or of Father Dickson. But with this, she has the keen sense of humour which preserves her from extravagance and monotony; and though she paints her religious Negroes en beau, they are always specifically Negroes – she never loses hold of her characters, and lets dramatic dialogue merge into vague oratory. Indeed, here is her strongest point: her dramatic instinct is always awake; and whether it is the grotesque Old Tiff or the aërial Nina, the bluff sophist Father Bonim or the gentlemanly sophist Frank Russell, her characters are always like themselves; a quality which is all the more remarkable in novels animated by a vehement polemical purpose.

The objection which is patent to every one who looks at Mrs Stowe’s novels in an argumentative light, is also, we think, one of their artistic defects; namely, the absence of any proportionate exhibition of the Negro character in its less amiable phases. Judging from her pictures, one would conclude that the Negro race was vastly superior to the mass of whites, even in other than slave countries – a state of the case which would singularly defeat Mrs Stowe’s sarcasms on the cant of those who call slavery a ‘Christianizing Institution’. If the Negroes are really so very good, slavery has answered as moral discipline. But apart from the argumentative suicide involved in this one-sidedness, Mrs Stowe loses by it the most terribly tragic element in the relation of the two races – the Nemesis lurking in the vices of the oppressed. She alludes to demoralization among the slaves, but she does not depict it; and yet why should she shrink from this, since she does not shrink from giving us a full-length portrait of a Legree or a Tom Gordon?