UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES WRITERS OF THE DAY Genekal Editoe; Bertram Christian MRS HUMPHRY WARD By STEPHEN QWYNN ROBERT EMMETT: A Historical Romanct THE GLADE IN THE FOREST FAIR HILLS OF IRELAND CHARLOTTE GRACE O'BRIEN HOLIDAY IN CONNEMARA MEMORIALS OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PAINTERS STORIES FROM IRISH HISTORY MRS. HUMPHREY WARD. MRS HUMPHRY WARD By STEPHEN GWYNN , ... NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY - • • • • * • • » I * • • • • # " 1 I • • * • • •• • • • * • • • * 3- V J '1 CONTENTS »% K ** 1 I. Introductory .... II. Robert Elsmere .... III. Novels of the General World 4 IV. Helbeck of Bannisdalb and Eleanor V. Novels with a Historical Basis VI. The Case of Richard Meynell . VII. Later Novels and General Appre CIATION .... Bibliography .... American Bibliography , Index 7 17 35 61 83 98 103 121 123 125 I ' INTRODUCTORY IT would be unfair and uncritical to say that the most remarkable point about Mrs Humphry Ward as a writer is the circulation of her books. What is true, what ought to be said at once, is that without her popular vogue the attention of artists would scarcely have been attracted to her work. Such a success as she has achieved and consolidated does not dictate to critical opinion, but it compels appraisement to be made. Note has to be taken of the fact that Mrs Ward has interested persons of high intellectual distinction, from Mr Gladstone downwards ; that she has done so by writ- N ings that have no pretension to humour or to wit, writings which, in so far as they are love stories, lack almost entirely the quality of suggesting passion ; writings, too, in which the most sympathetic reader must find 7 I MRS HUMPHRY WARD many dull pages. It has to be noted, in short, that she has succeeded with, all the odds against her. If, as I think, criticism has so far turned aside from the task of estimating her rank, that is because Mrs Ward created her position by a book whose popularity rested on qualities apart from its literary merits. Robert Elsmere was con- sidered less as a novel than as the vehicle for popularising a certain range of ideas, and for that reason critical opinion — which is some- what unduly specialised — refused to consider it seriously either as a novel or as a piece of theological controversy. It neglected to consider how far its unquestioned success was a success of literary art. I am speaking now of that critical opinion which is responsive and responsible only to the craft itself — which, in fact, very largely reflects the craft's own judgment — and which is always a little prejudiced against the successful artist by certain aspects of popularity. The admiration of those who, admiring Mrs Ward, admired also Miss Corelli, was in this respect a detrimental 8 INTRODUCTION asset. Yet, it may be replied, if Mrs Ward can interest fashionable ladies and other not very intellectual people in things of the mind (as undoubtedly she has done), that is matter for praise : unless her methods can be shown to be illegitimate, unless she has vulgarised and mutilated the thing which she delineates, to bring it down to facile comprehension. I do not think such a charge could be sustained for a moment. Highly trained, indefatigably industrious, her work proves her to be — and not only that, but fair in her presentment of those attitudes of mind which are not her own. The devil's advocate before the tribunal of art would be obliged, I think, to limit him- self to this indictment : that she is a publicist rather than an artist : or at least that her success was the success of a publicist rather than of an artist, and that even with develop- ing artistic power she has never learnt to subordinate thoroughly the accidental to the essential interests of her craft. It is possible to represent her books as only one or two degrees removed from that 9 MRS HUMPHRY WARD ungenial thing, the " symposium ' : in a review. People talk of such and such a person having " had no advantages." Mrs Ward has had too many " advantages " ; they stand in her way. There is something of the child in every artist, and it is hard to find in most of Mrs Ward's books. When you find it, she is unconsciously creative — working in a wholly different mood. Every page that she writes of the north country (where we know that she was bred, and if we did not know we could infer it) tells simply of life lived. She is part of what she writes about, is one with it. Every- where else we are conscious of experience deliberately pursued, of scenes and environ- ments intelligently depicted, but no more. She can describe to us the society in which most of her working life has presumably been passed: she cannot make it live. Herein she shows inferior to so true yet so pedestrian an artist as Trollope. Trollope made Barchester — made it out of his own consciousness, somehow obscurely informed. 10 INTRODUCTION It lives, it is all of a piece, it has an atmos- phere which conveys itself: he does not need to describe. Or take a closer parallel. Trollope was probably never in so close touch with politicians as Mrs Ward has been, yet his novels of parliamentary life, far less technical than hers in their method, far less shoppy (if one may be permitted the phrase), nevertheless catch, as hers do not, the spirit of the institution as we know it to-day, despite the passage of nearly two genera- tions and far-reaching change. The differ- ence is that Trollope is interested primarily in men and women, in the rough lump of humanity; Mrs Ward is preoccupied with special types, with their ideas, and their setting, social or historic. In one sense Mrs Ward has a better right than most novelists to be named with Trollope. Her survival is assured, like his, for the purposes of history. The historian seeking to construct a picture of the last hundred years will find his best resource (far better than the newspapers can afford) in certain novelists, persons of normal mind : 11 MRS HUMPHRY WARD such pre-eminently was Trollope. Take, for example, one of his least known works, The MacDermots of Ballycloran : it is like the report of the Devon Commission drama- tised and focused upon a particular locality. He saw Ireland with the mind of a jury. And if a Royal Commission had been in- stituted to report upon the life of the country clergy and the more devout among their well-to-do parishioners, who can doubt but that the evidence and the findings would have left an impression which could be well summed up in the novels of Miss Yonge ? These two artists (no candid mind can deny that title to Miss Yonge) presented the mode of middle-class living in their day, in a way that will help the historian — to whom Stevenson or Meredith will be of singularly little service. Mrs Ward also will go down to posterity as the writer who has known how to dramatise in an interesting fashion, not so much the life as the intellectual tendencies of her own generation. The historian will turn to her to understand not what people were like, what they did, what 12 INTRODUCTION they did not do, how they judged of conduct, but rather (in an age much marked by speculation) what they thought about. You will gather from Meredith what Meredith loved and laughed at, from Stevenson what Stevenson liked men to do or to be. But Mrs Ward dispassionately, or at least with scrupulous generosity, sets out for us the opinions current in her time upon high matters of general concern. The competence of her equipment is not to be disputed. Granddaughter to Arnold of Rugby, niece to Matthew Arnold, she was brought up in close touch with ruling powers both in the moral and in the intellectual sphere. She was one of a family in which every individual possessed the power and the inclination to write. Over and above this, her father, Professor T. Arnold, was among the men who felt the Oxford Move- ment at its strongest. He j oined the Church of Rome, and, being a fine critic of literature, went with Newman to help in founding a Catholic University in Ireland. But his mind never reached a final poise on the 13 MRS HUMPHRY WARD questions of faith which preoccupied him. Mrs Ward was reared in an atmosphere of intense spiritual unrest: theological con- troversy must have been in the air she breathed, and not alone in the air of her home. From 1865 to 1881 her abode was at Oxford. She came there a girl of fourteen, married there at the age of twenty-one, and lived there for nine years as a young married woman. During all this period, Jowett on one side, Liddon upon the other, were at the full tide of their influence. Behind these protagonists there were ap- paritions from time to time of Pusey on the side of authority, and, on the other, of Mark Pattison, reinforcing the armoury of de- structive criticism. Mrs Ward was a keen student of literature and of history at its sources, but the special bent of her mind showed itself in an early application to what she herself calls " the general literature of modern religion," and her first important publication was a translation of Amiel's ' Journal Intime — the self-revelation of a religious soul in difficulties. 14 INTRODUCTION From these academic surroundings she removed to London. As the wife of a leader- writer and art critic on a great newspaper, she was in touch with the most prominent intellectual personages of the moment. More than that, in a period of violent political excitement, her uncle, W. E. Forster, was a veritable storm-centre; her cousin, Arnold Forster, was entering, under the Irish Secretary's guidance, on a political career of high promise. In 1888 her own blazing success with Robert Elsmere made her a personage: it brought affluence as well. Thus throughout her career, keenly interested in all the vital movements of her time, she has been almost officially at the centre of things. Her contact with politics has been that of a minister or ex-minister; her contact with art, that of a Royal Academician; her contact with literature, that of an Oxford don. These things do not make a writer, but at least they ensured that if she wrote a novel about politics, or about art, or about theology, she was fully competent, say, to 15 MRS HUMPHRY WARD give University Extension lectures upon the subject with which she dealt. She had not been a parson in trouble about his faith, nor an active politician, nor an artist with his bread to earn ; but she knew as much as books could tell her about the distinctive problem of each, and in each case she was personally well acquainted with distinguished living examples of the type she studied. Thus her work, produced at a period when people were strongly disposed to derive part of their culture from the more serious class of fiction, had a high educational value ; she was both qualified and predisposed to instruct. Also, and this was essential to her success, she had as much of the true story-teller's gift as sufficed to win and hold her audience. 16 A II RORERT ELSMERE WKITER'S early attempts are often instructive, and Mrs Ward's first novel showed all the superficial characteristics of her manner. To begin with, Miss Bretherton had the attribute of associating itself inevitably with an actual personage — in that case a living actress, Miss Mary Anderson. Mrs Ward has always steadily insisted on the right to find in fact a starting-point for fiction, a suggestion which the artist may develop. In another respect the choice of subject was character- istic, since it admitted of being stated as an abstract intellectual formula. The book might have been written in answer to an examination question put somewhat thus: " If an actress of high ambition, but destitute of training, makes a dazzling success by sheer beauty, what is likely to be her b 17 MRS HUMPHRY WARD evolution ? " And the answer given in Mrs Ward's thesis-novel reveals a third trait destined to mark all her work. Miss Bretherton owes the salvation of her artistic soul to the fact that she has come in touch with persons of what is sometimes called the highest culture. It is an obsession with Mrs Ward that there exists somewhere (at the top) a distinctive society, admission into which may be simply represented as an assay or proof of fitness (it is so in one of her later novels, Canadian Born), but is more commonly treated by her as a ripening and perfecting experience. In almost all her later books her characters either belong to this charmed circle or come within its outer ambit — to be attracted or repulsed, accord- ing to the measure of their deserts. Her con- ception of this inner or upper society has no doubt been amplified and glorified since she wrote Miss Bretherton ; as distinguishing marks of its citizens, knowledge of the world, familiarity with power, have come to receive rather more emphasis than easy converse with the best in books; but, from first to 18 ROBERT ELSMERE last there is present to her mind a distinction, if not between the initiated and the un- initiated, at least between those capable and incapable of initiation. The young beauty- is changed from a bad actress into a good one by making acquaintance with an Oxford don who writes. Still, in Mrs Ward's later work the moral efiect of this contact is not put so crudely in terms of educational influence as in Miss Bretherton. In truth, the interesting thing about this first book is its lack of quality. It showed, one would have said, a deplor- able competence — ability to furnish out something that fitted all the orthodox formulae. A woman so well trained, who could write so well, had seen so many places and people, and yet who could give neither atmosphere nor life, seemed indeed a case to despair of. Yet within two years she had written Robert Elsmere, which beyond all doubt has life, and here and there has atmosphere. Life it has, poignant life, in the central chapters which relate the actual struggle 19 MRS HUMPHRY WARD of Elsmere's choice, whether he shall or shall not renounce his orders. They culminate, when the choice has been made, in the story of slight incidents which render delay un- bearable to him, his quest of one man's fortifying sympathy and then — the climax — the avowal to hie Puritan dale-bred wife. In that chapter and the next, which describe Catherine's frantic impulse of flight and her dazed penitent return, Mrs Ward reached a point which she has never surpassed, perhaps never again quite reached ; and this assuredly is no dispraise. She has not the gift that seems to burn away superfluous words till none is left but the essential utterance ; yet passion is there, the struggle, the strain, and out of passion the unspeak- able relief in reconciliation achieved. It is the only passion that she knows, the passion of souls perplexed between intellectual or moral faith and the drag of their humanity — a passion singularly austere and unsensu- ous, with affinities to the landscape which is never far from this writer's mind. What there should be of coldness in those fells 20 ROBERT ELSMERE and becks and dales, I cannot tell; but Wordsworth's temper enshrines it, and Mrs Ward is of the same lineage. If she can understand Catherine, the woman of little reading, of convictions so set and limited that they narrow even her heart, it is because Catherine embodies that austere spirit of the fells, Puritanism of the mountains and the glassy Westmoreland streams. Catherine, not Elsmere, is the true centre of the book : she is a life ; he is little more than a bundle of ideas, tendencies and attributes. Where he becomes vital, he catches life and signi- ficance from her. That is the atmosphere which I find in this book — the atmosphere of one place, of one person only. Mrs Ward details with love and with knowledge all the charms of southern English landscape — though here, as everywhere, she draws out too long her descriptive passages, and mars even the chapters of which I have spoken with an excessive elaboration of sights and sounds upon the heath where Elsmere paused before his fateful home-coming. If she does not 21 MRS HUMPHRY WARD smother her northern landscapes, it is only because the feeling behind them is too much alive. Much could be spared, no doubt, yet the superfluities, too, have the touch of inspiration. In the early chapters, which depict the life of Whindale, one perceives still the prentice hand. Mrs Ward strives after humour, a grace denied her, and the result is triviality ; but how wisely she learnt . her lesson ! I cannot recall in her later works any effort for a laugh. Her gift was so to impassion herself in following the struggles of a conscience that she could com- municate her own interest in an adventure half spiritual, half intellectual. That is where she is an artist. What matters to the artist is Catherine's grip on Robert, Robert's on Catherine — the effort of two souls bound by mortal love to retain close touch of one another when their most vital beliefs run counter. But — there is also the • publicist to be reckoned with. The publicist is persistent to expound exactly what Elsmere believed, why he came to believe it, and what expression his belief found in 22 ROBERT ELSMERE action. All this appeals to a curiosity, or a faculty, which is not the faculty that art affects. If Mrs Ward had needed to expound Catherine as she expounds her husband, the book could never have lived. In other words, where Mrs Ward suc- ceeded best, where she was most truly creative, most instinctive, and most an artist, was where she was least a propa- gandist. The creative gift was there, but not in higher measure than could be matched bv half-a-dozen other women novelists of her generation. What distinguished her, what made her unique, what gave her a real im- portance, was the fact that she made this gift subserve the purposes of an intelligence deliberately bent to the task of moulding and directing contemporary thought. Her novel was in its germ a pamphlet— a pamphlet written in answer to a sermon. Was there ever a more unlikely beginning for a vast popular success ? Bare qualities were needed for her task, and the first was a store of true knowledge. But knowledge of itself will not affect feeling, and without feelmg 23 MBS HUMPHRY WARD such a success is impossible. Emotion must be raised by emotion ; and there was passion in this book — a noble passion for freedom of the mind, a zeal for the rights of knowledge. The history of its genesis, which has been told by herself in the introduction prefixed to the first volume of the "West- moreland Edition" of her collected novels, deserves to be reproduced. To use her own words, Mrs Ward, in the first nine years of her married life, " got through a good deal of reading and writing of a rather various kind, concerned now with English, now with French, now with Spanish literature." The modesty of this statement is revealed by the fact that in 1879 Dr Wace, seeking for contributors to the Dictionary of Christian Biography, applied to this quite young woman for articles dealing with " the West Goths and Spanish Christianity gener- ally up to 800 a.d." This application was suggested by " some articles on Spanish chronicles" already contributed by her to The Saturday Review. Of the task to which Dr Wace thus set her, she says : 24 ROBERT ELSMERE " The two years of labour among the docu- ments of the early Spanish Church arjd the West Gothic kingdom, aided at every step by German criticism and research, were the determining years of my life. Practically I have described them and their effect on the mind in Robert Elsmere. Elsmere, setting himself to work on the origins of modern ^France, is confronted with the fact that 'contemporary record is coloured by the personal bias and training of the recorder, and that this bias and training is a leading part of the circumstances of the time. " The astonishment awakened in Elsmere, as his task develops, by those strange pro- cesses of mind current in the histories of certain periods, processes which are often more interesting and illuminating than the facts^ which the historians are trying to relate, was in truth my own astonishment. After some fourteen years spent at Oxford in a more or less continuous, though always desultory, study of English poetry, French belles lettres and what one may call the general literature of modern religion, the Acta of Spanish Councils and the chronicles and hagiography of the West Gothic King- dom produced in me, beside the immediate 25 MRS HUMPHRY WARD historical result, a kind of far-reaching stir and rumination, if one may so put it, which gradually affected the whole mind. And it was this stir and rumination which, six years later, I endeavoured to reproduce in Robert Elsmere" Another element in her life which reflected itself in the book was the influence of Mark Pattison — who, as she says, " was always interested in the young girl students of Oxford, tried to help them, and set a standard before them." It was an exacting standard of knowledge, of sustained and continuous endeavour — of "Benedictine application," to borrow the phrase used concerning another of these brilliant disciples, Mark Pattison' s young wife, afterwards Lady Dilke. To the squire, who represents in Elsmere' s history the sapping force of criticism, Mrs Ward has admittedly given Pattison' s exterior traits, and has no doubt suggested the character of his intellectual attack. It is curious and not a little ironical to reflect that the effects of the great scholar's long labour, so barren of direct results, may have 26 ROBERT ELSMERE been chiefly felt at second hand, transmitted through this casual discipleship, and that this acrid, domineering combatant, in so far as he conquered, may have conquered most through a woman. But this at least emerges as a certainty. Mrs Ward's two years of work, years, as she puts it, "of serious consecutive training, both in writing and thinking," strengthened in her the esprit de corps and gave her the sense of belonging to a regiment and the instinct of loyalty to its captains. The emotion which is felt throughout Robert Elsmere first found expression as a direct retort to the arraign- ment of those whom a Bampton Lecturer held responsible for " the present unsettle- ment in religion. " From the University- pulpit in St Mary's Church, Dr John Words- worth, then Fellow and Tutor of Brasenose College, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury, expounded, in 1881, his thesis that " Christ connects unbelief and sin," and specified among the sins to which unbelief was attri- butable, " indolence, coldness, recklessness, pride and avarice." 27 MRS HUMPHRY WARD I remember," writes Mrs Ward, u " gazing from the dim pews under the gallery where the Masters' wives sit, at the fine ascetic face of the preacher, with his strong likeness to his great-uncle, the poet of English pantheism, and seeing beside it and around it the forms of those, his colleagues and contemporaries, the patient scholars and thinkers of the Liberal host whom he was in truth, though not perhaps consciously, attackiug. My heart burned within me, and it sprang into my mind that the only way to show England what was in truth going on in its midst was to try and express it concretely — in terms of actual life and conduct. Who and what were the persons who had either provoked the present unsettlement of religion, or were suffering under its effects ? What was their history ? How had their thoughts and doubts come to be, and what was the effect of them on conduct ? " So was born a book whose publication should undoubtedly be marked as an event — though an event in quite another sense than, say, the publication of Richard 28 ROBERT ELSMERE Feverel. Mrs Ward was perhaps providen- tially saved from forestalling her effect. In the heat of her offended loyalty she wrote a protesting pamphlet entitled Unbelief and Sin, in which she says: " I tried to sketch two types of character, A and B, the one carried by history and criticism into ' un- belief,' the other gradually stifling in him- self the instincts and power of the free mind." The Oxford bookseller who printed it omitted to give any printer's name, and within a few hours a High Church opponent detected this fact, and pointed out that the omission made publication an illegal act. The pamphlet was withdrawn, but its writer's imagination did nob cease to work on the subject which was " always hovering in the mind." This long unconscious and half-conscious cerebration has perhaps preceded the birth of most good novels ; and it is perfectly compatible with other work. In these years Mrs Ward tried her hand with Miss Bretherton, but her translation of Amiel's Journal had a closer relation to the larger 29 MRS HUMPHRY WARD theme, for, by her own account, many of Amiel's traits were diligently reproduced in Langham, Elsmere's sceptic friend. It may be noted, however, that Oxford of the eighties was more inclined to see in Langham some reproduction of the Balliol tutor, R. L. Nettleship, a delicate and subtle intelligence, strangely fenced about by shyness. But the captain of the Liberal host to whom Mrs Ward most openly proclaimed her devotion was T. H. Green, Professor of Moral Phil- osophy, whose published words are actually put into the mouth of Grey, Elsmere's monitor and comforter. Green died in 1882, but his memory was still warmly cherished and the power of his influence still felt, when Mrs Ward began, in 1885, to write her book, placing some of her scenes in the landscape of that " beautiful wild land" about Hindhead in which, from 1882 onwards, her summers had been spent. Not till the end of 1887 was it finished: it appeared at the close of February, 1888, and before April was over had reached a third edition. In May Mr Gladstone, then at the 30 ROBERT ELSMERE very zenith of his amazing prestige, reviewed it in The Nineteenth Century. The article was a compliment, all the more impressive because it went far beyond the old-world courtesy which was to be expected from the great veteran, when he spoke of a lady and an Arnold. His praise of her literary gift might lend itself to the observation that .he commended specially a copiousness in which he himself was over-abundant : but none could dispute the authority with which he commended " the sense of mission, the generous appreciation of what is morally good, impartially exhibited." Here was a noble quality, nobly praised by one who spoke with all the more weight because none more clearly recognised and condemned Mrs Ward's aim, which was, in Mr Gladstone's definition, " to expel the preternatural element from Christianity, to destroy its dogmatic structure, and yet to keep intact the moral and spiritual results." In the long, controversial pages of the review the old Churchman set out to prove the impossi- bility of this ideal, and he attributed Mrs 31 MKS HUMPHRY WARD Ward's acceptance of the German critical conclusions to an imperfect study of the rebutting case made by such apologists as Westcott. Later in the year Dr Randall Davidson, then Dean of Windsor, now Archbishop of Canterbury, renewed the attack on Mrs Ward's intellectual preparation. Yet here again the adverse critic paid deferential homage, not to the book's success, but to its high merit, its power of commanding and sustaining interest. To these high disput- ants, and to the host of her controversial critics, Mrs Ward made answer indirectly. In some very charming pages of the West- moreland Edition, which recount her con- versations held with Mr Gladstone before his review was written, she admits that " feminine courage " quailed before the flashing eye and " deep, thunderous voice v which blew aside the " trumpery objections " of Renan and the Germans : nor did she, in her own person, so to say, stand up to him in print. But The Nineteenth Century of January, 1889, contained a " dialogue" by 32 ROBERT ELSMERE her entitled The New Reformation, in which a chosen spokesman uttered her mind as to Westcott and his fellow-champions. They demanded, she said, that criticism should apply itself in a special manner, with strong prepossessions, under the influence of " affection," to the records of Christianity's beginning. But unfettered modern thought demanded an equal vigilance, an impartial survey, over the whole religious field. Further than this it would be foreign to our purpose to follow Mrs Ward in contro- versy; but a word should be said as to the title of this expository dialogue, which she reprinted in her collected edition. "Reformation," in Mrs Ward's sense, as it operated in England, was not a schism from the Church : rather, it transformed the Church in reforming it. Devoted as she is to the English ideal of tradition reconciled with growth, this is evidently to her mind one of the glories of England's history. Robert Elsmere is a demand for a new mani- festation of the same English spirit: and more than that, she feels herself, in urging it, 33 MRS HUMPHRY WARD to be the heir of her progenitor. " Arnold, the great leader whom the Liberals lost in '42 — snatched from life at the height of bodily and spiritual vigour — in the very birth-hour of the New Learning. . . . Arnold was a devoutly orthodox believer, but a Church of free men, coextensive with the nation, gathering into one fold every English- man, woman and child — that was Arnold's dream." These words, taken from The Case of Richard Meynell, a book written by her more than twenty years later, describe the dream which inspired Arnold's grand- daughter in writing Robert Elsmere, and which has been the ruling principle alike of her Modernist Anglicanism and of her Anglican Imperialism. 34 Ill NOVELS OF THE GENERAL WORLD r\OBERT ELSMERE, Mrs Ward's f^ second book, was published in her <-*- ^ thirty-seventh year. It was to be ex- pected that with fully matured talent and ex- perience she would become more of a novelist and less of an expositor. Yet The History of David Grieve, the book which followed Robert Elsmere, though separated from it by an interval of no less than four years, was scarcely less expository than its predecessor, and was so with less excuse. No dramatic - conflict hinges on the question of David Grieve' s belief or unbelief: the merits of the story exist in spite of the author's attempt to show what a good man, spiritually minded, and with a brain capable and highly trained, will come to hold as his half-instinctive faith. The merits, however, are there, and they are so characteristic as to require some 35 MRS HUMPHRY WARD analysis, both of them and of the equally characteristic defects. We start with the somewhat arbitrary assumption of an abnormal marriage. A serious young dalesman, country bred, but seeking fortune in the town, where he develops into a highly skilled artisan, mates with a purely Latin type, the grisette from Provence adrift in London. Such a union would, naturally enough, produce a progeny with ill-balanced and inharmonious attributes ; and though in the first child, David Grieve, the uncongenial strains blend happily, the Arlesienne's second, and unwelcome, child is a freakish unkindly offspring. The two children, early deserted by their mother and orphaned of their father, come back for their upbringing to the dales, where the care of them falls to their father's brother, Reuben Grieve, and to his hard wife, Hannah. Here we touch life. The two children have wild blood in them, but in the boy it runs to profit: it gives him the touch of imagina- tion which animates his capable boldness. Yet with him Mr3 Ward has to describe. 36 NOVELSWTHE GENERAL WORLD She writes about him; she explains him ; she does, on the whole, succeed in making us understand. With the girl she has vision ; there is inspiration in that portrait, and from first to last Louie Grieve brings her atmos- phere with her whenever she enters on the scene. She is a living force, and the brain that conceived her was to that extent an artist's brain. The truth about Mrs Ward seems to be that she is intermittently an artist. She herself has taken account of the fact, though she does not state it pre- cisely in these terms. In the prefaces to the Westmoreland Edition of her works, which explain the circumstances in which each book came into being, and set down her later critical attitude towards it, she makes repeated allusion to a psychological experi- ence, which is well described in the Preface to Marcella : << Some of the work which, as I look back critically upon it, seems to me of my best— which the public has welcomed most warmly has been written as it were intellectually, following out a logical sequence whether in 37 174433 MRS HUMPHRY WARD character or event, under a conviction of necessity and truth, but without any over- powering vision. Imagination indeed placed and dressed the different scenes, conceiving them in a clear succession. But all through one knew how it was done, and felt that with proper concentration of mind it could be done again. But there are times and crises in imaginative work when this process seems to be quite superseded by another; and afterwards in looking back upon the results a writer will not know how it was done, and will not feel that it could be repeated. Some- thing intervened — a tranced, absorbed state, in which the action of certain normal facul- ties seemed suspended in order that others might work with exceptional ease, — like tools that elves had sharpened in the night." Every writer of fiction with the least real gift for his trade recognises the experience of "scenes composed" (I quote now the admirable Preface to Sir George Tressady) " with the same imaginative rush, the strange sense of a waking dream, of a thing aot invented but merely reported — imposed as by a vision and breathlessly written down." 38 NOVELS OF THE GENERAL WORLD This is the faculty of invention carried to such a power that the process seems automatic, like that calculating gift which enables certain human beings instantane- ously to see the result of long arithmetical combinations. But with the great artists the faculty is continuous and pervades equally the whole creation. With Mrs Ward it is patchy and discontinuous. Her work is at points laborious and imperfect, at others surprisingly vital. Moreover, even where the power of vision operates, the fact that there is real invention does not suffice; the invention must interest and must impress. She herself cites, as one instance in which the mood of possession lasted continuously with her, The Story of Bessie Costrell — a tale rather than a novel, the sort of subject which Maupassant might have chosen. Told as Mrs Ward tells it, the thing seems true and real ; but it does not interest, it does not hold us. There is a mass of unnecessary detail; Maupassant would have got into ten pages what she spreads over a hundred, and, instead of 39 MRS HUMPHRY WARD wearying us with the commonness of the circumstance, would have made us feel that its very commonness was the essence of the tragedy. A far greater talent than Mrs Ward's is needed to make the commonplace poignant: her invention, when it is most effective, often has a touch of the bizarre, and the picture of Louie Grieve is a case in point. Still Mrs Ward can create Louie ; she can, at moments, make David live ; and by this creative gift she induces readers to swallow a deal of controversial stuff which has no artistic value whatever. She harnesses the artist in her to drag the plough of a dis- putant. It is like providing good church music to drag people in to hear a sermon ; and there is no mistake about this, the sermon is what Mrs Ward really cares for. But also there is no mistake that some of the music is first-rate. We have the artistic creation of Louie; we have the picture of Reuben and Hannah. This is a picture of dale folk, of the unloveliest forms of Puritan- ism, treated with a comprehension that has 40 NOVELS OF THE GENERAL WORLD in it nothing cruel. Old Reuben, who so ill defended David and David's sister against the tyrannous Hannah, is lovable, and loved, through all his weakness ; and even for Hannah herself, the shrew, the oppressor, the defrauder in the name of God, Mrs Ward has at least respect. Hannah is of the dales ; her hardness is theirs, a thing needed to 'make up all that they stand for. Another gift of Mrs Ward shows itself first in David Grieve — her remarkable power of creating mean feminine types.. The young lady from a Manchester book-shop who sets her cap at David is excellently seen. But here again Mrs Ward sins against the light. She draws a nature in whom vulgarity is of the very grain; and yet we are asked to believe that because this little person has been taken to a big house, where her husband is welcome, and has been treated by the ladies of the house with an icy rudeness, and has been consoled and taken home by her husband, she then and there purges her soul of vulgar ambitions and settles down, to be a suitable adoring and uninterfering help- MRS HUMPHRY WARD mate. The truth is, and Mrs Ward should have admitted it, Lucy was created to be a nuisance, and a nuisance she would have been, even when she was dying conveniently of cancer. Marcdla is the first of the considerable series of novels whose interest is mainly political — in which the fortunes of characters are bound up with a House of Commons career. Here we are concerned, not with theology, but with social ethics : and there should be noted also an increasing pursuit of vehement dramatic collision, or even of violent incident. The vexed question of game-preserving is one which constantly recurs in these books — raising, as it does, in the acutest form, problems of the rights of property. But in Marcella it is more than an abstract question : it provides the central scene of the book. Moreover, it is a characteristic part of the new environment from which Mrs Ward now begins to draw her inspiration. Her residence — from 1892 onward — has been in Hertfordshire, amongst the Chiltern hangers 42 NOVELS OF THE GENERAL WORLD and beech-woods ; she is surrounded by the rich setting of the home counties; she is fascinated with the old-world beauty of mansions with a long history ; and, as she tells us, the neighbourhood in which she settled became almost at once the scene of a tragic affray between poachers and keepers of pheasants. New combinations began to take shape in the chamber of her invention ; also, new subjects demanded to be ventilated. Her readers were prepared — as far back as ! 8 94— for Mr Lloyd George's famous budget and for the Unionist housing policy. It cannot be denied that Mrs Ward has been consistently a serviceable publicist. But in considering the artist, to me, at least, it appears that we have in these later books of hers one more illustration of the truth that imagination is thoroughly impregnated only in the early years of life : that the scenes of childhood are stamped there with a unity and completeness of which later and more self-conscious impressions have only the simulacrum. Reuben and Hannah grow, so to speak, out of the ground ; they suggest 43 MRS HUMPHRY WARD their setting, they cannot be separated from it. Mrs Ward's peasants of the home counties have not this property: they are people whom she has seen, whom she has visited, whom she has had good will to know ; but she has not grown up among them in that comradeship of childhood when dis- tinctions of class are really obliterated. What, indeed, she indicates with most truth is Marcella's inability to pass this invisible barrier. Except in pictures of the dales, there is in her brain an eternal separateness between poor and rich, educated and un- educated. The peasants in her stories are little more than mechanical properties. Hurd murders, his wife weeps, to set in motion Marcella's intellectual and moral processes. Yet, for all that, the faculty of vision still is there, intermittent as always, not always to be counted on, but potent when the spell is felt. Of all unlikely things, Mrs Ward gives us an unforgettable picture of rabbit-netting on a moonlight night at the edge of one of the heavy copses that fringe those open bays of hill-side. It is not 44 NOVELS OF THE GENEKAL WORLD done as a sportsman would have done it, say Charles Kingsley or some other in whom lived that odd mixture of the poacher and naturalist which breeds the taste alike for capture and for observation of wild creatures. But it is done with extraordinary vividness ; the smell, the feel of the wood-side, the sounds and the stillness, all are there. < Also, in the main story, account must be taken of Mrs Ward's power to analyse the attraction of a woman for other women. Marcella's charm, her power to command, to dominate, even when she is disliked, among her own sex, are far better given than her effect on men. It is in this last respect, indeed, that the story fails. One may see the growth of Marcella's passion for Aldous Raeburn : we know nothing at all about his feelings for her. Oddly enough, they are better given in the sequel to this novel, Sir George Tressady, which its author depreciates, but which some probably will find better reading than the original book. Marcella is the central figure of both; she is un- doubtedly more likeable as a married woman ; 45 MRS HUMPHRY WARD and Mrs Ward has conveyed the sense of something rare and noble which is inspired by a union between two strong people who are equal comrades. She conveys also, with delicacy, if without amusement, something of the inconvenience which is inflicted on a politician by a too earnest and enthusiastic wife ; indeed, she indicates very plainly her characteristic opinion that a woman ought to be interested in " politics," ought to in- struct herself in their problems, ought to be * capable of procuring information with which to assist her husband — but had, on the whole, better keep out of direct political inter- / vention. As for the secondary activities, exertion of influence and the like, the more attractive a woman is, the more sympathetic her nature, the likelier she is to bring about some damaging complication — such as even Marcella did not escape from. The situation is planned out with a real knowledge of the world — with a knowledge that has no cynical affectation. Marcella is no doubt an angel, but she is an interfering angel, and when she is drawn to persuade a political 46 NOVELS OF THE GENERAL WOULD opponent, for her sake, to help her husband, there is a perfectly natural result. Marcella is none the worse, Sir George Tressady is none the worse, but Tressady' s wife is in serious danger of being driven to undertake reprehensible reprisals. Here again Mrs Ward's gift for dealing with mean women stands to her. Lady Tressady is a real addition to the portraiture of contemporary types; for the shrewish little doll is seen with humanity, and we are made to understand, if not sympathise with, the phases of her jealous rage. One scene in this book— that where Marcella comes to apologise to and appease the woman whose husband she has unwittingly made captive —is perhaps the best thing Mrs Ward has done : as a piece of technical mastery in the contrasting of two women's characters it was more difficult to achieve than the central chapters of Robert Elsmere. And if the novelist implies that Marcella strained com- passion almost to the limit of folly, it is only by way of reminding us that Lady Maxwell's married felicity (too sacred for Letty 47 MRS HUMPHRY WARD Tressady's ears) was of a piece with her fortune and her station in the world. Even here one cavils only at the novelist' s implied comment: the dramatic movement of the scene, the truth of what the two women do and say, could hardly be bettered. Not less good than the picture of Sir George Tressady's wife is that of his mother. The feather-witted ex-beauty, ravaging her son's resources as she had ravaged his father's, is a genuine type. Mrs Ward has the power to present her. What she lacks is the power to do so with that clean, decisive touch which stamps the artist. Everywhere, in any given paragraph, in any given scene, one is conscious of redundancies. The medium in which she works has no charm — she plasters her effects. But she has the gift of characterisation and the gift for con- structing a story which upon the whole sustains interest and stands critical examina- tion with a reasonable measure of success. Her interest in following out the various types of intellectual revolt is not matched by any pursuit of the bewildering problems 48 NOVELS OF THE GENERAL WORLD which sex presents. Certain conclusions are stated by her, and she is all on the side of orthodoxy. David Grieve becomes the lover of a Parisian art student. If he does not marry her, that is because she accepts only the union libre. She leaves him lest her art should suffer, and he has nothing to disturb his soul except a connection not legally sanctioned — for at the time he is in- tellectually severed from all Christian belief. Yet Mrs Ward makes him aware of a hurt done to his deepest nature: he has a con- sciousness of sin. On the other hand, in one of her later books, Manisty, a dabbler in religion, is reported to have lived through a couple of passions in his past, but there is no suggestion that they have marked him or affected the quality of his relations to other women. David afterwards makes a marriage which is avowedly accepted as an example of the second best — and a very poor second best ; but Mrs Ward, as I have indicated, does not face the facts here. In Marcella and in Tressady she walks on tiptoe up to a difficulty and then retires. Suppose d 49 MRS HUMPHRY WARD Marcella, instead of finding herself preserved for the virtuous Tory, had married the picturesque, deceiving Radical — suppose Wharton had not, at the lucky moment, been found out ! No doubt a novelist is not bound to tackle the problems which she adumbrates. But in Sir George Tressady the pieces are set. Tressady has married " with less thought than he would have given to the mating of an animal " — and ' trouble has followed. It is too easy a way out to kill him, melodramatically, in the last chapter. Mrs Ward does not want to discuss what would have happened had he lived. There are plenty of novelists to take up this department of discussion, and we have no cause to complain. But in a writer who is so explicitly the holder of a didactic philosophy it is necessary to mark the limitation. The subjects which she treats with com- petent assurance are those proper to the platform and the lecture-room — in the case of these two books, political speculations. Here we have a fancy picture of a Unionist 50 NOVELS OF THE GENERAL WORLD Government introducing legislation of a socialist and collectivist character: risking its political life for the attempt to regulate drastically the conditions of labour. Con- sidering the book as a prophecy, the foreseen case has delayed to accomplish itself : but as a study of the rival points of view Mrs Ward's pages may well furnish good matter ior readers not concerned with these things at first hand. She sees very clearly the perpetual struggle between irreconcilable points of view — that which seeks to maintain individual freedom as the chief good, and that which seeks to regulate citizens by authority of superior and established know- ledge ; and she perceives shrewdly that the collectivist and authoritarian view has much to commend itself to the instincts of a trained governing class: in a word, that Tory Socialism is a very defensible combination. Yet here her speculative mind is operating in a vacuum. In Marcella her theme is better nourished with fact when she portrays the struggle between the theory which justifies landlords' power by pointing to their 51 MRS HUMPHRY WARD prudent and philanthropic use of it, and, on the other hand, those schemes which aim at giving to the rural worker a wider scope and a much enlarged right. Very wisely, Mrs Ward does not attempt to reach a solution; she sets out with tact the case for an enlightened Toryism; but she makes plain also the uncertainty and dis- quiet which harass many honourable minds with the question: Why should we have so much when those about us have so little ? Equally characteristic of her is to show lovingly how much they have. She delights in a well-ordered sumptuousness, and prob- ably not a few of her readers take a special pleasure in what she writes with gusto — de- scriptions of stately abodes, the harmony of carpets and hangings, the evolutions of well- trained domestics, the presence of historic canvases on the wall, the accumulation of choice treasures in a hereditary home, itself a jewel, where generation after generation grows up, subconsciously cultured and per- fected by the mellowing influence of all this 52 NOVELS OF THE GENERAL WORLD distinguished environment. For an age exceedingly possessed by the taste for domestic decoration, a period in which con- noisseurship has become a ruling affecta- tion, such passages must have the attraction that Kingsley's excursions into trout-fishing or Lever's account of a fox-hunt have for a mass of readers. Here is a characteristic ^example : " He was ushered first into a stately outer drawing-room, filled with old French furni- ture and fine pictures; then the butler lifted a velvet curtain, pronounced the visitor's name with a voice and emphasis as perfectly trained as the rest of him, and stood aside for George to enter. " He found himself on the threshold of a charming room looking west, and lit by some last beams of February sun. The pale- green walls were covered with a medley of prints and sketches. A large writing-table, untidily heaped with papers, stood con- spicuous on the blue self-coloured carpet, which over a great part of the floor was pleasantly void and bare. Flat earthenware pans, planted with hyacinths and narcissus, 53 MRS HUMPHRY WARD stood here and there, and filled the air with spring scents. Books ran round the lower walls, or lay piled wherever there was a space for them ; while about the fire at the further end was gathered a circle of chintz- covered chairs — chairs of all shapes and sizes, meant for talking. The whole im- pression of the pretty, disorderly place, compared with the stately drawing-room behind it, was one of intimity and freedom ; the room made a friend of you as you entered." Such passages, apart from their artistic value, have an extrinsic interest — the in- terest, so to say, of a guide-book to the domestic circles of the really great. Mrs Ward undoubtedly knows how people with fifty thousand a year and a great political position do, as a matter of fact, dress and house themselves : even the uninitiated feel that she can be trusted to give a faithful account of what passes in these exalted spheres ; and she is quite determined in her purpose of reproducing their splendour. The " best people " — in her sense those who are 54 NOVELS OF THE GENERAL WORLD privileged to enjoy this way of life — value little less than their illustrious possessions (so she would seem to say) the presence among them of new and real merit. Personal distinction will admit a man, and possibly his dependents, to these charmed regions, and if he is of the elect he will find himself entirely at home there. He will recognise that the stewards of those excellences admit his right to participate ; and in that way the hereditary, trained, governing class will have gained by the reception of new blood. That, at least, is how I interpret her philosophy. The splendours are a trust: they are also, in practice, something of a touchstone or criterion : if a man looks all right when put alongside of them, the test is satisfactory. David Grieve, for instance, is accepted, and his wife no less clearly cast out. It is, in short, part of Mrs Ward's phil- osophy to set high value on a gathered, accumulated and transmitted culture, on what may be called the culture-producing plant, and she does not see clearly how this is to be obtained without the existence of 55 MRS HUMPHRY WARD privileged persons who shall be its hereditary custodians. One detects plainly enough the influence of Oxford. Tli ere beauty, the costly work of artists, enriched by a myriad associations, is made communally accessible, yet com- mitted to the charge of a selected order, for whom there is provided a decent and even a dignified way of living. Whether she knows it or not, Mrs Ward's conception of the inner governing world of Great Britain is that of another Oxford — another aristocracy placed in surroundings which, of themselves, must impress and mould the mind. She is so much in love with ripe perfection that she cannot contemplate happily any group of people not so provided — with the single exception of her dales' folk. With them she knows the life, she accepts its compensa- tions ; she sees it set in beauty, even at its bleakest. Apart from this, she is the novel- ist of the cultivated rich. An heirloom will attract her, even if it is a neglected heirloom ; but the society of decent villa residences is outside her ken. There are, it is true, 56 NOVELS OF THE GENERAL WORLD certain persons in her books, like the Edward Hallin of Marcella, who live penuriously, bnt they may be considered, for all practical purposes, as hermits, and they are hermits with a free foot in the superior dwell- ings, whether it be Oxford or in the larger world. It is true, and should be remembered, that Meredith was equally attracted by splendour, and could never have reconciled his spirit to the environments which W. D. Howells and Arnold Bennett (to pick two writers at a venture) tend to prefer. There are artists for whom the scene must be richly set. It is characteristic of Mrs Ward and of the time in which she writes that she should attach so much ethical importance to the setting — and that in very characteristic cases she should half apologise for the existence of what she emphasises. Marcella and her husband would not feel quite happy about their houses in Brookshire and St James's Square if they did not also keep up an estab- lishment in the Mile End Road, where they spend several days a week quite happily with 57 MRS HUMPHRY WARD only five servants to look after them. The specified detail of their household is so typical as to be worth extracting. There are " two little workhouse girls" (Mrs Ward knows that no trained servant would consent to be employed by a rich peer in such surround- ings); a German charwoman to cook, whose nationality answers for it that there shall be no undue research about the dinners ; a village boy from Marcella's house in Brook- shire to give a friendly, patriarchal touch ; and, finally, " the ancient maid who had been Marcella's mother's maid," for personal service. When one knows all this, one really has a clear picture of the establishment ; but it is completed by the description of Marcella, on days when her husband had to be away, going out " to meet him at the train in the evening like any small clerk's wife, to help him carry the books and papers with which he was generally laden, along the hot and dingy street, to make him tea from her little spirit-kettle, and then to hear the news of the day in the shade of the little sooty back garden, while the German charwoman 58 NOVELS OF THE GENERAL WORLD had her way with the dinner." Under these conditions one is quite content to learn that slumming " amused and delighted " the great lady. Only, if Tolstoi had been making a similar study, would he have left his great-hearted woman content to reconcile herself to the existence of slumdom by paying such ransom as this for the great house .in Brookshire? But Mrs Ward is too thoroughly Anglican not to be imbued with the spirit of compromise : and that spirit, however excellent in a citizen, makes un- sympathetic literature. Even in the sphere of feeling which is most vital with her, the realm of religious emotion, she retains something of this quality. Here, and here only, her characters risk all to gain all ; yet the great sacrifices which she sets out for admiration are in a sense made to uphold the right of compromise. Elsmere ruins his position by the claim to accept so much as suits him of a prescribed system. Once, and only once, Mrs Ward has written a novel whose theme was the clash of religious ideals, and has written it without a propagandist 59 MRS HUMPHRY WARD purpose. The theme of that novel was the impossibility of compromise between irreconcilable faiths — and in handling it Mrs Ward reached her highest achieve- ment. 60 IV HELBECK OF BANNISDALE AND ELEANOR Y JELBECK OF BANNISDALE was