The Bookman (London)
[The following excerpt assesses Ward's works from her early essays to the publication of The History of David Grieve.]
[Mrs. Ward's] popularity is a significant fact to the student of the English life of to-day. Not that any single page of hers is stamped with that seal of faithfulness and art that would make of it a historic document for time to come. But round all she has written there clings an aroma which distinctively belongs to the thought and ideals of a very large part of the national life. It lurks in her phrases, in her modes of thinking, and literary historians might well wish Mrs. Ward all the power with which her admirers credit her, that the durability of the material which secretes this flavour of our time might be ensured. Rightly understood, it reveals the mental condition of a far larger portion of the nation than the one in whose name the critics speak.
Her literary evolution has been far from simple. The connection between her earlier critical work and her recent fiction is hardly obvious at first sight. Her essays in Macmillan's Magazine, some ten years ago, were not cast in a popular form. They were not the food on which her later admirers have fed for the most part. All things considered, it is not so much to be regretted as to be wondered at that she ever left this field for fiction. From a purely literary point of view these essays are the best work she has ever done, if we except, perhaps, the translation of Amiel's Journal. They are good examples of honest, second-best criticism. In their solidity, their thoroughness, they belong rather to a past age. They have none of the slightness, the too often flimsy impressionism we are content with to-day. Commonplace they are at times, but never affected; cultivated, temperate, sane, and with never a spark of genius in them from beginning to end. Had she rested here she might have been our most faithful guide through the bye-ways of Continental literature. Perhaps only a few readers of Robert Elsmere would be interested in the subject of these essays—in Gustavo Becquer, Gamier, in the literature of French souvenirs, etc. But read in the light of her later fiction, they are curiously significant. The cast of mind, the ideals that have more space for betrayal and development in the novels, are lurking in these earlier works. Robert Elsmere is foreshadowed in her deep interest in Renan's Memories, inasmuch as "they touch the note which vibrates deepest in the modern world—the note of religious difference." "The greatest of the controversies of humanity," by which is meant the struggle between creeds and reason, is a constantly recurring phrase. In the essays and the novels there is the same uneasy consciousness of the changes passing over the world, the timid sympathy, the halting approval, the same talk of the modern spirit with the same curiously inadequate comprehension of what it means, the same combination of healthy instincts with morbid thinking, the same dislike of strong contrasts, of brutal certainties, the same air of tolerance and the lack of catholicity, the same gentle and fair mindedness, the same note of intellectual Pharisaism, the same repetition of the catchwords of a sect.
To her first attempt at fiction Mrs. Ward brought a well-stored mind, a fluent and vigorous pen, an amount of cultivation somewhat unusual, and perhaps unnecessary, for a novelist. Her familiarity with London literary society and her own mental experiences furnished the rest of her capital. Heavy baggage certainly; and she dropped none by the way. In Miss Bretherton there was no second-hand reporting, for Mrs. Ward knew London drawing-rooms and private views; she knew Oxford and Surrey. Only they are seen through such a highly rarefied medium, that they are no longer the London or the Oxford or the Surrey of ordinary folks. "Phrases of Joubert and Stendhal" and "subtleties of artistic and critical speculation float about" in the thick air as its inhabitants fly through the fog in hansoms to join kindred spirits in intellectual West End circles. The jargon and cant of art are heard on every side. We are not even spared the 'Paradoxe sur le Comedien.' The love of nature expressed is probably genuine enough, but the description of Surrey commons is a wild mixture of Hugo and heather, Balzac and bracken, gorse and Chateaubriand. The one strong human passion in the book—the devotion of Kendal to his sister, is made subordinate to intellectual interests, and becomes only another manifestation of priggishness. Kendal's keenest regret for the woman he is said to love seems to be "that her youth had been spoilt by her entire want of that inheritance from the past which is the foundation of all good work in the present." When the girl owns to her ignorance of French, instead of rejoicing in her fine honesty, he makes haste to give her an educational lecture on the benefits to be derived from the study of French prose. The reader's grievance is that Mrs. Ward does not herself attach the fitting label to Kendal's coat-tails, or endow her heroine with devilry enough to flout him. And the end of it is that we leave Miss Bretherton with a wild craving for the wilderness, the uttermost parts of the sea, the fastnesses of Philistia, where neither art nor letters do penetrate, and where the cultivated person is altogether unknown.
Since then Mrs. Ward has learnt much, and her aptness in learning has been rewarded by a great popularity. Robert Eismere, at least, was a long step on. It touched on commoner human interests; it was more readable. Well-bred mediocrity no longer spoke as it had been told to speak of art and literature; it took to solving religious and social problems instead. Now Mrs. Ward in her late protest against her critics has defended the Novel with a Purpose. She is quite right. A vast deal of cant has been talked on this subject. "Art for Art's sake"—that, too, is vanity like every canon and formula of criticism that is exclusive and intolerant. Genius is its own justification, and the methods of Flaubert and Dickens have both forced acceptance. Divest your novel of all moral atmosphere, if you will; weave into it even fanatical irrelevancies, if you will. If the creative power be there; if the tale be quick with human life, the verdict will be for you in spite of your theories or your lack of them. Those who condemned Robert Elsmere intelligently, did so, not because it had a purpose, but because they felt it to be a dramatic failure, or because of the provincial tone of its thought. Indeed, to the fulfilment of its "purpose" must be set down much of the praise it deserves. There is a distinct continuity about it. It develops its ideas in a sane and wholesome fashion. That those whose beliefs were fast grounded were not convinced by Robert's logic; or that others considered the book made a great fuss about small difficulties, has nothing to do with the case. Mrs. Ward, it is true, may have had propagandist intentions, but surely her purpose as a missionary and as a writer of fiction was fulfilled in presenting a sympathetic type of the compromising modern mind in face of religious difficulties. In David Grieve she was more ambitious and much less successful. The sated minds of readers demanded more variety in his experiences, and after giving him this, there is no moral or mental unity left about him at all. He is painted over with successive veneers of revivalism, atheism, socialism, sensualism. And the sum of all the coatings is the impossible one of Elsmerism. He reaps none of the harvest he has sown; he does not pay in hard coin the penalties he has merited. They were but shadowy picture fires he passed through. Surely here Mrs. Ward lost her way. Many a less instructive writer, with a firmer mental grasp, would have shaped the facts of David's case in harmony with the stern inevitable morality of real life.
Yet her people are not mere puppets. Elsmere is almost a success, so is Langham; Rose is charming; Robert's mother, with her strange garments and her Irish wit, is a sympathetic figure. Aunt Hannah is made of flesh and blood, and Lomax the wanderer is a reality. Unfortunately Mrs. Ward has an unfortunate habit of arresting our interest in her people's actions while she is looking after her hero's soul or her heroine's education, or drawing out the spiritual experiences of the supernumeraries. "I am so made," says Mrs. Ward, "that I cannot picture a human being's development without wanting to know the whole, his religion as well as his business, his thoughts as well as his actions." This sounds like a threat for the future; let us pray, therefore, that the dramatis personae be rigorously few. She has too little trust in the power of the untrained, untrimmed bits of human life for stirring human feeling. Her lack of artistic simplicity is instanced in the example she gives of "one of those experiences which remain with us as a sort of perpetual witness to the poetry which life holds in it, and yields up to one at any moment," for the "experience" was a spectacular rendering of Romeo and Juliet in a garden at Venice, with a moon and the canal in sight, a balcony, a sundial catching the moonbeams, a beautiful actress in white brocade, and other highly decorative accessories. She says she has a liking for "serious endings." No one will quarrel with the seriousness, but only with her manifestations of it. She wishes to wring from her readers the tears due to human suffering. Internal chill is her means of doing so in Miss Bretherton; tubercular disease of the larynx in Robert Elsmere; in David Grieve it is sarcoma and diphtheria. Yet there is no reason in the world why Madame Chateauvieux, or Elsmere, or Lucy should have died, except to satisfy that ghoulish tradition of the Sunday-school literature of the last generation. This triumph of the lachrymose over the pathetic betrays Mrs. Ward's inherent weakness and reveals her kindred.
Critics do her wrong by turning and rending her because she is lacking in what is not hers to give. Stripped of their outer garb of culture, her works belong to an order of writing to which critics as a rule pay but little attention. There is in England a very large class of persons who are serious, given to speculation, yet timid and unadventurous in mind. A generation ago they were less highly educated. In those days they read Miss Yonge. Now they are attracted by mild philosophical inquiries. They are influential, and they are worth influencing. On them depends whether ideals and impulses born within a narrow circle become popular forces bearing the life of the nation along. To widen their minds by ever so little, to point to further horizons, to teach forbearance to the new and unknown, is a work the best might be proud to take part in. That work is not for the inaccessible idealist, the austere logician, the fastidious artist. Subtle refinement, strong sensation, naked truth are alien to the mass of timid souls—the great middle class of the intellect. They may indeed be impressed and commanded by the greatest genius which is never very far away from the level of any human mind, high or low. But they are docile, and prefer to be instructed by one whose kinship they can feel. To this class Mrs. Ward appeals as a great moral force. Not that she is on their level; but she is at least within sight of it. She is concerned with their problems, owns, perhaps with a difference, their social ideals, interprets what lies just outside their borders. Within certain bounds, her admirers are fastidious. Academically, they are learned enough, cultured enough. The purely literary side of their demands it is not easy to satisfy. The cultivation, therefore, the full mind, which Mrs. Ward brings to bear on the questions towards the solution of which they would be discreetly guided, is not only flattering, it is indispensable. In thought and ideals the guide must not soar too far away from their levels: the form in which these are wrapped cannot be too fine. In the character of the public for whom these books were consciously or unconsciously written, lie the interest and the explanation of their success, and instead of pedantically pointing to artistic or dramatic flaws in their workmanship, we should be better employed in contentedly recognising that Mrs. Ward is a strong influence that reaches, and is effectual, where artists extolled by the critics would be powerless and unowned.
G. Y, "The Work of Mrs. Humphry Ward, "in The Bookman, London, Vol. II, No. 9, June, 1892, pp. 76-8.
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.