[An English author whose works often concern the city of London, Adcock served as editor of the London Bookman from 1923 until his death in 1930. In the following excerpt, he presents an appreciative survey of Ward's career to 1903.]

To think over the successful problem or purposeful novels of the last fifteen years is to indulge in what is very much of a meditation among the tombs. Books of their week, of their season, of their year, selling in tens of thousands, read and discussed by everyone, extravagantly praised and extravagantly condemned, so long as they lived they were intensely and aggressively alive; but "whom the gods love die early," and they are, most of them, already little more than half-forgotten names. They ran through their popularity as swiftly and as splendidly as a spendthrift runs through his inheritance, and died bankrupt and neglected after a career that was as brief as it was astonishing.

For though no other type of fiction is qualified, by the very nature of it, to achieve such a dazzling and uproarious notoriety easily and instantly, none loses its hold on the public sooner or is, as a rule, more inherently mortal. "It is not difficult to obtain readers," as Dr. Johnson puts it, "when we discuss a question which everyone is desirous to understand, which is debated in every assembly and has divided the nation into parties.… To the quick circulation of such productions all the motives of interest and vanity concur; the disputant enlarges his knowledge, the zealot animates his passion, and every man is desirous to inform himself concerning affairs so vehemently agitated and variously represented." But, with rare exceptions, it is the fate of controversial novelists, "even when they contend for philosophical or theological truth, to be soon laid aside and slighted. Either the question is decided and there is no more place for doubt and opposition, or mankind despair of understanding it and, grown weary of disturbance, content themselves with quiet ignorance."

It is by no ordinary talent, then, but by some rare creative power for which one can find no other name than genius, that out of this perishable material Mrs. Humphry Ward has fashioned novels of high and permanent value, and given them a vital and compelling interest, so that they have outlived, and continue to outlive, the once-current phases of thought and the stirring political or religious movements that are embodied in them.

Mrs. Humphry Ward is akin to Matthew Arnold mentally and spiritually, no less than by ties of blood: she has the same intellectual scepticism, the same passion for religious truth; she has been largely influenced, too, by the great French and German thinkers who influenced him, and in Robert Elsmere, in David Grieve, in certain lesser persons of her other books, she has given these teachings a practical application, and shown and analysed, with a fine insight, their workings upon high-minded and emotional men who take themselves and all things earnestly. It is done with a tense human appeal that is irresistible and unfailing, for though every religious movement passes, the hopes and doubts and world-old questionings in which it has its rise are never finally put by, but are such as come and will come, more or less prevailingly, to most men of average intelligence until the end of time; and, in the main, it is this and their vivid actuality of incident and character that give the greatest of these novels their root in life and their continuing charm.

Beginning her career as an author, in 1881, with Milly and Olly, an unambitious, small book for younger readers, in 1884 Mrs. Ward published Miss Bretherton, a clever little sketch of theatrical life, whose beautiful heroine reflects the fascinating personality of a famous actress who, after a brief and brilliant triumph, retired from the stage while she was still young and her fame at its zenith; and in Miss Bretherton's lofty ideal of her art, in her insistence on reconciling that art with morality, as well as in the general trend and masterful characterisation of the book, one has glimpses and foreshadowings of the psychological instinct and profound knowledge of humanity, the large sympathy and altruistic purpose that reached their fullest expression in Robert Elsmere and David Grieve, and had their share in the making of each one of the notable series of novels that have succeeded them.

But Robert Elsmere did not appear until 1888. In the meantime, Mrs. Ward had translated Amiel's Journal, and in that intimate record of a spiritual pilgrimage one traces, perhaps, the beginnings and shadowy suggestion of Elsmere's own less stoical and more complex personality. Such sayings of Amiel's as "There is but one thing needful—to possess God"; or "It is the historical task of Christianity to assume with every succeeding age a fresh metamorphosis and to be for ever spiritualising more and more her understanding of the Christ and of salvation"; or "Our century wants a new theology—that is to say, a more profound explanation of the nature of Christ and of the light which it flashes upon heaven and upon humanity"—these, in a manner, anticipate the mind of Elsmere himself, the convictions in which, after much travail of soul, he found something of peace at last.

The success of Robert Eismere was instant and startling. In the press, the critics cried it up or down with equal vehemence; the pulpits fulminated against it, or gave it qualified approval; courses of lectures were delivered about it; pamphlets were published to prove that its doctrines were noble and elevating or utterly pernicious; and while its prosperity was still on the increase, a critical article by Mr. Gladstone, in the Nineteenth Century, lent a fresh impetus to its popularity and sealed it for admission into those vast serious circles where the ordinary novel is not, or was not in those days, taken into account.

The absorbing interest of the book was granted even by those who held its teachings in abhorrence; yet it is quite unusually long and its plot is of the very simplest. It relies chiefly, indeed, as all enduring work in fiction does and must, upon the verisimilitude of its characters and the hold they take upon the reader's sympathies. You may be irritated by the narrow creed of Catherine, by her blind, unquestioning faith, her conventional habit of thought and the dull obstinacy with which she cramps her own life, and the lives of those she loves, in a rigid and unintelligent fulfilment of the dying wishes of her father; but your very irritation is a testimony to her actuality—if she were less true to life, less real to the imagination, you could not be sufficiently interested in her to resent the innocent ignorance and saintly littlenesses in her that count for so much in the shaping of Elsmere's destiny and her own. Moreover, if she had not been so uncompromising and her religious beliefs so shrined above the reach of reason, Elsmere's love romance would have been too insipid to have been worth telling, and, after their marriage, there could not have been that fierce and agonising spiritual conflict betwixt them, and all the intensity must have been absent from that painfully dramatic scene in which, after long heart-searching and pitying hesitancy, Elsmere brings himself to confess to her that he can no longer believe in the divinity of Christ, that he is an outcast from the sanctities of her religion and must resign his living and sever himself from communion with the Church outside whose pale she inexorably believed there was no hope of salvation.

The unanswerable arguments in that heretical book of the Squire's (a sinister personage, drawn with consummate fidelity and effectiveness, as are all, even the least important, men and women in the novel) are rightly not revealed, for if they failed to persuade us, as they and converse with the Squire are said to have persuaded Elsmere, then his conversion from Christianity to a sort of theism must of necessity have been unconvincing and unreal, and to that extent the story would have been crudely inartistic. Yet one general outcry against the book was that these potent reasonings were not duly set forth in it; that while the other side had such powerful advocates as the broadly philosophical Oxford tutor, Henry Grey, and the brilliant, selfishly cynical Langham, Christianity was allowed no champion other than the simple, ascetic, ritualistic priest, Newcome, who could oppose little to Elsmere's doubts but Scriptural commonplaces and exhortations to fast and pray and crucify the flesh.

The aim of Robert Elsmere was, as Mr. Gladstone said, "to expel the preternatural element from Christianity, to destroy its dogmatic structure, yet to keep intact the moral and spiritual results," and he protested that at the hands of Mrs. Humphry Ward "a great creed with the testimony of eighteen centuries at its back cannot find an articulate word to say in its defence." But this was, of course, to regard what was primarily a novel concerned with life and character and the play of human passions and errors, as nothing but a cut and dried essay in theological polemics. Assuming that the defence of Christianity could have been and had been presented with the triumphant results that certain critics considered inevitable, then Elsmere's doubts must have been laid, and he had remained firm in the faith instead of deserting the Church and suffering that bitter estrangement from his wife—obviously, in a word, there would have been no story to tell, or a story that would substitute a dramatised compendium of Christian evidences and philosophic doubts for the engrossing soul's tragedy that took the world by storm.

For the vogue and influence of Robert Elsmere were by no means limited to England. The book was translated into various languages; it carried its torch of controversy flaming all across the Continent and through America and the colonies, giving an impetus to religious thought everywhere by the very opposition and resentment it aroused. Nowhere was its success more marked than in Germany, where it was the subject of earnest and elaborate criticism and discussion, and inspired one author to write what appears to have been a sequel to it under the title of Catherine Elsmere's Widowhood.

"Why do people read a book like Robert Elsmere, and why do they take any interest in it?" a newspaper interviewer inquired of Colonel Ingersoll. "Simply because they are not satisfied with the religion of our day," replied the American apostle of free-thought. He considered that the book was conservative. "It is an effort to save something," he said—"a few shreds and patches and ravellings from the wreck"; and he was not far wrong in describing Elsmere's new religion as "after all, only a system of outdoor relief." But what then? Having studied and got to know a lot of things he is really none the wiser for knowing, Elsmere breaks away from the orthodox Christian tenets, forlornly assured that "the miraculous Christ story rests on a tissue of mistakes," that "Christ was only a wise man, and miracles do not happen," and proceeds to construct out of the salvage of his shattered theology a simple humanitarian gospel that is something nearer to his heart's desire:

Ruled by the Scripture and his own advice,
Each has a blind by-path to Paradise;

and though in the last resort his reformed gospel is no more demonstrable than was the one he has discarded, that is no flaw in the novel. On the contrary, it harmonises entirely with the broad, insistently human note of the whole book, for it is an essentially human futility that Elsmere's new religion, like every new religion that men have formulated, should be as elusive and as dark with potential uncertainties as the old.

David Grieve, which followed Elsmere after a lapse of four years, is in many respects the greater novel of the two. The narrative moves with an easier, larger sweep, and is managed with an assured mastery of construction and matured literary style. Here again there is conflict between the revelations of ancient theology and the revelations of modern science, but only as strong undercurrents and not as the all-absorbing main stream of the lives that are troubled and subtly influenced by them. David himself is more of a faulty, inconsistent, full-blooded natural man than Elsmere; he tries a wider range of emotions, his experiences are more varied and have more of colour in them. Between the early years when he and his elfish, wilful, hapless sister Louie tended their uncle's sheep in the Derbyshire hills, and the quiet end, where he is a widower with one son, a prosperous, middle-aged publisher and bookseller in Manchester, running his business on co-operative principles and taking a keen, practical interest in the current questions of labour and poverty, he had burnt through lawless ecstasies of love and joy and grief, and an intoxication of black despair against which Elsmere's narrower scope of feeling and straiter moral temperament and training had ramparted him inviolably.

In Marcella, and in Sir George Tressady, which is by way of being a sequel to it, Mrs. Ward handles contemporary politics and the tangled social problems of the hour with consummate art and effectiveness. Through a stormy atmosphere of political rivalries and parliamentary intrigues, an impulsive, fascinatingly tantalising individuality, constantly led astray in her judgment by her acute sympathy with the poor and the unhappy, and as constantly brought back to a sane comprehension of things by her innate common-sense and great-heartedness, Marcella emerges, at last, statuesquely magnificent, but sensitively feminine, one of the most capricious, truthful, and charmingly womanly women that fiction has given us. She is willing at first to marry Raeburn because she foresees that his wealth and position will assist her incalculably in her endeavours after social reformation; she indignantly breaks off their engagement on the eve of marriage because Raeburn feels that he cannot conscientiously support her petition for the reprieve of Hurd, the wretched hunchback poacher who shot one of his keepers in a midnight affray, and she is racked with grief for the condemned man's heart-broken wife and sickly children; then, having spent some months as a nurse, toiling among the London slumdwellers, and having come to a larger knowledge of the world and of him and of herself, she marries him for love only, when he had lost all hope of ever winning her. The scene of her final self-surrender, and the tact and characteristic nobility with which Raeburn acquiesces in her remorseful self-humiliation without allowing her to feel humiliated is very finely done.

The poacher Hurd, his wife and family, his squalid home life and warped morality, are drawn with a knowledge and biting realism that make them live in the memory with the detail and vividness of personal observation. Mrs. Ward knows the rural mind and the drab life of the countryside intimately, and the peasants and village folk transcribed in her pages, with all their cramped sympathies, their wry humour and pathetic patience, their sluggish subtleties and simplicities of thought and emotion, are as racy of the soil and as distinctly individualised as any even in that wonderful miscellany of rustics Mr. Thomas Hardy has created. There is Uncle Reuben, in David Grieve, with his grim, uncomfortable religion, and his inarticulate kindnesses; there is his hard, unscrupulous wife Hannah, who terrorises over him and holds him in fierce subjection, till his struggling, half-suffocated conscience nerves him to scrape and save and make secret restitution to his brother's children of the money Hannah is filching from them, and then to confess to her, fearfully, what he has done, with such nearly fatal results that her frenzy of rage culminates in a stroke of paralysis. There is the crazy old schoolmaster, 'Lias Dawson, and his gentle, long-enduring wife, Margaret. There are, to say nothing of many another, old Patton, the wistful Mrs. Brunt, and the rest of that memorable group of villagers in Marcella, with the vivacious, quaintly malicious and independent Mrs. Jellison, and her somewhat morose daughter, the gamekeeper's wife. Mrs. Ward understands these humble thoroughly, and is keenly sensitive to the hardness and monotony and the hopeless limitations of their existences, and recognises and feelingly denounces the petty injustice they are often compelled to put up with at the hands of the squires, landlords, and masters on whom they are pitifully dependent. She inveighs against the crying iniquity of the game laws, and against the insanitary and tumble-down state of the labourers' cottages with a fiery earnestness that Charles Kingsley himself, in all his savage tilting at those same old grievances, scarcely surpassed.

Nowhere is this minute knowledge of village life and character used more tellingly than in The Story of Bessie Costrell, a little masterpiece of sustained narrative power and realistic romance, the poignant pathos of whose closing scene touches one by its simple directness as no other passage of Mrs. Ward's writing does, except, perhaps, that amazingly vivid picture of the foundry accident in Helbeck of Baanisdule, when the wondering, frightened little girl is brought in among the rugged workmen as the burial service is about to be read before the furnace in which her father has perished.

But Mrs. Ward appears to approach the lower classes in London in a curiously different spirit; she does not evince the same intimacy with them, or move among them on the same friendly, equal footing. She uses them more in masses and as material necessary to the foundation of social propaganda, as a race to be taken in hand by rescue associations or the Charity Organisation Society, as unfortunates to be elevated in the bulk by means of lectures and serviceable institutions. She does not, with any effectiveness, show these town-bred men and women as separate entities and as they live in their own homes. Elsmere goes to preach to them and regenerate them by means of his new "Brotherhood"; or, accompanied by aristocratic friends, faces a crowd of them in debate at a public hall; Marcella and her husband establish an extra residence at Mile End and receive tired seamstresses and pallid artisans at informal "At Homes" where they would be awkward and unlike their normal selves, and to which those who were best worth knowing would be too proud to come; whilst earlier in her history Marcella had been to work among the poor as a member of a Nursing Home, and seeing, in that capacity, much of the worse side of lower London, was cured of some of her humanitarian illusions and impelled towards reconciliation with her aristocratic lover, whose apparent lack of humanity had stung her into revolt.

Speaking of this lover reminds one that though Mrs. Ward never hampers herself with anything intricate in the way of a plot, the love romances that grow up amid the strain and stress of the social, political, or religious problems that are handled in her novels, have an infinite freshness and variety. Once or twice the ending is unhappy, but only once does it fall a little short of being convincing, and that is in the case of Helbeck of Bawnisdale. Laura Fountain, inoculated with the advanced Radicalism and materialistic philosophy of her dead father, goes with her step-mother to live in the ruined mansion of Bannisdale, and there comes into contact with the strict, bigoted Roman Catholicism of the Jesuitical Helbeck. After scorning and ridiculing his fastings and prayings and his conventional superstitions, she comes to respect and, after flagrant outbreaks of rebellion, even to love the serious, sincere gentleman, who in return loves her with a passion that is only less than his love of heaven. Finally, in her utter devotion to him she is desirous of learning something of his religion in the hope of being converted to it. But his creeds are, she fears, irreconcilably alien to her very nature, and on the night of his sister's death, it is borne in upon her that she can never share his faith and her disbelief must always be a barrier between them, and in a dark access of despair she puts an end to her life. It is so powerfully and plausibly accomplished, this solution of the difficulty, that one is carried away in the reading and takes the probability of it for granted, but on after reflection it affects one as strained and unlikely, and lacks the sequential fitness that gives the suicide of Bessie Costrell its tragic touch of inevitability. This element of Roman Catholicism, in contrast with an opposing system of religion or morality, is introduced again in Eleanor and in Lady Rose's Daughter, but amid vastly different surroundings and to subserve widely different purposes.

It is impossible to do more here than touch very superficially on certain aspects and general tendencies of Mrs. Humphry Ward's work; and if it were not impossible, it would be unnecessary. A more practical and reliable testimony to the force of her genius is to be found in the far-reaching success that has attended the publication of each new novel of hers since Robert Elsmere. David Grieve was almost as extensively translated and has since been written and lectured about in half the languages of Europe; an able and appreciative address by a German Professor who treated the book as a typical presentation of certain phases of English religious opinion, having been recently reprinted in the Anglia. Of her later books, Marcella has been done into French, and Helbeck of Banwisdale is very shortly to appear in a well-known French journal.

Among living women novelists in England, Mrs. Humphry Ward occupies a unique eminence. Probably none has achieved a greater or sounder European reputation; and certainly none of them has done more to revivify and humanise the Christian ideal, or to stimulate thought and the enthusiasm for social reform; no other has exercised a more fruitful influence on the intellects and emotions of the religious, the sceptical, the serious-minded publics of her day and generation.

A. St. John Adcock, "Mrs. Humphry Ward, "in The Bookman, London, Vol. XXIV, No. 144, September, 1903, pp. 199-204.