[Peterson is an American educator and critic who has written extensively about the poet Robert Browning. In the following excerpt, Peterson offers a detailed, volume-by-volume analysis of Ward's Robert Elsmere.]

Archibald Tait once observed, 'The great evil is—that the liberals are deficient in religion and the religious are deficient in liberality.' This was the profound religious dilemma of the Victorian age to which Mrs Ward addressed herself in Robert Elsmere. How could a young man like Elsmere be both religious and liberal (i. e., intellectually enlightened)? The solution which she offered to her contemporaries was based upon the familiar Amoldian dialectic: the destruction of orthodoxy by modern rationalism must be followed by a new synthesis which would offer a reasonable religion for nineteenth-century men and women. The three stages of the dialectic are suggested in several ways. First, Robert himself undergoes a change as the story progresses. He begins as a conventional Christian, falls unsuspectingly into a morass of unbelief, and at last regains his footing by discovering what Matthew Arnold called the 'joy whose grounds are true'. Second, the Arnoldian dialectic is reflected in the characters who dominate each of the three volumes of the novel. The first volume belongs to Catherine, the representative of orthodoxy; the second belongs to Wendover, an embittered sceptic; and the third to Robert, the founder of the purified new faith.

Even the settings of Robert Elsmere evoke a similar dialectical pattern. The moral centre of volume i is Long Whindale (i. e., Longsleddale), a Westmorland valley of Wordsworthian beauty and freshness which symbolizes the simplicity of the earlier faith. In volume ii the really decisive actions take place in Squire Wendover's library, which is filled with poisonous books that nearly ensnare Robert's soul. They do in fact capture his mind, but his deepest spiritual life is untouched, so that in the third volume he is able to create in the East End of London (outwardly the City of Destruction) a City of God—though in an Arnoldian rather than an Augustinian sense. Like Dr Arnold in the closing lines of 'Rugby Chapel', Elsmere becomes an inspiring Carlylean hero, a modern Moses, leading the confused ranks of humanity through the wilderness of this world 'On, to the bound of the waste, / On, to the City of God'.

Yet such a schematic view of the novel overlooks the hints of change that are evident in Long Whindale, in Catherine, and in the old faith. The opening chapter of Robert Elsmere, which has often been admired for its beautiful portrayal of the arrival of spring in a Westmorland valley, is more than a clever exercise in Ruskinian landscape description. From the first paragraph onward, we learn that the impression of changelessness in Long Whindale is an illusion. It is not only the season which is robbing the valley of its natural austerity; there are signs everywhere of a more advanced civilization encroaching upon the ancient fells. Burwood Farm, Catherine Leyburn's home, has a bow window, neat flower-beds, and close-shaven lawn, all of which were unknown in Long Whindale a generation or two before:

The windows in [the sheds] were new, the doors fresh-painted and closely shut; curtains of some soft outlandish make showed themselves in what had once been a stable, and the turf stretched smoothly up to a narrow gravelled path in front of them, unbroken by a single footmark. No, evidently the old farm, for such it undoubtedly was, had been but lately, or comparatively lately, transformed to new and softer uses; that rough patriarchal life of which it had once been a symbol and centre no longer bustled and clattered through it. It had become the shelter of new ideals, the home of another and a milder race than had once possessed it.

There is a new church in the valley, and the vicar is a typically middle-class Victorian clergyman incapable of achieving the intimate relationships with the peasants that his predecessors had enjoyed. Even the description in Chapter 1 of Rose playing her violin at Burwood, with the music floating and eddying about the valley, which may appear to be an echo of Wordsworth's 'The Solitary Reaper', is in fact something quite different: the song is not of 'old, unhappy, far-off things' but a modern Andante by Spohr.

All of this is important because it points forward to the later, almost imperceptible changes in Catherine and her religious faith. After Robert has abandoned Christianity, Mrs Ward supplies this analysis of the corresponding but more subtle transformation of his wife:

She would live and die steadfast to the old faiths. But her present mind and its outlook was no more the mind of her early married life than the Christian philosophy of to-day is the Christian philosophy of the Middle Ages. She was not conscious of change, but change there was. She had, in fact, undergone that dissociation of the moral judgement from a special series of religious formulae which is the crucial, the epoch-making fact of our time.

Many reviewers, including Gladstone, were bewildered by Mrs Ward's assertion in the penultimate paragraph of the novel that Catherine quietly attended the services of the New Brotherhood of Christ after the death of Robert, because they felt it was out of character for her. Yet from the very beginning of Robert Elsmere Mrs Ward had been warning her readers that Catherine and her faith were no more exempt from the universal law of ceaseless, inexorable change than was Long Whindale.

Given this close symbolic relationship between the heroine and landscape of Book One, it is not surprising that Mrs Ward was able to create Catherine only after her visit in 1885 to Longsleddale. (Mrs Ward nearly always had to find settings for her novels before she could people them with characters.) Catherine towers over the other characters in Book One, because she is in her natural element, while her sisters and Robert have deeper affinities to the modern world outside the valley:

[Her] complexion had caught the freshness and purity of Westmoreland air and Westmoreland streams. About face and figure there was a delicate austere charm, something which harmonised with the bare stretches and lonely crags of the fells, something which seemed to make her a true daughter of the mountains, partaker at once of their gentleness and their severity. She was in her place here, beside the homely Westmoreland house and under the shelter of the fells.

Catherine moves with 'a beautiful dignity and freedom, as of mountain winds and mountain streams'; in her more tender moments she reminds Robert of March flowers breaking through the Westmorland soil; and when Robert compares her to the 'mountains, to the exquisite river, to that great purple peak', even the unsentimental Rose acknowledges the justice of the analogy with her cynical response that 'she is not unlike that high cold peak!'.

If Mrs Gaskell had not already appropriated the title, Mrs Ward might well have called her novel North and South, for the important conflicts of the story all hinge—as they often do also in Scott's fiction that she read so assiduously in childhood—upon psychological and social contrasts resulting from geography. The North is the past, a preindustrial world characterized by unspoilt natural beauty and simple faith. The South is the present, the familiar Victorian world of modern knowledge and doubt. When Robert finds himself a guest at the vicarage of Long Whindale, he realizes with delight that he has moved backward in time to a less complicated era. Though his decision to marry Catherine, whom he meets in this tranquil valley, suggests Robert's desire to wed himself to the moral simplicities of her world, ultimately he is an intruder in Long Whindale, a citizen of the intellectually sophisticated South, who cannot live comfortably with Catherine's naive religion. He belongs to the present, and she belongs to the past. This, rather than any specific theological differences that develop between them, is the source of trouble in their marriage.

The movement of the characters about the valley and its environs is keyed to the same geographical symbolism. Significantly, Long Whindale, which lies on a north-west-south-east axis, is tame and featureless throughout its lower half but is bordered by steep, rugged crags at the northern head of the valley. Shanmoor (the real name of which is Kentmere), the neighbouring valley to the south-west, is more heavily populated and 'civilized'; it is while on a picnic there that Catherine's resistance to Robert's charms begins to weaken. But Marrisdale (i. e., Bannisdale), the valley to the north-east, is completely uninhabited; and it is there that Catherine goes alone to wrestle with her desires and temporarily persuade herself that she cannot marry Robert. In order to stiffen her will, she instinctively turns to the north.

Long Whindale itself is a series of time-layers, as if it were an archaeologist's tell in which the deepest strata are uncovered as one moves north. The earliest form of human civilization is represented at the craggy northern end by High Ghyll (which recalls Wuthering Heights), the farmhouse of the Backhouses, with its atmosphere of superstition, brutality, and ignorance. At approximately the centre of the valley are the church, the vicarage, and Burwood Farm. At the southern tip of Long Whindale is the road that leads to the nearest city, Whinborough (Kendal). The church, in other words, occupies an intermediate position between primitive superstition and modern civilization. 'There are no fairies and no ghosts … any more', wrote Froude in The Nemesis of Faith; 'only the church bells and the church music have anything of the old tones, and they are silent, too, except at rare, mournful, gusty intervals'. Robert, in his pursuit of Catherine, penetrates ever deeper into this mysterious past, even beyond the Long Whindale church, until he proposes to her at last on a ghostly path above High Ghyll at midnight on Midsummer's Eve.

The frequent allusions to Wordsworth in Book One (Catherine, for example, is compared with his 'Louisa', and Richard Leyburn's portrait resembles that of the poet) function in the same way as do the Wordsworthian references in Matthew Arnold's poetry—that is to say, they evoke memories of an earlier age of innocence and simple religious trust. The Wordsworthian 'forest-glade' and Christianity alike belong to the uncomplicated past, which can be viewed only from a distance with longing and nostalgia by modern personalities like Elsmere.

Mrs Ward's Westmorland valley, like Hardy's Wessex or Emily Bronte's Yorkshire moors, is a powerful spiritual force which shapes the lives of its inhabitants. In an unpublished lecture (1909) on Hardy, Mrs Ward argued that the greatest literary figures, such as Shakespeare and Goethe, transcend any tie with a local scene; but she admired and emulated nevertheless 'that Antaean band of writers'—most notably Hardy and Emily Bronte—'which draws its life from a particular soil, and must constantly renew it there'. Mrs Ward's roots were in Westmorland, and she was always at her best when writing about it. For her the Cumbrian fells were richly alive, speaking to harried nineteenth-century men and women of the serene (but, alas, discredited) faith of their ancestors.

Catherine, far from being a 'repellent, evangelical monster' [as Clara Lederer has described her in Nineteenth Century Fiction, December 1951], is the genius loci of this pastoral setting, a beautiful spirit who hovers over the valley's poor peasants like 'Sister Dora', Mark Pattison's sister, among the miners of Walsall, and who, like George Eliot's Dorothea Brooke (in Middlemarch), is a saint that has had the misfortune of being born in the wrong century. Of course Catherine's religious ardour has its less attractive side, which is amply documented in the novel. Langham calls her 'the Thirty-nine Articles in the flesh', and Rose, when Agnes suggests that Catherine may marry, exclaims: 'Marry! … You might as well talk of marrying Westminster Abbéy'. Mrs Ward makes no attempt to conceal the substratum of fanaticism in her heroine. In the Elsmere notebook and twice in the novel itself she is identified with Madame Guyon, the ascetic, self-tormenting mystic of the Quietist school. Mrs Ward also notes the resemblance between Catherine and her bigoted Methodist aunt and sees her as secretly sympathizing with Newcome, another religious fanatic. Mrs Ward obviously regards Catherine with strongly ambivalent feelings: she responds to her heroine's intense spiritual fervour yet insists that such a childish faith in the modern age is, intellectually speaking, an anachronism. When Catherine is swept unwillingly into the nineteenth century by her marriage to Robert, some kind of catastrophe is inevitable. 'Half the tragedy of our time', writes Mrs Ward, 'lies in this perpetual clashing of two estimates of life—the estimate which is the offspring of the scientific spirit, and which is for ever making the visible world fairer and more desirable in mortal eyes; and the estimate of Saint Augustine'.

But in the Westmorland section of Robert Elsmere such portents are merely hinted at in muted tones. Book One is, as Mrs Ward said, 'very tame & domestic', possessing the flavour of a provincial comedy of manners done by Jane Austen. Mrs Thornburgh, bustling self-importantly about in her match-making efforts, is Mrs Bennett of Pride and Prejudice transplanted in Westmorland; Mr Thornburgh, the vicar of Long Whindale, who emerges from his study occasionally to offer ironic comments on his wife's activities, plays the part of Mr Bennett. 'One does not see these types, [Robert] said to himself, in the cultivated monotony of Oxford or London. [Mrs Thornburgh] was like a bit of a bygone world—Miss Austen's or Miss Ferrier's—unearthed for his amusement'. 'How Miss Austenish it sounded' to Robert at Mrs Thornburgh's party: 'the managing rector's wife, her still more managing old maid of a sister, the neighbouring clergyman who played the flute, the local doctor, and a pretty daughter just out'.

The 'Miss Austenish' tone is executed surprisingly well by Mrs Ward, particularly in a marvellously comic scene describing a musical duet by the vicar of Shanmoor and the inimitable Miss Barks, but for Mrs Ward such drawingroom satire is not the essence of her novel, as it was for Jane Austen, but only a light-spirited prelude to the ensuing crisis in the history of Robert's mind.

Though much of the second volume of Robert Elsmere is ostensibly devoted to a description of the hero as a happily married and energetic young country parson in Surrey, fishing and preaching with equal enthusiasm, Mrs Ward had little first-hand knowledge of rural life. She was, as she said, 'a townswoman, living in Oxford or London', and the photographic realism of the passages about Murewell Rectory (which was in reality Peperharrow Vicarage, where the Wards had lived in the summer of 1882) cannot conceal her apparent ignorance of the lives led by Robert's parishioners. Robert, we are told, had known the people of Murewell since early childhood, yet despite this assertion, none of them really emerges as a distinct individual in these chapters. What really matters in the Surrey section of the novel is the clash of ideas that takes place within Robert's mind. If Catherine, the spokesman of orthodoxy (as Mrs Ward understands orthodoxy), is the dominant figure of the first volume, then here the strongest personality is the local squire, an embodiment of atheistic rationalism; and, caught between these two powerful forces, Robert is nearly crushed.

Roger Wendover (whose name, ironically, is that of a medieval chronicler of ecclesiastical miracles) is in both physical appearance and cast of mind, though not in the external circumstances of his life, a fictionalized version of Mark Pattison. Pattison and Wendover both devote their lives to a literary magnum opus which is never completed; each has an insane father; each has associated with Newman but later turns to scepticism; each exalts the life of the mind above a life of action; each dies a bitter, frustrated, painful death. In the manuscript drafts of the novel the resemblance between the two men is even more pronounced. A cancelled passage in Chapter 18 portrays a long-standing quarrel between Wendover and the Provost of St Anselm's (i. e., Jowett) over the true nature of a university. Pattison, as Rector of Lincoln, attempted to foster research and scholarship in the German fashion, whereas Jowett, as Master of Balliol, subscribed to the rival theory that his college should offer a liberal education to prepare young men for public service. Wendover—in almost the exact language which Pattison had used in Suggestions on Academical Organisation (1868) to denounce Jowett's ideals—complains that the Provost has 'ruined a University' by turning it into a 'boarding-house university'.

In the Robert Elsmere manuscripts there are several cancelled references to an unhappy love-affair of Wendover's which immediately calls to mind Pattison's marital difficulties. Wendover proposes clumsily to the beautiful young daughter of Lord Windermere, who accepts him but then throws him over at the last moment for a cousin her own age. This episode (as in Pattison's case) deepens the Squire's melancholia and compels him to find solace in study and travel.

Why, then, did Mrs Ward claim (in 1888) that 'the Squire is in no sense a portrait of Pattison', and (in 1909) that' "the Rector" suggested the Squire only so far as outward aspect, a few personal traits, and the two main facts of great learning and a general impatience of fools are concerned'? The answer, of course, is that the picture of Wendover, a spiritually sick man, is hardly flattering, and there can be no doubt that Mrs Ward genuinely loved Pattison. Yet, as she wrote in A Writer's Recollections, 'When his Memoirs appeared [in February 1885, just as she was proposing Robert Elsmere to Macmillan], after his death, a book of which Mr. Gladstone once said to me that he reckoned it as among the most tragic and the most memorable books of the nineteenth century, I understood him more clearly, and more tenderly, than I could have done as a girl'. Squire Wendover was Mrs Ward's affectionate tribute to Pattison's role in shaping her own mind, tempered by an awareness that his complete rationalism had led in the end to a cul-de-sac of despair.

Mrs Ward did not accept the view that 'unbelief' was an expression of secret 'sin' (at one point in the novel she directly quotes John Wordsworth's lecture in order to refute it), but she was convinced that an exclusively intellectual life could damage a man's moral instincts. To dwell continually in the realm of thought was to behold Medusa directly and thus take the chance of being turned into stone. On the mantelpiece of the Squire's library Robert observes

a head of Medusa, and the frightful stony calm of it struck on Elsmere's ruffled nerves with extraordinary force. It flashed across him that here was an apt symbol of that absorbing and overgrown life of the intellect which blights the heart and chills the senses. And to that spiritual Medusa, the man before him was not the first victim he had known.

Wendover—like Pattison and those furtive inhabitants of the Bodleian that Mrs Ward had watched years before, and like Edith Lansdale of 'Lansdale Manor'—has incurred a 'fearful risk' by his pathological craving for knowledge. In his 'God-like isolation' from the poor at his gates, he plays out the part of the soul in 'The Palace of Art' and Wendover Hall, 'as beautiful as a dream', becomes inevitably a nightmare filled with Tennysonian 'white-eyed phantasms' which haunt him as death nears.

In depicting the moral catastrophe which overtakes the Squire, Mrs Ward may also have had in mind Matthew Arnold's Empedocles, who tells himself, as he toils up the 'charred, blacked, melancholy waste' of Etna, that 'something has impaired thy spirit's strength, / And dried its self-sufficing fount of joy'. Now a slave to thought and 'dead to every natural joy', Empedocles looks back upon the serene spiritual harmony of the past (both his own past and that of the human race) as an illusion whose unreality must be affirmed by every enlightened thinker. Wendover is attracted to Robert for the same reason that Empedocles listens with gratitude (but also sorrow) to the simple nature-myths sung by his companion, Callicles: the youth poignantly reminds the older man of what he himself once was. However, Wendover's attempt to make a disciple and surrogate son of Robert has sinister implications, for he is feeding parasitically upon the emotional vitality of another to compensate for his own state of dessication. 'Nothing but a devouring flame of thought—/ But a naked, eternally restless mind!' (as Empedocles says of himself), Squire Wendover is for Mrs Ward an object lesson in the terrors of modern rational thought divorced from ethical considerations.

Mrs Ward offers us a lengthy analysis of the contents of the Squire's library not only because she is fond of describing books (similar passages appear in several of her novels) but also because she is providing what amounts to an annotated bibliography of nineteenth-century intellectual history. As Langham detects the gradual shifts in the Squire's interests as reflected in his library—'from the Fathers to the Philosophers, from Hooker to Hume'—he comments, 'How history repeats itself in the individual!'. In the manuscript of Robert Elsmere (Chapter 20) Mrs Ward emphasizes that Robert's intellectual transformation is also a paradigm of 'that tumult and agony of the modern mind, which spreads itself year by year in ever wider circles of disturbance, troubling profundities of feeling & breaking up calm surfaces of life':

What was taking place in Robert during this period of his young intellectual development was the reproduction in miniature of what takes place on a large scale in any of the critical moments of human history. It was the slow & gradual substitution of one set of preconceptions for another; the steady imperceptible advance from the presuppositions of English orthodoxy, involving a double order of things, spiritual & material, continually interrupting & intersecting each other, to the presuppositions of science, in which the mind assumes the "rationality of the world" & the unity of all experience. Just as the world moves from the generalisation of St. Thomas Aquinas to that of Bacon & Locke, from the generalisation of Hegel to that of Comte, or from that of Rousseau to that of the modern student of anthropology and primitive culture, and for the common understanding of man the great kaleidescope of experience changes, & passes into ever fresh combinations & leading patterns, with every alteration of the point of view; so, in the history of the individual the same moments of crisis occur, preceded by the same periods of half-conscious preparation. All that vast confusion of circumstance which had been to a greater or less degree enslaved and brought to order by one master set of conceptions resumes as it were its inherent right of sway, and dictates another system of the mind, as a nation changes the form of its government.…

And with this fundamental change everything changes. Opinion in all directions throws itself into fresh lines; and action seeks for itself new outlets.

Mrs Ward saw the nineteenth century as one of these epochs of far-reaching intellectual change, and she regarded her own hours of quiet struggle in the Bodleian (which she attributed to Robert in the Squire's library) as a symbol of the contemporary upheaval in systems of ideas.

Though the Squire and his library operate as a catalyst, they are not the underlying cause of Robert's loss of faith. 'I recognise that his influence immensely accelerated a process already begun', explains Elsmere. Mrs Ward also remarks that 'now at every step the ideas, impressions, arguments bred in him by his months of historical work and ordinary converse with the squire rushed in… to cripple resistance, to check an emerging answer, to justify Mr. Wendover'. In a letter to Meredith Townsend written in 1888, Mrs Ward argued this thesis even more vigorously: 'The Squire's influence is described as only the match which ultimately lights the mine. I have tried to show that everything really depended not on the Squire but on the nature of the historical training which had gone before.'

The Elsmere notebook indicates that Mrs Ward at first intended to describe the 'converging pressure of science & history', and Darwin's name is listed under 'Books wanted' in the notebook (a character in The Testing of Diana Mallory [1908] declares that 'Darwin has transformed the main conceptions of the human mind'); but, as Mrs Ward wrote in the subsequent Introduction to Robert Elsmere:

As far as my personal recollection goes, the men of science entered but little into the struggle of ideas that was going on [in the 1870s]. The main Darwinian battle had been won long before 1870; science was quietly verifying and exploring along the new lines; it was in literature, history, and theology that evolutionary conceptions were most visibly and dramatically at work.

What shakes Robert's belief in Christianity is neither the Squire nor Darwinism but his own patient study of the documents and records of the late Roman Empire. In a half-hearted effort to conceal the confessional element in the novel, Mrs Ward has her hero absorbed in French rather than Spanish history, but nevertheless his conclusion is identical to the position she had adopted after preparing the Spanish articles for the Dictionary of Christian Biography: that the 'kings, bishops, judges, poets, priests, men of letters' of the early Christian era lived in such an atmosphere of credulity and superstition that the entire historical basis of Christianity must be called into question.

The climactic moment arrives when Robert realizes (in the words of Matthew Arnold) that 'miracles do not happen'—meaning particularly the miraculous resurrection of Jesus. Mrs Ward repeatedly asserted that this crucial statement was a result of inductive historical reasoning, yet she failed to acknowledge the obvious fact that a disbelief in miracles rests upon certain a priori assumptions about the operation of 'natural' laws. By embracing a dogmatic monism that was completely uncritical in its acceptance of 'reason', Elsmere, it might be argued, merely leaped from one system of authority to another. Instinctively a true believer, Mrs Ward was evidently incapable of genuine agnosticism; orthodox Christianity had to be discarded, but she (and Robert Elsmere) turned at once to constructing a new faith from the wreckage of the old. As Dr Arnold remarked in one of his sermons, 'For indeed to be for ever wavering in doubt is an extreme misery.'

What is disappointing about the culmination of Robert's mental struggles is that his cry of agony, though intense and heart-felt, seems to be expressed in the most banal terms: 'O God! My wife—my work!' To modern readers accustomed to acknowledging the redemptive value of total despair, this response may sound very tame, and we are not surprised to learn that 'at his worst there was never a moment when Elsmere felt himself utterly forsaken'. Yet if Elsmere's angst strikes us as almost cosily domestic, it should be said, in fairness to Mrs Ward, that she was not unaware of the potential depths of spiritual anguish. Robert weathers the storm with relative ease because he (like Mrs Ward) discovers almost instantly a middle ground between unreasonable orthodoxy and destructive rationalism. Laura Fountain in Helbeck of Bannisdale, who is unable to find such a convenient synthesis, commits suicide; Robert, however, is never really forced to peer into the abyss (though he is conscious at times that it is there beneath his feet), since Mrs Ward has already prepared an escape route for him.

Robert accordingly turns to a celebration of the human Christ and to a Theism which cannot be discredited by historical research. Mr Grey says to him:

Spiritually you have gone through the last wrench, I promise it you! You being what you are, nothing can cut this ground from under your feet. Whatever may have been the forms of belief, faith, the faith which saves, has always been rooted here! All things change,—creeds and philosophies and outward systems,—but God remains!

But it is a faith based on intuition rather than historical evidence or revealed Scriptures. Robert argues that the chief distinction between Christianity and Theism is that the latter 'can never be disproved" for 'at the worst it must always remain in the position of an alternative hypothesis'.

The dramatic interest of the novel turns primarily upon the struggle of will between Robert and Catherine after he has made his decision to leave the Church and his clerical vocation. The preservation of Catherine's love is supremely important to Robert, because it is for him the primary evidence of divine love and a reassuring link with the old faith. Robert, in fact, regards his wife as a symbol of the deep spirituality of Christianity: she has a 'Madonna-like face', and Robert addresses her as 'Madonna mine'. A cancelled passage in the Elsmere manuscript (Chapter 25) reveals even more explicitly the significance of Catherine in Robert's religious life:

A sort of allegory of himself ran vaguely through his mind. He felt as though he had been forcing his way for weeks through some dense & baffling forest, tangled by the creeper[s], bewildered by the closeness of the trees, stifled for lack of air, crushed by the sense of the impenetratable [sic] distance & discoverable issues. And suddenly the trees thin around him, the air grows lighter, the wood falls back, and under the blessed sky & wind of an uncovered heaven, there rises in a clearing made by pious hands a white & tender image,—a vision of the Mother & Child. And forgetting all the passion & the desperation of that long struggle through the blinding hindering branches, he falls on his knees, the heart crying out with joy, the black oppression lifted.

This dream-fantasy, filled with phrases from the opening canto of the Divine Comedy, discloses the symbolic weight of the recurrent scenes in which Robert stumbles through the dark Surrey woods. On the very night that he renounces Christianity, he moves mechanically along a darkened lane until 'the trees before him thinned' and he hears the voice of Catherine calling for him. After returning from Oxford, he must pass through a 'frowning mass of wood' before he can dimly see Catherine's figure behind the muslin curtains of the rectory window. When his wife temporarily flees the rectory, he searches for her among 'a thick interwoven mass of young trees' until he at last finds her in a clearing. Much later, in a delirium produced by fatigue and illness, Robert again catches a glimpse of his Madonna, whose faith he has formally rejected but whose spiritual beauty is nevertheless a solace to his troubled soul: 'The strangest whirlwind of thoughts fled through him in the darkness, suggested very often by the figures on the seventeenth-century tapestry which lined the walls. Were those the trees in the wood-path? Surely that was Catherine's figure … ?.

The Surrey portion of Robert Elsmere is also richer in colourful incident and characterization than the foregoing analysis might suggest. The brooding figure of the Squire casts an appalling shadow over the pastoral landscape. His sister, Mrs Darcy (who, incidentally, is a portrait of the wife of E. H. Craddock, Principal of Brasenose), lends an appropriately demented quality to the atmosphere of Wendover Hall. Newcome (whose name and mannerisms may have been suggested by Newman), the High Church clergyman, is a grotesque figure out of a child's nightmare. Above all, there is the strange, remote personality of Edward Langham, spiritual kin to the Squire, in whom unbelief has produced the moral paralysis of an Obermann or an Amiel. Mrs Ward claimed, in fact, that Langham was modelled exclusively upon these two introspective personalities, but he is also reminiscent of both Pater and Clough, particularly in his unsuccessful resolve to leave Oxford. His courtship of Rose—which is one the most fascinating episodes of the novel though admittedly too long for a mere subplot—owes much to Clough's 'Amours de Voyage' and Matthew Arnold's 'Marguerite' poems. Thematically the courtship is related to the main story, for we are meant to see that Langham's passivity, even when in love, contrasts unfavourably with Robert's earlier vigour as a suitor.

Rose herself is a refreshing character in a novel peopled so largely with intensely religious personalities. She is beautiful, vivacious, 'aesthetic' (indeed, in many respects very much like Emilia Pattison), yet Mrs Ward must punish her at least lightly because she is too self-assertive. As her juvenile tales demonstrate, Mrs Ward was preoccupied with the idea that a frivolous girl is morally strengthened only through an unhappy love affair. Hence we are informed that after Langham breaks off their engagement, 'deep undeveloped forces of character [begin to] stir within her'. Henry James, however, recognized the real implications of Rose's eventual 'third volume-y' marriage to Flaxman, the wealthy, handsome, but very colourless aristocrat. James sensed that Mrs Ward had provided such a conventional husband for Rose precisely because (perhaps at a subconscious level) the author's Puritan instincts disapproved of Rose's artistic ambitions. 'I can't help wishing that you had made her serious, deeply so, in her own line, as Catherine, for instance, is serious in hers', James wrote. But Mrs Ward, like Robert Elsmere, still worshipped the traditional religious and cultural values represented by the shrine in the forest clearing, and art and scholarship, though valuable in themselves, were lower in her scale of values than a strict standard of morality.

Mrs Ward believed that the final third of Robert Elsmere, which is set largely in the East End of London, was the finest part of her novel, but most readers would probably be inclined to apply to it T. S. Eliot's famous observation on Tennyson's In Memoriam that the author's doubt is a more intense and vivid reality than his faith. Elsmere, never a strong personality, is flattened into an instrument of propaganda once he is no longer afflicted by scepticism. 'One fears a little sometimes', James remarked wryly to Mrs Ward, 'that he may suffer a sunstroke, damaging if not fatal, from the high, oblique light of your admiration for him.' Elsmere's sufferings in Surrey compel our sympathy; his apotheosis in London as the saint of a new cult becomes a dull spectacle.

Mrs Ward also again laboured under the handicap of placing her hero in a milieu about which she knew little. When Robert is writing articles in his house in Bedford Square (which corresponds to descriptions of the Wards' house in Russell Square) or moves in the glittering social world of Madame de Netteville, Mrs Ward is obviously on familiar ground, but her descriptions of slum life are based on only a few visits to the East End in the company of her sister-in-law, who was a nurse, and conscientious research in printed sources. Though Mrs Ward was of course a perceptive observer, such a superficial acquaintance with working-class existence was hardly sufficient for one who professed to offer a new religion to the poor. When she made similar brief ventures into the world of the lower classes while writing David Grieve, Alice Green (the widow of J. R. Green) remarked sarcastically that Mrs Ward was going to Manchester 'for a three day study of the working class'.

From the Elsmere notebook and her letters written between 1885 and 1887, we know some of the books which Mrs Ward read to inform herself about the alien world of the East End. In the notebook one of the titles listed is Gissing's Demos: A Story of English Socialism (1886). She also studied the published letters of Edward Denison (1872), who spent much time among the London poor trying to teach them the elements of Christianity. James Knowles thought that Walter Besant's novel All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1884) had influenced Mrs Ward's treatment of 'Elgood Street', but there is no solid evidence to support this view. She was, however, intrigued by the problems of instructing the poor, and she turned to the lectures of Joseph Payne and Huxley's Lay Sermons (1870) for suggestions as to how scientific concepts could be communicated in simple fashion. She read widely in the autobiographies and memoirs of working men such as William Lovett and Thomas Cooper.

Having abandoned the Church and living now in the shadow of the British Museum, Elsmere would seem to be destined for a scholarly career, but his eyes turn quickly to the brutalized masses, devoid of any religious sentiments, that crowd the eastern and southern edges of London. Though he briefly engages in charitable work under the direction of a Broad Church vicar, Robert concludes that the Revd Mr Vernon is involved 'in endless contradictions and practical falsities of speech and action' because the essence of the Broad Church strategy is the concealment of one's opinions. The vein of Pattisonian radicalism in Mrs Ward's thinking made her impatient with such apparent duplicity, just as she had strongly disapproved of Jowett's willingness to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles. In a letter written in 1895, Mrs Ward remarked, 'I deeply regret—& wrote Robert Eismere to shew it—the whole action and attitude of the Broad churchmen of those days.' Elsmere declares (in language reminiscent of John Morley's) that there is no room for compromise:

Miracle is to our time what the law was to the early Christians. We must make up our minds about it one way or the other. And if we decide to throw it over as Paul threw over the law, then we must fight as he did. There is no help in subterfuge, no help in anything but a perfect sincerity.… The ground must be cleared; then may come the rebuilding.

Robert also has encounters with High Churchmen, Comtists (whose 'potent spirit of social help' he admires), Unitarians (with whom he identifies intellectually but not emotionally), and every variety of Secularist and Socialist, all of them moving helplessly about under the cloud of spiritual darkness that covers the East End. Eventually he decides that he must establish his own centre of activities, free of all sectarian ties, in an empty warehouse on Elgood Street. Undoubtedly with the example of Toynbee Hall in mind, Robert creates the New Brotherhood of Christ, described by one sceptical witness as 'a new church', which offers a multitude of social, educational, and religious activities for the working people of the neighbourhood.

Superficially, the New Brotherhood appears to be a 'purified' or attenuated version of Christianity. The faith has only two articles ('In Thee, 0 Eternal, have I put my trust' and 'This do in remembrance of me'), and its simple liturgy recalls that of James Martineau's Unitarian prayer book, which first appeared in 1862. The walls of the Elgood Street hall are lined with recesses which will hold the names of present and deceased members of the New Brotherhood, reminding us that Mrs Ward had once thus envisioned the cathedral of the new faith. In short, the New Brotherhood gives the impression of offering a modest, unpolemical alternative to orthodox Christianity that is nonetheless deeply Christian in spirit and ethics.

That is evidently how Mrs Ward wished the third volume of her novel to be read. However, the Arnoldian theme of reconciliation and the Pattisonian theme of intransigence are always straining against each other in Mrs Ward's religious fiction, and there are frequent indications that the ultimate goal of the New Brotherhood is not to modify but to supplant traditional Christianity. The one sermon we hear Robert preach at Murewell is on the Messianic text 'This day is the scripture fulfilled in your ears!', for he is destined to become the Christ of Mrs Ward's neo-Christianity. As he declares in a lecture to a crowd of working men on Easter Eve:

No—an idea cannot be killed from without—it can only be supplanted, transformed, by another idea, and that one of equal virtue and magic. Strange paradox! In the moral world you cannot pull down except by gentleness—you cannot revolutionise except by sympathy. Jesus only superseded Judaism by absorbing and recreating all that was best in it.

Clearly the implication is that the New Brotherhood today stands in the same relationship to Christianity as Christianity did in the first century to Judaism. Like Jesus, Robert gathers round himself a small circle of disciples who will carry on the work of Elgood Street after his martyrdom; but even before his death, pious legends and myths are beginning to be associated with Robert's name, thus suggesting how the earliest oral accounts of Jesus' ministry eventually developed into the versions found in the Synoptic Gospels.

Some readers and reviewers of Robert Elsmere, recognizing its revolutionary implications, have wondered why Mrs Ward chose to disguise this fundamentally new religion as a reformed Christianity. Was it merely timidity on her part? In The Future of University Hall, a lecture delivered and published in 1892, she explained that Christianity had so interwoven itself with European history and culture that the modern Englishman cannot escape it 'without wasteful and paralysing revolt'. Theoretically Buddhist mysticism might be of equal spiritual value to Christian mysticism, but in fact—as she told Felicia Skene in 1889—Christianity was superior to other religions because it had been associated with the greatest of all human cultures. The Christian colouration of the New Brotherhood, then, is a result of convenience and historical accident rather than of any intrinsic merit which the faith of Jesus might possess that would distinguish it from other religions.

One of the temptations in the urban wilderness which Robert as the new Christ must face and overcome is the siren call of an alluring Frenchwoman, Madame de Netteville. In several of her novels Mrs Ward created a similar feminine type, intellectually gifted but morally depraved (and nearly always of French birth or descent), who presides over a brilliant salon. Madame de Netteville's attempted seduction of Robert has class as well as sexual overtones. Her drawing room represents the most beautifully decorated room in the Palace of Art, and she wishes to lure Robert into it so that he will stop his ears to the cries of the poor without. But Robert, his mind filled with painful images of the suffering he has witnessed in Elgood Street, declines to separate himself from the moral realities of that world beyond the gates of the Palace of Art:

When, every now and then, in the pauses of their own conversation, Elsmere caught something of the chatter going on at the other end of the table, or when the party became fused into one for a while under the genial influence of a good story or the exhilaration of a personal skirmish, the whole scene—the dainty oval room, the lights, the servants, the exquisite fruit and flowers, the gleaming silver, the tapestried walls—would seem to him for an instant like a mirage, a dream, yet with something glittering and arid about it which a dream never has.

The grim paradox—which Mrs Ward was to explore often in her later novels—was that this drawing room, both in its furnishings and guests, symbolized the finest aspects of modern civilization, yet it was threatened with extinction by the moral indifference of those who frequented Madame de Netteville's salon. Like Squire Wendover's library, the fashionable drawing room, admirable in many ways, becomes crowded with daemonic shapes when it attempts to ignore its obligations to the peasants in the valley below.

On the same night that Robert spurns the advances of Madame de Netteville, Catherine for the first time learns from Hugh Flaxman the full story of her husband's self-sacrificial labours among the London poor. Having experienced these simultaneous moral crises, 'Elsmere and his wife', we are told, 'were lovers as of old'. The reconciliation which John Morley had predicted was finally achieved. The last chapter begins: 'There is little more to tell. The man who lived so fast was no long time dying'. Fatally ill with throat cancer in Algiers (where the Wards had visited in 1881), Robert remains faithful to the new creed until the end, never wavering in his trust of God, though he professes ignorance of what form of existence may await him in the afterlife.

The gospel according to Robert Elsmere may seem in some respects a hasty and premature theological synthesis, but it is impossible not to admire the eloquence and fervour with which Mrs Ward proclaimed it both in this novel and throughout the rest of her life. Though her religious ideas were tainted by the facile optimism of her century, she never lost touch—despite, as it were, her official ideology—with the tragic element of life which she had learned from orthodox Christianity. It is not enough to say that Robert Elsmere dies because Mrs Ward has the usual Victorian weakness for sentimental death-bed scenes. He dies because (in words that echo the closing paragraph of Middlemarch) 'his effort was but a fraction of the effort of the race', and only through the martyrdom of humanity's most precious spirits can the rest of us climb upward on the shadowy ladder of faith that leads to God.

William S. Peterson, in his Victorian Heretic: Mrs. Humphry Ward's "Robert Elsmere," Leicester University Press, 1976, 259 p.