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THE

QUARTERLY REVIEW.

No. 432.-JULY, 1912.

Art. 1.-THE IDEAS OF MRS HUMPHRY WARD. The Writings of Mrs Humphry Ward. Westmoreland Edition. Fourteen vols. London. Smith, Elder, 1911. THE novel falls into one of four classes, as it deals with romance, with life, with ideas, or as, lastly, it takes the shape of a work of art pure and simple. Of the great novelists of the last century, Scott, Thackeray and George Eliot stand for the first three types. For the fourth we look in vain in that period. Mr Hardy, who embodies it as to the manner born, is of our own generation; and here the name which at once occurs to us for romance is that of Robert Louis Stevenson, for life that of George Meredith, and for ideas that of Mrs Humphry Ward. The divisions, of course, overlap; Stevenson was a consummate artist, and Meredith had an instinctive faculty for ideas. But they indicate broadly the point of view occupied by these writers; and, in a large sense, the classification holds.

It would be too much to say that Mrs Ward is not an artist. She is so well educated,' says a recent critic, 'that she knows the proper ingredients for a novel. Picturesque backgrounds are provided; plot is carefully planned; incident does not lack; local colour is thoughtfully wrought up.' But her art is not instinctive. It suggests the collector who knows just what to buy and how to exhibit his collection to the best advantage, but whose motive for collecting lies outside art; or the critic who has made himself master of his subject, and is familiar with the various schools and their representatives, but whose lips are untouched by the sacred fire. If we go a little up stream we shall understand this. Mrs Ward is Vol. 217.-No. 432.

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the last term of a series. Dr Arnold was not only a great headmaster, the creator of the modern public school, but a thinker and teacher who, but for his early removal from Oxford and his premature death, would have exercised as profound an influence on English religion as he did on English education. The author of 'Literature and Dogma' was not only a poet and a man of letters, but a critic who, had he not been in advance of his age, and gifted with a lightness of touch which it viewed with the mistrust of stupidity brought into unaccustomed contact with genius, might have accelerated by a generation the advance of English theology. Mrs Ward has neither the passion of her grandfather, nor the irony of her uncle. But she has inherited the seriousness of the one and the insight of the other; there is an apostolical succession between the three.

Art, it would seem, has come into her life as a sideissue, and acquired no more than quasi-domicile. The Puritan tradition, the introspection, the strenuousness, and above all the marked absence of anything resembling the sensuous in her temperament, have tolerated rather than welcomed the alien guest. Her characters, and in particular her women, are skilfully drawn and often finely coloured. Marcella, Laura, Julie, Eleanor, and above all Catherine Elsmere, are alive. But they do not live for themselves, or because they cannot help living. There is nothing inevitable in them; they are there because they stand for something else-an idea, a moral, an association; they are by-products of thought, not up-wellings of spontaneous life. This is even more markedly the case with her men. Elsmere, Meynell, Raeburn are in the first instance preachers; the message is more than the man.

This point of view, which was that of Wordsworth'I wish to be considered as a teacher, or as nothing 'needs no apology. It comes naturally to the reflective, as distinct from the merely receptive, temperament. In a fine passage in the preface to David Grieve,' contributed to the handsome edition of her collected works, Mrs Ward explains it.

'I am so made 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. I

cannot try to reflect my time without taking account of forces which are at least as real and living as any other forces, and have at least as much to do with the drama of human existence about me. "The two great forming agencies of the world's history have been the religious and the economic," says Professor Marshall. Everyone will agree that in his own way the novelist may handle the "economic." By and by we shall all agree that in his own way he may handle the "religious." For every artist of whatever type there is one inexorable law. Your "criticism of life" must be fashioned under the conditions of imaginative truth and imaginative beauty. If you, being a novelist, make a dull story, not all the religious argument in the world will or should save you. For your business is to make a novel, not a pamphlet, a reflection of human life, and not merely a record of intellectual conception. But under these conditions everything is opentry what you will-and the response of your fellows, and that only, will decide your success.' ('David Grieve,' 1, xxi.) ·

This response has been in her favour; it was rapid, decisive, and it has been sustained. As applied to the things of mind the commercial test is open to criticism; but, on its own ground, it cannot be gainsaid. The sale of Robert Elsmere,' the writer's most characteristic work, has reached, she tells us, little short of a million; 'two years ago 50,000 copies of a new cheap edition were sold in a fortnight, and 100,000 within the year.' The circulation of the later works is steady. They rank among the classics of our generation; few living authors have been so successful in leading people to think, in avoiding the temper of political and religious party, and in getting below the surface of things. It is much to have done this; it is much, also, to have raised the roman à thèse to a higher level, and so created a standard by which later writers will be tried. Mrs Ward has taught seriously, greatly, and successfully; she has left her mark on the thought even more than on the literature of her age.

Her style, at times, reaches distinction. The sense of landscape is, perhaps, readier than the instinct for human nature, though it is not without an element of artificiality. The scenery of Cumberland and Westmoreland-not Scotland; this is of another order-is that of her predilection; but the southern counties have not failed to impress her with their more varied charm. The

pictures in Marcella' could only have been seen with a discerning eye and painted by a skilful hand.

'They had reached the brow of a little rising ground. Just below them, beyond a stubble-field in which there were a few bent forms of gleaners, lay the small scattered village, hardly seen amid its trees, the curls of its blue smoke ascending steadily on this calm September morning against a great belt of distant beechwood which begirt the hamlet and the common along which it lay. The stubble-field was a feast of shade and tint, of apricots and golds shot with the subtlest purples and browns; the flame of the wild-cherry leaf, and the deeper crimson of the haws made every hedge a wonder; the apples gleamed in the cottage gardens; and a cloudless sun poured down on field and hedge, and on the half-hidden medley of tiled roofs, sharp gables, and jutting dormers which made the village.' ('Marcella,' i, 61.)

The same may be said of a vivid impression of night in a later chapter (p. 99).

'To-night, too, the blinds were up, and the great view drawn in black and pearl, streaked with white mists in the ground hollows and overarched by a wide sky holding a haloed moon, lay spread before the windows. On a clear night Aldous felt himself stifled by blinds and curtains, and would often sit late, reading and writing, with a lamp so screened that it threw light upon his book or paper, while not interfering with the full range of his eye on the night-world without. He secretly believed that human beings see far too little of the night, and so lose a host of august or beautiful impressions, which might be honestly theirs if they pleased, without borrowing or stealing from anybody, poet or painter.' In spite, however, of such descriptions, of which many as finely drawn might be quoted, it is not as works of art that we should class Mrs Ward's writings; she is, as has been said, a novelist of ideas. Tell him I leave him my ideas-the easier ones,' was the last message of Arminius to the author of 'Friendship's Garland.' Mrs Ward has, perhaps, inherited the less easy. Her themes are serious; she has taken them seriously; and that a discussion of ideas conducted on this high level should have appealed to so large a circle of readers is creditable not only to her but to them. A certain tendency to idealise is noticeable. The novels of public life, in particular, introduce us to a society in which distinguished personages literally jostle

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one another in Belgravian drawing-rooms or in historical country houses; never since 'Lothair' have so many celebrities been 'all with one accord in one place.' Their culture is equal to their surroundings: ''Tis from high life high characters are drawn.' They are less fantastic than Lord Beaconsfield's creations. They fit their canvas; they say what should be said, and do what should be done. But there is a certain suggestion of the Scottish dowager who thanked heaven that the names of her friends, with few exceptions, were written in the Peerage and in the Book of Life.' There is, possibly, a section of society which corresponds to Mrs Ward's picture. There is certainly a much larger section, not wholly composed of worthless people, which does not. And there is yet another section, and apparently a numerous one, which likes to be, if only as lookers-on, in such good company.

The distinctive note of her thinking is sanity. She is progressive, but distrustful of Liberalism; a feminist, but an opponent of women's suffrage; a Modernist, but in her latest utterance, Richard Meynell,' an upholder of the Established Church. It is something, since this is so, to have escaped dullness; the perfectly sane thinker pays, so often, for his sanity by being also perfectly dull. Mrs Ward, didactic as she can be, is an exception; her criticism of ideas is solid without being heavy, and appeals to those whose minds move on other lines than hers. The discussion of Socialism in Marcella' is an example.

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'Socialism seems to me, like all other interesting and important things-destined to help something else! Christianity begins with the poor and division of goods-it becomes the great bulwark of property and the feudal State. The Crusades, they set out to recover the tomb of the Lordwhat they did was to increase trade and knowledge. And so with Socialism. It talks of a new order-what it will do is to help to make the old sound.' ('Marcella,' ii, 114.)

This is as just as it is acute. But-must it not be added? -if this be so, Socialism, like wisdom, is 'justified of all her children'; and we need not quarrel with the dictum of a genial politician-the late Sir William Harcourtthat we are all Socialists now.'

Somehow, however, the impression left by the political novels is that of one with whom the world has gone well;

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