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The Kensington  Volume 1   Issue: 3  May 1901  Page: 82
 
 The Novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward
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The two painters have a good deal in common and their colouring harmonises well on the walls; but the idea and general composition of the picture is totally different, Diaz choosing a little bit of Nature and rendering it minutely, whilst Isabey, with more dramatic instinct, groups his figures and arranges the landscape to suit the idea. Some of Isabey’s pictures have a distinctly Venetian quality and have the swing, movement and colour of that school in miniature. No. 16, the interior of a cool grey Cathedral with a group of scarlet cardinals, is an example of this and more especially No. 46 — two people talking together — and No. 49. Some of his earlier works, Nos. 68 and 70 especially, would have been better omitted.

To Diaz belongs the intimate charm of the forest; we feel instinctively that he must have spent long hours in the glades he paints so well and have studied Nature in all her moods, although — and this is specially noticeable in the present collection — he seems to give preference to one mood and to harp too much on one string. For we have many shady glades thick with underwood and always with a shaft of vivid sunlight across the path. The patch of sunlight is very often forced and in No. 10, a group of trees seen golden yellow against a slaty-grey sky, the effect is certainly strained. It was probably true to Nature, the effect of a sudden gleam from a stormy sky, but is almost too “fidèle”, as the slang of the studios would have it and is certainly not so pictorial as No. 84, a charming little pastoral showing the evening light behind some cottages which is totally without trickery of any kind. No. 76, “L’Orage”, is a fine impressionist sketch on a larger scale than the others; the storm sweeping over the country is given with much force. No. 21, a great tree covered with white lichen, has a charming background of stems of trees, which brings us back to the fascination of the forests of Diaz. They seem to stretch away, almost illimitable. You feel as if the world had gone back to some bygone age when the forests covered huge tracts of the world and when no one came to disturb the singing of the birds except an occasional woodman; or perhaps you go back even further and people the woods with nymphs and Fauns and baby Pans cara-colling on their little goats’ feet and then — you go back into Bond Street after half an hour which has assuredly not been misspent.


THE NOVELS OF MRS. HUMPHRY WARD

To those who recognise the high function of the Novel as criticism of life, the success of women in this department of letters, to the comparative exclusion of other branches, suggests that they are awakening to the consciousness of their power and especial fitness for the office of critic in its full significance of interpreter and guardian of the House Beautiful, or the Ideal. It is becoming generally understood that criticism is itself creative or transforming, and demands gifts no less rare and training no less severe than those of the creative artist, by whom it has too often justly been despised as a parasite of art.
The Kensington  Volume 1   Issue: 3  May 1901  Page: 83
 
 The Novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward
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The perfect criticism of life will include the criticism of art, and, to risk a generalisation, it may be said that, as man creates art by the inspiration of Nature, so woman, by virtue of her more elemental being, may become the medium for the reaction of Nature upon art as its interpreter and judge.

It is true that women are not yet great poets, painters, architects, or musicians, whatever achievements destiny may yet reserve for them in these directions, but the principles of all the arts are so intimately present in their daily lives as to suggest to the curious observer that they may have had, hitherto, nothing to spare, from being, for the more grandiose forms of expression in doing. A woman’s dress alone will betray a subtle, and sometimes wasteful, diffusion of aesthetic instinct, which, if it could find its intellectual equivalent, might provide a dainty outfit for a minor poet; the prosaic details of her housekeeping are made an artistic delight to her by that exquisite feeling for order and proportion which is the mother-sense of architecture; and the “unheard melody” that vibrates in the mere presence of a gracious woman is the disembodied soul of music.

The old-fashioned idea, so scoffed at nowadays, that the woman’s place is midway between the man and the child, holds within it an inexhaustible beauty. It makes her the cardinal point upon which the world’s progress hinges, and, so far from implying the covert insult of arrested development, it overwhelms her with an honour and a responsibility for which she has by no means yet adequately prepared herself. For what is it but a symbol of the fact that upon her, standing as she does between the past and the future, falls the duty and the privilege of interpreting to the coming race the accomplished beauty of man’s genius; of supplying, by this long-scorned and much-abused office of criticism, a link between the men, the masterminds of all ages, and the children of her time, whether the actually young in years, or those less fortunate than herself in opportunities of culture?

The secret of her fitness for the post lies in her potential possession of the attributes of those leading minds, combined with a certain priceless adaptability of imagination which brings her into communion with the rearguard of the race. And if it be true, as Montaigne in his cool, incisive way declares, that we have no hold even on things present but by imagination — and, to those prepared for it, the declaration comes with the refreshment of sheer truth — it follows that in proportion to the quality of this gift in the critics or interpreters of life, they will ease for us its Hills of Difficulty, and illumine its Valleys of Shadow. For it is by imagination, or perception born of the spirit, that the strength, the love, the light of all the ages are ours for the asking. Imagination is that “second sight” by which we take an unsuspected share in the blessedness of other people’s sorrows, and, without leaving them any the poorer, steal unawares a portion in all that can endure of their joys. Until we have won this spiritual intelligence, the mysteries of the real elude us, and we are ourselves but as flitting shadows in the universal flux. For as was sung by one who knows a way to the hearts of men: —

 

“Who holds by Thee hath Heaven in fee
To gild his dross thereby,
The Kensington  Volume 1   Issue: 3  May 1901  Page: 84
 
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The Kensington  Volume 1   Issue: 3  May 1901  Page: 85
 
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sterling material, excellent design, and skilled workmanship, but — alas for the thirsty! — there is no elixir within.

It is sometimes objected that to hold a writer responsible for that which he does not possess is both ungracious and unreasonable, the proper course being to confine attention to his positive gifts. The objection is valid, as a rule; but when authors elect to treat of the heights and depths of life instead of its ordinary levels, readers are justified in demanding special qualifications. Since Mrs. Humphry Ward, by her well-deserved renown for learned and conscientious investigation of great problems, appeals to that ever-widening circle of restless souls whose struggles have broken them from their old moorings of faith or habit, and borne them far on to the high seas of doubt and experiment, it is to be regretted that the immediate influence of her books is more likely to confirm them in their crudities of fermenting intelligence than to teach them, by attractive example and humorous illustration, either the rules of the highest art or the principles of conduct.

Any student or lover of men and things who for the last ten years has listened to the enthusiastic discussions of “Robert Elsmere” and “David Grieve” among the young men and women of colleges, medical and art schools, polytechnics, clubs, and reading societies, can hardly have failed to be impressed by their pathetic incapacity to distinguish between cleverness and wisdom, genius and talent, or between the dry bones of mechanical argument and the truth which is as the blood and marrow of life. If at the same time such an observer had kept an open ear for the few and far-between remarks of the busy level-headed men who make leisure for a thoughtful hour with a book or a friend over the evening pipe, he would have been equally struck by their confession of failure to find in the works of this writer either the humorous enlightenment which springs from the wide-eyed humanity of the greatest novelists, or a principle to help them in sustaining the drudgery of existence, beyond the cold comfort of loyalty to one’s own perceptions of right and wrong. But how to develop and exalt those perceptions: by what inspiration to preserve and render them effectual: to what ultimate goal direct them? Upon these dungeon troubles no window is thrown open: the prisoners are left to grope in their gloom. Mrs. Humphry Ward’s ethical ideal of altruistic devotion based on the brotherhood of man would be of the highest worth as a guiding influence upon conduct if she had the secret of making it appear as alluring as it really is when seen as the effect of Love. But is Marcella really either loving or lovable? Is not her altruism a veiled and elusive egotism? Does she draw us irresistibly, as only the magic of goodness can — charming us by the love of loveliness that lies dormant in even the ugliest perversions of that human nature which was made “in the likeness of God”?

This benevolent woman, whose little faults have an air of being tacked on to her from an anxiety lest she should seem too oppressively perfect, bears disastrous resemblance to the creations of George Eliot at her worst, in those tiresome women, Mirah and Romola, whose very virtues provoke impatience that they should be so unattractive. They are stiffened with their goodness, as if some petrifying agency were already preparing them for the stone niche to which indeed they properly belong. Romola and Marcella, in their
The Kensington  Volume 1   Issue: 3  May 1901  Page: 86
 
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equally statuesque and unattractive virtuosity, might be twin rivals for the honour of Canonisation as that favourite and self-conscious saint, the British Matron. Mrs. Humphry Ward has unquestionably a sense of humour, but it is apparently of that negative kind which consists in the perception that her characters are deficient in it; for Wharton, as the man of brilliant intelligence, is made to detect this flaw in Marcella.

Hence her books are such heavy reading that the caricaturist might almost be pardoned, for a certain likeness to the truth, if he exaggerated her faults into an apotheosis of that very Philistinism which her famous kinsman pursued with his gracefully lethal weapons. We submit to the admirable talents displayed in these novels, with a half-mutinous humility, as children to the pedagogue — and it must be owned that in the earlier books, especially in “David Grieve”, our authoress never misses an opportunity for taking us to school; but secretly we long for a little irony or satire, kindly or scathing, to break the tedium of the way, and give us a chance of playing truant, even in make-believe, from the monotony of being so persistently “improved”.

Public opinion, in assigning to Mrs. Humphry Ward the honour of succession to George Eliot, seems to have overlooked the much closer relation between her and that born schoolmistress, Harriett Martineau. The three women have in common the philosophic rather than the artistic temperament, and each, being full of the dogged conscientiousness dear to the Teutonic character, has given prominence to the moral and religious side of human conduct. But where George Eliot is solid, the others are often merely cumbrous; and where the first gives us, at her best, the wisdom of mellow experience, the others not seldom substitute the didactic mood. Neither as thinker nor as artist does Mrs. Humphry Ward bear comparison with the two great English women novelists, George Eliot and Jane Austen; for, in spite of the patient labour and integrity of purpose evident in her work, it leaves a dreary impression of being the product of a brain which has just missed greatness, for lack of the one all-glorifying gift of creative imagination; and it is only when the standard is pitched at a lower level that Mrs. Ward can be placed in the front rank.

It is only the few, after all, who can be artists; everyone, in some degree and capacity, is, or ought to be, an artisan — a worker; and as such Mrs. Ward is a model of fervent industry and scientific conscience to all for whom work is a matter of common everyday importance, demanding the best of brain and heart and will. If she cannot attain to the expression of that spontaneous devotion to Goodness as Beauty which made the glory and the grace of Hellenic influence, she does compel respect for the disciplined faithfulness to it as Duty, which is the grandeur of the Roman and the Teuton; and although humanity is in dire need of those who can multiply and dispense that sweet core of angels' food hidden in Browning’s couplet —

 

“O world as God has made it! All is Beauty,
And knowing this is Love, and Love is Duty” —

 

yet for those with whom Love has not had its perfect way, it is much to have learnt, and