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The Kensington  Volume 1   Issue: 5  July 1901  Page: 164
 
 The Novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward By Adela Curtis
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at the King’s death) he must have gained large sums by the portraits of people he painted outside the royal family. He acquired property; he made influential friends; Ronsard,the aristocrat, was one of his chosen companions. The poet wrote him sonnets — let us hope that the painter rewarded them with pictures as pure, as concise, as the verses that remain to us.

After the death of Francis I., Clouet went on painting for Henri II and for Charles IX. His portraits of those kings, of Mary Stuart at Windsor and Paris, of la Reine Margot in her childhood, are among the works most certainly ascribed to him. He seems always to have given satisfaction to his employers, excepting once in a design for a coin, when his head of Charles IX was rejected by Catherine de Médecis as insufficiently flattering. But we know hardly anything of his life, and the few stray facts we can glean are mostly to be found in State account-books which record the payments for his pictures. He had a married sister, Catherine Foulon, to whom he left an income of six hundred livres; and it was probably her son Benjamin, known to be an artist, who inherited his uncle’s drawings. In 1825 (we are paraphrasing Clouet’s biographer, M. Bouchot) the Bibliotheque Nationale purchased for five hundred francs a collection of sixteenth century portraits of very unequal value. Those ranging from 1560 to 1567 are evidently by a master-hand; the rest, belonging to Henri IV’s day, are by an inferior man, and one of these is signed “Fulonius fecit? Whatever Benjamin Foulon’s demerits as a draughtsman, his merits as a man and a nephew are incontestable. But for him we should know even less of Clouet than we do.

He died in 1572, the year of St. Bartholomew’s Eve. Corneille de Lyon, his pupil, carried on his tradition. But their names marked the close of the Renaissance era, and it was long before France again possessed an art so frank, so healthy, and so noble.


The novels of Mrs. Humphry WARD

BY ADELA CURTIS

(Concluded from page 144)

Most of Mrs. Ward’s books contain more than one incident of strange heart-blanching dreadfulness, not willingly to be renewed even in recollection; yet, since some of these very passages best illustrate the vigour and accuracy of her narrative power, it is but just to give them as examples. The last colliery scenes in "Sir George Tressady” are as much too long for quotation as the vivid reference in “David Grieve” to the death of the factory-girl, caught by the hair in the wheels of a cotton-spinning machine, is too short; but for scholarly command of language and personal dignity of reserved emotion, take the account of the vigil of Hurd’s execution in “Marcella”, where the horror of the whole situation is intensified by such natural effects as springtime struggling through one of its saddest moods without, and, within, night, silence, and the dying child, with the impalpable presence of the condemned man’s spirit haunting his ruined home.

Of all the harrowing scenes in Mrs. Ward’s novels, this one is pre-eminent for a
The Kensington  Volume 1   Issue: 5  July 1901  Page: -
 
 The Novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward By Adela Curtis
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STUDY OF A HEAD ATTRIBUTED TO CLOUET

FROM THE COLLECTION THE BRITISH MUSEUM.
The Kensington  Volume 1   Issue: 5  July 1901  Page: 165
 
 The Novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward By Adela Curtis
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quietness of tone expressive of both sympathy and detachment — a combination not easily achieved by women-writers, but as desirable as it is difficult Again, in the account of the foundry-yard accident in Helbeck, the awfulness of the event is impressively rendered by the reflection of its various effects upon the eyewitnesses, as the poor old woman, the little girl, the sensitive Laura and her stupid cousin, the strong young labouring man, and the whole mass of his terrified comrades. For sustained interest, in strong sober prose, this writer is unequalled among contemporary authoresses: the careful finish of her technique, as a rule, being emphasised by such an exception as the awkward repetitions of the word “wherewith” in the following paragraph: —

 

“The plaintive tone — as of a creature that has not even breath and strength left wherewith to elude the fate that crushes it — broke Marcellas heart. Sitting beside the dead son, she wrapt the mother in her arms, and the only words that even her wild spirit could find wherewith to sustain this woman through the moments of her husband’s death were words of prayer — the old shuddering cries wherewith the human soul from the beginning has thrown itself on that awful encompassing Life whence it issued, and whither it returns”.

 

Her scrutiny of character is seen to perfection in Wharton the soulless, whose entire artificiality brings him so happily within the range of her particular gifts that he remains, of all her conceptions, the most perfect and convincing; for in handling the slow growth of an individual from childhood to prime Mrs. Ward’s grip sensibly weakens halfway through, as in Marcella and David Grieve, neither of whom sustains in adult life the level of interest they aroused as boy and girl. In Louie Grieve, too, as a child, there was the making of a strangely attractive personality; but as a woman the fascination of the weird has dwindled into mere theatrical glamour, and her wickedness is only a degree less tiresome than her brother’s goodness. In none of her creations does Mrs. Ward strike the intimate personal note by which fictitious beings win our love and become our own familiar friends; nor does she attempt the mastery of smiles or tears; her dominant tone is a serious common sense such as appeals directly to the British temperament and secures a degree of respectful attention which naturally deepens into admiration on discovery of the thorough wearing quality of her talent.

In her latest work, “Eleanor”, as in “Helbeck of Bannisdale” and “Robert Elsmere”, she works her favourite theme of religious differences and difficulties round a central interest of man and woman love, the love in this instance being set in such high relief as to throw the religious element comparatively into a background shade and provoke the supposition that the authoress has here attempted the portrayal of a great passion; at least this may be imagined from the elaborate study made of Eleanor’s character under the subversive effects of her devotion to Edward Manisty. We read that from excessive love of him, this lady of such surpassing “distinction” of mind, morals, and appearance had reason to reproach herself for thoughts, deeds, and feelings the reverse of noble; but — perhaps because Manisty is a cad — these dire results leave us unmoved: the upheaval and disintegration of Eleanor’s soul touch us no more than would the sight of an earthquake — on a chart. We trace the course of the seismic wave on the paper, but it gives no thrill of actuality
The Kensington  Volume 1   Issue: 5  July 1901  Page: 166
 
 The Novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward By Adela Curtis
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or likelihood. The suffering of Clarissa Harlowe will dim the eyes of even a hardened nineteenth century novel-reader, impatient of Richardsons flagrant faults of style and taste; but the suffering of Eleanor Burgoyne, which ought to be more intense, since it is of an active rather than a passive nature, does not so much as rouse curiosity to know how it ended.

There is something artificial, self-conscious, about all three of the principal characters, Eleanor, Lucy, and Manisty. The man is intentionally presented as a coxcomb, though of the intellectual and “interesting” species; but, unfortunately, the two women are hardly more tolerable from the sentimental taint in their conception. It is a taint ingrained, unconscious, and irremediable, like most of the faults of talent that takes itself too seriously. Except for the creative part, the book follows the rule of Mrs. Ward’s work in being excellent. Descriptions of people, places, things, events, are as carefully planned, carefully wrought as ever, the construction is as sound as it is simple, the diction is ample and polished, the contrast of characters is studiously achieved, the “purple stripe of horror” (mad Alice Manisty) is duly proportioned to beauty of surroundings, and the incidental knowledge (of Italian art, history, and modern politics) forming the framework of the story is admirable, as usual; only the whole wants quickening.

“Miss Bretherton”, supposed to be an imaginary portrait of Mary Anderson, is the only one of Mrs. Ward’s novels in which there is spontaneity, and it is strange to turn back from her well-known and highly-lauded later books to find that this first, comparatively obscure little story can carry a critical mind out of itself on a wave of real, live feeling. Awkwardnesses of phrase — such as “if, in a superficial conception of things, the star of an Academician differs from that of the man who buys his pictures in glory” — are the mere accidents of a beginner, and the same excuse would have covered a blunder of taste in Chapter V. if subsequent work had not made such bluntness of perception a curious characteristic of this heavily - gifted writer. Kendal and Wallace have just read the note in which Miss Bretherton gracefully enough begs her friend Wallace to let her bring out his play “Elvira”, which he is longing to keep from her inadequate rendering, and Kendal, who is represented as a man of exquisite culture and refinement, makes this comment: — “Yes, that’s done with real delicacy. Not a word of the pecuniary advantages of her offer, though she must know that almost any author would give his eyes just now for such a proposal”.

Considering the type to which the characters concerned are supposed to belong, it would have been astonishing indeed if there had been "a word of the pecuniary advantages of her offer”!

These slips, however, cause but a momentary regret, easily forgotten in the pleasure of moving forward on the current of a story at once strong, simple, and alive. The scene in Nuneham Wood, where Isabel Bretherton awakes to the full bitterness of the truth that her success has been as a beauty, and not as an artist, and by her nobility of heart opens the way to a great artistic future for herself; or, again, the Death and Love scene that ends the book, is far more touching in its straightforward simplicity than any of the more elaborate presentments of emotion or would-be passion in the later novels.