Mrs. Ward's Later Novels

FICTION, NEW AND OLD.

WHEN we are told with authority, concerning a forthcoming book, that sixty-five thousand copies have been ordered in advance ; that sixty thousand pounds of paper will be required for the plebeian one-volume edition, to say nothing of the édition bourgeoise in two volumes, and the édition de luxe of two hundred numbered copies ; also, that if this paper were piled sheet upon sheet it would make a tower five hundred and fifty feet high, and that if the sheets were placed end to end. in a straight line, they would extend one thousand miles, — we are forced to admit, whatever we may think of the taste of the advertisement, that we are on the eve of an important event. The writer whose work can be thus heralded wields an incalculable power; and it is well when, as in the present case, we know beforehand that it is a power which will make both for righteousness in conduct and refinement in art.

The writer is Mrs. Humphry Ward, of course, and the book is Eleanor,¹ and I hasten to record my own impression, after reading the skillfully reserved and extremely beautiful winding up of the story, that no discerning reader can be disappointed therewith, and that the new romance is, upon the whole, altogether the finest thing that Mrs. Ward has done.

Yet Eleanor will be a surprise, in some ways, to those who have not followed attentively, in its author’s later work, the gradual alteration of her method and the new development of her distinguished talent. It will hardly, I suppose, be disputed that, at a time when there are multitudes of women at work in the literary mills, turning off, with reasonable success, many kinds of skilled labor which used to be supposed impossible for any woman, Mrs. Ward’s place in the honor list is among the very few double-firsts of her sex: with Charlotte Brontë, certainly, and George Sand, and Matilde Serao ; and only a little lower than Emily Brontë and Mrs, Browning and George Eliot.

But Mrs. Ward’s idea of her own vocation, when she first began, hardly more than a dozen years ago, her remarkable career as a novelist, was essentially different from any of theirs. I always dislike using of a writer the word “ artist,” which is almost more “ soiled by ignoble use ” than the greater word “ gentleman.” But I do not know what else to say than that the other famous women named above were all, in their different ways and degrees, artists; while Mrs. Ward, with all her dramatic instinct and analytic acumen, the wealth of her acquired knowledge and the grace of her inherited culture, began by being resolutely and even aggressively the moralist. She stooped to illustrate her lectures by fascinating parables; but lecture she must and would. The parables made the lectures go down with a vast majority of her readers ; but there will always remain an impatient and impenitent few who cannot long stand being lectured, — not even though the soundest precepts be presented with a maximum of feminine grace. And how much, after all, is ever accomplished by the lecture ? How many converts did Robert Elsmere make to agnosticism ? How many people were deterred from the dangers and indecorums of the union libre by David Grieve’s mythical experiences in Paris ? And then, after a suitable interval,— for Mrs. Ward is not one of those who tend to write too much, — we were invited to a treatise on the new woman and her possibilities, in Marcella.

The book opened most attractively. Marcella was the new woman to the life, and the new young woman : courageous and sincere, though crude and chaotic ; self-centred and self-exaggerated; full of generous impulses and audacious ambitions ; her brain disproportionately developed rather than soberly and effectually disciplined ; philanthropical, but not affectionate, — the strangest compound, surely, of nobility and absurdity that the world has ever seen. But Mrs. Ward has not a quick eye for absurdity. One of the few marked defects which go along with her many brilliant qualities is an insufficient, not to say absent sense of humor. She meant to portray a type in Marcella, and she meant to portray it seriously and respectfully; sympathetically also, and, if we may judge by her incessant and almost fatiguing insistence on the heroine’s transcendent personal beauty, even flatteringly. Here, however, she labored in vain. The Marcellas of this world may be admirably handsome; and, indeed, the conditions of life in the class from which they mostly come, especially in England and America, undoubtedly favor the development of a high order of personal comeliness. But they seldom produce the effect of beauty. What we all recognize as charm is a nicely proportioned compound of many different qualities, — mental, sentimental, and, above all, physical ; but, like a perfect salad dressing, the product should be neutral, retaining the distinct flavor of no one of its ingredients. Now, in Marcella and the daily growing class whom she represents, every pungent condiment speaks, or rather stings, for itself. “ Macta virtute! ” we murmur, a little awestruck, as the intrepid young Amazon adjusts her armor and essays her exercise.

Howbeit, the highly aspiring, grossly blundering, and unconsciously appealing Marcella of Mrs. Ward’s first vivid conception, unclassed through no fault of her own, and held at arm’s length by her embittered mother (one of the author’s most powerful character studies), — that faulty but entirely natural being did really enlist our sympathies and compel our belief. But the same girl, rescued from her grim struggle by the fairy prince of the nursery tale, and established on a social pinnacle ; rewarded, like the virtuous PeriwinkleGirl in the ballad, with a coronet and a clear income of thirty thousand pounds, was as unreal as one of Ouida’s most lavishly bespangled heroines; and the sequel to her story in Sir George Tressady came perilously near a fiasco. Her gross abuse of the opportunities of her new position, and her truly inexcusable behavior with the fatuous and illstarred hero of Mrs. Ward’s feeblest book, accused, upon every page, her bad up-bringing, and must have been a sad mortification to her intimidated but infinitely correct lord. For a laborious attempt was made in Sir George Tressady to represent the married and promoted Marcella as a political force, an influential voice upon the liberal side of English legislation. Now it is matter of history that, sometimes in England, though less often perhaps than in France, women have exercised that kind of influence in one or the other of the highly trained and privileged coteries which alternately govern England. But they never have exercised it in the least after the fashion of the intense and irrepressible Marcella. Neither preaching nor “ slumming ” has been in the line of these clever ladies. Their ways have been — and it were well for civilized society that they should continue to be — the supple, suave, indirect, and chiefly anonymous ways of the granddaughters of Sheridan, the wives of Palmerston and Beaconsfield, and the benign stars of the scrupulously guarded circles of Bowood, Panshanger, and Holland House. One hardly sees, indeed, how, with her own traditions and environment, Mrs. Ward could so signally have failed to catch the tone and reflect the manners of that paramount section of the English great world. She goes astray in the House of Commons, and loses her head completely among the Lords. And it is the more remarkable because she had such excellent models to study. The thing which the biographer of Marcella tried to do was done to admiration, twenty-odd years ago, both in Endymion, with its full flow of patrician gossip and perfect familiarity with the subject in hand, and in those easy, unassuming, garrulous, and yet thoroughbred chronicles of contemporary life, so rich in humor and insight, so full of social and civic intelligence, — the political novels of the too lightly appreciated and too soon forgotten Anthony Trollope.

But the power handsomely to retrieve an error, whether in literature or in life, is almost more rare than the power to avoid the same. It proves, at all events, the penitent’s possession of some admirable qualities, both moral and intellectual, — such as breadth and versatility of mind, candor of spirit, and the most excellent kind of humility. When Helbeck of Bannisdale appeared, a complete story, not anticipated by periodical publication and announced by no pompous headlines, the sympathetic reader perceived at once in its author an altered, more graceful, and less authoritative manner. The theme was still a grave, even a sombre one, — the light and playful is never in Mrs. Ward’s line, — but it was a theme, and not a thesis; and it was developed earnestly, indeed, but quietly and without argument. The intellectual tragedy involved in the hapless loves of the Catholic magnate and the agnostic maiden was yet a tragedy of pure circumstance, — the occult and awe-inspiring tragedy of the legitimate Greek drama; the clash of souls driven to their own mutual undoing by cosmic forces, incomprehensible and seemingly blind. It was not that Mrs. Ward had not studied, and studied profoundly, the terms of one of the most painful spiritual problems of her time ; and the conditions of her own young life had given her an exceptional advantage in grappling with it. But she offers no solution, pronounces no judgment. How, indeed, could she have given sentence between the two sponsors of her own prophetic soul, her father and her uncle ?

The figure of Helbeck is an heroic one, and drawn with astonishing power. It haunts the reader like some lately discovered portrait, dark with the accretions of age, but commanding in its authenticity, by Titian or Velasquez. The author, formerly so salient and emphatic, is forgotten at last in the creation; the tale achieves, as it goes along, its own sad symmetry, and moves with touching dignity to the inevitable end, without a flaw, if we except a touch of unnecessary melodrama in the concluding chapter.

In Eleanor, one is tempted, in the glow of one’s first enthusiasm over the delicate and restrained yet infinitely moving conclusion of the story, to say that there is no flaw whatever. The plot of Eleanor is even simpler than that of Helbeck, the annalist more innocent of ulterior views, the treatment more entirely natural. We have the ardent, self-consuming love of an already fading woman, of exquisite nature, for a man of many gifts and little heart, who carelessly accepts all homage and almost all sacrifice as his due. The pure and primitive passion of the woman pierces the conventionalities of her caste, and shoots heavenward like a tongue of lambent altar flame. It speaks the matchless language of the Portuguese Sonnets, but receives no such fitting response as did they. Enter then the fresh, young, inexperienced, almost rustic rival, unconscious at first, and then unwilling; ingenuous, loyal, and proud. The man’s unstable nature swings from its old allegiance and tumbles to a new, as the darkling tide obeys the rising moon. There is no need to anticipate here, for those who have not yet read it, the precise end of the story. The loveliest feature of it, as a psychological study, is the noble reaction of the two women upon one another. Let us do justice, after all, to the uneasy age in which we live ; whose fads do fret, whose manners displease, whose hitherto unheard-of claims and innovations often fairly appall us. Women are less petty, upon the whole, than they were, — let us say in the days of Miss Austen. Never before our time would the invigorating truth have been instantly and widely recognized of the great scenes between Dinah and Hetty in Adam Bede, between Dorothea and Rosamund in Middlemarch, between Eleanor and Lucy in the last chapters of Mrs. Ward’s new story.

Of Lucy herself, the remorseful rival, the magnanimous ingénue, with her cool temperament, her stern conscience, her self-collected sweetness, a word must be said as embodying Mrs. Ward’s idea of the unfashionable and unspoiled American girl. On the whole, I consider this one of the Englishwoman’s most remarkable pieces of divination; lacking but a shade here and a touch there of consummate veracity. We all know the type: the flower of the oldfashioned provincial town; a creature of gentle blood, but often stringent circumstances, of heroic instincts, wholesome training, and a spotless imagination. But Mrs. Ward cannot have seen much of this type in the phalanx of those who march every summer to the conquest of Mayfair, in such marvelous bravery of equipment; and she is the less likely to have done so, because we are beginning to think of it even here as a blossom of seasons gone by. Certainly we have more Marcellas than Lucys among us at the present moment, though we may hope that it will not always be so. Lucy is essentially of New England (mons viridis genuit), but with odd touches here and there of the remoter West, which do not detract from her piquancy ; and Manisty was quite right in his complacent prevision that she would adapt herself easily and rapidly to the tone of his monde, and “ become the grande dame of the future that his labor, his ambitions, and his gifts should make for her.”

That Lucy will play well her untried part of great lady in an old society seems more certain, indeed, than that she will be a happy woman as the wife of Edward Manisty. Mrs. Ward’s complex, inconsistent, and highly sophisticated hero is a very real being to herself, and she succeeds in making him almost equally so to her readers. Our feeling about him does but oscillate with her own, between delight in his rich temperament and his intellectual gifts, and impatience with his astonishing spiritual coxcombry; his inveterate coquetries with all the women he meets, including the scarlet one. It is, of course, impossible not to remember that Manisty’s purely sentimental attraction toward the Catholic Church, and the grand démenti of his effusive but highly unphilosophical book, have a parallel in the case of that English man of letters who has introduced into his latest novel a harsh and vulgar but unmistakable caricature of Mrs. Ward. In so far, however, as the character of Manisty is a retort for that of Mrs. Norham in Mallock’s Tristram Lacy, it is a wholly dignified and magnanimous one, which leaves the advantage, in this curious battle, overwhelmingly upon the woman’s side.

The scene of Eleanor all passes in rural Italy: first, among the storied hills to the south of Rome; later, in the sylvan tract that is dominated by the isolated Arx of Orvieto, and the rarely explored nooks and valleys of that minor mountain range which culminates in the visionary peak of Monte Amiata. How deeply the enchantment of that scenery is felt, and how exquisitely it is rendered in Eleanor, only the lifelong lover of Italy — perhaps only her unwilling exile — can fully appreciate. It is all here, painted in soft yet vivid hues, — the classic lineaments, the purpureal air, the haunting sense of immemorial habitation, and what Mrs. Ward herself so aptly calls the “ Virgilian grace ” of the “ Saturnia tellus.”

But she has done more and better than faithfully to reproduce upon her English canvas the finest stage setting ever yet provided for every possible act in the human drama. Her eloquent dedication of the book to the country shows that hers is no mere sentimental infatuation, but a tried and sacred love ; and the same exceptional experience which enabled her to handle with so masterly a freedom, in Helbeck of Bannisdale, the sore problem presented by the clash of hoary faith with modern thought assists her to understand and analyze, as few outsiders have done, the desperate and still undecided struggle between the old church and the new state in Italy. Here all her learning tells, and tells as learning should ; not loudly, vauntingly, imperiously, but with the still small voice that wins to a wider comprehension and a more sincere and searching charity.

Mrs. Ward’s Italians are not always drawn with a flattering pen, but she introduces us to one peculiarly fine type of Italian womanhood — and not a very rare type, either — in the Contessa Guerrini. She is a minor character, indeed, and comes rather late into the story, but, as not infrequently happens, with Mrs. Ward as with other writers, the figure on the second plane seems drawn with a firmer and more expert hand than even those foremost ones on which a more anxious industry has been bestowed. A brave, wise woman is the old countess, — a woman of the oldest race and the youngest sympathies; a good Catholic, and an equally good patriot; and I, for one, could embrace Mrs. Ward for the word of sober and yet thrilling hope for her country’s future which she puts into the mouth of this deeply chastened but indomitable creature who would have “ no pessimism about Italy : ” —

“ I dare say the taxes are heavy, and that our officials and bankers and impiegati are not on as good terms as they might be with the Eighth Commandment. Well ! was ever a nation made in a night before ? When your Queen came to the throne, were you English so immaculate ? You talk about our Socialists — have we any disturbances, pray, worse than your disturbances in the twenties and thirties ? The parroco says to me day after day, ‘ The African campaign has been the ruin of Italy ! ’ That’s only because he wants it to be so. The machine marches, and the people pay their taxes, and farming improves every year, all the same. A month or two ago, the newspapers were full of the mobbing of trains starting with soldiers for Erythrea. Yet all that time, if you went down into the Campo de’ Fiori, you could find poems sold for a soldo, that only the people wrote and the people read, that were as patriotic as the poor King himself.”

The “ poor King ” has fallen well asleep after his fitful fever, since these words were written, and a younger, and it may be stronger, reigns in his stead. But when we find a gem of political wisdom, like this, incidentally dropped in the pages of the most poetic and highly wrought romance of the year, we can only rejoice that sixty-five thousand people have pledged themselves, on peril of pecuniary sacrifice, to read the book, and hope that the number may be largely increased.