The Quarterly Review

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.

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

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