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,' I, 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

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.

'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;

so well as, not indeed to repress sympathy with the less favoured of this there is evidence on every page-but to inspire the conviction that the existing social order is absolute and beyond discussion.

'Property to him means self-realisation; and the abuse of property was no more just ground for a crusade which logically aimed at doing away with it than the abuse of other human powers or instincts would make it reasonable to try and do away with-say-love, or religion.

Socialism, as he read it, despised and decried freedom, and placed the good of man wholly in certain exterior conditions. 'I don't so much want to take from them and to give to the others. I only want to be sure that the beauty, and the leisure, and the freshness are somewhere-not lost out of the world.

'Never, never, be ashamed merely of being rich-of living with beautiful things, and having time to enjoy them! One might as well be ashamed of being strong rather than a cripple, or having two eyes rather than one.' (Ib. pp. 175, 177, 213, 214.)

Well, property is a form, though not the highest form, of self-realisation; and the Socialist State, were it to become actual, might not improbably come into conflict with individual freedom, though freedom does not consist in doing what you please. Millionairism is as mischievous to millionaires as it is to society; but few will contend that the possession of property is, in itself, a thing of which to be ashamed. And, human nature being what it is, there is not much fear of these considerations being overlooked. The Franciscan idea sets up a standard by which they may be and (some of us think) should be balanced. But they have their weight, and this weight is considerable; no one formula exhausts the truth of things.

Mrs Ward's contention that social and economic questions should be treated on non-party lines is now generally admitted to be reasonable. Must it not also be recognised that labour unrest, emphasise its evils as we will, is a sign of growth? It is not most prevalent where the pinch of poverty is sharpest. One of its conditions is a certain intelligence and power of reflection in those affected; and this presupposes a material standard above the lowest. In 1789 there was

less misery among the French than the German peasantry. But the former had become articulate-hence the Revolution; the latter were dumb. The central feature of the situation by which we are faced to-day is not so much the problem of poverty in itself, as the increasing perception of the fact that the only sufficient reason for the permanence of the actual, or any conceivable, social order is that it is believed, not indeed to be faultless, but to work more effectually than any other by which we could replace it for the good of the community at large. Where this belief is weakened, the social order is imperilled. If it were destroyed, the social order would not last a week; its foundation would be gone. During the last fifty years this belief, with regard to the system under which we live, has been shaken. The proof of this is the amount of apologetic on the subject which is current, and of which 'Marcella' is a type. As religious apologetic indicates religious insecurity, so social apologetic indicates social insecurity; people do not apologise for what is unhesitatingly received. This consideration rules out of court the common objection to social reconstruction, that it is revolutionary. The question is, Is it on the lines of the general human movement? The most complete, because the most inevitable, revolutions are those which are brought about by this movement, and are in the nature of things.

Mrs Ward's fear of Socialism, while useful as a corrective, has a tendency (it may seem) to become excessive. Society, in the first place, is not identical with the existing social order. It was before this order was, and will remain when this order has passed away. For, firstly, it is founded not on this or that social or economic order, but on human nature and the laws of things. And, in the second place, the influence of Socialism in this country is unlikely to be lasting. Socialism is a plant of foreign growth, and presupposes conditions not commonly met with among us. It is based on ideas rather than on experience; and ideas flourish in a lighter soil than ours. There is something practical, perhaps even prosaic, about English thinking. Facts, or what we take to be such, influence us much, theories little. We were pragmatists before pragmatism; our first question with regard either to a belief or an institution is not, What can be said for