24 March: Boreham on Humphry Ward

Brilliance and Charm
Today we reflect that it was on the twenty-fourth of March, 1920, that the world was impoverished by the death of a very gifted and very gracious lady. It was on the eleventh of June, nearly a century ago, that, in the modest settlement then known as Hobart Town, a little girl was born who was destined to be described from the historic pulpit of St. Paul's Cathedral, London, as "perhaps the greatest Englishwoman of our time." The words, uttered by the celebrated Dean Inge, are worth recalling today. Not on personal grounds alone, but because it forges a link between ourselves and a stately British tradition, Tasmania is proud of the fact that Mrs. Humphry Ward was born in this island State. Herself a distinguished novelist, Mrs. Ward was the grand-daughter of Thomas Arnold, the famous headmaster of Rugby and the niece of Matthew Arnold, whose essays and whose poems were regarded as the ultimate articulation of 19th century culture. Her father was appointed an Inspector of Schools in Tasmania.

No novelist in our history has divided the critics into hostile camps as sharply as has Mrs. Ward. Professor W. N. I. Phelps, of Yale University, refused point blank to recognise Mrs. Ward as a novelist. She never wrote a novel in her life, he bluntly declares. He recalls a Sunday evening in 1894, when, on finishing "Marcella," he felt as if his mouth were full of ashes. By way of damning the lady with faint praise, the professor benignly admits that Mrs. Ward is a serious, earnest, thoughtful, and deeply-read woman with a passion for improving the world and everybody in it. He dismisses her masterpiece by observing, as though between the puffs of his cigar, that she once wrote a treatise on religious reform and called it "Robert Elsmere." Could any diatribe be more caustic? As against this, however, Benjamin Jowett, the omniscient master of Baliol, wrote to tell her that "Robert Elsmere" was the best novel since George Eliot.

Intense Culture Wedded To Lofty Passion
On one and the self-same day two of the great London dailies reviewed "Robert Elsmere." The one declared that, at last, "Adam Bede" must take second place among the first-class novels written by feminine hands; the other said that the new book was an unutterable dreariness, a sandy desert of weary words, an insufferable boredom, an iniquitous waste of time, temper, and material. "Were ever such contradictory judgments?" the young authoress demanded of her publishers. She could make nothing of it. But, since the critics insisted on instituting a comparison between George Eliot and herself, she drew some crumbs of consolation from the records of the similar conflict that divided the literary pontiffs when "Daniel Deronda" first saw the light.

We probably make the closest approximation to the truth when we aver that Mrs. Ward was a penetrating rather than a popular novelist. Like George Eliot, her fiction is introspective romance. She lays the soul bare. She is instinctively an analyst, a scientist, a philosopher. She seems to be in the secrets of her characters. She scrutinises their motives, their sensations, their passions; she tells the tale from the inside. Others wrote from the circumference; she wrote from the centre. "Her strength lies," as Mr. Gladstone once told her, "in an extraordinary wealth of diction never separated from thought; in a close and searching faculty of social observation; in generous appreciation of what is morally good; in the sense of a mission with which the writer is possessed; and, above all, in the earnestness and persistency of purpose with which that mission is pursued through every page." Mr. Gladstone held that the value of Mrs. Ward's work lies in its profound influence upon the thoughtful few rather than in its capacity to appeal to the multitudes who glory in a rural idyll, or who devour with avidity the alternating thrills of a sentimental and exciting romance.

Loftiest Truth Incapable Of Demonstration
Not that Mrs. Ward's work was destitute of sentiment. On the contrary, she was, in a very real sense, the apostle of the sentimental. Living in an age in which everything was being analysed in the intellectual dissecting room and tested in the scientific crucible, Mrs. Ward's outstanding contention was that the monumental verities of the Christian faith, whilst necessarily incapable of logical demonstration, nevertheless make to human hearts an irresistible appeal. Readers of "Robert Elsmere" will never forget the poignancy of the emotions with which they witnessed the terrible scene when Robert, having stated his abstract and academic doubts to his simple-hearted and bewildered wife, stuns her by announcing his intention of leaving the ministry. Mrs. Ward held that life is a matter of notions and of emotions, and that, whilst notions have their value, emotions also possess theirs.

She had her reward. Thousands of people who were feeling tired of the frothy and saccharine fiction of the moment, bought and discussed "Robert Elsmere," "David Grieve," "Marcella," and the other novels. For some years she enjoyed an enormous vogue, and, in consequence, a princely income. The soul of generosity, she spent as rapidly as she acquired. Miss J. T. Stoddart says that no writer since Sir Walter Scott practised such lavish hospitality. Until just before she died, she entertained at her beautiful home at Grosvenor Place the most eminent men and women in the world. It broke her heart when failing health compelled her to leave it. She stood with moist eyes in the great entrance hall on her last night there and seemed to see, moving hither and thither, the shades of Burne-Jones, Stopford Brooke, Henry James, Lowell, Martineau, Roosevelt, Northbrook, Goschen, and all her honoured guests. But her work, into which she had poured her very self, had exhausted her strength. She died in 1920, bequeathing to the world the memory of a good and great woman who, cherishing the loftiest ideals, had immeasurably enriched the world by living a singularly beautiful life and creating a literature that perfectly matched it.

F W Boreham

Image: Humphry Ward