Richard Meynell, as the readers of this book will remember, makes himself the leader of a crusade for modernizing and re-vivifying the services of the Church, in accordance with the new preaching of “the Christ of to-day,”—finds his message taken up by hundreds of his fellow priests and hundreds of thousands of eager souls throughout the country,—comes into collision with the higher powers of the Church, takes his trial in the Court of Arches, and, when the inevitable judgment goes against him, leaves us, on a note of hope, carrying his appeal to the Privy Council, to Parliament and to the people of England. The whole book is written in a vein of passionate inspiration—save for the few touches, here and there, which convey the note of irony or contemplation—; the reader may disagree, but he cannot help being carried away, for the time at least, by the infectious enthusiasm of Meynell and his movement.
“Perhaps the strongest impression,” declared one of the reviewers, “at once the most striking and the most profound, created by The Case of Richard Meynell, is its religious optimism. One finds oneself marvelling how any writer, in so sceptical an age as this, can picture a Modernist religious movement with so inspired, so fervent a pen, as to kindle a factitious flame even in hearts grown cold to religious inspiration and to religious hope.”
Others, again, pronounced the book to be, on the whole, a failure. “And yet,” said the Dublin Review, “there is a certain force in Mrs. Humphry Ward that enables her to push her defective machine into motion; Richard Meynell is the work of a forcible, if tired, imagination. This fact may be wrong, and that detail ugly, and another phrase offensive to the sense of the ridiculous; but as a whole it ranks higher than many and many a production that is lightly touched in and delicately edged with satire. Spiritual sufferings, a yearning after truth, self-restraint, revolt, the helpless wish to aid those who will not be helped, the texture of fine souls, such things are brought home to us in Richard Meynell. This is not done by the vitality of the author’s personages, for they never wholly escape from bondage to the main intention of the book, but it is done by contact with a remarkable mind tuned to fine issues.”
The reappearance of Catherine Elsmere, far less overwhelming and more attractive than in the earlier book, endeared this tale to all who remembered Robert’s wife; her death in the little house in Long Sleddale where Robert had first found her was felt to be a masterpiece that Mrs. Ward had never surpassed.
The writer did not disguise from herself and her friends that she looked forward with unusual interest to the reception of this book. Would it in truth find itself “in the movement”? Would it kindle into a flame the dull embers of religious faith and freedom?
“What I should like to do this winter,” she wrote to Mrs. Creighton, in September, 1911 (six weeks before the book’s appearance), “is to write a volume of imaginary ‘Sermons and Journals of Richard Meynell,’ going in detail into many of the points only touched in the book. If the book has the great success the publishers predict, I could devote myself to handling in another form some of the subjects that have been long in my mind. But of course it may have no such success at all. I sometimes think that, as Mr. Holmes maintains in his extraordinarily interesting book,[33] the church teaching of the last twenty years has gone a long way towards paganizing England—together of course with the increase of wealth and hurry.”
These “Sermons and Journals of Richard Meynell” were, however, never written. The book certainly aroused interest and even controversy in England, but it did not sweep the country and set all tongues wagging, as Elsmere had done, while in America the populace refused to be roused by what they regarded as the domestic affairs of the English Church. Mrs. Ward never spoke of Meynell’s reception as a disappointment, but she must have felt it so, and within six months of its appearance she was at work, as usual, upon its successor.
Yet a piece of work which brought her two such letters as the following (amongst many others) cannot be said to have gone unrewarded:—
From Frederic Harrison
“I am one of those to whom your book specially appeals, as I know so much of the literature, the persons, the questions it dealt with. It has given me the most lively interest both as romance—as fine as anything since Adam Bede—and also as controversy—as important as anything since Essays and Reviews. Meynell seems to me a far higher type than Elsmere, both as a man and as a book, and I am sure will have a greater permanent value—even if its popularity for the hour is not so rapid—for it appeals to a higher order of reader, and is of a larger kind of art.”