We have studied two great novelists of the later Victorian age who failed of wide popularity. We shall not understand that age completely unless we study one who was crowned, not merely by the critics, but by the mass of novel-reading ladies.
Mrs. Humphry Ward was her name, and she takes me back to the days when I was a poor devil of a would-be writer, half starving in a New York lodging-house. What made success in the world of books? I had to know, or die; and the New York “Times” was kind enough to publish a weekly review to give me the information. Every year or two there would appear a new novel by Mrs. Humphry Ward; and always this novel would be the occasion for a grand state review, signed by the name of some eminent pundit, occupying pages one and two, with a large portrait on page one. So I knew that Mrs. Humphry Ward was modern literature, and read each novel as part of my life training.
I read it with a mingling of interest and fear; interest, because it told me about a set of people whom I knew did actually exist, and did actually govern the world in which I lived; and fear, because this set of people, so obviously both predaceous and stupid, were so powerfully buttressed by the prestige of snobbery, and protected by the holy mantle of religion. No novelist every worshipped Mammon-respectability more piously or portrayed it with more patient devotion than Mrs. Humphry Ward in her later years.
She was brought up in the inner circle of culture; her father was an Oxford big-wig, and Matthew Arnold was her “Uncle Matt.” Everything that education could do for a young girl was done for her, and she was writing a history of Spain at the age of twenty. Incidentally, she was dreaming a wonderful dream—that some day she might be presented at court.
Her first novel, “Robert Elsmere,” dealt with the subject of religion. A large section of the idling classes of England get their incomes by believing that Jesus was born of a virgin and that Jonah swallowed a whale; and with the progress of science they were naturally finding this more and more difficult. A school of ingenious Bible-twisters arose, to invent symbolical and literary meanings for fairy-tales, in order that people who no longer believed could continue with good conscience to collect the salaries of belief. Mrs. Ward made her hero one of these new-style clergymen, and somebody persuaded Gladstone to read the novel, and he wrote a long refutation of it, which caused a tremendous fuss. Statesmen in England, as a rule, read only Thucydides and Homer, while in the United States they read only the “Saturday Evening Post.” There were a great many people who never saw a modern novel, who hastened to read it when Gladstone called it dangerous. Half a million copies were sold in our country, and Mrs. Ward’s fortune was made.
She had begun, you see, as a radical; and in her next novel, “The History of David Grieve,” she glorifies a young hero who devotes himself to social reform. But in a very few years success and wealth and the applause of the great changed the hue of this lady novelist’s reflections. She wrote “Marcella,” a complete recantation of her unorthodoxy, and a picture of what had gone on in her mind. Leaders of labor and social reformers now turn out to be dangerous demagogs; and a beautiful heroine, who loves one, discovers the error of her way, and comes back to safety as the wife of a nobleman’s son. From which time on Mrs. Humphry Ward was safe for aristocracy.
She moved to a mansion in Grosvenor Place, where she had a view of the garden of Buckingham Palace. She became an intimate of duchesses, and a great figure in society and politics. Her publisher would negotiate with America before breakfast, and get her seven thousand pounds advance on a new novel; so the good lady spent the rest of her life grinding out a series of glorified pot-boilers in support of the Tory principles of government. Each novel was an Anglo-Saxon world event, and the counters of book-stores in the fashionable shopping districts of America were piled to the ceiling with the new volume. Mrs. Ward’s following was the Anglomaniac mob, people who have but one idea in life, to imitate the British governing classes; the sort of people who study those page advertisements and speculate anxiously: “What is Wrong with this Picture?”
Says Mrs. Ogi: “I was in that mob. In our town in Mississippi there was no book-store, but an adventurous Jew who kept a cigar-store had the idea of getting a shelf of modern novels and renting them for ten cents a volume. I was the first young lady in the town who had the courage to go into a cigar-store, and I set all the other young ladies to reading Mrs. Humphry Ward.”
“What did you get out of it?”
“I never could find out. It was all about British political life; people were pulling and hauling and intriguing, but I never could understand what their principles were, or what they expected to do when they got elected.”