Mrs. Humphry Ward has outdone herself in the interest aroused by “The Marriage of William Ashe,” Harpers, and the book has kept readers and reviewers busy, with many editions, since its publication. The surmise that its author provided herself with some historical backing for her portraiture of Lady Kitty and Geoffry Cliffe, in the characters of Lady Caroline Lamb and Lord Byron, by no means diminishes admiration of her creative powers. The background of reality merely serves to protect her from the charge of over-exaggeration, while the personality of the restless and many-sided little heroine herself takes too strong a hold upon all readers to leave much room for criticism in this respect.
Ashe is, as the best type of English gentleman and statesman, capitally done. Mary Lyster would have been as perfect a portrait of the same class of social product but for the author’s inartistic slip in degrading her unexpectedly to the rôle of stage villain, the jarring note in this clever story. Logically, Mary would have been William’s wife but for Kitty’s appeal to the latter at a time when his sympathies were most vulnerable. Their marriage is, from the first, an incongruous one; Ashe’s indulgence and blindness throw Kitty’s absurdities into increasingly conspicuous relief, and his absorption in political exigencies is broken only at intervals by some startling misdemeanor on her part, resulting in scenes of passionate and half-remorseful affection. Cliffe’s strange influence upon Kitty forms a powerful developing force upon her destiny. Her occasional revolt against it is quite in keeping with the strength which now and then manifests itself in her untrained and abnormal make-up. The character of Lady Caroline is followed in main events; seldom overdrawn, though in the capacity of hostess she is now and then allowed to lapse into a lower grade of social standards than one would expect, and her heartlessness toward her child seems inconsistent with certain other outbreaks of maternal passion.
The gentle, worldly-wise little Dean must not be passed over. Perhaps the strongest point in the whole story is laid in the closing scene, where he brings home to Ashe the latter’s terrible responsibility for his wife’s degradation because of the poverty of a love which has taken no account of the soul and its claims in his policy of blindness and indulgence. Poor Lady Kitty discovers that same soul, too late for the discovery to be of much use either to herself or her husband, but one is rather relieved to leave them reconciled, even with the interruption of Lady Kitty’s demise, and to wish William a more serene period of existence. For Mrs. Ward’s heroes and heroines are very real people, moving in familiar paths, and the charm of her stories is that one forgets the fictitious in a thoroughly absorbing interest.
“A Dark Lantern,” by Elizabeth Robins, Macmillan Company, is another story of English society, and involves a somewhat striking study of character, though that is by no means all there is to the book.
Katharine Dereham is a very human and a very charming personality, in spite of the almost incredible inconsistencies which mark her relations with Prince Anton of Breitenlohe-Waldenstein in the beginning, and Garth Vincent at the end. It is not altogether incomprehensible that she should have been both attracted and repelled by the prince, when one considers the innate deceitfulness of his nature, and perhaps, after her experience with him, it is not so strange that she should have turned with relief to Vincent, whose sincerity was indomitable, even if it was habitually brutal.
Probably the feminine reader will more thoroughly understand and sympathize with Kitty Dereham’s distress of mind and spirit in her struggles with the problems presented to her, and even with her unconditional surrender to Garth Vincent.
If so, it will be because women lay greater stress upon uncompromising truthfulness in a man than in a mere artificial exterior.
These three characters are the predominating ones in the book, and they are drawn with a good deal of skill; those who assume the minor rôles are used with good effect to carry on the action and develop the story naturally and logically.
The style of the narrative is a little vexatious at times, but, on the whole, the story is extremely well told, and there is a succession of more or less dramatic episodes that make the book very interesting reading.