art of the story—its atmosphere, its lofty tone, its fine delineation of character and of environment, social and natural, and its dramatic evolution—no assurance is necessary; and it is as confidently to be presumed that, however absorbing the emotional currents of the story may be, the individual passion will not delete or confuse but rather determine the lines of individual character and career, and that, as we see in these opening chapters, the reader will always seem to be in a large place, open to the inflowing currents of the world's life. This catholicity is the distinction of all the great novelists of our day, and it is peculiarly Mrs. Humphry Ward's.
The development of Mrs. Ward's art in fiction has been a steady progress from her first venture, growing into the catholicity which is now so distinctive a feature of it. Mental specialties have been dropped more and more through the operation of that instinct of pure art which insists upon vital harmony, attainable only by such detachment on the part of the artist as will let life utter itself after its own nature and in its own patterns, whether these patterns be native or conventional.
Mrs. Ward deals almost entirely with the conventional—that is, with human life in its structural harmony. She does not select for her characters the men and women nearest the soil or build up her drama from elemental passions, as George Eliot did and Thomas Hardy. We do not look to her for mother-wit or native humor, but for the traits of a refined and exquisitely modulated life—the traits of culture. She does not make for us suggestive sketches, but finished pictures. The intricate and complex patterns, such as distinguish the finest modern music from native and simple melodies, she has woven into her fiction, giving it alike distinction from the merely bold and striking narrative and from the more elaborate sketches and romances in which Nature holds her own as fully as in her mountain torrents and barren moors.
Therefore we designate as distinctively "polite" the audience which Mrs. Ward has won for herself. How extensive this polite world of readers is may be estimated from the large sales of Lady Rose's Daughter, since it is impossible to suppose anybody prompted to the purchase of such a novel by the motives which usually make a market for those which are accounted great "popular successes." It would almost seem that culture itself had become popular, in the best sense of the term—the only sense in which Mrs. Ward's novels are popular.
It is not to be assumed that the polite world is, to this extent, captivated by merely intellectual qualities. As highly intellectual novels as Mrs. Ward's have had a very limited acceptance, because they lack the supreme charm of dramatic art. We naturally ask why the works of George Meredith, whom Mrs. Ward has called "the master" in this kind of fiction, have a so narrowly select appreciation. But we easily find an answer to this question. Meredith may have greater genius, but it is of that order which is superciliously aristocratic, not by intention so much as by caprice, and this caprice is not of the kind that captivates all classes of even the polite world. Not only is he too difficult, too arbitrarily exacting, but his detachment is too complete, so that he is more masterful than sympathetic in the shifting of his drama and in his habitual manner. He has the sense of the play, but it is the sense of his own play—of the comedy of life in his own detached mental view of it. We note something of the same fantastic mastery in other great novels written by men, whose readers would form a limited caste but for the selection of characters and themes which appeal to general sympathy, and the artistic treatment of which does not involve such cold and speculative detachment as to seem exclusive.
To account for Mrs. Ward's popularity—if we may guardedly use that term—we remember first of all that she is a woman, with womanly intuitions; and it follows that her heroines are real living women with deeply passionate hearts. Thus we are brought very close to nature, even in a highly developed humanity; the elemental note, however modulated, is distinctly heard. If in her novels wit and humor do not wear their native garb or excite chortling laughter, yet these qualities unobtrusively pervade all her work, enhancing its delicacy, sanity, and charm.
