THE PREMIER NOVELIST
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.”
“That’s the point exactly; there are no principles, there are only
parties. Whichever one gets in constitutes the ‘government,’ and its
task is to hold labor by the throat while capital picks its pockets.
Labor produces a sovereign a day, and capital takes it, and gives labor
four shillings wages, and labor tips its cap and is grateful. And then
capital’s favorite lady-novelist comes round with a market basket
containing sixpence worth of food and medicine; which is called charity,
and is the means of getting labor’s vote at election time.”
Such was the private life of Mrs. Humphry Ward. She was what is called
“philanthropic”; that is, she was prominent in those society activities
which help the poor by playing upon the vanity and love of display of
the rich. Her life consisted in rushing about from one meeting to
another, shaking hands and chatting, rushing home to dress and dine with
prominent people, and then reading about it in the next day’s
newspapers. She was so busy with all this that she could only find half
an hour a day in which to read Greek!
The characters in her books are busy with the same kind of activities.
The leading man is a handsome young aristocrat, whose occupation is
becoming premier. We never have any idea why he wants to be premier,
except that as hero that is his function. The idea that the people of
England should ask reasons for making an empty-headed noodle into their
premier is one that never occurs to anyone in the novels. What interests
us is the efforts of the young man’s friends to push him in, and the
efforts of his enemies to bar him out.
Success or failure in all such “political novels” depends on one factor,
an entanglement of sex. It appears that the English voters insist
rigidly upon one requirement--that the statesman who holds them by the
throat while their pockets are being picked shall be ostensibly chaste.
The law may be summed up by saying that he is permitted to have only one
leisure-class female during his life. Of course, if she dies, he is
permitted one more leisure-class female; but for the rest, he is
required to satisfy his needs with females of lower classes. Political
novels derive their plots from the fact that occasionally some
statesman fails to conform to this law; there is a statesman who wants
two ladies, or there are two ladies who want the statesman. Nature has
not created man exclusively for the purpose of wearing a top-hat and a
frock-coat, and making speeches in Parliament; nor do all women find
complete satisfaction, like Mrs. Humphry Ward, in political labors to
keep other women from getting the vote. There are women with mischief in
them, who endeavor to tempt statesmen from exclusive devotion to
“careers.” And the statesmen are tempted; they commit indiscretions,
such as taking walks in the moonlight with the evil females; and a
thrill runs through all “society,” and the tongues of the gossips wag
furiously. Did they? Or did they not? The friends of the statesman rally
to save him; and the enemies of the statesman sharpen their tomahawks;
and Anglomaniacs, watching the scene, are thrilled as when Blondin on
the tight-rope sets out to walk across Niagara Falls.
“We don’t really need to worry,” says Mrs. Ogi; “a hero is always a
hero, and in all the books that I got from the little cigar-store in the
Mississippi town, I cannot recall that one hero ever failed to become
premier.”
“It would be interesting,” says Ogi, “to compile statistics on the
question: How many premiers have there been in the novels of Mrs.
Humphry Ward, and how many in the recent history of the British Empire?”