style and versification have undergone a change. I might point to the
profound intellectual depth of certain pieces as its characteristic,
or, equally, to the traces here and there of an apparent carelessness
of workmanship; or, yet again, to the new and very marked partiality
for scenes and situations of English and modern rather than mediæval
and foreign life."
Noble as much of Mr. Browning's later work is, full of intellect, alive
with excellent passages (in the first volume of the Dramatic Idyls [50]
perhaps more powerful than in any earlier work); notwithstanding all
that, we think the change here indicated matter of regret. After all,
we have to conjure up ideal poets for ourselves out of those who stand
in or behind the range of volumes on our book-shelves; and our ideal
Browning would have for his entire structural type those two volumes of
Men and Women with Pippa Passes.
Certainly, it is a delightful world to which Mr. Browning has given us
the key, and those volumes a delightful gift to our age-record of so
much that is richest in the world of things, and men, and their
works--all so much the richer by the great intellect, the great
imagination, which has made the record, transmuted them into
imperishable things of art:--
"'With souls should souls have place'--this, with Mr. Browning, is
something more than a mere poetical conceit. It is the condensed
expression of an experience, a philosophy, and an art. Like the lovers
of his lyric, Mr. Browning has renounced the selfish serenities of
wild-wood and dream-palace; he has fared up and down among men,
listening to the music of humanity, [51] observing the acts of men, and
he has sung what he has heard, and he has painted what he has seen.
Will the work live? we ask; and we can answer only in his own words--
It lives,
If precious be the soul of man to man."
9th November 1887
IV. "ROBERT ELSMERE"
[55] THOSE who, in this bustling age, turn to fiction not merely for a
little passing amusement, but for profit, for the higher sort of
pleasure, will do well, we think (after a conscientious perusal on our
own part) to bestow careful reading on Robert Elsmere. A chef d'oeuvre
of that kind of quiet evolution of character through circumstance,
introduced into English literature by Miss Austen, and carried to
perfection in France by George Sand (who is more to the point, because,
like Mrs. Ward, she was not afraid to challenge novel-readers to an
interest in religious questions), it abounds in sympathy with people as
we find them, in aspiration towards something better--towards a certain
ideal--in a refreshing sense of second thoughts everywhere. The author
clearly has developed a remarkable natural aptitude for literature by
liberal reading and most patient care [56] in composition--composition
in that narrower sense which is concerned with the building of a good
sentence; as also in that wider sense, which ensures, in a work like
this, with so many joints, so many currents of interest, a final unity
of impression an the part of the reader, and easy transition by him
from one to the other. Well-used to works of fiction which tell all
they have to tell in one thin volume, we have read Mrs. Ward's three
volumes with unflagging readiness.
For, in truth, that quiet method of evolution, which she pursues
undismayed to the end, requires a certain lengthiness; and the reader's
reward will be in a secure sense that he has been in intercourse with
no mere flighty remnants, but with typical forms, of character, firmly
and fully conceived. We are persuaded that the author might have
written a novel which should have been all shrewd impressions of
society, or all humorous impressions of country life, or all quiet fun
and genial caricature. Actually she has chosen to combine something of
each of these with a very sincerely felt religious interest; and who
will deny that to trace the influence of religion upon human character
is one of the [57] legitimate functions of the novel? In truth, the
modern "novel of character" needs some such interest, to lift it
sufficiently above the humdrum of life; as men's horizons are enlarged
by religion, of whatever type it may be--and we may say at once that
the religious type which is dear to Mrs. Ward, though avowedly "broad,"
is not really the broadest. Having conceived her work thus, she has
brought a rare instinct for probability and nature to the difficult
task of combining this religious motive and all the learned thought it
involves, with a very genuine interest in many varieties of average
mundane life.
We should say that the author's special ethical gift lay in a
delicately intuitive sympathy, not, perhaps, with all phases of
character, but certainly with the very varied class of persons
represented in these volumes. It may be congruous with this, perhaps,
that her success should be more assured in dealing with the characters
of women than with those of men. The men who pass before us in her
pages, though real and tangible and effective enough, seem,
nevertheless, from time to time to reveal their joinings. They are
composite of many different men we seem to have [58] known, and fancy
we could detach again from the ensemble and from each other. And their
goodness, when they are good, is--well! a little conventional; the kind
of goodness that men themselves discount rather largely in their
estimates of each other. Robert himself is certainly worth knowing--a
really attractive union of manliness and saintliness, of shrewd sense
and unworldly aims, and withal with that kindness and pity the absence
of which so often abates the actual value of those other gifts. Mrs.
Ward's literary power is sometimes seen at its best (it is a proof of
her high cultivation of this power that so it should be) in the
analysis of minor characters, both male and female. Richard Leyburn,
deceased before the story begins, but warm in the memory of the few who
had known him, above all of his great-souled daughter Catherine,
strikes us, with his religious mysticism, as being in this way one of
the best things in the book:--
"Poor Richard Leyburn! Yet where had the defeat lain?
"'Was he happy in his school life?' Robert asked gently. 'Was teaching
what he liked?'
[59] "'Oh! yes, only--' and then added hurriedly, as though drawn on in
spite of herself by the grave sympathy of his look, 'I never knew
anybody so good who thought himself of so little account. He always
believed that he had missed everything, wasted everything, and that
anybody else would have made infinitely more out of his life. He vas
always blaming, scourging himself. And all the time he was the
noblest, purest, most devoted--'
"She stopped. Her voice had passed beyond her control. Elsmere was
startled by the feeling she showed. Evidently he had touched one of
the few sore places in this pure heart. It was as though her memory of
her father had in it elements of almost intolerable pathos, as though
the child's brooding love and loyalty were in perpetual protest even
now after this lapse of years against the verdict which an
over-scrupulous, despondent soul had pronounced upon itself. Did she
feel that he had gone uncomforted out of life--even by her--even by
religion? Was that the sting?"
A little later she gives the record of his last hours:--
[60] "'Catherine! Life is harder, the narrower way narrower than ever.
I die--and memory caught still the piteous long-drawn breath by which
the voice was broken--'in much--much perplexity about many things. You
have a clear soul, an iron will. Strengthen the others. Bring them
safe to the day of account.'"
And then the smaller--some of them, ethically, very small--women; Lady
Wynnstay, Mrs. Fleming, Mrs. Thornburgh; above all, Robert's delightful
Irish mother, and Mrs. Darcy; how excellent they are! Mrs. Darcy we
seem to have known, yet cannot have enough of, rejoiced to catch sight
of her capital letter on the page, as we read on. In truth, if a high
and ideal purpose, really learned in the school of Wordsworth and among
the Westmorland hills which Mrs. Ward describes so sympathetically,
with fitting dignity and truth of style, has accompanied the author
throughout; no less plain, perhaps more pleasing to some readers, is
the quiet humour which never fails her, and tests, while it relieves,
the sincerity of her more serious thinking:--
"At last Mrs. Darcy fluttered off, only, however, to come hurrying back
with little, short, [61] scudding steps, to implore them all to come to
tea with her as soon as possible in the garden that was her special
hobby, and in her last new summer-house.
"'I build two or three every summer,' she said; 'now there are
twenty-one! Roger laughs at me,' and there was a momentary bitterness
in the little eerie face; 'but how can one live without hobbies?
That's one--then I've two more. My album--oh, you will all write in my
album, won't you? When I was young--when I was Maid of Honour'--and
she drew herself up slightly--'everybody had albums. Even the dear
Queen herself! I remember how she made M. Guizot write in it;
something quite stupid, after all. Those hobbies--the garden and the
album--are quite harmless, aren't they? They hurt nobody, do they?'
Her voice dropped a little, with a pathetic expostulating intonation in
it, as of one accustomed to be rebuked."
Mrs. Ward's women, as we have said, are more organic, sympathetic, and
really creative, than her men, and make their vitality evident by
becoming, quite naturally, the centres of very [62] life-like and
dramatic groups of people, family or social; while her men are the very
genii of isolation and division. It is depressing to see so really
noble a character as Catherine soured, as we feel, and lowered, as time
goes on, from the happy resignation of the first volume (in which
solemn, beautiful, and entire, and so very real, she is like a poem of
Wordsworth) down to the mere passivity of the third volume, and the
closing scene of Robert Elsmere's days, very exquisitely as this
episode of unbelieving yet saintly biography has been conceived and
executed. Catherine certainly, for one, has no profit in the
development of Robert's improved gospel. The "stray sheep," we think,
has by no means always the best of the argument, and her story is
really a sadder, more testing one than his. Though both alike, we
admit it cordially, have a genuine sense of the eternal moral charm of
"renunciation," something even of the thirst for martyrdom, for those
wonderful, inaccessible, cold heights of the Imitation, eternal also in
their aesthetic charm.
These characters and situations, pleasant or profoundly interesting,
which it is good to have [63] come across, are worked out, not in rapid
sketches, nor by hazardous epigram, but more securely by patient
analysis; and though we have said that Mrs. Ward is most successful in
female portraiture, her own mind and culture have an unmistakable
virility and grasp and scientific firmness. This indispensable
intellectual process, which will be relished by admirers of George
Eliot, is relieved constantly by the sense of a charming landscape
background, for the most part English. Mrs. Ward has been a true
disciple in the school of Wordsworth, and really undergone its
influence. Her Westmorland scenery is more than a mere background; its
spiritual and, as it were, personal hold on persons, as understood by
the great poet of the Lakes, is seen actually at work, in the
formation, in the refining, of character. It has been a stormy day:--
"Before him the great hollow of High Fell was just coming out from the
white mists surging round it. A shaft of sunlight lay across its upper
end, and he caught a marvellous apparition of a sunlit valley hung in
air, a pale strip of blue above it, a white thread of stream wavering
[64] through it, and all around it and below it the rolling
rain-clouds."
There is surely something of "natural magic" in that! The wilder
capacity of the mountains is brought out especially in a weird story of
a haunted girl, an episode well illustrating the writer's more
imaginative psychological power; for, in spite of its quiet general
tenour, the book has its adroitly managed elements of
sensation--witness the ghost, in which the average human susceptibility
to supernatural terrors takes revenge on the sceptical Mr. Wendover,
and the love-scene with Madame de Netteville, which, like those other
exciting passages, really furthers the development of the proper
ethical interests of the book. The Oxford episodes strike us as being
not the author's strongest work, as being comparatively conventional,
coming, as they do, in a book whose predominant note is reality. Yet
her sympathetic command over, her power of evoking, the genius of
places, is clearly shown in the touches by which she brings out the so
well-known grey and green of college and garden--touches which bring
the real Oxford to the mind's eye better than any elaborate description
[65] --for the beauty of the place itself resides also in delicate
touches. The book passes indeed, successively, through distinct,
broadly conceived phases of scenery, which, becoming veritable parts of
its texture, take hold on the reader, as if in an actual sojourn in the
places described. Surrey--its genuine though almost suburban wildness,
with the vicarage and the wonderful abode, above all, the ancient
library of Mr. Wendover, all is admirably done, the landscape naturally
counting for a good deal in the development of the profoundly
meditative, country-loving souls of Mrs. Ward's favourite characters.
Well! Mrs. Ward has chosen to use all these varied gifts and
accomplishments for a certain purpose. Briefly, Robert Elsmere, a
priest of the Anglican Church, marries a very religious woman; there is
the perfection of "mutual love"; at length he has doubts about
"historic Christianity"; he gives up his orders; carries his learning,
his fine intellect, his goodness, nay, his saintliness, into a kind of
Unitarianism; the wife becomes more intolerant than ever; there is a
long and faithful effort on both sides, eventually successful, on the
part of these mentally [66] divided people, to hold together; ending
with the hero's death, the genuine piety and resignation of which is
the crowning touch in the author's able, learned, and thoroughly
sincere apology for Robert Elsmere's position.
For good or evil, the sort of doubts which troubled Robert Elsmere are
no novelty in literature, and we think the main issue of the "religious
question" is not precisely where Mrs. Ward supposes--that it has
advanced, in more senses than one, beyond the point raised by Renan's
Vie de Jésus. Of course, a man such as Robert Elsmere came to be ought
not to be a clergyman of the Anglican Church. The priest is still, and
will, we think, remain, one of the necessary types of humanity; and he
is untrue to his type, unless, with whatever inevitable doubts in this
doubting age, he feels, on the whole, the preponderance in it of those
influences which make for faith. It is his triumph to achieve as much
faith as possible in an age of negation. Doubtless, it is part of the
ideal of the Anglican Church that, under certain safeguards, it should
find room for latitudinarians even among its clergy. Still, with
these, as [67] with all other genuine priests, it is the positive not
the negative result that justifies the position. We have little
patience with those liberal clergy who dwell on nothing else than the
difficulties of faith and the propriety of concession to the opposite
force. Yes! Robert Elsmere was certainly right in ceasing to be a
clergyman. But it strikes us as a blot on his philosophical
pretensions that he should have been both so late in perceiving the
difficulty, and then so sudden and trenchant in dealing with so great
and complex a question. Had he possessed a perfectly philosophic or
scientific temper he would have hesitated. This is not the place to
discuss in detail the theological position very ably and seriously
argued by Mrs. Ward. All we can say is that, one by one, Elsmere's
objections may be met by considerations of the same genus, and not less
equal weight, relatively to a world so obscure, in its origin and
issues, as that in which we live.
Robert Elsmere was a type of a large class of minds which cannot be
sure that the sacred story is true. It is philosophical, doubtless,
and a duty to the intellect to recognize our doubts, [68] to locate
them, perhaps to give them practical effect. It may be also a moral
duty to do this. But then there is also a large class of minds which
cannot be sure it is false--minds of very various degrees of
conscientiousness and intellectual power, up to the highest. They will
think those who are quite sure it is false unphilosophical through lack
of doubt. For their part, they make allowance in their scheme of life
for a great possibility, and with some of them that bare concession of
possibility (the subject of it being what it is) becomes the most
important fact in the world.
The recognition of it straightway opens wide the door to hope and love;
and such persons are, as we fancy they always will be, the nucleus of a
Church. Their particular phase of doubt, of philosophic uncertainty,
has been the secret of millions of good Christians, multitudes of
worthy priests. They knit themselves to believers, in various degrees,
of all ages. As against the purely negative action of the scientific
spirit, the high-pitched Grey, the theistic Elsmere, the "ritualistic
priest," the quaint Methodist Fleming, both so admirably sketched,
present [69] perhaps no unconquerable differences. The question of the
day is not between one and another of these, but in another sort of
opposition, well defined by Mrs. Ward herself, between--
"Two estimates of life--the estimate which is the offspring of the
scientific spirit, and which is for ever making the visible world
fairer and more desirable in mortal eyes; and the estimate of Saint
Augustine."
To us, the belief in God, in goodness at all, in the story of
Bethlehem, does not rest on evidence so diverse in character and force
as Mrs. Ward supposes. At his death Elsmere has started what to us
would be a most unattractive place of worship, where he preaches an
admirable sermon on the purely human aspect of the life of Christ. But
we think there would be very few such sermons in the new church or
chapel, for the interest of that life could hardly be very varied, when
all such sayings as that "though He was rich, for our sakes He became
poor" have ceased to be applicable to it. It is the infinite nature of
Christ which has led to such diversities of genius in preaching as St.
Francis, and Taylor, and Wesley.
[70] And after all we fear we have been unjust to Mrs. Ward's work. If
so, we should read once more, and advise our readers to read, the
profoundly thought and delicately felt chapter--chapter forty-three in
her third volume--in which she describes the final spiritual reunion,
on a basis of honestly diverse opinion, of the husband and wife. Her
view, we think, could hardly have been presented more attractively.
For ourselves we can only thank her for pleasure and profit in the
reading of her book, which has refreshed actually the first and deepest
springs of feeling, while it has charmed the literary sense.
28th March 1888
V. THEIR MAJESTIES' SERVANTS
Annals of the English Stage, from Thomas Betterton to Edmund Kean. By
Dr. Doran, F.S.A. Edited and revised by Robert W. Lowe. John C. Nimmo.
[73] THOSE who care for the history of the drama as a branch of
literature, or for the history of that general development of human
manners of which the stage has been always an element and a very lively
measure or index, will be grateful to Mr. Lowe for this revised and
charmingly illustrated edition of Dr. Doran's pleasant old book. Three
hundred years and more of a singularly varied and vivacious sort of
history!--it was a bold thing to undertake; and Dr. Doran did his work
well--did it with adequate "love." These Annals of the English Stage,
from Thomas Betterton to Edmund [74] Kean, are full of the colours of
life in their most emphatic and motley contrasts, as is natural in
proportion as the stage itself concentrates and artificially
intensifies the character and conditions of ordinary life. The long
story of "Their Majesties' Servants," treated thus, becomes from age to
age an agreeable addition to those personal memoirs--Evelyn's, and the
like--which bring the influence and charm of a visible countenance to
the dry tenour of ordinary history, and the critic's work upon it
naturally becomes, in the first place, a mere gathering of some of the
flowers which lie so abundantly scattered here and there.
A history of the English stage must necessarily be in part a history of
one of the most delightful of subjects--old London, of which from time
to time we catch extraordinary glimpses in Dr. Doran's pages. From 1682
to 1695, as if the Restoration had not come, there was but one theatre
in London. In Charles I.'s time Shoreditch was the dramatic quarter of
London par excellence.--
"The popular taste was not only there directed towards the stage, but
it was a district [75] wherein many actors dwelt, and consequently
died. The baptismal register of St. Leonard's, Shoreditch, contains
Christian names which appear to have been chosen with reference to the
heroines of Shakespeare; and the record of burials bears the name of
many an old actor of mark whose remains now lie within the churchyard."
Earlier and later, the Surrey side of the Thames was the favourite
locality for play-houses. The Globe was there, and the Bear-garden,
represented in Mr. Lowe's luxurious new edition by delightful woodcuts.
For this new edition adds to the original merits of the work the very
substantial charm of abundant illustrations, first-rate in subject and
execution, and of three kinds--copper-plate likenesses of actors and
other personages connected with theatrical history; a series of
delicate, picturesque, highly detailed woodcuts of theatrical
topography, chiefly the little old theatres; and, by way of tail-pieces
to the chapters, a second series of woodcuts of a vigour and reality of
information, within very limited compass, which make one think of
Callot and the German [76] "little masters," depicting Garrick and
other famous actors in their favourite scenes.
In the vignettes of the Bear-garden and the Swan Theatre, for instance,
the artist has managed to throw over his minute plate a wonderful air
of pleasantness, a light which, though very delicate, is very
theatrical. The river and its tiny craft, the little gabled houses of
the neighbourhood, with a garden or two dropped in, tell delightfully
in the general effect. They are worthy to rank with Cruikshank's
illustrations of Jack Sheppard and The Tower of London, as mementoes of
the little old smokeless London before the century of Johnson, though
that, too, as Dr. Doran bears witness, knew what fogs could be. Then
there is the Fortune Theatre near Cripplegate, and, most charming of
all, two views--street and river fronts--the Duke's Theatre, Dorset
Garden, in Fleet Street, designed by Wren, decorated by
Gibbons--graceful, naïve, dainty, like the work of a very refined
Palladio, working minutely, perhaps more delicately than at Vicenza, in
the already crowded city on the Thames side.