independent and detached work of imagination, and to dis- regard
entirely the echoes of our social annals which insistently reverberate throughout its pages. Approached from this standpoint, The Marriage of William. Ashe is an elaborate and engrossing study of an ill-assorted union between equanimity and impulse. William Ashe at the opening of the story has just made a brilliant entry on the political arena. Young, handsome, well born, highly educated, genial, and level-headed, he makes a love- match with Lady Kitty Bristol, the brilliant but neglected daughter of Madame d'Estrees, formerly the Countess of Blackwater, a meteoric lady of damaged reputation. Lady Kitty is only eighteen, but she has been educated in France, has lived every moment of her feverish life, and is consumed with the desire to live every moment that remains. Good-hearted in the main, she is possessed by the twin devils of daring and curiosity. Ashe fully realises all the risks he runs in linking his fate with this elfish creature, who will never brook coercion, but is confident that he can conquer her caprices by his imperturbable equanimity. The novel relates the results of an experiment which Kitty's character and antecedents foredoom to disaster. For not only do her blazing indiscretions of speech and manner, her violent likes and dislikes, embarrass his political position at every turn, but her passionate and reckless desire for " more life " impels her to encourage the compromising attentions of Geoffrey Cliffe, a poet and man of action combined, who happens to be her husband's most persistent political assailant and critic. The duel between Kitty and Cliffe is long, but the issue is foreshadowed in the striking passage in which the growth of this intimacy is traced. It had started in her ineffectual attempt "to penetrate the secret history of a man whose poems had filled her with a thrilling sense of feelings and passions beyond her ken ":—
"She had not found it quite easy. Cliffe, as wo know, had resented the levity of her first attempt. But when she renewed it, more seriously and sweetly, combining with it a number of subtle flatteries, the flattery of her beauty and her position, of the private interest she could not help showing in the man who was her husband's public antagonist, and of an admiration for his poems which was not so much mere praise as an actual covetous sharing in them, a making their ideas and their music her own,—Cliffe could not in the end resist her. After all, so far, she only asked him to talk of himself, and for a man of his type the process is the very breath of his being, the stimulus and liberation of all his powers. So that, before they knew, they were in the midst of the most burning subjects of human dis- cussion,—at first in a manner comparatively veiled and general, then with the sharpest personal reference to Cliffe's own story, as the intimacy between them grew. Jealousy, suffering, the hard cases' of passion,—why men aro selfish and exacting, why women mislead and torment,—the ugly waste and crudity of death,—it was among these great themes they found themselves. Death above all,—it was to a thought of death that Cliffe's harsh face owed its chief spell perhaps in Kitty's eyes. A woman had died for love of him, crushed by his jealousy and her own self-scorn. So Kitty had been told ; and Cliffe's tortured vanity * The Marriage of William Ashe. By Mrs. Humph ry Ward. With lib& trationi by Albert Sterner. London : Smith, Elder, and Co. [Us.] would not deny it. How could she have cared so much ? That was the puzzle. But this vicarious relation had now passed into a relation of her own. Cliffe was to Kitty a problem,—and a problem which, beyond a certain point, defied her. The element of sex of course entered in, but only as intensifying the contrasts and mysteries of imagination. And he made her feel these con- trasts and mysteries, as she had never yet felt them ; and so he enlarged the world for her, he plunged her, if only by contact with his own bitter and irritable genius, into new regions of sentiment and feeling. For, in spite of the vulgar elements in him, there were also elements of genius. The man was a poet and a thinker, though he were at the same time, in some sense, an adventurer. His mind was stored with eloquent and beautiful imagery, the poetry of others, and poetry of his own. He could pursue the meanest personal objects in an unscrupulous way ; but he had none the less passed through a wealth of tragic circumstance ; he had been face to face with his own soul in the wilds of the earth ; he had met every sort of physical danger with contempt ; and his arrogant, imperious temper was of the kind which attracts many women, especially perhaps women physically small, and intellectually fearless, like Kitty, who feel in it a challenge to their power and their charm. His society then had in these six weeks become, for Kitty, a passion,—a passion of the imagination. For the man himself, she would probably have said that she felt more repulsion than anything else. But it was a repulsion that held her, because of the con- stant sense of re-action, of on-rushing life, which it excited in herself. Add to these, the elements of mischief and defiance in the situation, the snatching him from Mary, her enemy and slanderer, the defiance of Lady Grosville and all other hypo- critical tyrants, the pride of dragging at her chariot wheels a man whom most people courted even when they loathed him, who enjoyed, moreover, an astonishing reputation abroad, especially in that France which Kitty adored, as a kind of modern Byron, the only Englishman who could still display in public the pageant of a bleeding heart,' without making himself ridiculons,—and perhaps enough has been heaped together to explain the infatuation, that now like a wild spring gust on a shining lake, was threatening to bring Kitty's light bark into dangerous waters. ' I don't care for him,'—she said to herself, as she sat thinking alone,—' but I must see him—I will ! And I will talk to him as I please, and where I please !' Hor small frame stiffened under the obstinacy of her resolution. Kitty's will at a moment of this kind was a fatality,—so strong was it, and so irrational."
Of the sequel we need not speak in detail, except to applaud the skill with which, without unduly extenuating Kitty's infatuation, Mrs. Ward has in the main contrived to retain the reader's interest in and compassion for her erring heroine.
We have said and quoted enough to indicate the high level of interest and literary achievement attained by Mrs. Humphry Ward in her romance, viewed, so to speak, in vacuo, and very probably it will be most keenly enjoyed by readers who approach it unencumbered by any knowledge of the actualities on which it is based. But when the know- ledge is possessed, and in face of the author's avowal, it is impossible, in endeavouring to form an adequate estimate of the novel as a work of art, to disregard its historical context. For Mrs. Humphry Ward has resorted in her new book, as in its predecessor, to that special varia- tion on the historical romance which, if she did not invent it, she has made peculiarly her own. The formula is that of transferring an episode in real life to a much later period, and while preserving its main outlines and re-enacting its cardinal incidents, entirely modifying and modernising the atmosphere, milieu, and characterisation. It is a device which is perfectly legitimate in itself. History repeats itself, human nature is the same in all ages, and if a more specific justification be required, one may point to the practice of some of the greatest composers when they take an ancient melody as the basis and theme of a set of modern variations. Music, however, has the great advantage that in its abstract form, at any rate, its suggestion is inarticulate, and the bridging of the past and the present is beset with less danger and difficulty than in the case of a story where all the facts are precise and familiar.
In the story before us the skeleton of the plot is taken from the relations of William Lamb, afterwards Lord Melbourne, his wife Lady Caroline Lamb, and Lord Byron, the episode being post-dated to a period which, from a variety of pieces of internal evidence, is intended to be that of the mid " sixties," or just half-a-century later. Mrs. Humphry Ward, however, is not altogether consistent in regard to chronology. Speaking broadly, the manners portrayed are not those of forty years ago, but of to-day or yesterday. The coterie of smart intellectuals called " The Archangels," to whom reference is made, is antedated at least twenty-five years, and many other of the decorative details of the
narrative are obviously based on observation of the usages of contemporary life, though the time colour is in the main designed to be that of a previous generation. The result, therefore, to any student of the social life of the nineteenth century is somewhat bewildering. It is not merely that new wine has been put into old bottles, but that the new wine is of different vintages. Or to put it in another way, too many successive phases of social life are telescoped together to render the result a really faithful picture of any one period. The book, in short, has the drawbacks not only of a roman. a clef, but of a composite photograph.
It is irksome and ungrateful, however, to dwell further on the flaws—as they appear to us—of what we have found to be the most attractive and brilliant of all Mrs. Humphry Ward's novels. The fine literary quality of her work remains, the reader is once more charmed by the restrained eloquence of her descriptions, and impressed by the penetrating analysis of characters so essentially complex as those of Lady Kitty and Geoffrey Cliffe. But along with these familiar excellences one notes a marked improvement in technique, a livelier movement in the handling of incident and dialogue,— in short, a greater ease, skill, and charm in presentation. We cannot help thinking that the story would have gained had the dramatis personae been more widely representative of the different social strata of modern civilisation. The atmo- sphere of a drama tends to become somewhat rarefied when the characters, with hardly an exception, belong to the elite of birth and high office. Beyond a few faithful and perfectly trained servants, we meet no one who is not highly educated or well born. The tragedy is genuine, but it is somewhat of a tragedy de luxe, and in this clash of highly strung and highly gifted and delicately reared natures we miss the contrast which the stupidity, ingenuousness, or untutored mother-wit of the natural man would have supplied.
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