16 
LAND 6? WATER 
October 31, 1918 
Life and Letters Qj J. C Squire 
Looking Backward 
MRS. HUMPHRY WARD'S A Writer's Recol- 
lections (Collins, I2S. 6d. net) contains as 
many famous people to the page as any recent 
book. She was born, if not in the purple, 
at any rate in its scholastic equivalent. Her 
grandfather was Arnold, of Rugby ; Matthew Arnold was 
her uncle ; her other uncles were prominent public servants 
and educationists ; her aunt married W. E. Forster ; and 
her cousins have included historians, men of letters, and 
Cabinet Ministers. As a girl, she knew everybody in Oxford ; 
ever since then she has known everybody in London ; and 
when she made her first success with Robert Elsmere, half the 
celebrities in England, from Mr. Gladstone downwards, seem 
to have been waiting for the chance of compHmenting her 
upon it. She has mingled with politicians as a politician, 
with ecclesiastics as a theologian, with novelists as a novelist, 
with historians as an expert on the Dark Ages, with dons 
as the first woman to examine men for a University Scholar- 
ship. And the Times puts her letters in large type. 
Nevertheless, her book of reminiscences is not so exciting 
as it might be. It is, indeed, a little insipid. Here and 
there one finds a good story or quotation, and one's face 
lights up ; but one is soon back among lofty trivialities. 
It is interesting to hear that George Eliot could converse 
for twenty minutes "with perfect ease and finish, without 
misplacing a word or dropping a sentence" ; it is a good 
remark of Lowell's that ' Nobody but Wordsworth ever 
got beyond the need of sympathy, and he started there," 
and there are one or two bearable anecdotes. For instance, 
there is one about Swinburne at Jowett's : 
I could not think why he seemed so cross and uncomfort- 
able. He was perpetually beckoning to the waiters, then, 
when they came, holding peremptory (ionversation with 
them ; while I from my side of the table could see them 
going away, with a whisper or shrug to each other, Hke 
men asked for the impossible. At last, with a kind of 
bound, Swinburne leapt from his chair and seized a copy 
of the Times, which he seemed to have persuaded one of 
the men to bring him. As he got up I saw that the fire 
behind him, and very close to him, must indeed have been 
burning the very marrow out of a long-suffering poet. 
And, alack, in that house without a mis|;ress, the small 
conveniences of life, such as fire-screens, were often over- 
looked. The Master did not possess any. In a pale 
exasperation Swinburne folded the Times over the back 
of his chair, and sat down again. Vain was the effort ! 
The room was narrow, the party large, and the servants 
pusliing by had soon dislodged the Times. Again and 
again did Swinburne in a fury replace it ; and was soon 
reduced to sitting silent and wild-eyed, his back firmly 
pressed against the chair and the newspaper, in a concen- 
trated struggle with fate. 
This is not a first-rate story. No word is spoken, no light is 
thrown on character, and, as for the telling of it, we have 
only to imagine what Mr. Gosse, with a slight touch of carica- 
ture, would have made of it, to realise that it is not well told. 
But Mrs. Ward cannot keep up even to this level. When 
we are told that she put the coals on the lire for Mark 
Pattison, and that he said " Good ! does it drive you dis- 
tracted, too, when people put on coals the wrong v/ay ? " we 
wonder why on earth so desperately banal a remark has been 
repeated. Mrs. Ward seems, indeed, to have made a point 
of overlooking the most characteristic and exciting things 
about the people she has known ; and this is maddening, 
considering they have ranged from Uncle Matthew to Henry 
James, of whom she appears to have been a long and close 
friend, to whom she pays most devoted "tribute," and of 
whom scarcely a good remark is repeated. The conclusion 
is that there is a .great deal in life that does not interest her 
and a great deal of which she disapproves. 
Mrs. Ward's private life seems to have been almost 
indistinguishable from public life. Everybody she has ever 
known appears to have been eminent, distinguished, and 
earnest. And she never seems able to lose her strong sense 
of responsibility, her consciousness of the duty of intellectual ' 
ardour, for one moment. You begin a chapter headed 
"Early Married Life." In most autobiographies this would 
induce in you either the fear of a waste of dull domestic 
minutiae, children's progress, trivial dinner-parties, and the 
like, or the hope of an amusing record of "private" things 
seen and a parade of obscure but fascinating characters. 
But there are no such things here. It needn't have been 
"early" and it scarcely need have been "married"; the 
record of this life in this chapter is a page of Mandell 
Creighton and the Renaissance Popes, and some pages of J. R. 
Green, Mr. Freeman, Bishop Stubbs, and the Gothic kings 
of Spain. Towards the close of it the author very properly 
pulls herself up with: "But life then was not all lectures," 
just as in an earlier chapter she suddenly remarks : "But a 
girl of seventeen is not always thinking of books." There 
were holidays, too ; but the first holiday leads us to • the 
"Ecole Normale," the "Ecole des Sciences politiques," and 
"an illuminating talk with M. Renan." So throughout 
chapter after chapter. 
* . * « » « « 
The Cabinet Ministers, the distinguished foreigners, the 
educational reformers, the philosophers, the heads of houses, 
the deans, bishops, scientists, Tractarians, Broad Church- 
men, and Rationalists, stand in serried rows with brows 
broad or beetling, lips grim or sensitive, eyes penetrating 
or other-worldly, all a little inhuman, a little solemnised, 
described reverently from the outside in such a way as to 
invite the profane ironies of Mr. Lytton Strachey. They 
mostly, in her pages, deliver themselves of improving maxims. 
One recognises the tyuth of Mr. Max Beerbohm's cartoon of 
the young Mary Augusta asking her debonair Uncle Matthew 
why he was not always serious. She has little taste for 
more than an occasional condescension into flippancy or 
temperate high spirits made as a concession to the weakness 
of human nature. Everything to her is an occasion for 
moralising. Everything has a purpose and a lesson all the 
time, and where the purposes are puzzling the resultant 
tension and gravity in the mind are all the greater. She 
can seldom describe anything without reference to its bearing 
upon something else. It is characteristic of her that her 
best descriptive passage, in which she tells of her love of 
the fells when she was a child, should end with juvenile 
cogitations about geology ; and that her confession of pleasure 
in nature should be qualified thus : 
I have used the words "physical joy" because, although 
such passionate pleasure in natural things as has been my 
constant Helper (in the sense of the Greek «Tri-Kou/)os) 
through life, has connected itself no doubt, in the process 
of time, ■Orith various intimate beliefs, philosophic or 
religious, as to the Beauty which is Truth, and therewth 
the only conceivable key to man's experience, yet I could 
not myself endorse the famous contrast in Wordsworth's 
Dintern Abbey between the "haunting passion" of 
youth's delight in Nature, and the more complex feeling 
of later years, when Nature takes an aspect coloured by 
our own moods and memories, when our sorrows and 
reflections enter so much into what we feel about the 
"bright and intricate device" of earth and her seasons, 
that "in our life alone doth Nature live." 
This unmitigated seriousness is, above all, a handicap for a 
writer of recollections. Apart from its disastrous effects on 
the selection of material and the treatment of character, 
it is wasted even where, given a larger room and a special 
subject, it might be fruitful. When we have finished Mrs. 
Ward we have only caught glimpses of a hundred problems 
and controversies, and we have not really become familiar 
with the development of her own thought — which might, 
granted that her own thought was interesting enough, that 
she had a sufficient insight into her own processes, and that 
she could write about them in a vivid and accurate way, 
have made a good autobiography of one kind. As it is, 
one feels she has missed her opportunities. Her concluding 
pages on contemporary literature are redeemed by a good 
deal of shrewdness and a certain animus, which, if not admir- 
able for its own sake, is refreshing after three hundred pages 
of dignified genuflexions before the remembered images of 
the great and good. She is an enthusiast for Stevenson, 
Hardy, and Henry James, she respects Mr. Arnold Bennett, 
she is freezing about Mr. Wells. But whatever one's views 
about novels with a mission and the division between jour- 
nalism and fiction, one may pardonably be surprised to find 
Mrs. Ward taking it for granted that the novel is not the 
place for propaganda and argument. For she has mada it 
evident that her own interests have always been primarily 
controversial. 
