Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 144.djvu/8

2 It is not as a work of art that we undertake to criticise it. It is a novel with a purpose, which to our mind is usually a serious if not a fatal defect. The purpose, however, in this case is dominant and ruthless. Mrs Humphry Ward belongs, by birth at least, to a family which has now, to the third generation, aspired to lead the religious thought of the country. Her own. effort in that direction follows more or less on the lines of 'Literature and Dogma.' But it is more aggressive and dogmatic. Matthew Arnold's attitude to what he called popular Christianity was tolerant, and he even thought that Broad Churchmen who accepted his views might remain in orders, though they would act wrongly in taking them. Mrs Ward's book is an appeal to all who reject miracle to find in her system "a more excellent way"; and, of course, if in orders, at once to renounce them. The hero of the book, Robert Elsmere, adopts that course. His doing so is the culminating point in the tragedy of two young lives; for his orthodox and Puritan wife is impervious to doubt, and regards her husband's defection with profound horror and dismay – vanquished only by the overmastering impulse of a most genuine and devoted love. Every reader will recognise the dramatic force, power, and pathos of the representation. The object of this review, however, is not to linger over the incidents of the tale, but to criticise the aggressive and dogmatic scheme which wrought the havoc, and to examine the "Christianity of the future," its genesis, its credentials, its inherent vitality and characteristics. The book is worth close consideration, for it is a characteristic offspring of the time, and it has the fascination and power which, as Carlyle insisted, result – we forget the exact expression – wherever man speaks to man from the very heart of him in relation to a subject which has stirred it to its depths.

As the authoress of this book has chosen the form of novel for the purpose of unfolding her scheme of religion, it is necessary for a reviewer who wishes to express dissatisfaction with that scheme to begin by criticising the dramatis personæ. Catherine Elsmere, the heroine of the book, the wife of Robert Elsmere, and the passive victim of the tragedy, is one of the most important. She is intended to represent the Puritan element, refined and softened by the vicissitudes of an existence which has afforded free scope to all the charities of life within and without the domestic circle, and has been completely withdrawn from all controversy, religious or otherwise. She was the daughter of an evangelical minister of the Church of England, who, in his last years, withdrew to his native Westmoreland hills to die, and leave his family – a widow and three daughters – as much as possible withdrawn from the world. He would not let his children know any unbeliever, however apparently worthy and good – from a prejudice, which apparently Mrs Ward shares, that that precaution is the only, or at least the most effective, safeguard of orthodoxy. They were to cherish the faith, to live a secluded life, that they might incur no spiritual danger. To Catherine was assigned the duty of "looking after the others." She was the "Thirty-nine Articles in the flesh," as one of the other characters puts it. At her first acquaintance with Elsmere there is an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with his glorification of Grey,