This lack of charm that I always feel in reading Mrs. Ward's books (and I have read them all) is owing not merely to the lack of humour. It is partly due to what seems to be an almost total absence of freshness, spontaneity, and originality. Mrs. Ward works like a well-trained and high-class graduate student, who is engaged in the preparation of a doctor's thesis. Her discussions of socialism, her scenes in the House of Commons and on the Terrace, her excursions to Italy, her references to political history, her remarks on the army, her disquisitions on theology, her pictures of campaign riots, her studies of defective drainage, her representations of the labouring classes,--all these are "worked up" in a scholarly and scientific manner; there is the modern passion for accuracy, there is the German completeness of detail,--there is, in fact, everything except the breath of life. She works in the descriptive manner, from the outside in--not in the inspired manner which goes with imagination, sympathy, and genius. She is not only a student, she is a journalist; she is a special correspondent on politics and theology; but she is not a creative writer. For she has the critical, not the creative, temperament.
The monotonous sameness of her books, which has been mentioned above, is largely owing to the sameness of her characters. She changes the frames, but not the portraits. First of all, in almost any of her books we are sure to meet the studious, intellectual young man. He always has a special library on some particular subject, with the books all annotated. One wearies of this perpetual character's perpetual library, crowded, as it always is, with the latest French and German monographs. Her heroes smell of books and dusty dissertations, and the conversations of these heroes are plentifully lacking in native wit and originality--they are the mere echoes of their reading. Let us pass in review a few of these serious students--Robert Elsmere, Langham, Aldous Reyburn (who changes into Lord Maxwell, but who remains a prig), the melancholy Helbeck, the insufferable Manisty, Jacob Delafield, William Ashe, Oliver Marsham--all, all essentially the same, tiresome, dull, heavy men--what a pity they were not intended as satires! Second, as a foil to this man, we have the Byronic, clever, romantic, sentimental, insincere man--who always degenerates or dies in a manner that exalts the dull and superior virtues of his antagonist. Such a man is Wharton, or Sir George Tressady, or Captain Warkworth, or Cliffe--they have different names in different novels, but they are the same character. Curiously enough, the only convincing men that appear in her pages are _old_ men--men like Lord Maxwell or Sir James Chide. In portraying this type she achieves success.