" It ought to
have known better. It did know better. If our unique daily is to yield to
the snobbishness which ranks Mrs. Humphry Ward among genuine artists,
where among dailies are we to look for the shadow of a great rock?

* * * * *

Mrs. Humphry Ward's novels are praise-worthy as being sincerely and
skilfully done, but they are not works of art. They are possibly the best
stuff now being swallowed by the uneducated public; and they deal with the
governing classes; and when you have said that you have said all. Nothing
truly serious can happen in them. It is all make-believe. No real danger
of the truth about life!... I should think not, indeed! The fearful
quandary in which the editor of _Harper's_ found himself with "Jude the
Obscure" was a lesson to all Anglo-Saxon editors for ever more! Mrs.
Humphry Ward has never got nearer to life than, for instance, "Rita" has
got--nor so near! Gladstone, a thoroughly bad judge of literature, made
her reputation, and not on a post card, either! Gladstone had no sense of
humour--at any rate when he ventured into literature. Nor has Mrs. Humphry
Ward. If she had she would not concoct those excruciating heroines of
hers. She probably does not know that her heroines are capable of rousing
temperaments such as my own to ecstasies of homicidal fury. Moreover, in
literature all girls named Diana are insupportable. Look at Diana Vernon,
beloved of Mr. Andrew Lang, I believe! What a creature! Imagine living
with her! You can't! Look at Diana of the Crossways. Why did Diana of the
Crossways marry? Nobody can say--unless the answer is that she was a
ridiculous ninny. Would Anne Elliot have made such an inexplicable fool of
herself? Why does Diana Mallory "go to" her preposterous Radical ex-M.P.?
Simply because she is tiresomely absurd. Oh, those men with strong chins
and irreproachable wristbands! Oh, those cultured conversations! Oh, those
pure English maids! That skittishness! That impulsiveness! That noxious
winsomeness!

* * * * *

I have invented a destiny for Mrs. Humphry Ward's heroines. It is
terrible, and just. They ought to be caught, with their lawful male
protectors, in the siege of a great city by a foreign army. Their lawful
male protectors ought, before sallying forth on a forlorn hope, to provide
them with a revolver as a last refuge from a brutal and licentious
soldiery. And when things come to a crisis, in