of respectability and good manners. Let us give her her due, and admit that in her prime she was a powerful influence.
She was one of the most serious novelists that ever lived. It is said that when the London Library was founded for the benefit of students, the proposal was made at one of the inaugural meetings that novels should be excluded from its shelves. This proposal was received with applause. "Except, of course," added Herbert Spencer, "the novels of George Eliot"; and this, too, was received with applause. Mrs. Ward was a novelist of that kind. She has a place in history, which is not with the artists, but with the sociologists. The long list of her novels describes very well certain phases of late Victorian society, and the writer of the future who wishes to describe that time will not be able to do without her. In later times this power of hers diminished. She ceased to be an influence because she lost touch with the age. She made herself a little absurd by her opposition to woman's suffrage, while she was publicly supporting her son's candidature for Parliament. A number of observers found this irrational; but it meant no more than that she had survived unaltered from an earlier period of thought. The same inability to change prevented her from observing as accurately as once she had done the characteristics of the society about her. The last novel of hers which I read, published last year, purported to describe the behaviour and mental attitude of the younger generation as it appeared at the end of the war; and, in elementary points of slang and idiom, Mrs. Ward had obviously the knowledge of what she was describing. But, in her earlier years, when she was not peering down from Olympian heights of experience and wisdom into the misty valleys of youth, she knew what she was talking about.
I know very well that even in her best books there is much that to-day gives us cause to smile. Those intellectual ladies, those urbane Prime Ministers, those thoughtful Dukes! Mrs. Ward had not a first-class mind. But she knew her governing classes and she had journalistic ability of a superior kind. Besides, it is a very sound rule in criticism not to disparage altogether any book that you have at all enjoyed, whatever may be at the moment the fashions in enjoyment and disparagement. And, as I write, the names of books by Mrs. Ward that I have more or less enjoyed, Robert Elsmere and The Marriage of William Ashe and Lady Rose's
