stand. But at least, whether for the scholar or for the man of affairs, it looks as if, first of all, we needed somehow or other to get the fear of God back into society. OXFORD, WOMEN, AND GOD MRS. HUMPHRY WARD has the unenviable portion of a reformer who wrought manfullyshould we say womanfully? to lead England out of the Cimmerian bogs of Victorianism, yet somehow is heartily despised by the younger generation which walks the sunlit ways of our peaceful, spacious Georgian world. It would be an instructive pastime, with her autobiography in hand, to study the causes of this cruel injustice; but that is another story. My present interest in her autobiography 1 has been centred not so much on her own career as on her account of life in Oxford during the sixties and seventies. The four chapters in which she collects her reminiscences of these years are quite the most entertaining of the record — are, in fact, the only part that offers much entertainment of any sort; and if this were my theme, I might suggest that it was the spell of Oxford, however reformed an Oxford, still haunting her mind that makes her so unacceptable to the very much otherwise reformed young wits now gasping their discontent in London. Her first novel, Miss Bretherton, was a tale 1 A Writer's Recollections. By Mrs. Humphry Ward. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1918. This essay, it need scarcely be noted, was written while Mrs. Ward was living. of the university, and Lady Connie, her latest novel written before her autobiography, returns to the same scenes; and these, with the chapters of her Recollections, might give the lie to Andrew Lang's pleasant witticism that there are no good books about Oxford because they are all composed by women who have spent one day in Cambridge. Jowett and Mark Pattison are her heroes, the Master of Balliol in his triumphant days of educational supremacy, and the Rector of Lincoln socially tamed by the restless, keen, very æsthetical "Mrs. Pat.," yet otherwise savage enough with his gibes at the unteutonized scholarship of Balliol and the persistent priestcraft of Christ Church. But other figures, denizens and visitors, flit through her pages-Swinburne, Renan, George Eliot, Mandell Creighton, Taine, Green - each the subject of an anecdote or the occasion for moralizing. Perhaps the most memorable of these stories is that which reports a conversation with Walter Pater in the days when the critic had yielded something of his earlier paganism and was lapsing into a kind of artistic dalliance with the charms of Christianity. Mrs. Ward had been proclaiming the near downfall of orthodoxy and the impossibility of its maintaining itself long against the attacks from the historical and literary camps. To her surprise, Pater shook his head and looked rather troubled. |