and correct persons, he does not please nearly so many respectable and correct persons as does Mrs. Humphry Ward.  If anybody has a right to the leader page of our unique daily, Mrs. Humphry Ward is that body.  My objection to the phenomenon is that the Guardian falsified its item of news.  It deliberately gave the impression that a serious work of art had appeared in “Diana Mallory.”  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?

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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!

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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 order to be concluded in our next, the revolvers ought to prove to be unloaded.  I admit that this invention of mine is odious, and quite un-English, and such as would never occur to a right-minded subscriber to Mudie’s.  But it illustrates the mood caused in me by witnessing the antics of those harrowing dolls.