manent record, and will repay an attentive perusal. Those who would understand the position of the Church of Rome in this country, and the claims and forces which the Church of England has to contend against from that quarter, will do well to give careful consideration to this biography. It may be said of Wiseman that, in military phrase, he changed the front of the Roman host at a very critical moment in the battle, and with that front the Roman forces are still encountering us. We have indicated in the course of this article what we regard as the central weakness in Rome's position-the simple fact that she occupies doctrinal positions which are demonstrably incompatible either with Scripture or with the teaching of the early Church, and which, to any impartial eye, 'absolutely pulverize,' in Newman's phrase, her claim to infallibility. But we have not been disposed to deal with an honourable career in a spirit of controversy. We must acknowledge that so long as the Church of Rome can command the services of men like Wiseman, she must be a formidable antagonist; and in parting from him we cannot but echo the old exclamation: Cum talis sis, utinam noster

esses.

ART. VI.—HELBECK OF BANNISDALE.

Helbeck of Bannisdale. By MRS. HUMPHRY WARD. (London, 1898.)

THERE can scarcely be two opinions about the merits of this work. The conception is a striking one, and it is worked out with great force and vividness. The characters are well drawn, and well sustained throughout; and the descriptive powers, which the writer possesses in a remarkable degree, are given their full scope. It is, in fact, a thoroughly good novel; but if this were all, it would, perhaps, be rather out of place to give it more than a brief notice in a distinctly theological review. But the book itself is theological—in a sense; that is, it deals largely-we had almost said exclusively-with questions which are of the most direct and vital interest to the Christian, questions on the answer to which his very existence, as a Christian, depends. We need, therefore, make no apology for dwelling at some length upon a story which is certainly one of the most remarkable stories that have appeared for a long time.

The plot hinges entirely upon the struggle between the

religious and non-religious sentiments of the hero and heroine, which are as wide as the poles are asunder, and which lead to the catastrophe with which the book closes. All the subordinate characters are treated, more or less, from the standpoint of religion, and move chiefly as they are actuated by religious or anti-religious motives. Indeed, the whole book is as much concerned, in its way, with religion as The Pilgrim's Progress or Callista and Loss and Gain. But there is this difference. It is impossible to mistake the position of John Bunyan and Cardinal Newman; it is not always easy to know that of Mrs. Humphry Ward.

The story is briefly as follows. Mr. Helbeck of Bannisdale, a man of high birth, whose ancestors for twenty generations have been Roman Catholics, and who himself holds the ancestral faith with far more than the ancestral rigour, receives into his house a widowed sister. This sister had, against her brother's wish, married Stephen Fountain, a widower with one daughter, a man who had risen from the ranks to a fair position at Cambridge by his brains, and who was as much a bigot, in his way, as Helbeck was in his. The daughter, Laura Fountain, had imbibed her father's anti-religious views, and, being passionately attached to her father's memory, clung to them with the utmost tenacity after his death. Two such discordant elements as Alan Helbeck and Laura Fountain, when brought together in the same house, naturally clashed; but as both are very good-looking and attractive, they as naturally fall in love with each other. Love overcomes all barriers; and in spite of obstacles on both sides, but especially on Helbeck's, they become engaged, with the understanding that they should go their own way in religious matters. The arrangement, however, is found impossible, both being too earnest in their respective views; and the engagement is broken off by Laura. She leaves Bannisdale; but the dangerous illness of her step-mother, to take care of whom was the sole object of her coming to Bannisdale at all, forces her to return; the latent fires are revived; the engagement is renewed, Laura determining by a strong mental effort to put herself under instruction with a view to becoming a Roman Catholic. But her nature again rebels; and, rather than disappoint Helbeck, whom she loves more than ever, a second time, she commits suicide, taking care, however, to do it under circumstances which will lead him to think that she has met with a fatal accident. Helbeck never knows the truth of the matter, and, as he had intended to do before the Laura episode, enters the Jesuit novitiate.

The relations between the hero and heroine are much complicated by the fact that Laura's sole relatives on the father's side live in the neighbourhood; and, besides being in a different social position from Helbeck, are violently incensed against him as 'a Papist.' Among them is a handsome, ill-conditioned, male cousin, a drunkard and a sensualist, who of course falls in love with Laura. Laura does not return the love, but feels it a duty-and also rather a pleasure to play the mentor to the youth, and by so doing is brought more than once into rather dubious relations with him. Both the ascetic and the aristocratic instincts in Helbeck are shocked by Laura's intimacy with the dissipated, vulgar young man; but he behaves with wonderful forbearance. Laura will not break the only link which binds her to her dead father, and thus the family of the Masons of Browhead farm are interwoven with the thread of the story. So also is a rather shadowy family at Cambridge named Friedland, the head of which had been a sort of friend of Laura's father to this family Laura has recourse when she cannot comfortably stay either at Bannisdale or Browhead farm; and Dr. Friedland, his wife and daughter Molly, Laura's girl-friend and confidante, are characters with whose religion Mrs. Humphry Ward is most in sympathy.

The descriptions of natural scenery, which the authoress loves, and of the artificialities of great manufacturing towns and watering-places, which she hates, are very striking and life-like. That interesting country which lies between what has been called the back-door to the Lake district' and the ocean, with its mosses and its fells, its flashing streams and its estuaries, and the great shadowy mountains looming in the distance, is well brought before the mind's eye; while the unloveliness of the brand-new town of Froswick-that is, of course, Barrow-in-Furness-stands out in artistic relief. Mrs. Humphry Ward has an hereditary right to love and appreciate the beauties of nature. Admirers of the great and good Dr. Arnold will remember how strongly marked a feature this was in his character; the delightful letters of Mr. Matthew Arnold to his sister Fan' show that this feature descended to a second generation; and Helbeck of Bannisdale shows that it has descended to a third.

The interest of the book never flags; the thread of the story is not interrupted by digressions, which, however interesting in themselves, break the continuity of a narrative. From first to last the relations between Helbeck and Laura are kept steadily in view, and everything else turns upon or

illustrates them; scarcely anything could be left out without injury to the story.

But with all these merits-and it is hoped that enough has been said to show that they are very great-the book leaves a rather painful impression upon the mind. Religious questions are brought before us in connection with almost every character, and in almost every page; but what is the end of it all? What are we to believe and what are we not to believe?

Let us not be misunderstood. We are not complaining because the book is not written with a purpose. Novels with a purpose are seldom convincing, and often exasperating. You take a book up for recreation, and, finding yourself entrapped into a theological or philosophical or political argument, are inclined to rebel; you are not going to be proselytized unawares in this sort of way. Neither are we desirous that the religious or quasi-religious element should be eliminated from novels altogether. A novel should be a reflection of real life, and it could not be true to nature if it ignored what always has been, and always will be, a main component of that life. If, for instance, our best novelists had from principle abstained from introducing any clerical characters, what an irreparable loss it would have been! We should have lost Mr. Collins, Mr. Elton, Archdeacon Grantly, Bishop Proudie, Dr. Portman, Parson Adams, Dr. Primrose, Dr. Rochecliffe, Mr. Irwine-in short, some of the very best characters in fiction. And, of course, to represent them without their foibles would be worse than not representing them at all. The solemn pomposity of Mr. Collins, who 'will make it his earnest endeavour to demean himself with grateful respect towards her Ladyship [his patron], and be ever ready to perform those rites and ceremonies which are instituted by the Church of England'; the failure of Dr. Portman to arrest Madame Fribsby's attention to his sermon,' although it was one of his oldest and most valued compositions' (that 'although' is perfectly delicious); the sweet simplicity of Dr. Primrose, who consoled himself for the non-sale of his theological tracts by thinking that they were read only by the happy few-these and such like are gems which we could ill afford to spare. Or, turning from divines of the Church of England to other religious teachers, what a loss it would have been to have had no Dinah Morris, no Dominie Sampson (who was at any rate 'a meenister' if he was not a religious teacher), no Stiggins, no Chadband, nay, no Andrew Fairservice, for Andrew without his religion would have been

nothing. It would be, not piety, but pedantry—sheer Philistinism of the grossest kind-to object to religion being introduced in this sort of way into our novels. But Mrs. Humphry Ward's way is wholly different. Not the earthen vessel, but the treasure which it contains, is the subject on which she dwells-not the foibles of the clergy or other religious teachers, but the message which they deliver. Compare Mrs. Humphry Ward, the greatest female novelist of the later years of the nineteenth century, with Miss Austen, the greatest of the earlier, and the difference will be obvious. You do not know, and do not want to know, what are the peculiar opinions of the easy-going clergy whom Miss Austen loves to introduce upon her stage. Probably they had none, like many clergymen in real life in those comfortable days. She simply describes, most admirably, their outer life, as it would appear to the general society in which they freely mixed. There is a delicacy of humour, a lightness of touch about her portraits, which make them as charming as they are harmless. But Mrs. Humphry Ward's mind is cast in quite a different mould. Humour is not her forte-and what she has is of a rather grim sort; her touch is not a light one, and she is nothing if she is not serious. But to what conclusion does her seriousness lead her? That is just the question which it is rather difficult to answer. And the difficulty is increased by her expressing the views of her characters in the oratio obliqua without inverted commas; so that it is not always easy to know whether you are reading the sentiments of Mrs. Humphry Ward, or the sentiments of Stephen Fountain, Laura Fountain, Alan Helbeck, Father Leadham, and so forth, as the case may be.

It is, in fact, the same with her theological speculations as it is with her description of places, in which she follows the example of Dickens and Tennyson. Everyone who has tried the experiment knows how impossible it is to identify 'Dickens land' and Tennyson land.' You often recognize, broadly, Kent in the one and Lincolnshire in the other; but when you come to details they elude your grasp. So it is with the country about Bannisdale; some names are reallike Bannisdale itself for instance; some are fictitious; some actual places are accurately described, some are, evidently with intention, half accurate, half inaccurate. All this is, of course, perfectly legitimate in a novel, but it is rather embarrassing when the same principle is applied to spiritual matters of the gravest importance. After having in vain tried to identify Bannisland House, for instance, you may fairly