"
Mrs. Ward's women, as we have said, are more organic, sympathetic,
and really creative, than her men, and make their vitality evident by
becoming, quite naturally, the centres of very [62] life-like and
dramatic groups of people, family or social; while her men are the
very genii of isolation and division. It is depressing to see so
really noble a character as Catherine soured, as we feel, and
lowered, as time goes on, from the happy resignation of the first
volume (in which solemn, beautiful, and entire, and so very real, she
is like a poem of Wordsworth) down to the mere passivity of the third
volume, and the closing scene of Robert Elsmere's days, very
exquisitely as this episode of unbelieving yet saintly biography has
been conceived and executed. Catherine certainly, for one, has no
profit in the development of Robert's improved gospel. The "stray
sheep," we think, has by no means always the best of the argument,
and her story is really a sadder, more testing one than his. Though
both alike, we admit it cordially, have a genuine sense of the
eternal moral charm of "renunciation," something even of the thirst
for martyrdom, for those wonderful, inaccessible, cold heights of the
Imitation, eternal also in their aesthetic charm.
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