Thomas Hardy lacks nothing of the highest excellence of art because he deals with peasants and farmers and seeks woodland ways; and Mrs. Ward, though she has carried the novel to the highest plane of our refined modern social life, making for herself there a field peculiarly her own, discloses, in situations the most conventional, passions as old as humanity, creating a drama whose fine and ample investiture cannot disguise, however it may veil, its natural strength. These vibrant currents thrill a far larger audience than any she could have won merely through her finely developed art of expression and her close study of life.
To the student of literary aims and methods nothing can be more interesting than to follow closely and sympathetically a writer's career from its tentative beginnings to its firm and full maturity.
In some careers there is little growth manifestly apparent; the writers seem to be fully equipped from the start, with an already fixed but characteristic habit of style which is steadily maintained to the end. Still, almost always, both in matter and in manner, there is a noticeable change as the writer goes on. He profits by wider, observation and a deeper experience of life; from time to time some new interest takes possession of him, a strong current swerving him from his earlier bearings; or his mood may be sensibly affected by success or disappointment in his literary ventures, or by the vicissitudes of life. Sometimes, indeed, a writer's work betrays so much of what is most intimate to him personally that we feel a delicacy in speaking of it, as if it were a breach of confidence even in the case of so open a secret. Oftener we are delightfully interested in these implicit disclosures, which are so human and so natural. How easily we detect the writer's love of the earth and of the free air, his sympathy with every living thing, or his spontaneous gayety and pride of life, or simply that he is a lover. On the other hand, what deep breathings there may be of solitude and sorrow!
It is very instructive to the literary student to follow the indications of simple growth in a writer, of steady advance to most excellent workmanship—as in the case of an essayist like Hamilton Mabie or of a story-writer like Mrs. Mary Wilkins Freeman.
To read a good memoir of a great author, written with reference to the direct association of his life with his works, is the best help to one's effort in intelligently following a writer's career—such a memoir as Charles Whibley has written of Thackeray, or that of Charles Dudley Warner recently given us by Mrs. Fields. The readers of to-day are abundantly supplied with such memoirs.
There are great writers whose masterpieces are so detached from their lives that we do not much regret the absence of their biographies except for the satisfaction of our curiosity. A life of Shakespeare would throw no light upon his plays, nor one of Milton upon his epics. But the close relationship which in our day is developed between individual writers and a large contemporary audience, until it becomes a kind of culture in both, acting and reacting, gives a nearer interest than that of curiosity to the memoirs of favorite authors.
It is with such intimate friendliness of interest that our readers will open Mrs. Fields's memoir of Charles Dudley Warner, already mentioned, but which we cannot dismiss with a mere allusion, so closely was he for many years associated with this Magazine. A perusal of the brief volume sharpens the reader's appetite for the more minute details of the life of this delightful humorist which will sometime, it is hoped, be presented in an adequate biography; but we have in this charming sketch by a friendly hand all that is necessary for the illumination of his literary work and for the comprehension of his serious and lofty purpose, not only in literature, but in those absorbing labors which to such an extent, unhappily for his readers, diverted him from his earlier course of easy and graceful entertainment, in books like My Summer in a Garden, and essays like that "On being a Boy." The ease and grace and humor were maintained to the end, but we love to linger with Mrs. Fields over his travels abroad and the letters written by him to friends at home, while these charms freshly and frankly shone forth out of a life still unvexed by the problems of the world.
