No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, no manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, no abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools--no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class--no Epsom nor Ascot! CHAPTER XCIX THE PREMIER NOVELIST We have studied two great novelists of the later Victorian age who failed of wide popularity. We shall not understand that age completely unless we study one who was crowned, not merely by the critics, but by the mass of novel-reading ladies. Mrs. Humphry Ward was her name, and she takes me back to the days when I was a poor devil of a would-be writer, half starving in a New York lodging-house. What made success in the world of books? I had to know, or die; and the New York “Times” was kind enough to publish a weekly review to give me the information. Every year or two there would appear a new novel by Mrs. Humphry Ward; and always this novel would be the occasion for a grand state review, signed by the name of some eminent pundit, occupying pages one and two, with a large portrait on page one. So I knew that Mrs. Humphry Ward was modern literature, and read each novel as part of my life training. I read it with a mingling of interest and fear; interest, because it told me about a set of people whom I knew did actually exist, and did actually govern the world in which I lived; and fear, because this set of people, so obviously both predaceous and stupid, were so powerfully buttressed by the prestige of snobbery, and protected by the holy mantle of religion. No novelist every worshipped Mammon-respectability more piously or portrayed it with more patient devotion than Mrs. Humphry Ward in her later years. She was brought up in the inner circle of culture; her father was an Oxford big-wig, and Matthew Arnold was her “Uncle Matt.” Everything that education could do for a young girl was done for her, and she was writing a history of Spain at the age of twenty. Incidentally, she was dreaming a wonderful dream--that some day she might be presented at court.