Smith, Elder & Co. first edition - 1898
What a well-written, deeply thought out novel - and, yet, so depressing. Roman Catholicism hovered over it throughout, not like a benevolent umbrella but a threatening storm cloud. Very little happiness occurs in the pages, the Jesuitical influences ensure that. I finished the last page with my own anti Roman Catholicism more firmly embedded than before.
Essentially, a 21 year old girl, Laura Fountain, who has recently lost her father, turns up with her feeble step-mother at the latter's brother's home in Westmoreland. The brother, 37 year-old Alan Helbeck of Bannisdale, is more than a card-carrying Catholic; he is deeply wedded to the Jesuit Order, narrow in his beliefs and living a near-ascetic bachelor life in his decaying mansion. The story involves the conflict between 'normal' passions and the fundamental and crushing tenets of the Faith.
Laura and Alan are chalk and cheese The former's father, Stephen, the son of a small Lancashire farmer, held a lectureship at Cambridge in an obscure scientific subject and regards Catholicism as
abhorrent. She finds the Catholic regime at Helbeck oppressive. She listens to children in its chapel, the service and responses being gabbled as fast as possible, as though the one object of both priest and people were to get through and make an end. Over and over again, without an inflection, or a change - with just the one monotonous repetition and the equally monotonous variation. What a barbarous and foolish business! Laura seems to spend much of her time angry and/or depressed.
Alan had been brought up at Stonyhurst, where he came under the influence of a Jesuit teacher, and afterwards at Louvain. By the start of the novel, he has a high brow - hollows in the temples, deep hollows in the cheeks - pale blue eyes - a short and pointed beard, greyish-black like the hair - the close whiskers black too against the skin - a general impression of pallor, dark lines, strong shadows, melancholy force...Now he appears to be surrounded by the Jesuits; the church simply leeching off his inheritance, forcing him to sell lands and, eventually, a prized family oil painting, to pay for their schemes. Helbeck, indeed, was of real importance to Catholicism in this particular district of England...only enthusiasm such as his could have sufficed for the task. But, for the Church's sake, he had now remained unmarried some fifteen years. He lived like an ascetic in the great house, with a couple of women-servants; he spent all his income - except a fraction - on the good works of a wide district...There is a particularly painful description by the author of one of Alan's periods of introspection, which includes the following: I am not my own - I have taken tasks upon me that no honest man could betray. There are vows on me also, that bind me specially to our Lord - to his Church. The Church frowns on such love - such marriages. She does not forbid them - but they pain her heart. And when Laura asks him what are 'The Four Last Things'? he replies: 'Death - Judgement - Heaven - and Hell.' How awful.
Laura realises she can never win against that - she chooses suicide instead of a life of torture. The bereaving Alan will leave Helbeck for the Jesuits. Surely, another form of torture.
The Mason family, Laura's cousins who live quite near Helbeck, are well described, all speaking broad Westmoreland. The mother Elizabeth, is as narrowly religious - allus talkin out o' t' Bible - as Helbeck, with a hatred of Catholicism; the son, Hubert, madly in love with Laura but simply too coarse for her; the blowsy daughter Polly, with her high and red cheek-bones, the extravagant fringe that vulgarised all her honest face...an earthy character shaped for 'The Darling Buds of May'!
Mrs Humphry Ward is a powerful writer (the death of the worker in the furnace in the factory is heart-rending) and the reader skims over passages at his peril. The characters - Father Bowles, Laura's step-mother Mrs Fountain, the tortured young artist/Jesuit novitiate Williams - are deeply drawn and very life-like; the occasional descriptions of the scenery well sketched out. The crux of the novel comes as Laura realises exactly what she is confronting. the nuns, with their unintelligible virtues, and their very obvious bigotries and littlenesses; the slyness and absurdities of Father Bowles; the priestly claims of Father Leadham... these Catholic figures were to her so many disagreeable automata, moved by springs she could not possibly conceive, and doing perpetually the most futile and foolish things... Ah, Laura, this reader totally agrees with you.
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