[Peterson is an American educator and critic who has written extensively about the poet Robert Browning. In the following excerpt, Peterson offers a detailed, volume-by-volume analysis of Ward's Robert Elsmere.]
Archibald Tait once observed, 'The great evil is—that the liberals are deficient in religion and the religious are deficient in liberality.' This was the profound religious dilemma of the Victorian age to which Mrs Ward addressed herself in Robert Elsmere. How could a young man like Elsmere be both religious and liberal (i. e., intellectually enlightened)? The solution which she offered to her contemporaries was based upon the familiar Amoldian dialectic: the destruction of orthodoxy by modern rationalism must be followed by a new synthesis which would offer a reasonable religion for nineteenth-century men and women. The three stages of the dialectic are suggested in several ways. First, Robert himself undergoes a change as the story progresses. He begins as a conventional Christian, falls unsuspectingly into a morass of unbelief, and at last regains his footing by discovering what Matthew Arnold called the 'joy whose grounds are true'. Second, the Arnoldian dialectic is reflected in the characters who dominate each of the three volumes of the novel. The first volume belongs to Catherine, the representative of orthodoxy; the second belongs to Wendover, an embittered sceptic; and the third to Robert, the founder of the purified new faith.
