The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward
by Janet Penrose Trevelyan · English · Gutenberg #40319 · 743,328 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward
Author: Janet Penrose Trevelyan
Release date: July 24, 2012 [eBook #40319]
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE OF MRS. HUMPHRY WARD ***
Produced by Chuck Greif, University of Michigan Libraries
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net
THE LIFE OF
MRS. HUMPHRY WARD
[Illustration: MARY WARD AT THE AGE OF TWENTY-FIVE]
FROM A WATER-COLOUR PAINTING BY MRS A. H. JOHNSON]
THE LIFE OF
MRS. HUMPHRY WARD
BY HER DAUGHTER
JANET PENROSE TREVELYAN
Author of
"A Short History of the Italian People"
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1923
_Printed in Great Britain by_ Butler & Tanner Ltd., _Frome and London_
TO
DOROTHY MARY WARD
AUTHOR'S NOTE
My warmest thanks are due to the many friends who have helped me,
directly or indirectly, in the writing of this book, but especially to
all those who have sent me the letters they possessed from Mrs. Ward, or
who have given me leave to publish their own. Mr. Henry Gladstone kindly
looked out for me the letters written by Mrs. Ward to Mr. Gladstone
during the _Robert Elsmere_ period; Mrs. Creighton did the same for the
long period covered by Mrs. Ward's correspondence with the Bishop and
with herself; Miss Arnold of Fox How sent me many valuable letters
belonging to the later years. So with Mrs. A. H. Johnson, Mrs.
Conybeare, Mrs. R. Vere O'Brien, Sir Robert Blair, Mr. Leonard Huxley,
Mrs. Reginald Smith, Lord Buxton, M. Chevrillon, Miss McKee, Mrs.
Turner, Miss Gertrude Wood, and many others, and although the letters
may not in all cases have been suitable for publication, they have given
me many valuable side-lights on Mrs. Ward's life and work.
To Mrs. A. H. Johnson my special thanks are due for permission to
reproduce her water-colour portrait of Mrs. Ward, and to Mrs. T. H.
Green for much help in connexion with the Oxford portion of the book.
No book at all, however, could have been produced, even from the
material so generously placed at my disposal, had it not been for the
constant collaboration of my father and sister, whose help in sifting
great masses of papers and in advising me in all difficulties has been
my greatest support throughout this task.
J. P. T.
BERKHAMSTEAD,
_July, 1923_.
CONTENTS
PAGES
CHAPTER I
CHILDHOOD
Mary Arnold's Parentage--The Sorells--Thomas Arnold the
Younger--Marriage in Tasmania with Julia Sorell--Conversion
to Roman Catholicism--Return to England--The
Arnold Family--Mary Arnold's Childhood--Schools--Her
Father's Re-conversion--Removal to Oxford 1-16
CHAPTER II
LIFE AT OXFORD, 1867-1881
Oxford in the 'Sixties--Mark Pattison and Canon Liddon--Mary
Arnold and the Bodleian--First Attempts at Writing--Marriage
with Mr. T. Humphry Ward--Thomas Arnold's
Second Conversion--Oxford Friends--The Education of
Women--Foundation of Somerville Hall--_The Dictionary
of Christian Biography_--Pamphlet on "Unbelief and Sin" 17-34
CHAPTER III
EARLY YEARS IN LONDON--THE WRITING OF _ROBERT
ELSMERE_, 1881-1888
Mr. Ward takes work on _The Times_--Removal to London--The
House in Russell Square--London Life and Friends--Work
for John Morley--Letters--Writer's Cramp--_Miss
Bretherton_--Borough Farm--Amiel's _Journal Intime_--Beginnings
of _Robert Elsmere_--Long Struggle with the
Writing--Its Appearance, February 24, 1888--Death of
Mrs. Arnold 35-54
CHAPTER IV
_ROBERT ELSMERE_ AND AFTER, 1888-1889
Reviews--Mr. Gladstone's Interest--His Interview with Mrs.
Ward at Oxford--Their Correspondence--Article in the
_Nineteenth Century_--Circulation of _Robert Elsmere_--Letters--Visit
to Hawarden--_Quarterly_ Article--The Book
in America--"Pirate" Publishers--Letters--Mrs. Ward
at Hampden House--Schemes for a _New Brotherhood_ 55-80
CHAPTER V
UNIVERSITY HALL, _DAVID GRIEVE_ AND "STOCKS," 1889-1892
Foundation of University Hall--Mr. Wicksteed as Warden--The
Opening--Lectures--Social Work at Marchmont Hall--Growing
Importance of the Latter--Mr. Passmore
Edwards Promises Help--Our House on Grayswood Hill--Sunday
Readings--The Writing of _David Grieve_--Visit
to Italy--Reception of the Book--Letters--Removal to
"Stocks" 81-103
CHAPTER VI
THE STRUGGLE WITH ILL-HEALTH--_MARCELLA_ AND _SIR
GEORGE TRESSADY_--THE BUILDING OF THE PASSMORE
EDWARDS SETTLEMENT, 1892-1897
Mrs. Ward much Crippled by Illness--The Writing of _Marcella_--Stocks
Cottage--Reception of the Book--Quarrel with
the Libraries--_The Story of Bessie Costrell_--Friends at
Stocks--Letter from John Morley--_Sir George Tressady_--Letters
from Mrs. Sidney Webb and Mr. Rudyard Kipling--Renewed
attacks of Illness--The Building and Opening
of the Passmore Edwards Settlement 104-122
CHAPTER VII
CHILDREN AND ADULTS AT THE PASSMORE EDWARDS SETTLEMENT--THE
FOUNDATION OF THE INVALID CHILDREN'S
SCHOOL, 1897-1899
Beginnings of the Work for Children--The Recreation School--The
Work for Adults--Finance--Mrs. Ward's interest
in Crippled Children--Plans for Organizing a School--She
obtains the help of the London School Board--Opening
of the Settlement School--The Children's Dinners--Extension
of the Work--Mrs. Ward's Inquiry and Report--Further
Schools opened by the School Board--After-care--Mrs.
Ward and the Children 123-142
CHAPTER VIII
_HELBECK OF BANNISDALE_--CATHOLICS AND UNITARIANS--_ELEANOR_
AND THE VILLA BARBERINI, 1896-1900
Origins of _Helbeck_--Mrs. Ward at Levens Hall--Her Views on
Roman Catholicism--Creighton and Henry James--Reception
of _Helbeck_--Letter to Creighton--Mrs. Ward
and the Unitarians--Origins of _Eleanor_--Mrs. Ward takes
the Villa Barberini--Life at the Villa--Nemi--Her Feeling
for Italy 143-164
CHAPTER IX
MRS. WARD AS CRITIC AND PLAYWRIGHT--FRENCH AND
ITALIAN FRIENDS--THE SETTLEMENT VACATION SCHOOL,
1899-1904
Mrs. Ward and the Brontës--George Smith and Charlotte--The
Prefaces to the Brontë Novels--André Chevrillon--M.
Jusserand--Mrs. Ward in Italy and Paris--The Translation
of Jülicher--Death of Thomas Arnold--The South
African War--Death of Bishop Creighton and George
Smith--Dramatization of _Eleanor_--William Arnold--Mrs.
Ward and George Meredith--The Marriage of her
Daughter--The Vacation School at the Passmore Edwards
Settlement 165-186
CHAPTER X
LONDON LIFE--THE BEGINNINGS AND GROWTH OF THE
CHILDREN'S PLAY CENTRES, 1904-1917
Mrs. Ward's Social Life--Her Physical Delicacy--Power of
Work--American Friends--F. W. Whitridge--Plans for
Extending Recreation Schools for Children to other Districts--Opening
of the first "Evening Play Centres"--The
"Mary Ward Clause"--Negotiations with the London
County Council--Efforts to raise Funds--No help from the
Government till 1917--Two more Vacation Schools--Organized
Playgrounds--_Fenwick's Career_--"Robin
Ghyll" 187-206
CHAPTER XI
THE VISIT TO THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA, 1908
Invitations to visit America--Mr. and Mrs. Ward and Dorothy
sail in March, 1908--New York--Philadelphia--Washington--Mr.
Roosevelt--Boston--Canada--Lord Grey and
Sir William van Horne--Mrs. Ward at Ottawa--Toronto--Her
Journey West--Vancouver--The Rockies--Lord
Grey and Wolfe--_Canadian Born_ and _Daphne_ 207-223
CHAPTER XII
MRS. WARD AND THE SUFFRAGE QUESTION
Early Feeling against Women's Suffrage--The "Protest" in
the _Nineteenth Century_--Advent of the Suffragettes--Foundation
of the Anti-Suffrage League--Women in Local
Government--Speeches against the Suffrage--Debate with
Mrs. Fawcett--Deputations to Mr. Asquith--The "Conciliation
Bill"--The Government Franchise Bill--Withdrawal
of the Latter--_Delia Blanchflower_--The
"Joint Advisory Committee"--Women's Suffrage passed
by the House of Commons, 1917--Struggle in the House of
Lords--Lord Curzon's Speech 224-245
CHAPTER XIII
LIFE AT STOCKS, 1908-1914--_THE CASE OF RICHARD MEYNELL_--THE
OUTBREAK OF WAR
Rebuilding of Stocks--Mrs. Ward's Love for the Place--Her
Way of Life and Work--Greek Literature--Politics--The
General Elections of 1910--Visitors--Nephews and Nieces--Grandchildren--Death
of Theodore Trevelyan--The
"Westmorland Edition"--Sense of Humour--_The Case
of Richard Meynell_--Letters--Last Visit to Italy--_The
Coryston Family_--The Outbreak of War 246-263
CHAPTER XIV
THE WAR, 1914-1917--MRS. WARD'S FIRST TWO
JOURNEYS TO FRANCE
Mrs. Ward's feeling about Germany--Letter to André
Chevrillon--Re-organization of the Passmore Edwards
Settlement--President Roosevelt's Letter--Talk with Sir
Edward Grey--Visits to Munition Centres--To the Fleet--To
France--Mrs. Ward near Neuve Chapelle and on the
Scherpenberg Hill--Return Home--_England's Effort_--Death
of F. W. Whitridge and of Reginald Smith--Second
Journey to France, 1917--The Bois de Bouvigny--The
Battle-field of the Ourcq--Lorraine--_Towards the Goal_ 264-287
CHAPTER XV
LAST YEARS: 1917-1920
Mrs. Ward at Stocks--Her _Recollections_--The Government
Grant for Play Centres--The Cripples Clause in Mr. Fisher's
Education Act--The War in 1918--Italy--The Armistice--Mrs.
Ward's third journey to France--Visit to British
Headquarters--Strasburg, Verdun and Rheims--Paris--Ill-health--The
Writing of _Fields of Victory_--The last
Summer at Stocks--Mrs. Ward and the "Enabling Bill"--Breakdown
in Health--Removal to London--Mr.
Ward's Operation--Her Death 288-309
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
TO FACE
PAGE
Mary Ward at Twenty-five. From a water-colour painting by
Mrs. A. H. Johnson _Frontispiece_
Borough Farm. From a water-colour painting by Mrs.
Humphry Ward 45
Mrs. Ward in 1889. From a photograph by Bassano 82
Mrs. Ward in 1898. From a photograph by Miss Ethel M.
Arnold 149
Mrs. Ward and Henry James at Stocks. From a photograph
by Miss Dorothy Ward 252
Mrs. Ward beside the Lake of Lucerne. From a photograph
by Miss Dorothy Ward 262
CHAPTER I
CHILDHOOD
1851-1867
Is the study of heredity a science or a pure romance? For the unlearned
at least I like to think it is the latter, since no law that the
Professors ever formulated can explain the caprices of each little human
soul, bobbing up like a coracle over life's horizon and bringing with it
things gathered at random from an infinitely remote and varying
ancestry. It is, I believe, generally known that the subject of this
biography was a granddaughter of Arnold of Rugby, and therewith her
intellectual ability and the force of her character are thought to be
sufficiently explained. But what of her mother, the beautiful Julia
Sorell, of whom her sad husband said at her death that she had "the
nature of a queen," ever thwarted and rebuffed by circumstance? What of
the strain of Spanish Protestant blood that ran in the veins of the
Sorells: for although they were refugees from France after the Edict of
Nantes, it is most probable that they came of Spanish origin? What of
the strain brought in by the wild and forcible Kemps of Mount Vernon in
Tasmania? A daughter of Anthony Fenn Kemp (himself a "character" of a
remarkable kind) married William Sorell and so became the mother of
Julia and the grandmother of Mary Arnold; but the principal fact that is
known of her is that she deserted her three daughters after bringing
them to England for their education, went off with an army officer and
was hardly heard of more. An ungovernable temper seems to have marked
most of this family, and the recollections of her childhood were so
terrible to Julia Sorell that she wrote in after years to her husband,
"Few families have been blessed with such a home training as yours, and
certainly very few in our rank of life have been cursed with such as
mine." Yet although Julia inherited much of this violence and passion,
to her own constant misery, she had also "the nature of a queen," and
transmitted it in no small degree to her daughter Mary.
The Sorells were descended from Colonel William Sorell, one of the early
Governors of Tasmania, who had been appointed to the post in 1816. Nine
years before, on his appointment as Adjutant-General at the Cape of Good
Hope, this Colonel Sorell had left behind him in England a woman to whom
he was legally married and by whom he had had several children, but whom
he never saw again after leaving these shores. He occupied himself,
indeed, with another lady, while the unfortunate wife at home struggled
to maintain his children on the very inadequate allowance which he had
granted her. Twice the allowance lapsed, with calamitous results for the
wife and children, and it was only on the active intervention of Lord
Bathurst, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, that the payment
of her quarterly instalments was resumed in 1818. Meanwhile, her eldest
son William, a steady, hard-working lad, had been trying to support the
family from his own earnings of 12s. a week, and when he grew to man's
estate he applied to Lord Bathurst for permission to join his father in
Van Diemen's Land, hoping that so he might help to reconcile his
parents. Lord Bathurst gave him his passage out, but had in fact already
decided to recall Governor Sorell, so that when young Sorell arrived at
Hobart Town early in 1824 he found his father only awaiting the arrival
of his successor (the well-known Colonel Arthur), before quitting the
Colony for good. William, however, decided to remain there, accepted the
position of Registrar of Deeds from Colonel Arthur, and made his
permanent home in the island. He married the head-strong Miss Kemp, and
in his sad after-life suffered a reversal of the parts played by his own
father and mother. Long after his wife had deserted him he lived on in
Hobart Town, much respected and beloved, and remembered by his
granddaughter as a "gentle, affectionate, upright being, a gentleman of
an old, punctilious school, content with a small sphere and much loved
within it."
His daughter Julia grew up as the favourite and pet of Hobart Town
society, much admired by the subalterns of the solitary battalion of
British troops that maintained our prestige among the convicts and the
"blacks" of that remote settlement. But for her Fate held other things
in store. Early in 1850 there appeared at Hobart Town a young man of
twenty-six, tall and romantic-looking, who bore a name well known even
in the southern seas--the name of Thomas Arnold. He was the second son
of Dr. Arnold of Rugby. He had left the Old World for the Newest three
years before on a genuine quest for the ideal life; had tried farming in
New Zealand, but in vain, and had then, after some adventures in
schoolmastering, come to Tasmania at the invitation of the Governor, Sir
William Denison, to organize the public education of the Colony. Fortune
seemed to smile upon the young Inspector of Schools, who as a
first-classman and an Arnold found a kind and ready welcome from those
who reigned in Tasmania, and when he met Julia Sorell a few weeks after
he landed and fell in love with her at first sight, no obstacles were
placed in his way. They were married on June 12, 1850--a love-match if
ever there was one, but a match that was too soon to be subjected to
that most fiery test of all, a religious struggle of the deepest and
most formidable kind.
Thomas Arnold came of a family to whom religion was always a "concern,"
as the Quakers call it; whether it was the great Doctor, with his making
of "Christian gentlemen" at Rugby and his fierce polemics against the
"Oxford malignants," or Matt, with his "Power, not ourselves, that makes
for righteousness," or William (a younger brother), with his religious
novel, _Oakfield_, about the temptations of Indian Army life; and Thomas
was by no means exempt from the tradition. A sentimental idealist by
nature, he was a friend of Clough and had already been immortalized as
"Philip" in the _Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich_.[1] He came now to the
Antipodes in rationalistic mood and in search of the nobler, freer life;
but soon the old beliefs reasserted themselves, yet brought no peace.
His mind was "hot for certainties in this our life," and he had not been
five years in Tasmania before he was seeing much of a certain Catholic
priest and feeling himself strongly drawn towards the ancient fold. His
poor wife, in whom her Huguenot ancestry had bred an instinctive and
invincible loathing for Catholicism, felt herself overtaken by a kind of
black doom; she made wild threats of leaving him, she shuddered at the
thought of what might happen to the children. Yet nothing that she or
any of his friends could say might avert the fatal step. Tom Arnold was
received into the Roman Catholic Church at Hobart Town on January 12,
1856.
His prospects immediately darkened, for feeling ran high in the Colony
against Popery, and it soon became clear that he must give up his
appointment and return to England. Already three children had been born
to him and Julia, but the young wife was now plunged in preparations for
the uprooting of her household and the transport of the whole family
across the globe, to an unknown future and a world of unknown faces. The
voyage was accomplished in a sailing-ship of 400 tons, the _William
Brown_, so overrun by rats that the mother and nurse had to take turns
to watch over the children at night, lest their faces should be bitten;
but after more than three months of this existence the ship did finally
reach English waters and cast anchor in the Thames on October 17, 1856.
It was wet autumn weather and the little family huddled forlornly in a
small inn in Thames Street, but the next day a deliverer appeared in the
person of William Forster (the future Education Minister), who had
married Tom's eldest sister Jane a few years before and who now carried
off the whole family to better quarters in London, helped them in the
kindest way and finally saw off the mother and children to the friendly
shelter of Fox How--that beloved home among the Westmorland hills which
"the Doctor" had built to house his growing family and which was now to
play so great a part in the development of his latest descendant, the
little Mary Arnold.
Mary Augusta had been born at Hobart Town on June 11, 1851. She was, of
course, the apple of her parents' eyes, and the descriptions which her
father wrote of her, in the long letters that went home to his mother at
Fox How by every available boat, give a curiously vivid picture of a
little creature richly endowed with fairy gifts, but above all with the
crowning gift of _life_. At first she is a "pretty little creature, with
a compact little face, good features and an uncommonly large forehead";
then at eight months, "If you could but see our darling Mary! The vigour
of life, the animation, the activity of eye and hand that she displays
are astonishing. Her brown hair in its abundance is the admiration of
everybody." At a year old she is "passionate but not peevish, sensitive
to the least harshness in word or gesture, but usually full of merriment
and gladsomeness. She is like a sparkling fountain or a gay flower in
the house, filling it with light and freshness." She has many childish
ailments, but conquers them all in a manner strangely prophetic of her
later power of resisting illness. "I fear you will think she must be a
very sickly child," writes her father, "and she certainly is delicate
and easily put out of order; but I have much faith in the strength of
her constitution, for in all her ailments she has seemed to have a power
of battling against them, a vitality that pulls her through." As a
little thing of under two her feelings are terribly easily worked upon:
"The other evening it was raining very hard and I began to talk to her
about the poor people out in the rain who were getting wet and had no
warm fire to sit by and no nice dry clothes to put on. You cannot
imagine how this touched her. She kept on repeating over and over again,
'Poor people! Poor people! Out in the rain! Get warm! get warm!'" But as
she grows bigger she develops a will of her own that sorely troubles her
father, beset with all the ideas of his generation about "prompt
obedience"; at three and a half he writes: "Little Polly is as imitative
as a monkey and as mischievous; self-willed and resolute to take the
lead and have her own way, whenever her companions are anything
approaching to her own age. Not a very easy character to manage as you
will see, yet often to be led through her feelings, when it would be
difficult to drive her in defiance of her will." Soon he is having "a
regular pitched battle with her about once a day," and writes ruefully
home--as though he were having the worst of it--that Polly is "kind
enough where she can patronize, but her domineering spirit makes even
her kindness partake of oppression." Two little brothers, Willie and
Theodore, had already been added to the family by the time they made the
voyage home--playthings whom Mary alternately slapped and cuddled and in
whom she took an immense pride of possession. They were the first of a
long series of brothers and sisters to whom her kindness, in after
years, was certainly not of the kind that "partakes of oppression."
Thus, at the age of five, this little spirit, passionate, self-willed
and tender-hearted, came within the direct orbit of the Arnold family.
During most of the four years that followed their arrival she was either
staying with her grandmother, the Doctor's widow, at Fox How, or else
living as a boarder at Miss Clough's little school at Eller How, near
Ambleside, and spending her Saturdays at Fox How. Her father meanwhile
took work under Newman in Dublin and earned a precarious subsistence for
his wife and family by teaching at the Catholic University there. They
were times of hardship and privation for Julia, who never ceased to be
in love with Tom and never ceased to curse the day of his conversion;
and as the babies increased and the income did not she was fain to allow
her eldest daughter to live more and more with the kind grandmother, who
asked no better than to have the child about the house. And, indeed, to
have this particular child about the house was not always a light
undertaking! She was wonderfully quick, clever and affectionate, but her
tempers sometimes shook her to pieces in storms of passion, and the
devoted "Aunt Fan," the Doctor's youngest daughter, who lived with her
mother at Fox How, was often sorely puzzled how to deal with her. Still,
by a judicious mixture of severity and tenderness she won the child's
affection, so that Mary was wont to say, looking slyly at her aunt, "I
like Aunt Fan--she's the master of me!"
The Arnold atmosphere made indeed a very remarkable influence for any
impressionable child of Mary's age to live in; it supplied a deep-rooted
sense of calm and balance, an unalterable family affection and a sad
disapproval of tempers and excesses of all kinds which, as time went on,
had a marked effect on the Tasmanian child. From a Sorell by birth and
temperament, as I believe she was, she gradually became an Arnold by
environment. If she inherited from her mother those wilder springs of
energy and courage which impelled her, like some dæmon within, to be up
and doing in life's race, it was from the Arnolds that she learnt the
art of living, the art of harnessing the dæmon. They certainly made a
memorable group, the nine sons and daughters of Arnold of Rugby: all of
whom, except Fan, the youngest daughter, were scattered from the nest by
the time that "little Polly" came to Fox How, but all of whom maintained
for each other and for their mother the tenderest affection, so that
life at the Westmorland home was continually crossed and re-crossed by
their visits and their letters. In looking through these faded letters
the reader of to-day is struck by their seriousness and simplicity of
tone, by the intense family affection they display and by the very real
relation in which the writers stood towards the "indwelling presence of
God." Hardly a member of the family can be mentioned without the prefix
"dear" or "dearest," nor can anyone who is acquainted with the Arnold
temperament doubt that this was genuine. Birthdays are made the occasion
for rather solemn words of love or exhortation, and if any sorrow
strikes the family one may expect without fail to find a complete
reliance on the accustomed sources of consolation. Yet they are not
prigs, these brothers and sisters; their roots strike deep down to the
bed-rock of life, and though they are all (except poor Tom) in fairly
prosperous circumstances, they can be generous and open-handed to those
who are less so. Tom was, I think, the special darling of the family,
and his lapse to Catholicism a terrible trial to them, but none the less
did they labour for Tom's children in all simplicity of heart.
The daughter who, next to "Aunt Fan," had most to do with little Mary
was Jane, the wife of William Forster; Mary was her godchild, and soon
conceived a kind of passion for this sweet-faced woman of thirty-five,
who, childless herself, returned the little girl's affection in no
ordinary degree. Mary would sometimes go to stay with her at
Burley-in-Wharfedale, where she looked with awe at the "great wheels" in
Uncle Forster's woollen mill and saw the children working
there--children untouched as yet by their master's schemes for their
welfare, or by the still remoter visions of their small observer. Then
there was Matt--Matt the sad poet and gay man of the world, who brought
with him on his rarer visits to Fox How the breath of London and of
great affairs, for was he not, in his sisters' eyes at least, the spoilt
darling of society, the diner-out, the frequenter of great houses? He
looked, we know, with unusual interest upon Tom's Polly, and in later
years was wont to say, with his whimsical smile, that she "got her
ability from her mother." Another aunt to whom the Tasmanian child
became much devoted was her namesake Mary, at that time Mrs. Hiley, a
woman whose rich, responsive nature and keen sense of humour endeared
her greatly to the few friends who knew her well, and whose early
rebellions and idealisms had given her a most human personality. It was
she among all the group who understood and sympathized most keenly with
Tom's wife, so that between Julia and Mary Hiley a bond was forged that
ended only with the former's death. Poor Julia! The Arnold atmosphere
was indeed sometimes a formidable one, and had little sympathy to give
to her own undisciplined and tempestuous nature, with its strange deeps
of feeling. Julia's temptations--to extravagance in money matters and to
passionate outbursts of temper--were not Arnold temptations, and she
often felt herself disapproved of in spite of much outward affection and
kindness. And then she would have morbid reactions in which the old
Calvinistic hell-fire of her forefathers seemed very near. Once when she
was staying at Fox How, ill and depressed, she wrote to her husband:
"The feeling grows upon me that I am one of those unhappy people whom
_God has abandoned_, and it is the effect of this feeling I am sure
which causes me to behave as I often do. Oh! it is an awful thing to
_despair_ about one's future state...." Probably she felt that in spite
of their undoubted humility, her in-laws never quite despaired about
theirs.
* * * * *
By the time that Mary was seven years old, that is in the autumn of
1858, it was decided that she should go as a boarder to Miss Anne
Clough's school at Ambleside, or rather at Eller How on the slopes of
Wansfell behind the town. Here she spent two years and more--happy on
the whole, often naughty and wilful, but usually held in awe by Miss
Clough's stately presence and power of commanding her small flock.
There was only one other boarder besides Mary, a girl named Sophie
Bellasis, whose recollections of those days were preserved and given to
the world long afterwards by her husband, the late Mr. T. C. Down, in an
article published by the _Cornhill Magazine_.[2] Miss Bellasis'
impressions of the queer little girl, Mary Arnold, who was her
fellow-boarder, make so vivid a picture that I may perhaps be forgiven
for reproducing them here:
"Mary had a very decided character of her own, as well as a pretty
vivid imagination, for the odd things she used to say, merely on
the spur of the moment, would quite stagger me sometimes. Once when
we were going along the passage upstairs leading to the schoolroom,
she stopped at one of the gratings where the hot air came up from
the furnace, with holes in the pattern about the size of a
shilling, and told me that she knew a little boy whose head was so
small that he could put it through one of those holes: and after we
had gone to bed she would tell me the oddest stories in a whisper,
because it was against the rules to talk. I think now that her
fancy used to run riot with her, and, of course, she had to give
vent to it in any way that suggested itself. But I implicitly
believed whatever she chose to tell me, so that you see we both
enjoyed ourselves. Her energy and high spirits were something
wonderful; out of doors she was never still, but always running or
jumping or playing, and she invariably tired me out at this sort of
thing. Still, nothing came amiss to her in the way of amusement;
anything that entered her head would answer the purpose, and she
was never at a loss. I recollect she had a lovely doll, which her
aunt, Mrs. Forster, had given her, all made of wax. Once she was
annoyed with this doll for some reason or other and broke it up
into little bits. We put the bits into little saucepans, and melted
them over one of the gratings I told you of. Sometimes Willy Dolly
(that was the name we had for the general factotum) would let the
fire go down, and then the gratings were cold, and at other times
he would have a roaring fire, and then they would be so hot that
you couldn't touch them. So we melted the wax and moulded it into
dolls' puddings, and that was the last of her wax doll!
"One day we were over at Fox How, which was a pretty house, with a
wide lawn and garden. One side of it was covered with a handsome
Virginia creeper, which was thought a great deal of, and, of
course, was not intended to be meddled with. Suddenly it occurred
to Mary that it would be first-rate fun to pick 'all those red
leaves,' and I obediently went and helped her. We cleared a great
bare space all along the wall as high as we could reach, but from
what Miss Arnold said when she came out and discovered what was
done, I gathered that she was not so pleased with our work as we
were ourselves."
It was during these years, from six to nine, that the foundation was
laid of that passionate adoration for the fells, with their streams,
bogs and stone walls, which became one of Mary's most intimate
possessions and never deserted her in after years. In her
_Recollections_ she describes a walk up the valley to Sweden Bridge with
her father and Arthur Clough, the two men safely engaged in grown-up
talk while she, happy and alone, danced on in front or lingered behind,
all eyes and ears for the stream, the birds and the wind. It was a walk
of which she soon knew every inch, just as she knew every inch of the
Fox How garden, and I believe that the sights and sounds of that rough
northern valley came to be woven in with the very texture of her soul.
They appealed to something primitive and deep-down in her little heart,
some power that remained with her through life and that, as she once
said to me, "stands more rubs than anything else in our equipment."
Then, when she was only nine and a half, she was transferred to a school
at Shiffnal in Shropshire, kept by a certain Miss Davies, whose sister
happened to be an old friend of Tom Arnold's and offered now to
undertake little Mary's maintenance if she were sent to this "Rock
Terrace School for Young Ladies." But the change seemed to call out all
the demon in Mary's composition; she fought blindly against the
restrictions and rules of this new community, felt herself at enmity
with all the world and broke out ever and anon in storms of passion. In
the first chapter of _Marcella_ it is all described--the "sulks,
quarrels and revolts" of Marcie Boyce (_alias_ Mary Arnold), the
getting up at half-past six on dark winter mornings, the cold ablutions
and dreary meals, and the occasional days in bed with senna-tea and
gruel when Miss Davies (at her wits' end, poor lady!) would try the
method of seclusion as a cure for Mary's tantrums. The poor little thing
suffered cruelly from headaches and bad colds, and laboured too under a
sore sense of poverty and disadvantage as compared with the other girls;
she was, in fact, paid for at a lower rate than most of the other
boarders, and was not allowed to forget it. Often she writes home to beg
for stamps, and once she says to her father: "Do send me some more
money. It was so tantalizing this morning, a woman came to the door with
twopenny baskets, so nice, and many of the other girls got them and I
couldn't." Another time she begs him to send her the threepence that she
has "earned," by writing out some lists of names for him. But on
Saturdays she had one joy, fiercely looked forward to all the week; a
"cake-woman" came to the school, and by hoarding up her tiny weekly
allowance she was able--usually--to buy a three-cornered jam puff. To a
rather starved and very lonely little girl of nine or ten this was--she
often said to us afterwards--the purest consolation of the week.
But there were some compensations even in these unlovely surroundings.
The nice old German governess, Fräulein Gerecke, was always kind to her,
and tried in little unobtrusive ways to ease the lot which Mary found so
hard to bear. Once she made for her, surreptitiously, a white muslin
frock with blue ribbons and laid it on her bed in time for some little
function of the school for which Mary had received no "party frock" from
home. A gush of hot tears was the response, tears partly of gratitude,
partly of soreness at the need for it; but the muslin frock was worn
nevertheless, and entered from that moment into the substance of the
day-dreams and stories that she was for ever telling herself. Any child
who has a faculty for it will understand how great a consolation were
these self-told stories, in which she rioted especially on days of
senna-tea and gruel. Tales of the Princess of Wales and how she, Mary,
herself succeeded in stopping her runaway horses, with the divinity's
pale agitation and gratitude, filled the long hours, and the muslin
frock usually came into the story when Mary made her trembling
appearance "by command" at the palace afterwards. Gradually, too, these
tales came to weave themselves round more accessible mortals, for Mary's
heart and affections were waking up and she did not escape, any more
than the modern schoolgirl, her share of "adorations." At twelve years
old she fell headlong in love with the Vicar of Shiffnal and his wife,
Mr. and Mrs. Cunliffe; going to church--especially in the evenings, when
the Vicar preached--became a romance; seeing Mrs. Cunliffe pass by in
her pony-carriage lent a radiance to the day. The Vicar's wife, a gentle
Evangelical, felt genuinely drawn towards the untamed little being and
did her best to guide the wayward footsteps, while Mary on her side
wrote poems to her idol, keeping them fortunately locked within her
desk, and let her fancy run from ecstasy to ecstasy in the dreams that
she wove around her. What "dauntless child" among us does not know these
splendours, and the transforming effect that they have upon the prickly
hide of youth? Little Mary Arnold was destined to leave her mark upon
the world, partly by power of brain, but more by sheer power of love,
and the first human beings to unlock the unguessed stores of it within
her were these two kindly Evangelicals.
Still, the demon was not quite exorcised, and "Aunt Fan" still found
Mary something of a handful when she stayed at Fox How, though now in a
different way.
"She seems to me very much wanting in _humility_," she writes in
January, 1864, "which, with the knowledge she must have of her own
abilities, is not perhaps wonderful, but it is ungraceful to hear
her expressing strong opinions and holding her own, against elder
people, without certainly much sense of reverence. One thing,
however I will mention to show her desire to conquer herself. She
had no gloves to go to Ellergreen, and I objected to buying her
kid, but got her such as I wear myself, very nice cloth. She vowed
and protested she couldn't and shouldn't wear them, so I said I
should not make her, but if she wanted kid, she must buy them with
her own money. I talked quietly to her about it and said how
pleased I should be if she conquered this whim, and when she came
to say good-bye to me before starting for Ellergreen her last words
were--'I am going to put on the gloves, Auntie!'--and she has worn
them ever since, though I must say with some grumblings!"
She stayed for four years at Miss Davies's, during which time her
parents moved (in 1862) from Dublin to Birmingham, where Tom Arnold was
offered work under Newman at the Oratory School. The change brought a
small increase in salary, but not enough to cover the needs of the still
growing family, and if it had not been for the help freely given during
these years by W. E. Forster, the struggling pair must almost have gone
down under their difficulties. One result of the change was that the
elder boys, Willie and Theodore, were themselves sent to the Oratory
School, and the thought of Arnold of Rugby's grandsons being pupils of
Newman gave rise to bitter reflections at Fox How. "I was very glad to
hear of Willy's having done so well in the examination of his class,"
wrote Julia to her husband from the family home, "although I must
confess the thought of _our son_ being examined by Dr. Newman had
carried a pang to my heart. Your mother I found felt it in the same way;
she said (when I read out to her that part of your letter) with her eyes
full of tears, 'Oh! to think of _his_ grandson, _dearest Tom's son_,
being examined by Dr. Newman!'" Still, Julia was emphatically of opinion
that if priests were to have a hand in their education at all, she would
rather it were English than Irish priests.[3]
Meanwhile, the shortcomings of the school at Shiffnal were becoming
evident to Mary's mother, and in the winter of 1864-5 she succeeded in
arranging that the child should be sent instead to another near Clifton,
kept by a certain Miss May, which was smaller and also more expensive
than Miss Davies's. Heaven knows how the payments were managed, but the
change answered extremely well, for after the first term Mary settled
down in complete happiness and soon developed such a devotion to Miss
May as made short work of her remaining tendencies to temper and
"contrariness." Miss May must have been exactly the type of
schoolmistress that Mary needed at this stage--kind and large-hearted,
with the understanding necessary to win the confidence of such an
uncommon little creature--so that it was not long before the child's
mind began to expand in every direction. Long afterwards she was wont to
say that the actual knowledge she acquired at school was worth next to
nothing--that she learnt no subject thoroughly and left school without
any "edged tools." But certainly by the time she was twelve she could
write a French letter such as not many of us could produce with all our
advantages, while the drawing and music that she learnt at school
encouraged certain natural talents in her that were to give her some of
the purest joys of her after-life. Still, no doubt her mind received no
systematic training, and at Miss Davies's I believe that _Mangnall's
Questions_ were still the common textbook! Though she learnt a little
German and Latin she always said that she had them to do all over again
when she needed them later for her work, while Greek, which became the
joy and consolation of her later years, was entirely a "grown-up"
acquisition. But whatever the imperfections of her nine years of school,
better times were at hand both for Mary and her mother.
Whether it was that after two or three years of the Birmingham Oratory,
Tom Arnold's political radicalism (always a sturdy growth) began to make
him uneasy at the proceedings of Pio Nono--for 1864 was the year of the
Encyclical--or whether it was more particularly the Mortara case, as he
says in his autobiography,[4] at any rate his feeling towards the
Catholic Church had grown distinctly cool by the end of that year, and
he was meditating leaving the Oratory. Gradually the rumour spread among
his friends that Tom Arnold was turning against Rome, and in June, 1865,
a paragraph to this effect appeared in the papers. Little Mary, now a
girl of fourteen, heard the news while she was at Miss May's, and wrote
in ecstasy to her mother:
"My precious Mother, I have indeed seen the paragraphs about Papa.
The L's showed them me on Saturday. You can imagine the excitement
I was in on Saturday night, not knowing whether it was true or not.
Your letter confirmed it this morning and Miss May, seeing I
suppose that I looked rather faint, sent me on a pretended errand
for her notebook to escape the breakfast-table. My darling Mother,
how thankful you must be! One feels as if one could do nothing but
thank Him."
Her father's change opened indeed a new and happier chapter in their
lives, for it opened the road to Oxford. He had been seriously facing
the possibility of a second emigration, this time to Queensland, and had
been making inquiries about official work there, but his own
inclinations--and, of course, Julia's too--were in favour of trying to
make a living at Oxford by the taking of pupils. His old friends there
encouraged him, and by the autumn of 1865 they were established in a
house in St. Giles's and the venture had begun. Mary wrote in delight
that winter to her dear Mrs. Cunliffe:
"Do you know that we are now living at Oxford? My father takes
pupils and has a history lectureship. We are happier there than we
have ever been before, I think. My father revels in the libraries,
and so do I when I am at home."
A fragment of diary written in the Christmas holidays of 1865-6 reveals
how much she enjoyed being taken for a grown-up young lady by Oxford
friends. "Went to St. Mary Magdalen's in the morning and heard a droll
sermon on Convictional Sin. Met Sir Benjamin [Brodie] coming home. Miss
Arnold at home supposed to be seventeen, and Mary Arnold at school known
to be fourteen are two very different things." She is absorbed in
_Essays in Criticism_, but can still criticize the critic. "Read Uncle
Matt's Essay on Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment. Compares the
religious feeling of Pompeii and Theocritus with the religious feeling
of St. Francis and the German Reformation. Contrasts the religion of
sorrow as he is pleased to call Christianity with the religion of sense,
giving to the former for the sake of propriety a slight pre-eminence
over the latter." She does not like the famous _Preface_ at all. "The
_Preface_ is rich and has the fault which the author professes to avoid,
that of being amusing. As for the seductiveness of Oxford, its moonlight
charms and Romeo and Juliet character, I think Uncle Matt is slightly
inclined to ride the high horse whenever he approaches the subject."
As the eldest of eight children she led a very strenuous life at home,
helping to teach the little ones and ever striving to avoid a clash
between her mother's temper and her own. The entries in the diary are
often sadly self-accusing: "These last three days I have not served
Christ at all. It has been nothing but self from beginning to end.
Prayer seems a task and it seems as if God would not receive me."
But after another year and a half at Miss May's school these
difficulties vanished, and by the time that she came to live at home
altogether, in the summer of 1867, the rough edges had smoothed
themselves away in marvellous fashion. She was sixteen, and the world
was before her--the world of Oxford, which in spite of her criticisms of
the _Preface_ was indeed _her_ world. Her father seemed content with his
teaching work, and was planning the building of a larger house. She set
to work to be happy, and so indeed did her mother--happy in a great
reprieve, and in the reviving hopes of prosperity. But now and then
Julia would stop suddenly in her household tasks, hearing ominous sounds
from Tom's study. Was it the chanting of a Latin prayer? She put the
fear behind her and passed on.
CHAPTER II
LIFE AT OXFORD
1867-1881
When Tom Arnold settled with his family at Oxford, in 1865, the old
University was still labouring under the repercussions, the thrills and
counter-thrills, of the famous Movement set on foot in 1833 by Keble's
sermon on _National Apostasy_. Keble, indeed, was withdrawn from the
scene, but Newman's conversion to Rome (1845) had made so prodigious a
stir that even twenty years later the religious world of England still
took its colour from that event. In the words of Mark Pattison, "whereas
other reactions accomplished themselves by imperceptible degrees, in
1845 the darkness was dissipated and the light was let in in an instant,
as by the opening of the shutters in the chamber of a sick man who has
slept till mid-day." So at least the crisis appeared to the Liberal
world; the mask had been torn from the Tractarians and their Romanizing
tendencies stood revealed to all beholders. In the opposite camp the
consternation was proportionate, but the formidable figure of Pusey
rallied the doubters and brought them back in good order to the _Via
Media_ of the Anglican communion; while the tender poetry of Keble and
the far-famed eloquence of Liddon fortified and adorned the High Church
cause. But the sudden ending of the Tractarian controversy opened the
way for another movement, slower and less sensational than that of
Newman, yet destined to have an even deeper effect upon the religious
life of England. The freedom of the human mind began to be insisted
upon, not only in the realm of science, or where science clashed with
the Book of Genesis, but in the whole field of the Interpretation of
Scripture. Slowly the results of fifty years of patient study of the
Bible by German scholars and historians began to penetrate here, and
even Oxford, stronghold and citadel of the Laudian establishment, felt
the stir of a new interest, a new challenge to accepted forms. A Liberal
school of theologians arose, led by Jowett, Mark Pattison and other
writers in _Essays and Reviews_ (1860), for whom the old letter of
"inspiration" no longer existed, though they stoutly maintained their
orthodoxy as members and ministers of the Church of England. The Church,
they said, must broaden her base so as to make room for the results of
science and of historical criticism, or else she would be left high and
dry while the forces of democracy passed on their way without her.
Jowett, in his famous essay "On the Interpretation of Scripture," boldly
summed up his argument in the precept, "Interpret the Scripture like any
other book." "The first step is to know the meaning, and this can only
be done in the same careful and impartial way that we ascertain the
meaning of Sophocles or Plato." "Educated persons are beginning to ask,
not what Scripture may be made to mean, but what it does mean."
The hubbub raised by these and similar expressions continued during the
three years of proceedings before the Court of Arches, the Judicial
Committee of the Privy Council, and finally Convocation, against two of
the contributors to _Essays and Reviews_, and had hardly died away when
the Arnolds came to take up their life in Oxford. And side by side with
the theoretical discussion went the insistent demand of the reforming
party, both at Oxford and in Parliament, for the abolition of the
disabilities that still weighed so heavily against Dissenters. For,
although the "Oxford University Act" of 1854 had admitted them to
matriculation and the B.A. degree, neither Fellowships nor the M.A. were
yet open to any save subscribers to the Thirty-nine Articles. All
through the 'sixties the battle raged, with an annual attempt in
Parliament to break down the defence of the guardians of tradition, and
not till 1871 was the "citadel taken."[5] Jowett and Arthur Stanley
stood forth among the Liberal champions at Oxford--the latter reckoning
himself always as carrying on the tradition of Arnold of Rugby, whose
pamphlet urging the inclusion of Dissenters in the National Church had
made so great a sensation in 1833. It was hardly possible, therefore,
for a little Arnold of Mary's temperament and traditions to escape the
atmosphere that surrounded her so closely, though we need not imagine
that at the age of sixteen she did more than imbibe it passively. But
there were certain things that were not passive in her memory--visions
of Dr. Newman in the streets of Edgbaston, passing gravely by upon his
business--business which the child so passionately resented because she
understood it to be responsible in some vague way for all the hardships
and misfortunes of her family. We may safely assume that if she was ever
taken into Oriel College and saw the many rows of portraits looking down
at her there, in Common-room and Hall, she would feel an instinctive
rallying to the standard of her grandfather rather than to that of his
mighty opponent.
Two other remarkable figures who dominated the Oxford world of that day,
though from opposite camps, were the silver-tongued Dr. Liddon, "Select
Preacher" at the University Church, and Mark Pattison, Rector of
Lincoln, whom his contemporaries looked on with awe as one of the most
learned scholars in Europe in matters of pure erudition, but in religion
a sad sceptic, though twenty years before, they knew, he had been a
brand only barely plucked from Newman's burning. Both were to have their
influence upon Mary Arnold, the former superficial, the latter deep and
lasting, and it is curious to find a letter from her father, written in
1865, before he had definitely left the Catholic communion, in which he
describes hearing both men preach on the same day in the University
Church.
"Pattison's sermon was certainly a most remarkable one," he writes;
"I could have sat another half-hour under him with pleasure. But he
has much more of the philosopher than the divine about him, and the
discourse had the effect of an able article in the _National_ or
_Edinburgh Review_, read to a cultivated audience in the academical
theatre, much more than of a sermon. In fact, the name either of
Jesus Christ or of one of the Apostles was not once mentioned
throughout. The subject was, the higher education; and the felicity
of the language accorded well with the clearness and beauty of the
thoughts. He condemned the Catholic system, and also the Positivist
system, and in speaking of the former he said, 'I cannot do better
than describe it in the words of one whose voice was once wont to
sound within these walls with thrilling power, but now, alas! can
never more be heard by us, who in his Treatise on University
Education--' and then he proceeded to quote at some length from Dr.
Newman. It was an extremely powerful sermon, but scandalized, I
think, the High Church and orthodox party. 'Do you often now,' I
asked Edwin Palmer with a smile, meeting him outside after it was
over, 'have University sermons in that style?' 'Oh dear no,' he
said, 'scarcely ever, except indeed from Pattison himself'; this
with some acidity of tone. I dined early; then thought I, in for a
penny, in for a pound, I'll go and hear the other University
sermon. I was punctual, but there was not a seat to be had, the
ladies mustered in overwhelming force. It was strange, but sermon
and preacher were now everything most opposite to those of the
morning. Liddon is a dark, black-haired little man--short,
straight, stubby hair--and with that shiny, glistening appearance
about his sallow complexion which one so often sees in Dissenting
ministers, and which the devotees no doubt consider a mark of
election. Liddon's whole sermon was an impassioned strain of
apologetic argument for the truth of the Resurrection, and of the
church doctrine generally. It was very clever certainly, but rather
too long, it extended to about an hour and twenty minutes. The tone
was earnest and devout; yet there were several sarcastic, one might
almost say irritable, flings at the liberal and rationalizing
party; and it was evident that he was thinking of the Oxford
congregation when he spoke pointedly of the 'educated sceptics who
at that time composed, or at any rate controlled, the Sanhedrin.'
These two," he continues, "were certainly sermons of more than
ordinary interest--each worthily representing a great stream of
thought and tendency, influential for good or evil at the present
moment upon millions of human beings."
It was under such influences as these that Mary Arnold passed the four
impressionable years of her girlhood, from sixteen to twenty, that
elapsed between her leaving school and her engagement to Mr. Humphry
Ward, of Brasenose. She plunged with zest into the Oxford life, making
friends, helping her father at the Bodleian in his researches into
early English literature and studying music to very good purpose under
James Taylor, the future organist of New College. But she had no further
regular education, and was free to roam and devour at will in that city
of books, guided only by the advice of a few friends and by her own
innate literary instincts. The Mark Pattisons early befriended her,
frequently asking her to supper with them on Sunday evenings--suppers at
which she sat, shy and silent, in a high woollen dress, with her black,
wavy hair brushed very smoothly back, listening to every word of the
eager talk around her and drinking in, no doubt, the Rector's caustic
remarks about Oxford scholarship. These were the years of battle between
the champions of research and the champions of the Balliol ideal of
turning out good men for the public service, and in her ardent
admiration for the Rector Mary Arnold threw herself whole-heartedly into
the former camp. "Get to the bottom of something," he used to say to
her; "choose a subject and know _everything_ about it!" And so she
plunged into early Spanish literature and history, working at it in the
Bodleian with the fervour that comes from knowing that your subject is
your very own, or at least that it has only been traversed before by
dear, musty German scholars. There was hard practice here in the reading
of German and Latin, let alone the Spanish poems and chronicles
themselves, but after a couple of years of it there was little she did
not know about the _Poema del Cid_, or the Visigothic invasion, or the
reign of _Alfonso el Sabio_. Her friend, J. R. Green, the historian, was
so much impressed with her work that he recommended her when she was
only twenty to Edward Freeman as the best person he could suggest for
writing a volume on Spain in an historical series that the latter was
editing. Mr. Freeman duly invited her, but by that time she was already
deep in the preparations for her marriage and was obliged to decline the
offer. She maintained her allegiance to the subject, however, through
all the years that followed, until, as will be seen hereafter, Dean Wace
made her the momentous proposition that she should undertake the lives
of the early Spanish kings and ecclesiastics for the _Dictionary of
Christian Biography_. And there, in the four volumes of the
_Dictionary_, her articles stand to this day, a monument to an early
enthusiasm lightly kindled by a word from a great man, but pursued with
all the patience and intensity of the true historian.
In the course of this work on the early Spaniards she developed an
extraordinary attachment to the Bodleian, with all the most secret
corners of which she soon became familiar, under the benevolent guidance
of the Librarian, Mr. Coxe. The charm of the noble building, with its
mellow lights and shades, its silences, its deep spaces of book-lined
walls, sank into her very soul and gave her that background of the love
of books and reading which became perhaps--next to her love of
nature--the strongest solace of her after-life. At the age of twenty she
wrote a little essay, called "A Morning in the Bodleian,"[6] which
reflects all the joy--nay, the pride--of her own long days of work among
the calf-bound volumes.
"As you slip into the chair set ready for you," she writes, "a deep
repose steals over you--the repose, not of indolence but of
possession; the product of time, work and patient thought only.
Literature has no guerdon for 'bread-students,' to quote the
expressive German phrase; let not the young man reading for his
pass, the London copyist or the British Museum illuminator, hope to
enter within the enchanted ring of her benignest influences; only
to the silent ardour, the thirst, the disinterestedness of the true
learner, is she prodigal of all good gifts. To him she beckons, in
him she confides, till she has produced in him that wonderful
many-sidedness, that universal human sympathy which stamps the true
literary man, and which is more religious than any form of creed."
A touch about the German students to be found there has its note of
prophecy: "In a small inner room are the Hebrew manuscripts; a German is
working there, another in shirt-sleeves is here--strange people of
innumerable tentacles, stretching all ways, from Genesis to the latest
form of the needle-gun." And in the last page we come upon her most
intimate reflections, the thoughts pressed together from her many months
of comradeship with those silent tomes, which show, better than any
letters, the quality of a mind but just emerging--as the years are
reckoned--from its teens:--
"Who can pass out of such a building without a feeling of profound
melancholy? The thought is almost too obvious to be dwelt upon; but
it is overpowering and inevitable. These shelves of mighty folios,
these cases of laboured manuscripts, these illuminated volumes of
which each may represent a life--the first, dominant impression
which they make cannot fail to be like that which a burial-ground
leaves--a Hamlet-like sense of 'the pity of it.' Which is the
sadder image, the dust of Alexander stopping a bung-hole, or the
brain and life-blood of a hundred monks cumbering the shelves of
the Bodleian? Not the former, for Alexander's dust matters little
where his work is considered, but these monks' work is in their
books; to their books they sacrificed their lives, and gave
themselves up as an offering to posterity. And posterity,
overburdened by its own concerns, passes them by without a look or
a word! Here and there, of course, is a volume which has made a
mark upon the world; but the mass are silent for ever, and zeal,
industry, talent, for once that they have had permanent results,
have a thousand times been sealed by failure. And yet men go on
writing, writing; and books are born under the shadow of the great
libraries just as children are born within sight of the tombs. It
seems as though Nature's law were universal as well as rigid in its
sphere--wide wastes of sand shut in the green oasis, many a seed
falls among thorns or by the wayside, many a bud must be sacrificed
before there comes the perfect flower, many a little life must
exhaust itself in a useless book before the great book is made
which is to remain a force for ever. And so we might as profitably
murmur at the withered buds, at the seed that takes no root, at the
stretch of desert, as at the unread folios. They are waste, it is
true; but it is the waste that is thrown off by Humanity in its
ceaseless process towards the fulfilment of its law."
No doubt her life was not all books during these four years, though
books gave it its tone and background; she took her part in the gaieties
of Oxford, in Eights Week and Commem. and in river parties to the
Nuneham woods, and it is to be feared that her stout resistance to the
"seductiveness of Oxford, its moonlight charms and Romeo and Juliet
character" was not of long duration. In one select Oxford pastime, the
game of croquet, she attained to real pre-eminence, becoming, after her
marriage, one of the moving spirits of the Oxford Croquet Club. But her
shyness made social events no special joy to her, and she was far
happier sitting at the feet of "Mark Pat" or helping "Mrs. Pat" with her
etching in the sitting-room upstairs than in making conversation with
the youth of Oxford.
One charming glimpse of her, however, at a social function remains to us
in the letters of M. Taine. The great Frenchman had come over in the
very spring of the _Commune_ (1871) to give a course of lectures at
Oxford; he met her one evening at the Master of Balliol's, being
introduced to her by Jowett himself. "'A very clever girl,' said
Professor Jowett, as he was taking me towards her. She is about twenty,
very nice-looking and dressed with taste (rather a rare thing here: I
saw one lady imprisoned in a most curious sort of pink silk sheath).
Miss Arnold was born out in Australia, where she was brought up till the
age of five. She knows French, German and Italian, and during this last
year has been studying old Spanish of the time of the Cid; also Latin,
in order to be able to understand the mediæval chronicles. All her
mornings she spends at the Bodleian Library--a most intellectual lady,
but yet a simple, charming girl. By exercise of great tact, I finally
led her on to telling me of an article--her first--that she was writing
for _Macmillan's Magazine_ upon the oldest romances. In extenuation of
it she said, 'Everybody writes or lectures here, and one must follow the
fashion. Besides, it passes the time, and the library is so fine and so
convenient.' Not in the least pedantic!"[7]
Mary's efforts at writing fiction, which had been many from her
school-days onwards, were far less successful at this stage than her
more serious essays; but she persisted in the attempt, for the pressure
on the family budget was always so great that she longed to make herself
independent of it by earning something with her pen. She sent one story,
at the age of eighteen, to Messrs. Smith & Elder, her future
publishers, but when it was politely declined by them she showed her
philosophy in the following note--
LALEHAM, OXFORD.
_October 1, 1869._
DEAR SIRS,--
I beg to thank you for your courteous letter. "Ailie" is a juvenile
production and I am not sorry you decline to publish it. Had it
appeared in print I should probably have been ashamed of it by and
by.
I remain,
Yours obediently,
MARY ARNOLD.
But at length no less a veteran than Miss Charlotte Yonge, who was then
editing a blameless magazine named the _Churchman's Companion_, accepted
a tale from her called "A Westmorland Story," and Mary's joy and pride
were unbounded. But the tale shows no glimpse, I think, of her future
power, and is as far removed from "A Morning in the Bodleian" as water
is from wine.
Sometimes the Forsters would invite her to stay with them in London, and
so it occurred that at the age of eighteen she was actually there, in
the Ladies' Gallery of the House of Commons, when her uncle brought in
his famous Education Bill. In after life she was always glad to recall
that day, and when in the fullness of time her own path led her among
the stunted lives of London's children she liked to think that she was
in a sense continuing her uncle's work.
In the winter of 1870-71 she first met Mr. T. Humphry Ward, Fellow and
Tutor of Brasenose College, between whom and herself an instant
attraction became manifest. Mr. Ward was the son of the Rev. Henry Ward,
Vicar of St. Barnabas, King Square, E.C., while his mother was Jane
Sandwith, sister of the well-known Army surgeon at the siege of Kars,
Humphry Sandwith, and herself a woman of remarkable charm and beauty of
character. By an odd chance, J. R. Green, the historian, had been curate
to Mr. Henry Ward in London for two years, had made himself the devoted
friend of all his numerous children and has left in his published
Letters a striking tribute to the great qualities of Mrs. Ward.[8] But
she died at the age of forty-two, and Mary Arnold never knew her. The
course of true love ran smoothly through the spring of 1871, and on June
16, five days after Mary's twentieth birthday, they became engaged.
Never was happiness more golden, and when the pair of lovers went to
stay at Fox How and the young man was introduced to all the well-beloved
places--Sweden Bridge and Loughrigg, Rydal Water and the
stepping-stones--she was quite puzzled, as she wrote to him afterwards,
by the change that had come over the mountains, by the "new relations
between Westmorland and me!" It was simply, as she said, that the
mountains had become the frame, instead of being, as hitherto, the
picture.
They were engaged for ten months, and then, on April 6, 1872, Dean
Stanley married them and they settled, a little later, in a house in
Bradmore Road (then No. 5, now 17), where they lived and worked for the
next nine years.
* * * * *
Strenuous and delightful years! In looking back over them her old
friends recall with amazement her intense vitality and energy, in spite
of many lapses of health; how she was always at work, writing articles
or reviewing books to eke out the family income, and how she seemed
besides to bear on her shoulders the cares of two families, her own and
her husband's. She was the eldest and he the third of a long string of
brothers and sisters, the younger of whom were still quite children and
much in need of shepherding. The house in Bradmore Road was always a
second home to them. Her own parents lived close by and she was much in
and out of their house, sharing in their anxieties and struggles and
helping whenever it was possible to help. For she was linked to her
father by a deep and instinctive devotion, much strengthened by these
years of companionship at Oxford, and to her mother by a more aching
sense of pity and longing. Tom Arnold was growing restless again in the
mid-'seventies, and when he went with his younger children to church at
St. Philip's they would nudge each other to hear him muttering under his
breath the Latin prayers of long ago--little thinking, poor babes, how
their very bread and butter might hang upon these mutterings! But in
1876 there came a day when his election to the Professorship of Early
English was almost a foregone conclusion; as the author of the standard
edition of Wycliffe's English Works he was by far the strongest
candidate in the field, and Julia looked forward eagerly to a time of
deliverance from their perpetual money troubles. For some months,
however, he had secretly made up his mind that he must re-enter the
Roman fold, and now that once more his worldly promotion depended on his
remaining outside it he decided that this was the moment to make his
re-conversion public. He announced it on the very eve of the election,
with the result that the majority of the electors decided against him.
Poor Mary heard the news early next morning and ran round in great
distress to her true friends, the T. H. Greens, pouring it out to them
with uncontrollable tears. And, indeed, it was the death-knell of the
Arnolds' prosperity at Oxford. Pupils came no longer to be taught by a
professing Catholic, and Julia was reduced to taking "boarders" in a
smaller house in Church Walk, while Tom earned what he could by
incessant writing and eventually took work again at the Catholic
University in Dublin. And then a still more terrible blow fell upon
Julia; she was discovered to have cancer, and an operation in the autumn
of 1877 left her a maimed and suffering invalid. All this could not fail
to leave a profound mark on the anxious and tender heart of her
daughter, in whom the capacity for human affection seemed to grow and
treble with the years; it made a dark background to her Oxford life,
otherwise so full to overflowing with the happiness of friends and home.
In her _Recollections_ she has given us once and for all a picture of
the Oxford of her day which in its brilliance and charm is not to be
matched by any later comer. All that can be attempted here is to fill in
to some extent the only gap that she has left in it--the portrait of
herself. How did she move among that small but gifted community, where
Walter Pater revolutionized the taste of Oxford with his Morris papers
and blue china, shocked the Oxford world with his paganizing tendencies
and would, besides, keep his sisters laughing the whole evening, when
they were quite alone, with his spontaneous fun; where Mandell
Creighton was leading and stimulating the teaching of history, with J.
R. Green to help him as Examiner in the Modern History Schools; where T.
H. Green was inspiring the younger generation with his own robust
idealism and the doctrine of the "duty of work," and the more venerable
figures of Jowett and Mark Pattison, Ruskin and Matthew Arnold, Stubbs
and Freeman dominated the intellectual scene? The impression that she
made upon this circle of friends seems first of all to have been one of
extraordinary energy and power of work, of great personal charm veiled
by a crust of shyness, of intellectual powers for which they had the
respect of equals and co-workers, and of a warm and generous sympathy
which was yet free from "gush." One of her closest friends in these
early years, Mrs. Arthur Johnson, has allowed me to use certain extracts
from her journal, in which the figure of "Mary Ward" stands out with the
clearness of absolute simplicity. Mrs. Johnson, besides having the
public spirit which has since made her the President of the Oxford Home
Students' Society, was also a charming artist, and in 1876 painted
Mary's portrait in water-colour, using the opportunities which the
sittings gave her to explore her friend's mind to the uttermost:
"July 22. Began her portrait. I was so excited that my head ached all
day afterwards. She talked of deep, most interesting subjects, and
attention to the arguments and drawing too was too much for one's head!
I was surprised at the full extent of her vague religion. Jowett is her
great admiration and Matt Arnold her guide for some things. She is great
on the rising Dutch and French and German school of religious thought,
very free criticism of the Bible, entire denial of miracle, our Lord
only a great teacher. I felt as if I had been beaten about, as I always
do after the excitement of such talks. And yet it is all a striving
after righteousness, sincerity, truth." Or, again: "Mary W. came to tea.
My visitor was charmed with her and truly she is a sweet, charming
person, full of gentleness and sympathy, with all her talent and
intelligence too. She had dined at the Pattisons' last night and had
felt appalled at the learning of Mrs. P. and Miss ----,' more in their
little fingers than I in my whole body!' But I felt that no one would
wish to change her for either of them."
Her music was a constant joy to her friends, and Mrs. Johnson makes
frequent mention of her playing of Bach and of her wonderful reading. It
was a possession that remained with her, to a certain extent, all her
life, in spite of writer's cramp and of a total inability to find time
to "keep it up." But even twenty and thirty years later than this date,
her playing of Beethoven or Brahms--on the rare occasions when she would
allow herself such indulgence--would astonish the few friends who heard
it.
Meanwhile the portrait prospered, and was at length presented to its
subject when she lay recovering from the birth of her second babe--a boy
whom they named Arnold--in November, 1876. "Humphry and I are full of
delight over the picture," writes Mary to Mrs. Johnson, "and of wonder
at the amount of true and delicate work you have put into it. It will be
a possession not only for us but for our children--see how easily the
new style comes!" These were prophetic words, for it is indeed the
portrait of her that still gives most pleasure to the beholder, though
in later years she was painted or drawn by many skilful hands.
Her two babies, Dorothy and Arnold, naturally absorbed a great deal of
her time and thoughts in these years, although it was possible in those
spacious days to live comfortably and to keep as many little
nursery-maids as one required on £800 or £900 a year, which was about
the income that husband and wife jointly earned. Her natural talent for
"doctoring" showed itself very early in the skill with which she fed her
babies or cured them of their ills when they were sick. Nor was she
content with her domestic success, but in days before "Infant Welfare"
had ever been thought of she wrote a leaflet entitled "Plain Facts on
Infant Feeding" and circulated it in the slums of Oxford. We will not,
however, rescue it from oblivion, lest it should be found to contain
heretical matter! But there was still time for other pursuits, and since
both she and her husband did their writing mainly at night, from nine to
twelve, Mary began to show her practical powers in other directions, and
to take a leading part in the movement for the higher education of women
which was then absorbing some of the best minds of Oxford. As early as
the winter of 1873-4 a committee was formed among this group of friends,
with Mrs. Ward and Mrs. Creighton (followed, on the latter's departure,
by Mrs. T. H. Green) as joint secretaries, for organizing regular
"Lectures for Women"--not in any connection with the University, for
this was as yet impossible, but in order to satisfy the growing demand
among the women residents of Oxford for more serious instruction in
history, or modern languages, or Latin. The first series of lectures was
held in the early spring of 1874, in the Clarendon Buildings, with Mr.
A. H. Johnson as lecturer; it was an immediate success, and the large
sum of 5_s._ which each member of the Committee had put down as a
guarantee could be triumphantly refunded. Further courses were arranged
in each succeeding winter, till in 1877 the same committee expanded into
an "Association for the Education of Women" (again with Mrs. Ward as
secretary[9]), which undertook still more important work. The idea of
the founding of Women's Colleges was already in the air, for Girton and
Newnham had led the way at Cambridge, and all through 1878 plans were
being discussed to this end. In the next year a special committee was
formed for the raising of funds towards the foundation of a "Hall of
Residence"; Mrs. Ward and Mrs. Augustus Vernon Harcourt were joint
secretaries, but since the latter soon fell ill the whole burden of
correspondence fell upon Mary's shoulders. "There seems no end to the
things I have to do just now," she writes to her father in June, 1879.
"All the secretary's work for Somerville Hall falls on me now as my
colleague, Mrs. Harcourt, is laid up, and yesterday and the day before I
have had the house full of girls being examined for scholarship at the
Hall, and have had to copy out examination papers and look after them
generally. Our Lady Principal, Miss Shaw-Lefevre, is here and she came
to dinner to-night to talk business about furnishing, etc. I think we
are getting on. Did you see in _The Times_ that the Clothworkers'
Company have given us 100 guineas?"
And thus the work went on, week after week, all through the year 1879. I
have before me a common-looking engagement-diary in which it is all
recorded, from the month of March to late in the month of October: all
the committee-meetings, all the letters written to newspapers, to
prospective students or to possible heads; the decision to purchase the
lease of "Walton House," "to be assigned to the President (Dr. Percival)
on August 1"; the builder's estimate for alterations ("£540 for raising
the roof and making twelve bedrooms"), the letters about drainage, or
cretonne, or armchairs and fenders, no less than the resolution passed
at Balliol on October 24 to "form a Company for the management of the
Hall under the Limited Liability Act of 1862, with a nominal capital of
£25,000." But by that time the Hall was already opened and the long
labour crowned; and a fortnight afterwards, on November 6, her youngest
child was born. It may be hoped that after this Mrs. Ward took a brief
holiday from the cares of Somerville.
Mrs. Ward remained a member of the original Council of Somerville Hall
long after her departure from Oxford, and during her last two years
there continued to be largely responsible, as one of the most active
members of the Association for the Education of Women, for the
organization of the teaching. All the lectures were arranged by the
Association--in consultation, of course, with the Principal--for it was
not until 1884 that women students were admitted to the smallest of the
University examinations, or to lectures at a few of the Colleges.
Thus had Mrs. Ward learnt her first lesson and won her first laurels in
the carrying out of a big piece of public work. It was an experience
that was to stand her in good stead in after years. But at this time her
ambitions were still largely historical, weaving themselves in dreams
and plans for the writing of that big book on the origins of modern
Spain of which she afterwards sketched the counterpart in Elsmere's
projected book on the origins of modern France. Very likely she would
have settled down to write it before the opening of Somerville, but as
early as October, 1877, she had received a very flattering offer from
Dean Wace, the general editor of the _Dictionary of Christian
Biography_, to take a large share in writing the lives of the early
Spanish ecclesiastics for that monumental work. It was an offer that she
could not refuse, and she always spoke with gratitude of the years of
hard and exacting work that followed, although once or twice she almost
broke down under the strain of it. "Sheer, hard, brain-stretching work,"
she calls it in her _Recollections_, and if anyone will look up her
articles on Joannes Biclarensis, or Idatius, or the Histories of Isidore
of Seville, they will see how triply justified she was in using the
term. "You have gone over the ground so thoroughly that there is no
gleaning left," wrote Mr. C. W. Boase, in those days one of the
best-known of Oxford history tutors, while Dean Wace himself, in the
many letters he wrote to her, showed by his kindness and consideration
how much he valued her contributions. Oxford began to think that she was
definitely committed to an historical career, when to its astonishment
she came out as the author of a children's story. "Milly and Olly" was
the record of her own "Holiday among the Mountains" with her children in
the summer of 1879, but the very simplicity of the tale has endeared it
to many generations of children and child-lovers, while the stories it
contains of Beowulf and the Spanish Queen give it a note of romance that
differentiates it from other nursery tales. She wrote it almost as a
relaxation in the summer of 1880; in the midst of her historical work it
showed that the story-telling instinct was already stirring within her.
And indeed the Oxford historical school was to be disappointed in her
after all, for her labours on the early Spaniards were in reality to
lead her into far other fields. Her interest in the problems of
Christianity had only gathered strength with the years, and were now
greatly stimulated by these researches into the early history of the
Spanish Church. She began to feel the enormous importance to the
believer of the _historical testimony_ on which the whole fabric rested,
while her keen historical imagination enabled her to grasp the mentality
of those distant ages which produced for us the literature of the New
Testament. A feeling of revolt against the arrogance of the orthodox
party, as it was represented in Oxford by Christchurch and Dr. Pusey,
grew and increased in her mind, while at the same time she became more
and more attracted by the romance and mystery of Christianity when
stripped of the coating of legend which pious hands had given it. As
early as 1871 she had written to Mr. Ward (à propos of a somewhat
fatuous sermon to which she had been listening): "How will you make
Christianity into a _motive_?--that is the puzzle. Traditional and
conventional Christianity is worked out--certainly as far as the great
artisan and intelligent working-class in England is concerned, and all
those who are young and touched, ever so vaguely and uncertainly, with
the thought-atmosphere, thought-currents of the day. Is there a
substitute which shall still be Christianity? Yes surely, but it is not
to be arrived at by mere arbitrary remoulding and petulant upsetting as
Mr. Voysey seems to think." And two years later she writes to her
father: "Just now it seems to me that one cannot make one's belief too
simple or hold what one does believe too strongly. Of dogmatic
Christianity I can make nothing. Nothing is clear except the personal
character of Christ and that view of Him as the founder and lawgiver of
a new society which struck me years ago in _Ecce Homo_. And the more I
read and think over the New Testament the more impossible it seems to me
to accept what is ordinarily called the scheme of Christianity."
But these reflections need never have led her in the direction of
writing _Robert Elsmere_ if it had not been for a personal incident. On
Sunday, March 6, 1881, she attended the first Bampton Lecture of the
Rev. John Wordsworth, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury. It was on "the
present unsettlement in religion," and the speaker castigated the
holders of unorthodox views as being very definitely guilty of sin.
Something in the tone of the sermon set Mary's heart on fire within her.
She walked home in a tumult of feeling. That this man with his confident
phrases should dare thus to arraign the leaders of the Liberal host--men
of such noble lives as T. H. Green, thinkers like Jowett and Matt
Arnold! She sat down and wrote, within a very few days, a reply to Dr.
Wordsworth entitled "Unbelief and Sin: a Protest addressed to those who
attended the Bampton Lecture of Sunday, March 6." A little pamphlet cast
in the form of a dialogue between two Oxford men, it was put up for sale
in Slatter & Rose's window and attracted considerable attention. But
before it had been selling for many hours a certain ecclesiastic took
the bookseller aside and pointed out that the pamphlet bore no printer's
name, which made the sale illegal. He politely threatened proceedings,
and the bookseller in alarm withdrew it from circulation and sent the
unsold copies up to Bradmore Road with an apology, but a firm intimation
that no further copies could be sold. Mary laughed and submitted, and
sent her anonymous offspring round to various friends, among them the
redoubtable Rector of Lincoln. He replied to her as follows:--
"No, I did not guess your secret. It was whispered to me in the
street, and I fancy was no secret within the first week of
publication.
"I admire your courage in attacking one of their strong places. The
doctrine of disbelief in Church principles being due to a
propensity to secret sins is one of the oldest tenets of the
Anglican party. It is also a fundamental principle of popular
Catholicism. I have heard it from the catholic pulpit so often that
it must have among them the character of a commonplace.
"There is, as you admit, a certain basis of fact for it--just as
'Patriotism' is often enough the trade of the egoist. 'Licence they
mean when they cry liberty.'
"More interesting even than your argument against the psychological
dogma, was your constructive hint as to the 'Church of the future.'
I wish I could follow you there! But that is an 'argumentum non
unius horæ.'
"Believe me, dear Mrs. Ward, to be
"Yr. attached friend,
"MARK PATTISON."
It was indeed an argument, not of a single hour, but of many long years.
But the spark had been set to a complex train of thought which was now
to work itself out through toil and stress towards its appointed end.
CHAPTER III
EARLY YEARS IN LONDON--THE WRITING OF _ROBERT ELSMERE_
1881-1888
It was in the early summer of 1880 that Mr. Ward was first approached by
Mr. Chenery, the editor, with a suggestion that he should join the staff
of _The Times_. The proposal was in many ways an attractive one, in
spite of the love of both husband and wife for Oxford, for Mr. Ward was
becoming known to a wider world than that of Oxford by his _English
Poets_, which had appeared in this year, nor was he a novice in
journalism. His wife, too, had many links with London through her visits
to the Forsters and her journalistic work. The experiment began in a
tentative way in the winter of 1880-81, she remaining in Oxford with the
children, and he being "tried" for leader-writing while staying in
Bloomsbury lodgings. Within a very few months it proved itself a
success, and, after some pleasant interviews with Mr. John Walter, he
was retained on the permanent staff of the paper. They began seriously
to plan their removal and to look for a house, and found one at length
in that comfortable Bloomsbury region, which was then innocent of big
hotels and offices, and where the houses in Russell Square had not yet
suffered embellishment in the form of pink terra-cotta facings to their
windows. They found that the oldest house in the Square, No. 61, was to
let, and in spite of the dirt of years with which it was encrusted,
perceived its possibilities at once, and came to an agreement with its
owner. A charming old house, built in 1745, its prettiest feature was a
small square entrance-hall, with eighteenth-century stucco-work on the
walls, from which a wide staircase ascended to the drawing-room, giving
an impression of space rare in a _bourgeois_ London house. At the back
was a good-sized strip of garden shaded by tall old plane-trees and
running down to meet the gardens of Queen Square, for No. 61 stood on
the east side of the square and adjoined the first house of Southampton
Row. Little powder-closets jutted out at the back, one of which Mrs.
Ward used as her writing-room, and upstairs the bedroom floors seemed to
expand as you ascended, reaching only to a third story, but giving us
rooms enough even so for ourselves, our maids, and a German governess,
besides the various relations who were constantly coming to stay. Wholly
pleasant are the memories connected with that benign old house, to us
children as well as to our elders, save only that to the youngest of us
there were always two lurking horrors, one on the second floor landing,
where a dark alcove gave harbourage to a little old man in Scotch kilts,
who might, if your legs were not swift enough, come after you as you
toiled up the last flight, and one--still more disquieting--on the top
landing itself, where the taps dripped in a dreadful little boxroom, and
if the taps dripped you knew that the water-bogy, _who lives in taps_,
might at any moment escape and overwhelm you. Since no self-respecting
child ever imparts its terrors to its elders, these nightmares went
unknown until one night, when all the maids were downstairs at supper,
the child in question could not make up its mind to cross the landing,
past the dark mouth of that box-room, from the room where it undressed
to the room where it slept, and was found an hour later, fast asleep in
a chair, with towels pinned over every inch of its small body lest the
bogy should come out and catch hold. After this crisis I think the
terrors declined, and now, alas! taps and box-room and dark alcove have
all disappeared together, with the pleasant rooms downstairs and the
gravelled garden where one made so many persevering expeditions with the
salt-cellar, after the tails of London's sparrows--all swept away and
vanished, and the air that they enclosed parcelled out once more into
the rectangles of the Imperial Hotel! Peace be to the ghost of that poor
house, for it gave happiness in its latter days for nine long years to
the human folk who inhabited it, and it watched the unfolding of a human
heart and mind which were to have no mean influence upon the generation
that encompassed them.
The house at Oxford was disposed of to the Henry Nettleships, at
Michaelmas, 1881, and in the following November the family moved in to
Russell Square. It was not without searchings of heart, I think, that
Mr. and Mrs. Ward embarked upon the larger venture, where all depended
on their retaining health and strength for their work; but they fondly
hoped that with the larger regular income from _The Times_ the burden on
both pairs of shoulders would be lessened.
"All will be well with us yet," wrote Mrs. Ward to her husband
three months before their move, "and if God is good to us there are
coming years of work indeed, but of less burden and strain. All
depends on you and me, and though I know the very thought depresses
us sometimes, it ought not to, for we have many good gifts within
and without, and a fair field, if not the fairest possible field to
use them in. It seems to me that all I want to be happy is to keep
my own heart and conscience clear, and to feel my way open into the
presence of God and the unseen. And surely to seek is to find."
Years of less burden and strain! She had, indeed, forgotten the spirit
within, which was to drive her on to ever new and greater efforts in the
more stimulating atmosphere of London. Though her work for the
_Dictionary of Christian Biography_ was almost over, she had by this
time made the acquaintance of Mr. Morley, then editor of the _Pall Mall
Gazette_, and was doing much reviewing of French and Spanish books for
him, while she continued to write weekly articles for the Church
_Guardian_ and the _Oxford Chronicle_. Nor were the authorities of _The
Times_ long in finding out that she too could write, and by the autumn
of 1882 many foreign books reached her for review from Printing House
Square. She complains in her letters that she cannot get through them
quickly enough. "Three or four volumes of these books a week is about
all I can do, and that seems to go no way." The inevitable expenses of
London life did in fact weigh upon her heavily within a year of their
migration, and the sense of "burden and strain" was never long absent.
But she could not have lived otherwise. It was her fundamental instinct
to work herself to the bone and then to share her good times with others
less fortunate, and since this process made away with her earnings she
would work herself to the bone again. In this atmosphere of unremitting
toil interruptions were of course discouraged, but when they occurred in
spite of all defences she never showed the irritation which so
frequently accompanies overwork. And in the many interruptions caused by
the childish illnesses of her small family her tenderness and devotion
were beyond all words. How she dosed us with aconite and belladonna,
watching over us and compelling us to throw off our fevers and colds!
Nor was anything allowed to interfere with the befriending of all
members of the family who wished to come to Russell Square. Her brother
Willie, who had by this time been appointed to the staff of the
_Manchester Guardian_, was a frequent visitor, renewing with each
appearance his literary _camaraderie_ with her and delighting in the
friends whom she would ask to meet him. Matthew Arnold, too, was
sometimes to be caught for an evening--great occasions, those, for Mrs.
Ward's relations with him were already of the most affectionate. He
influenced her profoundly in literary and critical matters, for she
imbibed from him both her respect for German thoroughness and her
passion for French perfection. These, indeed, were the years when she
saw most of "Uncle Matt," for Pains' Hill Cottage, at Cobham, was not
too far away for a Sunday visit, so that she and Mr. Ward would
sometimes fly down there for an afternoon of talk. Usually, however, she
would return full of blasphemies about his precious dogs, who had
diverted their master's attention all through the walk and prevented the
flow of his wit and wisdom. Therefore she preferred to get him safely to
herself at Russell Square!
Her two younger sisters, Julia and Ethel, were constantly in the house,
the elder of whom married in 1885 Mr. Leonard Huxley, and so brought
about a happy connection with the Professor and his wife, which gave
Mrs. Ward much joy for many years. Nor were her neighbours neglected.
When Christmas came round there was always a wonderful _Weihnachtsbaum_,
dressed with loving care by the good German governess, and by any uncles
and aunts who were within reach, and attended not only by all possible
relations and friends (including especially and always Mr. and Mrs. J.
R. Thursfield and their children), but also by the choirboys of St.
John's Church and by many of _their_ relations too. But behind all this
eager hospitality lay a far deeper longing. Her mother had, early in
1881, undergone a second operation for cancer, and though this gave her
a year's immunity from pain the malady returned. In March, 1882, she
wrote to her daughter with stoical courage that she foresaw what was in
store for her--"a hard ending to a hard life." Though she was devotedly
nursed by her youngest daughter, Ethel, her suffering overshadowed the
next six years of Mary's life like a cloud, but it became also Mrs.
Ward's keenest joy to be able to help her and to ease her path. Once
when she herself had been ill and suffering, she wrote her a few lines
which reveal her own inmost thoughts on the relation between pain and
faith:
"I am _so_ sorry, dearest, for your own suffering. This is a weary
world,--but there is good behind it, 'a holy will,' as Amiel says,
'at the root of nature and destiny,' and submission brings peace
because in submission the heart finds God and in God its rest.
There is no truth I believe in more profoundly."
Yet in spite of the unceasing round of work, what compensations there
were in the London life! The making of new friends can never fail to be
a delightful process, and it very soon became apparent that Mrs. Ward
was to be adopted to the heart of that London world which thought about
books and politics and which incidentally was making history. London was
smaller then than now, and if a new-comer had brains and modesty, and
above all a gift of sympathy that won all hearts, there were few doors
that did not open to her or him in time. Her connection with the
Forsters and with "Uncle Matt" brought her many friends to start with,
while Mr. Ward's work on _The Times_ took them naturally both into the
world of painters (for after 1884 he joined art criticism to his
political and other writing) and into the world of affairs. A letter
written to Mrs. A. H. Johnson in May, 1885, gives a typical picture of
the social side of her life three years after the move to London. The
occasion is the marriage of Alfred Lyttelton and Laura Tennant:
"The wedding function yesterday was very interesting. I am glad not
to have missed Gladstone's speech at the breakfast. What a wondrous
man it is! The intensity, the feeling of the speech were
extraordinary.... Life has been rather exciting lately in the way
of new friends, the latest acquisition being Mr. Goschen, to whom
I have quite lost my heart! There is a pliancy and a brilliancy
about him which make him one of the most delightful companions. We
dined there last Saturday and I have seldom had so much interesting
talk. Lord Arthur Russell, who sat next me, told me stories of how,
as a child at Geneva, he had met folk who in their youth had seen
Rousseau and known Voltaire, and had been intimate friends of Mme.
de Stael in middle life. And then, coming a little further down the
stream of time, he could describe to me having stayed at
Lamartine's château in the poet's old age, and so on. Mr. Goschen
is busy on a life of his grandfather, who was the publisher of
Goethe, Schiller and Wieland, and whose correspondence, which he is
now going through, covers the whole almost of the German literary
period,--so that after dinner the scene shifted to Germany, and we
talked away with an occasional raid into politics, till, to my
great regret, the evening was over."
Her own little dinner-parties very soon began to make their mark, while
not long after their establishment in London, she began the practice of
being at home on Thursday afternoons, and though at first her natural
shyness and lack of small talk made her openings somewhat formidable,
she soon warmed to the task, till within a very few months her Thursdays
became a much-appreciated institution. Men, as well as women, came to
them, for they always liked to make her talk and to hear her eager views
on all the topics of the day, from Irish coercion to the literary
personalities of France, or the need for prodding the Universities to
open their examinations to women. She still called herself a good
Radical in these days, but her devotion to Mr. Forster--whom she had
visited in Dublin during his Chief Secretaryship--gave the first
reservations to her Liberal faith, for she took his part in the matter
of his resignation, and felt that he had not been sufficiently supported
by the Cabinet. It was a great grief to her that Mr. Morley, in the
_Pall Mall Gazette_, found it necessary to attack Mr. Forster's Irish
administration with such persistent energy, and once, towards the end of
1882, she summoned up the courage to write him a remonstrance in good
set terms. Mr. Morley's reply is characteristic:
_Dec. 13, 82._
DEAR MRS. WARD,--
I have got your letter at last, and carefully read and digested it.
Need I say that its frank and direct vigour only increases my
respect for the writer? To answer it, as it deserves, is hardly
possible for me. It would take a day for me to set forth, with
proper reference to chapter and verse, all the reasons why I could
not follow Mr. Forster in his Irish administration. They were set
forth from time to time with almost tiresome iteration as events
moved forward.
In all that you say about Mr. Forster's unselfishness, his
industry, his strenuous desire to do what was right and best,
nobody agrees more cordially than I do. Personally I have always
had--if it is not impertinent in me to say so--a great liking for
him. He was always very kind and obliging to me, and nothing has
been more painful to me than to know that I was writing what would
wound a family for whom I have such sincere respect as I have for
his. But the occasion was grave. I have been thinking about Ireland
all my life, and that fashion of governing it is odious and
intolerable. If Sir Charles Dilke or Mr. Chamberlain had been Chief
Secretary, and carried out the Coercion Act as Mr. Forster carried
it out, I could not have attacked either of them, but I should have
resigned my editorship rather than have connived by silence or
otherwise at such mischief.
I may at times have seemed bitter and personal in my language about
Mr. Forster. One falls into this tone too readily, when fighting a
battle day after day, and writing without time for calm revision.
For that I am sorry, if it has been so, or seemed so. Mr. Forster's
friends--some of them--have been extremely unscrupulous in their
personalities against me, their charges of intrigue, conspiracy.
All that I do not care for one jot; my real regret, and it is a
very sincere one, is that I should seem unjust or vindictive to
people like you, who think honestly and calmly about politics, and
other things.
I hope that it is over, and that I shall never have to say a word
about Mr. Forster's Irish policy again.
Yours very sincerely,
JOHN MORLEY.
Such a letter only served to strengthen friendship. Mrs. Ward's literary
comradeship with Mr. Morley remained unbroken in spite of widening
differences in politics, and when, a few months later, he assumed the
editorship of _Macmillan's Magazine_ he proposed to her that she should
virtually take over its literary criticism:--
_March 22, 83._
DEAR MRS. WARD,--
My reign over "Macmillan" will begin in May. I want to know whether
you can help me to a literary article once a month--in the shape of
a _compte rendu_ of some new books, English or French. It is highly
desirable that the subject should be as lively and readable as
possible--not erudite and academic, but literary, or
socio-literary, as Ste Beuve was.
I don't see why a "causerie" from you once a month should not
become as marked a feature in our world, as Ste Beuve was to
France. In time, the articles would make matter for a volume, and
so you would strike the stars with your sublime head.
I hope my suggestion will commend itself to you. I have been
counting upon you, and shall be horribly discouraged if you say No.
Yours sincerely,
JOHN MORLEY.
Flattered as she was by the suggestion, she was never able to carry out
his whole behest, yet between February, 1883, and June, 1885, she wrote
no less than twelve articles for _Macmillan's_, on subjects ranging from
the young Spanish Romanticist, Gustavo Becquer, to Keats, Jane Austen,
Renan and the "Literature of Introspection" (à propos of Amiel's
_Journal Intime_), while the series was ended by a full-dress review of
Pater's _Marius the Epicurean_. These articles did much to assure her
position in the world of pure literature, as her Dictionary articles had
assured it in the world of scholarship, and she never ceased to be
grateful to Mr. Morley for the opportunities he had given her in
inviting them, for the encouragement of his praise and the bracing of
his occasional criticism.
But these articles were all written under the heaviest physical
disabilities. Early in 1883 she began to suffer from a violent form of
writer's cramp, which made her right hand almost useless at times, and
recurred at intervals all through her life, so that writing was usually
a far more arduous and painful process to her than it is to most of us.
Through the years 1883 and 1884 she was frequently reduced to writing
with her left hand, but she also dictated much to her young
sister-in-law, Gertrude Ward, who came to live with us at this time, and
became for the next eight years the prop and support of our household.
Many remedies were tried for the ailment, but nothing was really
effective until after two years a German "writing-master" came on the
scene, one Dr. Julius Wolff, who completely transformed her method of
writing by making her sit much higher than before, rest the whole
fore-arm on the table, and use an altogether different set of muscles.
Many curious exercises he gave her also, which she practised at
intervals for years afterwards, and by these means he succeeded in
giving her comparative immunity, though whenever she was specially
pressed with work the pain and weakness would recur. During the year
1884, however, before Dr. Wolff had appeared, her arm was practically
disabled, and she wore it much in a sling.
Yet it was during this year that she began her translation of Amiel's
_Journal_ and wrote her first novel, _Miss Bretherton_. The idea of it
was suggested by her first sight of the beautiful actress, Mary
Anderson, though she always maintained that, once created, Isabel
Bretherton became to her an absolutely distinct personality. The manner
of its writing is told in a fragment of Miss Gertrude Ward's journal:
"The book was written in about six weeks. She used to lie or sit
out of doors at Borough Farm, with a notebook and pencil, and
scrawl down what she could with her left hand; then she would come
in about twelve and dictate to me at a great rate for an hour or
more. In the afternoon and evening she would look over and correct
what was done, and I copied out the whole. The scene of Marie and
Kendal in his rooms was dictated in her bedroom; she lay on her
bed, and I sat by the window behind a screen."
The book was published by Messrs. Macmillan and appeared in December,
1884. It attracted a good deal of attention. The general verdict was
that it was a fine and delicate piece of work, but on too limited, too
intellectual a scale. This view was admirably put by her old friend, Mr.
Creighton (then Emmanuel Professor at Cambridge):
MY DEAR MRS. WARD,--
I have read _Miss Bretherton_ with much interest. It was hardly
fair on the book to know the plot beforehand, but I found myself
carried away by the delicate feeling with which the development of
character was traced. The Nuneham scene, the death-bed and the
final reconciliation were really touching and powerfully worked
out.
[Illustration: Borough Farm.]
At the same time it is not a novel of my sort. I demand that I
should have given me an entire slice of life, and that I should see
the mutual interaction of a number of characters. Your interest
centres entirely on one character: your characters all move in the
same region of ideas, and that a narrow one. Your book is dainty,
but it does not touch the great springs of life. Of course you
didn't mean it to do so: but I am putting before you what I
conceive to be the novelist's ideal. It seems to me that a novelist
must have seen much, must lay himself out to be conversant with
many sides of life, must have no line of his own, but must lend
himself to the life of those around him. This is the direct
opposite of the critic. I wonder if the two trades can be combined.
Have you ever read Sainte Beuve's solitary novel, _Volupté_? It is
instructive reading. You are a critic in your novel. Your object is
really to show how criticism can affect a nature capable of
receiving it. Now is this properly a subject of art? Is it not too
didactic? It is not so for me, for I am an old-fashioned moralist:
but the mass of people do not care for intellectual teaching in
novels. They want an emotional thrill. Remember that you have
deliberately put this aside. Kendal's love is not made to affect
his life, his character, his work. Miss Bretherton only feels so
far attracted to him as to listen to what he says.... I only say
this to show you what the book made me think, that you wrote as a
critic not as a creator. You threw into the form of a story many
critical judgments, and gave an excellent sketch of the possible
worth of criticism in an unregenerate world. This was worth doing
once: but if you are going on with novels you must throw criticism
to the winds and let yourself go as a partner of common joys,
common sorrows and common perplexities. There, I have told you what
I think just as I think it. I would not have done so to anyone else
save you, to whom I am always,
Your most affectionate,
M. CREIGHTON.
No doubt Mrs. Ward stored up this criticism for future use, for when she
next embarked upon a novel the canvas was indeed broad enough.
They had not been settled in London for much more than a year before
Mrs. Ward began to feel the need for some quiet and remote country place
to which she might fly for peace and work when the strain of London
became too great. Fortune favoured the quest, for in the summer of 1882
they took the rectory at Peper Harow, near Godalming (the "Murewell
Rectory" of _Robert Elsmere_), for a few weeks, and during that time
were taken by Lord Midleton, the owner of Peper Harow, to see a
delightful old farm in the heart of the lonely stretch of country that
lies between the Portsmouth Road and Elstead. They fell in love with it
at once, and during the following winter made an arrangement to take its
six or seven front rooms by the year. So from the summer of 1883 onwards
they possessed Borough Farm as a refuge and solace in the wilds, a
paradise for elders and children alike, where London and its turmoil
could be cast off and forgotten. It lay in a country of heather commons,
woods, rough meadows, streams and lakes--those "Hammer Ponds" which
remain as a relic of the iron-smelting days of Surrey, and in which we
children amused ourselves by the hour in fishing for perch with a bent
pin and a worm. Here Mrs. Ward would lie out whenever the sun shone in
the old sand-pit up the lane, where we had constructed a sort of terrace
for her long chair, or else under the ash-tree on the little hill,
writing or reading, while no sound came save the murmur of wind in the
gorse, or in the dry bells of the heather. If her physique had been
stronger she would, perhaps, have been too much tempted by the beauty of
the country ever to have lain still and worked for so many hours as she
did in that long chair; but she was never robust, she was extremely
susceptible to bad weather, cold winds and every form of chill, and her
longest expeditions were those which she took in a little pony-carriage
over Ryal or Bagmoor Commons to Peper Harow, or up the Portsmouth Road
to Thursley and Hindhead.
Here a few friends came at intervals to share the solitude with us:
Laura Tennant, on a wonderful day in May, 1884, when she seemed to her
dazzled hostess the very incarnation of the spring; M. Edmond Scherer,
her earliest French friend, who, in 1884, was helping her with her
translation of Amiel's _Journal_; Henry James, whose visit laid the
foundation of a friendship that was to ripen into one of the most
precious of all Mrs. Ward's possessions; Mlle. Souvestre, foundress of
the well-known girls' school at Wimbledon, and one of the keenest
intellects of her time; and once, for a whole fortnight, Miss Eugénie
Sellers,[10] who had for many months been teaching the family their
classics, and who now came down to superintend their Greek a little and
to roam the commons with them much. It was in 1886, just before this
visit, that Mrs. Ward began seriously to read Greek, usually with her
ten-year-old son; she bought a Thucydides in Godalming one day and was
delighted to find it easier than she expected. It was a passion that
grew upon her with the years, as any reader of her later books will
clearly perceive.
Then, though the solitude of the farm itself was profound, there were a
few, a very few, neighbours in the more eligible districts round about
who made it their pleasure sometimes to call upon us; there were the
Frederic Harrisons at Elstead, whose four boys dared us children to
horrid feats of jumping and climbing in the sand-pit, while our elders
were safely engaged elsewhere; John Morley also, for a few weeks in
1886, and in the other direction Lord and Lady Wolseley, who took a
house near Milford, and thence made their way occasionally down our
sandy track. But the neighbours who meant most to us were, after all,
our landlords, the Brodricks of Peper Harow; they were not only
endlessly kind, giving us leave to disport ourselves in all their
ponds, but took a sort of pride of possession, I believe, in their
pocket authoress, watching her struggles and her achievement with
paternal eyes. And when _Robert Elsmere_ at length appeared, old Lord
Midleton, pillar of Church and State as he was, came riding over to the
farm, sitting his horse squarely in spite of his white hairs and his
semi-blindness, and sent in word that the "Wicked Squire" was at the
gate!
Two letters written to her father from Borough Farm during these years,
give glimpses of her browsings in many books, and of her thoughts on
Shakespeare, evolution and kindred matters:
"I have been reading Joubert's _Pensées_ and _Correspondance_
lately, with a view to the Amiel introduction. You would be charmed
with the letters, and some of the _pensées_ are extraordinarily
acute. Now I am deep in Sénancour, and for miscellaneous reading I
have been getting through Horace's Epistles and dawdling a good
deal over Shakespeare. My feeling as to him gets stronger and
stronger, that he was, strictly speaking, a great poet, but not a
great dramatist! There's a remark over which I trust you will draw
a fatherly veil! But one can only say what one feels, and I am more
oppressed than I used to be by his faults of construction, his
carelessness, his excrescences, while at the same time much more
sensitive to his preternatural power as a poet and as a
psychological analyst. He gets at the root of his characters in a
marvellous way, he envisages them separately as no one else can,
but it is when he comes to bring them into action to represent the
play of outward circumstance and the interaction of character on
character that he seems to me comparatively--only comparatively, of
course--to fail. I have always felt it most strongly in Othello,
and of course in the last act of Hamlet, which, in spite of the
magnificent poetry in it, is surely a piece of dramatic
bungling....
"As to Renan it would be too long to argue it, but I think he very
much saves himself in the passage you quote by the qualifying word
'comme.' The Church is 'as it were' _un débris de l'Empire_. It is
only another way of putting what Harnack said in that article you
and I read at Sea View. 'The Empire built up the Church out of its
own substance, and destroyed itself in so doing,' or words to that
effect. I cannot help feeling that as far as organization and
institutions go it is very true, though I would never deny that God
was in the Church, as I believe He is in all human society,
moulding it to His will. Everything, from the critical and
scientific standpoint, seems to me so continuous and natural--no
sharp lines anywhere--one thing leading to another, event leading
to event, belief to belief--and God enwrapping and enfolding all.
But this is one general principle, and yours is quite another. I
quite agree that from your standpoint no explanation that Renan
could give of the Church can appear other than meagre or
grotesque."
Her translation of Amiel's _Journal Intime_ was a long and exacting
piece of work, but she enjoyed the struggle with the precise meaning of
the French phrases and always maintained that she owed much to it, both
in her knowledge of French and of English. She had begun it, with the
benevolent approval of its French editor, M. Scherer, early in 1884, and
took it up again after _Miss Bretherton_ came out; found it indeed a far
more troublesome task than she had foreseen, and was still wrestling
with the Introduction in the summer of 1885, when her head was already
full of her new novel, and she was fretting to begin upon it. But the
book appeared at length in December, 1885, and very soon made its mark.
The wonderful language of the Swiss mystic appealed to a generation more
occupied than ours with the things of the soul, while Mrs. Ward's
introduction gave a masterly sketch of the writer's strange personality
and the development of his mind. As Jowett wrote to her, "Shall I tell
you the simple truth? It is wonderful to me how you could have thought
and known so much about so many things." Mr. Talbot, the Warden of Keble
(now Bishop of Winchester), wrote of the "almost breathless admiration
of the truth and penetration of his thought" with which he had read the
book, while Lord Arthur Russell reported that he had "met Mr. Gladstone,
who spoke with great interest of Amiel, asked me whether I had compared
the translation with the original, and said that a most interesting
small volume might be extracted, of _Pensées_, quite equal to Pascal."
But it was, inevitably, "caviar to the general." Mrs. Ward's brother,
Willie Arnold, her close comrade and friend in all things literary,
wrote to her from Manchester a few months after its appearance: "I
served on a jury at the Assizes last week--two murder cases and general
horrors. I sat next to a Mr. Amiel--pronounced 'Aymiell'--a worthy
Manchester tradesman; no doubt his ancestor was a Huguenot refugee. I
had one of your vols. in my pocket, and showed him the passage about the
family. He was greatly interested, and borrowed it. Returned it next day
with the remark that it was 'too religious for him.' Alas, divine
philosophy!"
* * * * *
Ever since the previous winter the idea of a novel in which the clash
between the older and the younger types of Christianity should be worked
out in terms of human life, had been growing and fermenting in her mind.
_Miss Bretherton_ and Amiel's _Journal_ had given her a valuable
apprenticeship in the art of writing, while Amiel's luminous reflections
on the decadence and formalism of the churches had tended to confirm her
own passionate conviction that all was not well with the established
forms of religion. But the determining factor in the writing of _Robert
Elsmere_ was the close and continuous study which she had given ever
since her work for the _Dictionary of Christian Biography_ to the
problem of "Christian origins." She was fascinated by the intricacy and
difficulty of the whole subject, but more especially by such branches of
it as the Synoptic Problem, or the relation of the Fourth Gospel to the
rest; while the questions raised by the realization that the Books of
the New Testament were the products of an age steeped in miracle and
wholly uncritical of the records of it, struck her as vital to the whole
orthodox position. At the same time her immense tenderness for
Christianity, her belief that the life and teaching of the Founder were
still the "master-light of all our seeing," made her yearn for a
simplification of the creeds, so that the Message itself should once
more appeal to the masses without the intervention of formulæ that
perpetually challenged their reason. The argument of "Literature and
Dogma" culminates in the picture of mankind waiting for the lifting of
the burden of "Aberglaube" and dogmatism, with which the spirit of
Christianity had been crushed down for centuries, waiting for the
renewal that would come when the old coil was cast off. It was in that
spirit also that Mrs. Ward attacked the problem; her Robert was to her a
link in the chain of the liberators of all ages. Was her outlook too
intellectual? Did she overestimate the repugnance to obsolete forms that
possessed her generation? So it was said by many who rose up in startled
defence of those forms, many who had never felt the uttermost clash
between the things which they wished to believe and the things which
Truth allowed them to believe. Yet still the response of her generation
was to be greater than she ever dreamt. No doubt the renewal did not
come in the precise form in which she looked for it; creeds were to
prove tougher, the worship of the Risen Lord more vital than she
thought; yet still, in a hundred ways, the influence of the fermentation
caused by the ideas of _Robert Elsmere_ may be traced in the Church
to-day. "Biblical criticism" may now be out of fashion; but it is
because its victory has in reality been won. All this lay hidden from
the mind of the writer as she sat toiling over her task in the solitude
of Borough Farm, or in the little "powder-closet" overlooking the back
gardens of Russell Square; she wrote because she "could no other," and
only rarely did she allow herself to feel, with trembling, that the
_Zeitgeist_ might indeed be with her.
The book was begun in the autumn of 1885, with every hope that it would
be finished in less than a year. It was offered, when a few chapters had
been written, to the Macmillans for publication, since they had
published both _Miss Bretherton_ and the _English Poets_, but to the sad
disappointment of its author they rejected it on the ground that the
subject was not likely to appeal to the British public. In this dilemma
Mrs. Ward bethought herself of Mr. George Murray Smith, the publisher of
Charlotte Brontë, and in some trepidation offered the book to him. Mr.
Smith had greater faith than the Macmillans and accepted it at once,
sealing the bargain by making an advance of £200 upon it in May, 1886.
So began Mrs. Ward's connection with "George Smith," as she always
familiarly spoke of him: a friend and counsellor indeed, to whom she
owed incalculable things in the years that followed.
In the Preface to the "Westmorland Edition" of _Robert Elsmere_, issued
twenty-three years later, Mrs. Ward herself confessed to her models for
some of the principal characters--to the friend of her youth, Mark
Pattison, for the figure of the Squire (though not in his landowning
capacity!); to Thomas Hill Green, "the noblest and most persuasive
master of philosophic thought in modern Oxford," for that of Henry Grey;
and to Amiel himself, the hapless intellectual tortured by the paralysis
of will, for that of Langham. Both the Rector of Lincoln and Professor
Green had recently died, the latter in the prime of his life and work,
and Mrs. Ward sought both in the dedication and in her sketch of the
strong and lovable tutor of St. Anselm's, to express her lasting
admiration for this lost friend. But she claimed in each case the
artist's freedom to treat her creatures as her own, once they had
entered the little world of the novel: a thesis which she was to
maintain and develop in later years, when she occasionally went to the
past for her characters. Catherine was a more composite picture, drawn
from the "strong souls" she had known among her own kinswomen from
childhood up, and therefore, perhaps, more tenderly treated by the
author than the rules of artistic detachment would allow. She was a type
far more possible in the 'eighties than now, but it is perhaps
comforting to know that no single human being inspired her. As to the
scene in which these figures moved, it was on a sunny day at the end of
May, 1885, that Mrs. Ward's old friend, Mr. James Cropper, of
Ellergreen, took her for a drive up the valley of Long Sleddale, in a
lonely part of Westmorland. There she saw the farm at the head of the
dale, the vicarage, the Leyburns' house. Already her thoughts were busy
with her story, and from that day onwards she peopled the quiet valley
with her folk.
At first she was full of hope that the book would be finished before the
summer of 1886, although she admits to her mother that "it is very
difficult to write and the further I get the harder it is." In March of
that year she writes to her sister-in-law: "I have made up my mind to
come here [Borough Farm] for the whole of April, so as to get _Robert
Elsmere done_! It must and shall be done by the end of April, if I
expire in the attempt." In April she did indeed work herself nearly to
death, writing sixteen, eighteen and even twenty pages of manuscript in
the day, and a sort of confidence began to grow up in her mind that the
book would not speak its message in vain. "I think this book _must_
interest a certain number of people," she writes to her mother; "I
certainly feel as if I were writing parts of it with my heart's blood."
But the difficulties only increased, and actually it was the end of
October before even the first two volumes were finished. And then "the
more satisfied I become with the second volume the more discontented I
am with the first. It must be re-cast, alas!" Her arm was often
troublesome, especially in the autumn of this year, when she was staying
at the Forsters' house near Fox How, working very hard. "I am dreadfully
low about myself," she writes; "my arm has not been so bad since April,
when it took me practically a month's rest to get it right again. I have
been literally physically incapable of finishing my last chapter. And to
think of all the things I promised myself to do this week! And here I
have time, ideas, inclination, and I can do nothing. I will dictate if I
can to Gertrude, but I am so discouraged just at present I seem to have
no heart for it." Then a few days later it has taken a turn for the
better, and she is overjoyed: "The second volume was _finished_ last
night! The arm is _decidedly_ better, though still shaky. I sleep badly,
and rheumatism keeps flying about me, now here, now there, but I am not
at all doleful--indeed in excellent spirits now that the arm is better!"
So, in spite of the distractions of London, she struggled on with the
third volume all through that winter (1886-7), flying for a week in
December to Borough Farm in order to get complete isolation for her
task. "Oh, the quiet, the blissful quiet of it! It helps me most in
thinking out the book. I can _write_ in London; I seem to be unable to
think." Sometimes, however, her head was utterly exhausted. Returning to
London, she wrote to her mother: "I did a splendid day's work yesterday,
but it was fighting against headache all day, and this morning I felt
quite incapable of writing and have been lying down, reading, though my
wretched head is hardly fit for reading. It is not exactly pain, but a
horrid feeling of tension and exhaustion, as if one hadn't slept for
ever so long, which I don't at all approve of."
Often, when these fits of exhaustion came on, a small person would be
sent for from the schoolroom, in whose finger-tips a quaint form of
magic was believed to reside, and there she would sit for an hour,
stroking her mother's head, or her hands, or her feet, while the
"Jabberwock" on the Chinese cabinet curled his long tail at the pair in
silence. "Chatter to me," she used to say; but this was not always easy,
and a golden and friendly silence, peopled by many thoughts, usually lay
between the two.
At length, on March 9, 1887, the last words of the third volume were
written, there in the little powder-closet behind the back drawing-room.
But this did not mean the end. She was already painfully aware that the
book was too long, and Mr. George Smith, best and truest of advisers,
firmly indicated to her that the limits even of a three-volume novel had
been overstepped. She herself had already admitted to her brother Willie
that it was "not a novel at all," and she now plunged bravely into the
task of cutting and revision, fondly hoping that it would take her no
more than a fortnight's hard work. Instead it took her the best part of
a year. Publication first in the summer season, then in the autumn, had
to be given up, while her own fatigue increased so that sometimes for
days together she could not touch the book. The few friends to whom she
showed it were indeed encouraging, and her brother Willie was the first
to prophesy that it would "make a great mark." After reading the first
volume he wrote to Mrs. Arnold, "You may look forward to finding
yourself the mother of a famous woman!" But the mood of this year was
one of depression, while Mrs. Arnold's illness became an ever-increasing
sorrow. In the Long Vacation Mrs. Ward took the empty Lady Margaret
Hall, at Oxford, for a few weeks, in order to be near her mother--a step
which brought her unexpectedly another pleasure. On the very day after
they arrived she wrote: "I have had a great pleasure to-day, for at
three o'clock arrived a note from Jowett saying that he was in Oxford
for a day and would I come to tea? So I went down at five, stayed an
hour, then he insisted on walking up here, and sat in the garden
watching the children play tennis till about seven. Dear old man! I have
the most lively and filial affection for him. We talked about all sorts
of things--Cornwall, politics, St. Paul--and when I wanted to go he
would not let me. I think he liked it, and certainly I did."
Through the autumn and into the month of January, 1888, she struggled
with mountains of proofs, while Mr. Smith, though without much faith in
the popular prospects of the book, was always "kind and indulgent," as
she gratefully testifies in the _Recollections_. At length, towards the
end of January, she sent in the last batch, and on February 24 the book
appeared.
Six weeks later, in the little house in Bradmore Road, which had
witnessed so many years of suffering indomitably borne, Julia Arnold lay
dying. Through pain and exhaustion unspeakable she had yet kept her
intense interest in the human scene, and now the last pleasure which she
enjoyed on earth was the news that reached her of the growing success of
her daughter's book. With a hand so weak that the pen kept falling from
her fingers, she wrote her an account of the Oxford gossip on it; she
asked her, with a flash of the old malice, to let her know at once
should she hear what any of her aunts were saying. Alas, Julia knew
better than anyone else on earth what the religious temperament of the
Arnolds might mean; but before the answer came her poor tormented spirit
was at rest for ever.
CHAPTER IV
_ROBERT ELSMERE_ AND AFTER
1888-1889
Three volumes, printed as closely as were those of _Robert Elsmere_,
penetrated somewhat slowly among the fraternity of reviewers. The
_Scotsman_ and the _Morning Post_ were the first to notice it on March
5, nine days after its appearance; the _British Weekly_ wept over it on
March 9; the _Academy_ compared it to _Adam Bede_ on the 17th; the
_Manchester Guardian_ gave it two columns on the 21st; the _Saturday_
"slated" it on the 24th; while Walter Pater's article in the Church
_Guardian_ on the 28th, calling it a "_chef d'œuvre_ of that kind of
quiet evolution of character through circumstance, introduced into
English literature by Miss Austen and carried to perfection in France by
George Sand," gave perhaps greater happiness to its author than any
other review. _The Times_ waited till April 7, being in no hurry to show
favour to one connected with its staff, but when it came the review duly
spoke of _Robert_ as "a clever attack upon revealed religion," and all
was well. By the end of March, however, the public interest in the book
had begun in earnest; the first edition of 500 copies was exhausted and
a second had appeared; this was sold out by the middle of April; a third
appeared on April 19 and was gone within a week; a fourth followed in
the same way. Matthew Arnold wrote from Wilton, the Pembrokes' house, a
week before his death (which occurred on April 15), that he found all
the guests there reading or intending to read it, and added, "George
Russell, who was staying at Aston Clinton with Gladstone, says it is all
true about his interest in the book. He talked of it incessantly and
said he thought he should review it for Knowles."
As a matter of fact, Mr. Gladstone had already written the first draft
of his article and was corresponding with Lord Acton on the various
points which he wished to raise or to drive home. His biographer hints
that Acton's replies were not too encouraging. But the old giant was not
to be deterred. The book had moved him profoundly and he felt impelled
to combat the all too dangerous conclusions to which it pointed. "Mamma
and I," he wrote to his daughter in March, "are each of us still
separately engaged in a death-grapple with _Robert Elsmere_. I
complained of some of the novels you gave me to read as too stiff, but
they are nothing to this. It is wholly out of the common order. At
present I regard with doubt and dread the idea of doing anything on it,
but cannot yet be sure whether your observations will be verified or
not. In any case it is a tremendous book." And to Lord Acton he wrote:
"It is not far from twice the length of an ordinary novel; and the
labour and effort of reading it all, I should say, sixfold; while one
could no more stop in it than in reading Thucydides." Early in April he
came to Oxford to stay with the Edward Talbots at Keble College, and
hearing that Mrs. Ward was also there, watching over her dying mother,
he expressed a desire to see her, and, if possible, to talk the book
over with her. She came on the day after her mother's death--April
8--towards evening, and waited for him alone in the Talbots'
drawing-room. That night she wrote down the following account of their
conversation:
"I arrived at Keble at 7.10. Gladstone was not in the drawing-room.
I waited for about three minutes when I heard his slow step coming
downstairs. He came in with a candle in his hand which he put out,
then he came up most cordially and quickly. 'Mrs. Ward--this is
most good of you to come and see me! If you had not come, I should
myself have ventured to call and ask after yourself and Mr.
Arnold.'
"Then he sat down, he on a small uncomfortable chair, where he
fidgeted greatly! He began to ask about Mamma. Had there been much
suffering? Was death peaceful? I told him. He said that though he
had seen many deaths, he had never seen any really peaceful. In all
there had been much struggle. So much so that 'I myself have
conceived what I will not call a terror of death, but a repugnance
from the idea of death. It is the rending asunder of body and soul,
the tearing apart of the two elements of our nature--for I hold the
body to be an essential element as well as the soul, not a mere
sheath or envelope.' He instanced the death of Sidney Herbert as an
exception. _He_ had said 'can this indeed be dying?'--death had
come so gently.
"Then after a pause he began to speak of the knowledge of Oxford
shown by _Robert Elsmere_, and we went on to discuss the past and
present state of Oxford. He mentioned it 'as one of the few points
on which, outside Home Rule, I disagree with Hutton,'[11] that
Hutton had given it as his opinion that Cardinal Newman and Matthew
Arnold had had more influence than any other men on modern Oxford.
Newman's influence had been supreme up to 1845--nothing since, and
he gathered from Oxford men that Professor Jowett and Mr. Green had
counted for much more than Matthew Arnold. M.A.'s had been an
influence on the general public, not on the Universities. How
Oxford had been torn and rent, what a 'long agony of thought' she
had gone through! How different from Cambridge!
"Then we talked again of Newman, how he had possessed the place,
his influence comparable only to that of Abelard on Paris--the
flatness after he left. I quoted Burne-Jones on the subject. Then I
spoke of Pattison's autobiography as illustrating Newman's hold. He
agreed, but said that Pattison's religious phase was so
disagreeable and unattractive that it did small credit to Newman.
He would much like to have seen more of the autobiography, but he
understood that the personalities were too strong. I asked him if
he had seen Pattison's last 'Confession of Faith,' which Mrs.
Pattison decided not to print, in MS. He said no. Then he asked me
whether I had pleasant remembrances of Pattison. I warmly said yes,
and described how kind he had been to me as a girl. 'Ah!' he
said--'Church would never cast him off; and Church is almost the
only person of whom he really speaks kindly in the Memoirs.'
"Then, from the state of Oxford, we passed to the state of the
country during the last half-century. 'It has been a _wonderful_
half-century! I often tell the young men who are coming on that we
have had a better time than they can have, in the next
half-century. Take one thing only--the abolition of slavery in the
world (outside Africa I suppose he meant). You are too young to
realize what that means. But I draw a distinction between the first
twenty-five years of the period and the second; during the first,
steady advance throughout all classes, during the second, distinct
recession, and retrogression, in the highest class of all. That
testing point, _marriage_, very disquieting. The scandals about
marriage in the last twenty years unparallelled in the first half
of the period. I don't trust my own opinion, but I asked two of the
keenest social observers, and two of the coolest heads I ever
knew--Lord Granville and the late Lord Clanwilliam--to tell me what
they thought and they strongly confirmed my impression.' (Here one
of the Talbot boys came in and stood by the fire, and Gladstone
glanced at him once or twice, as though conversation on these
points was difficult while he was there.) I suggested that more was
made of scandals nowadays by the newspapers. But he would not have
it--'When I was a boy--I left Eton in 1827--there were two papers,
the _Age_ and the _Satirist_, worse than anything which exists now.
But they died out about 1830, and for about forty years there was
_nothing of the kind_. Then sprang up this odious and deplorable
crop of Society papers.' He thought the fact significant.
"He talked of the modern girl. 'They tell me she is not what she
was--that she loves to be fast. I don't know. All I can bear
testimony to is the girl of my youth. _She_ was excellent!'
"'But,' I asked him, 'in spite of all drawbacks, do you not see a
gradual growth and diffusion of earnestness, of the social passion
during the whole period?' He assented, and added, 'With the decline
of the Church and State spirit, with the slackening of State
religion, there has unquestionably come about a quickening of the
State conscience, of the _social_ conscience. I will not say what
inference should be drawn.'
"Then we spoke of charity in London, and of the way in which the
rich districts had elbowed out their poor. And thereupon--perhaps
through talk of the _motives_ for charitable work--we came to
religion. 'I don't believe in any new system,' he said, smiling,
and with reference to _Robert Elsmere_; 'I cling to the old. The
great traditions are what attract me. I believe in a degeneracy of
man, in the Fall--in _sin_--in the intensity and virulence of sin.
No other religion but Christianity meets the sense of sin, and sin
is the great fact in the world to me.'
"I suggested that though I did not wish for a moment to deny the
existence of moral evil, the more one thought of it the more plain
became its connection with physical and social and therefore
_removable_ conditions. He disagreed, saying that the worst forms
of evil seemed to him to belong to the highest and most favoured
class 'of _educated_ people'--with some emphasis.
"I asked him whether it did not give him any confidence in 'a new
system'--i.e. a new construction of Christianity--to watch its
effect on such a life as T. H. Green's. He replied individuals were
no test; one must take the broad mass. Some men were born 'so that
sin never came near them. Such men never felt the need of
Christianity. They would be better if they were worse!'
"And as to difficulties, the great difficulties of all lay in the
way of Theism. 'I am surprised at men who don't feel this--I am
surprised at you!' he said, smiling. Newman had put these
difficulties so powerfully in the _Apologia_. The Christian system
satisfied all the demands of the conscience; and as to the
intellectual difficulties--well there we came to the question of
miracles.
"Here he restated the old argument against an _a priori_
impossibility of miracles. Granted a God, it is absurd to limit the
scope and range of the _will_ of such a being. I agreed; then I
asked him to let me tell him how I had approached the
question--through a long immersion in documents of the early
Church, in critical and historical questions connected with
miracles. I had come to see how miracles arise, and to feel it
impossible to draw the line with any rigidity between one
miraculous story and another.
"'The difficulty is'--he said slowly, 'if you sweep away miracles,
you sweep away _the Resurrection_! With regard to the other
miracles, I no longer feel as I once did that they are the most
essential evidence for Christianity. The evidence which now comes
_nearest_ to me is the evidence of Christian history, of the type
of character Christianity has produced----'
"Here the Talbots' supper bell rang, and the clock struck eight. He
said in the most cordial way it was impossible it could be so late,
that he must not put the Warden's household out, but that our
conversation could not end there, and would I come again? We
settled 9.30 in the morning. He thanked me, came with me to the
hall and bade me a most courteous and friendly good-bye."[12]
The next morning she duly presented herself after breakfast, and this
time they got to grips far more thoroughly than before with the question
of miracles and of New Testament criticism generally. In a letter to her
husband (published in the _Recollections_) she calls it "a battle royal
over the book and Christian evidences," and describes how "at times he
looked stern and angry and white to a degree, so that I wondered
sometimes how I had the courage to go on--the drawn brows were so
formidable!" But she stuck to her points and found, as she thought, that
for all his versatility he was not really familiar with the literature
of the subject, but took refuge instead in attacking her own Theistic
position, divested as it was of supernatural Christianity. "I do not say
or think you 'attack' Christianity," he wrote to her two days later,
"but in proposing a substitute for it, reached by reduction and
negation, I think (forgive me) you are dreaming the most visionary of
all human dreams."
He enclosed a volume of his _Gleanings_, marking the article on "The
Courses of Religious Thought." Mrs. Ward replied to him as follows:--
_April 15, 1888._
DEAR MR. GLADSTONE,--
Thank you very much for the volume of _Gleanings_ with its gracious
inscription. I have read the article you point out to me with the
greatest interest, and shall do the same with the others. Does not
the difference between us on the question of sin come very much to
this--that to you the great fact in the world and in the history of
man, is _sin_--to me, _progress_? I remember Amiel somewhere speaks
of the distinction as marking off two classes of thought, two
orders of temperament. In myself I see a perpetual struggle, in the
world also, but through it all I feel the "Power that makes for
righteousness." In the life of conscience, in the play of physical
and moral law, I see the ordained means by which sin is gradually
scourged and weakened both in the individual and in the human
society. And as to that sense of _irreparableness_, that awful
burden of evil both on the self and outside it, for which all
religions have sought an anodyne in the ceremonies of propitiation
and sacrifice, I think the modern who believes in God and cherishes
the dear memory of a human Christ will learn humbly, as Amiel says,
even "to accept himself," and life, as they are, at God's hands.
Constant and recurrent experience teaches him that the baser self
can only be killed by constant and recurrent effort towards good;
the action of the higher self is governed by an even stronger and
more prevailing law of self-preservation than that of the lower;
evil finds its appointed punishment and deterrent in pain and
restlessness; and as the old certainty of the Christian heaven
fades it will become clear to him that his only hope of an
immortality worth having lies in the developing and maturing of
that diviner part in him which can conceive and share the divine
life--of the soul. And for the rest, he will trust in the
indulgence and pity of the power which brought forth this strangely
mingled world.
So much for the minds capable of such ideas. For the masses, in the
future, it seems to me that charitable and social organization will
be all-important. If the simpler Christian ideas can clothe
themselves in such organization--and I believe they can and are
even now beginning to do it--their effect on the democracy may be
incalculable. If not, then God will fulfil Himself in other ways.
But "dream" as it may be, it seems to many of us, a dream worth
trying to realize in a world which contains your seven millions of
persons in France, who will have nothing to say to religious
beliefs, or the 200,000 persons in South London alone, amongst
whom, according to the _Record_, Christianity has practically no
existence.
And the letter ends with a plea that the faith which animated T. H.
Green might fitly be described by the words of the Psalm, "my soul is
athirst for God, for the living God."
To this Mr. Gladstone replied immediately:
ST. JAMES'S STREET.
_April 16, 1888._
MY DEAR MRS. WARD,--
I do not at all doubt that your conception of _Robert Elsmere_
includes much of what is expressed in the opening verses of Psalm
42. I am more than doubtful whether he could impart it to Elgood
St., and I wholly disbelieve that Elgood St. could hand it on from
generation to generation. You have much courage, but I doubt
whether even you are brave enough to think that, fourteen centuries
after its foundation, Elgood St. could have written the _Imitation
of Christ_.
And my meaning about Mr. Green was to hint at what seems to me the
unutterable strangeness of his passionately beseeching philosophy
to open to him the communion for which he thirsted, when he had a
better source nearer hand.
It is like a farmer under the agricultural difficulty who has to
migrate from England and plants himself in the middle of the
Sahara.
But I must abstain from stimulating you. At Oxford I sought to
avoid pricking you and rather laid myself open--because I thought
it not fair to ask you for statements which might give me points
for reply.
Mr. Gladstone evidently believed he had been as mild as milk--he knew
not the terror of his own "drawn brows!"
_Mrs. Ward to Mr. Gladstone._
_April 17, 1888._
I think I must write a few words in answer to your letter of
yesterday, in view of your approaching article which fills me with
so much interest and anxiety. If I put what I have to say badly or
abruptly, please forgive me. My thoughts are so full of this
terrible loss of my dear uncle Matthew Arnold, to whom I was deeply
attached, that it seems difficult to turn to anything else.
And yet I feel a sort of responsibility laid upon me with regard to
Mr. Green, whom you may possibly mention in your article. There are
many people living who can explain his thought much better than I
can. But may I say with regard to your letter of yesterday, that in
turning to philosophy, that is to the labour of reason and thought,
for light on the question of man's whence and whither, Mr. Green as
I conceive it, only obeyed an urgent and painful necessity. "The
parting with the Christian mythology is the rending asunder of
bones and marrow"--words which I have put into Grey's mouth--were
words of Mr. Green's to me. It was the only thing of the sort I
ever heard him say--he was a man who never spoke of his
feelings--but it was said with a penetrating force and sincerity
which I still remember keenly. A long intellectual travail had
convinced him that the miraculous Christian story was untenable;
but speculatively he gave it up with grief and difficulty, and
practically, to his last hour, he clung to all the forms and
associations of the old belief with a wonderful affection. With
regard to conformity to Church usage and repression of individual
opinion he and I disagreed a good deal.
If you do speak of him, will you look at his two Lay Sermons, of
which I enclose my copy?--particularly the second one, which was
written eight years after the first, and to my mind expresses his
thought more clearly.
Some of the letters which have reached me lately about the book
have been curious and interesting. A vicar of a church in the East
End, who seems to have been working among the poor for forty years,
says, "I could not help writing; in your book you seemed to grasp
me by the hand and follow me right on through my own life
experiences." And an Owens College Professor, who appears to have
thought and read much of these things, writes to a third person, à
propos of Elsmere, that the book has grasped "the real force at
work in driving so many to give up the Christian creed. It is not
the scientific (in the loose modern sense of the word), still less
the philosophical difficulties, which influence them, but it is the
education of the historic sense which is disintegrating
faith."--Only the older forms of faith, as I hold, that the new may
rise! But I did not mean to speak of myself.
When the famous article--entitled "Robert Elsmere and the Battle of
Belief"--appeared in the May _Nineteenth Century_, there was nothing but
courtesy between the two opponents. Mrs. Ward sent the G.O.M. a copy of
the book, with a picture of Catherine's valley bound into it, and he
replied that the volumes would "form a very pleasant recollection of
what I trust has been a 'tearless battle.'" Many of the papers now
reviewed both book and article together, and the _Pall Mall_ ironically
congratulated the Liberal Party on "Mr. Gladstone's new preoccupation."
"For two and a half years," it declared, the G.O.M. had been able to
think of nothing but Home Rule and Ireland. "But Mrs. Ward has changed
all that." The excitement among the reading public was very great. It
penetrated even to the streets, for one of us overheard a panting lady,
hugging a copy of the _Nineteenth Century_, saying to her companion as
she fought her way into an omnibus, "Oh, my dear, _have_ you read Weg on
Bobbie?" Naturally the sale received a fresh stimulus. Two more
three-volume editions disappeared during May, and a seventh and last
during June. Then there was a pause before the appearance of the Popular
or 6s. edition, which came out at the end of July with an impression of
5,000. It was immediately bought up; 7,000 more were disposed of during
August, and the sale went on till the end of the year at the rate of
about 4,000 a month. Even during 1889 it continued steadily, until by
January, 1890, 44,000 copies of the 6_s._ edition had been sold. But as
the sale had then slackened Mr. Smith decided to try the experiment of a
half-crown edition. 20,000 of this were sold by the following November,
but the drop had already set in and during 1891 the total only rose to
23,000. But even so, the sale of these three editions in the United
Kingdom alone had amounted to 70,500.
All through the spring and summer of 1888 letters poured in upon Mrs.
Ward by the score and the hundred, both from known and unknown
correspondents, so that her husband and sister-in-law had almost to
build a hedge around her and to insist that she should not answer them
all herself. Those which the book provoked from her old friends,
however, especially those of more orthodox views than her own, were
often of poignant interest. The Warden of Keble wrote her six sheets of
friendly argument and remonstrance. Mr. Creighton wrote her a letter
full of closely reasoned criticism of Elsmere's position, to which she
made the following reply:
_March 13, 1888._
MY DEAR MAX,--
I have been deeply interested by your letter, and am very grateful
to you for the fairness and candour of it. Perhaps it is an
affectation to say always that one likes candour!--but I certainly
like it from you, and should be aggrieved if you did not give it
me.
I think you only evade the whole issue raised by the book when you
say that Elsmere was never a Christian. Of course in the case of
every one who goes through such a change, it is easy to say this;
it is extremely difficult to prove it; and all probability is
against its being true in every case. What do you really fall back
upon when you say that if Elsmere had been a Christian he could not
have been influenced as he was? Surely on the "inward witness." But
the "inward witness," or as you call it "the supernatural life,"
belongs to every religion that exists. The Andaman islander even
believes himself filled by his God, the devout Buddhist and
Mahommedan certainly believe themselves under divine and
supernatural direction, and have been inspired by the belief to
heroic efforts and sufferings. What is, in essence and
fundamentally, to distinguish your "inner witness" from theirs? And
if the critical observer maintains that this "supernatural life" is
in all cases really an intense life of the imagination, differently
peopled and conditioned, what answer have you?
None, unless you appeal to the facts and _fruits_ of Christianity.
The Church has always done so. Only the Quaker or the Quietist can
stand mainly on the "inward witness."
The fruits we are not concerned with. But it is as to the _facts_
that Elsmere and, as I conceive, our whole modern time is really
troubled. An acute Scotch economist was talking to Humphry the
other day about the religious change in the Scotch lowlands. "It is
so pathetic," he said: "when I was young religion was the main
interest, the passionate occupation of the whole people. Now when I
go back there, as I constantly do, I find everything changed. The
old keenness is gone, the people's minds are turning to other
things; there is a restless consciousness, coming they know not
whence, but invading every stratum of life, that _the evidence is
not enough_." There, on another scale, is Elsmere's experience writ
large. Why is he to be called "very ill-trained," and his
impressions "accidental" because he undergoes it?... What convinced
_me_ finally and irrevocably was two years of close and constant
occupation with the materials of history in those centuries which
lie near to the birth of Christianity, and were the critical
centuries of its development. I then saw that to adopt the witness
of those centuries to matters of fact, without translating it at
every step into the historical language of our own day--a language
which the long education of time has brought closer to the
realities of things--would be to end by knowing nothing, actually
and truly, about their life. And if one is so to translate
Augustine and Jerome, nay even Suetonius and Tacitus, when they
talk to you of raisings from the dead, and making blind men to see,
why not St. Paul and the Synoptics?
I don't think you have ever felt this pressure, though within the
limits of your own work I notice that you are always so translating
the language of the past. But those who have, cannot escape it by
any appeal to the "inward witness." They too, or many of them,
still cling to a religious life of the imagination, nay perhaps
they live for it, but it must be one where the expansive energies
of life and reason cannot be always disturbing and tormenting,
which is less vulnerable and offers less prey to the plunderer than
that which depends on the orthodox Christian story.
Another old friend, Mrs. Edward Conybeare, wrote to contend that the
"mere life and death of the carpenter's son of Nazareth could never have
proved the vast historical influence for good which you allow it to be,"
had that life ended in
"nothing but a Syrian grave."
Mrs. Ward replied to her as follows:--
_May 16, 1888._
MY DEAR FRANCES,
It was very interesting to me to get your letter about _Robert
Elsmere_. I wish we could have a good talk about it. Writing is
very difficult to me, for the letters about it are overwhelming,
and I am always as you know more or less hampered by writer's
cramp.
I am thinking of "A Conversation" for one of the summer numbers of
the _Nineteenth Century_, in which some of the questions which are
only suggested in the book may be carried a good deal further. For
the more I think and read the more plain the great lines of that
distant past become to me, the more clearly I see God at work
there, through the forms of thought, the beliefs, the capacities of
the first three centuries, as I see Him at work now, through the
forms of thought, the beliefs and capacities of our own.
Christianity was the result of many converging lines of thought and
development. The time was ripe for a moral revolution, and a great
personality, and the great personality came. That a life of
importance and far-reaching influence could have been lived within
the sphere of religion at that moment, or for centuries afterwards,
without undergoing a process of miraculous amplification, would, I
think, have been impossible. The generations before and the
generations after supply illustration after illustration of it.
That Jesus, our dear Master, partly shared this tendency of his
time and was partly bewildered and repelled by it, is very plain to
me.
As to the belief in the Resurrection, I have many things to say
about it, and shall hope to say them in public when I have pondered
them long enough. But I long to say them not negatively, for
purposes of attack, but positively, for purposes of
reconstruction. It is about the new forms of faith and the new
grounds of combined action that I really care intensely. I want to
challenge those who live in doubt and indecision from year's end to
year's end, to think out the matter, and for their children's sake
to count up what remains to them, and to join frankly for purposes
of life and conduct with those who are their spiritual fellows. It
is the levity or the cowardice that will not think, or the
indolence and self-indulgence that is only too glad to throw off
restraints, which we have to fear. But in truth for religion, or
for the future, I have no fear at all. God is his own vindication
in human life.
But apart from the religious argument, the characters in _Robert
Elsmere_ aroused the greatest possible interest, especially perhaps that
of Catherine.
"As an observer of the human ant-hill, quite impartial by this
time," wrote Prof. Huxley, "I think your picture of one of the
deeper aspects of our troubled times admirable. You are very hard
on the philosophers: I do not know whether Langham or the Squire is
the more unpleasant--but I have a great deal of sympathy with the
latter, so I hope he is not the worse.
"If I may say so, I think the picture of Catherine is the gem of
the book. She reminds me of her namesake of Siena--and would as
little have failed in any duty, however gruesome. You remember
Sodoma's picture?"
The appreciation of her French friends was always very dear to Mrs.
Ward, and amongst them too the book was eagerly read by a small circle,
though, as Scherer warned her, the subject could never become a popular
one in France. But both he and M. Taine were greatly excited by it,
while M. André Michel of the Louvre, to whom she had entrusted the copy
which she desired to present to M. Taine, wrote her a delightful account
of his embassy:
PARIS.
_ce 31 janvier, 1889._
CHERE MADAME,--
Votre lettre m'a été une bien agréable surprise et une bien
intéressante lecture. Je l'ai immédiatement communiquée à M.
Taine, en lui remettant l'exemplaire que vous lui destiniez de
_Robert Elsmere_ et je vous avoue qu'en me rendant chez lui à cet
effet, je me _rengorgeais_ un peu, très-fier de servir
d'intermédiaire entre l'auteur de _Robert Elsmere_ et celui de la
_Littérature Anglaise_. L'âne portant des reliques chez son évêque
ne marchait pas plus solennellement!
M. Taine a été très-touché de cet hommage venant de vous, et je
pense qu'il vous en a déjà remercié lui-même. J'aurais voulu que
vous eussiez pu entendre--incognito--avec quelle vivacité de
sympathie et d'admiration il parlait de votre livre. Pendant
plusieurs jours, il n'a pas été question d'autre chose chez lui.
The cumulative effect of all these letters, both approving and
disapproving; of the preachings on Robert's opinions that began with Mr.
Haweis in May, and continued at intervals throughout the summer; of the
general atmosphere of celebrity that began to surround her, was
extremely upsetting to so sensitive a nature as Mrs. Ward's, and much of
it was and remained distasteful to her. But fame had its lighter sides.
There were the inevitable sonnets, beginning
"I thank you, Lady, for your book so pure,"
or
"Hail to thee, gentle leader, puissant knight!"--
there were inquiries as to the address of the "New Brotherhood of
Christ," "so that next time we are in London we may attend some of its
meetings," and there was a gentleman who demanded to know "the opus no.
of the Andante and Scherzo of Beethoven mentioned on p. 239, and of Hans
Sachs's Immortal Song quoted on p. 177. I am in want of a little fresh
music for one of my daughters and shall esteem your kind reply." And
finally there was the following letter, which must be transcribed in
full:
DEAR MADAM,--
Trusting to your Clemency, in seeking your advice, knowing my
sphere in life, to be so far below your's. My Mother, who is a
Cook-Housekeeper, but very fond of Literature, Poetry
("unfortunately"), in her younger days brought out a small volume,
upon her own account, a copy of which Her Majesty graciously
accepted. Tennyson considered it most "meritorious," Caryle most
"creditable." But what I am asking your advice upon is her
"Autography," her Cook's Career, which has been a checquered one.
She feels quite sure, that if it were brought out by an abler hand,
it would be widely sought and read, at least by two classes "my
Ladies" and Cooks. The matter would be truth, names and places
strictously ficticious. With much admiration and respect,
I am, Madam,
Yours Obediently,
A. A.
History does not record what reply Mrs. Ward made to this interesting
proposal, but no doubt she took it all as part of the great and amusing
game that Fate was playing with her. As to that game--"I have still
constant letters and reviews," she wrote to her father on July 17, "and
have been more lionized this last month than ever.--But a little
lionizing goes a long way! One's sense of humour protests, not to speak
of anything more serious, and I shall be _very_ glad to get to Borough
next week. As to my work, it is all in uncertainty. For the present Miss
Sellers is coming to me in the country, and I shall work hard at Latin
and Greek, especially the Greek of the New Testament."
And to her old friend, Mrs. Johnson, she wrote: "Being lionized, dear
Bertha, is the foolishest business on earth; I have just had five weeks
of it, and if I don't use it up in a novel some day it's a pity. The
book has been strangely, wonderfully successful and has made me many new
friends. But I love my old ones so much best!" This latter sentiment is
expressed again in a letter to Mr. Ward: "Strange how tenacious are
one's first friendships! No other friends can ever be to me quite like
Charlotte or Louise or Bertha or Clara.[13] They know all there is to
know, bad and good--and with them one is always at ease."
That autumn they went off on a round of visits, staying first at
Merevale with Mrs. Dugdale, whose husband had been killed three years
before in his own mine near by--a story of simple heroism which moved
Mrs. Ward profoundly, so that years afterwards she used it in her own
tale of _George Tressady_. Then to Sir Robert and Lady Cunliffe, with
whom they went over to see the "old wizard" of Hawarden, and spent a
wonderful hour in his company.
To her old friend, J. R. Thursfield (a staunch Home Ruler), she wrote
the following account of it:
_September 14, 1888._
"Where do you think we spent the afternoon of the day before
yesterday? You would have been _so_ much worthier of it than we!
The Cunliffes took us over to tea at Hawarden and the G.O.M. was
delightful. First of all he showed us the old Norman keep, skipping
up the steps in a way to make a Tory positively ill to see, talking
of every subject under the sun--Sir Edward Watkin and their new
line of railway, border castles, executions in the sixteenth
century, Villari's _Savonarola_, Damiens and his tortures--'all for
sticking half-an-inch of penknife into that beast Louis
XV!'--modern poetry, Tupper, Lewis Morris, Lord Houghton and Heaven
knows what besides, and all with a charm, a courtesy, an _élan_, an
eagle glance of eye that sent regretful shivers down one's Unionist
backbone. He showed us all his library--his literary table, and his
political table, and his new toy, the strong fire-proof room he has
just built to hold his 60,000 letters, the papers which will some
day be handed over to his biographer. His vigour both of mind and
body was astonishing--he may well talk, as he did, of 'the foolish
dogmatism which refuses to believe in centenarians.'"
À propos of this last remark, Mrs. Ward filled in the tale on her return
by telling us how he turned upon her with flashing eye and demanded:
"Did it ever occur to you, Mrs. Ward, that Lord Palmerston was Prime
Minister at 81?" He himself was to surpass that record by returning to
power at 82.
From the Cunliffes' they also made an expedition to the Peak country,
which Mrs. Ward wished to explore for purposes of her next book (_David
Grieve_), now already taking shape in her mind--and then travelled up to
Scotland to stay at a great house to whose mistress, Lady Wemyss, she
was devoted. From one who was afterwards to be known as the portrayer of
English country-house life the following impressions may be of interest:
_To Mrs. A. H. Johnson_
FOX GHYLL, AMBLESIDE,
_October 21, 1888_.
...Yes, we had many visits and on the whole very pleasant ones. In
Derbyshire I saw a farm and a moorland which I shall try to make
the British public see some day. Then on we went to the Lyulph
Stanleys', saw them, and Castle Howard and Rivaulx, and journeyed
on by the coast to Redcar and the Hugh Bells. There we found Alice
Green, and had a merry time. Afterwards came a week at Gosford,
whereof the pleasure was mixed. Lady Wemyss I love more than ever,
but the party in the house was large and very smart, and with the
best will in the world on both sides it is difficult for plain
literary folk who don't belong to it to get much entertainment out
of a circle where everybody is cousin of everybody else, and on
Christian name terms, and where the women at any rate, though
pleasant enough, are taken up with "places," jewels and Society
with a big S. I don't mean to be unfair. Most of them are good and
kindly, and have often unsuspected "interests," but naturally the
paraphernalia of their position plays a large part in their lives,
and makes a sort of hedge round them through which it is hard to
get at the genuine human being.
Perhaps our most delightful visit was a Saturday to Monday with Mr.
Balfour, at Whittinghame. There life is lived, intellectually, on
the widest and freest of all possible planes, and the master of it
all is one to whom nature has given a peculiar charm and magnetism,
in addition to all that he has made for himself by toil and
trouble.
...I am a little disturbed by the announcement of a _Quarterly_
article on _R.E._ It must be hostile--perhaps an attack in the old
_Quarterly_ fashion: well, if so I shall be in good company! But I
don't want to have to answer--I want to be free to think new
thoughts and imagine fresh things.
When the _Quarterly_ article appeared a few days later she found it
courteous enough in tone, but its attitude of complacent superiority
towards the whole critical process, which it described as "a phase of
thought long ago lived through and practically dead," stung her to
action and made her feel that some reply--to this and Gladstone
together--was now unavoidable. She owed it to her own position--not as a
scholar, for she never claimed that title, but as an interpreter of
scholars and their work to the modern public. But "If I do reply," she
wrote to her husband, "I shall make it as substantive and constructive
as possible. All the attacking, destructive part is so distasteful to
me. I can only go through with it as a necessary element in a whole
which is not negative but positive." But she could not be induced even
by Mr. Knowles's persuasions to make it a regular "reply" to Mr.
Gladstone, whose name is not once mentioned throughout the article[14];
she threw her argument instead into dialogue form, so keeping the
artistic ground which she had used in the novel, and replying to the
_Quarterly_ or to the G.O.M. rather by allusion than by direct argument.
The article was very widely read and certainly carried her cause a stage
further; it was felt that here was something that had come to stay, that
must be reckoned with, and her skilful use of the admissions made in the
Church Congress that year as to the date and authorship of certain books
of the Old Testament filled her readers with a vague feeling that
perhaps after all these things must be faced for the New Testament also.
* * * * *
Meanwhile in America the hubbub produced by _Robert Elsmere_ had far
exceeded anything that occurred on this side of the Atlantic. Those were
the days before International Copyright, when any American publisher was
free to issue the works of British authors without their consent and
without payment, and when if an "authorized edition" was issued by some
reputable firm which had paid the author for his rights, it could be
undersold the next day by some adventurous "pirate." Messrs. Macmillan
had bought the American rights of _Robert Elsmere_ for a small sum and
had issued it at $1.50 in April, but as soon as it began to excite
attention, and especially after the appearance of Gladstone's article,
the pirate firms rushed in and raged furiously with each other and with
Macmillan's to get the book out at the lowest possible price. One
firm--Messrs. Lowell & Co.--which had sold tens of thousands of copies,
magnanimously sent the author a cheque for £100, but this was the only
payment which Mrs. Ward ever received for _Robert Elsmere_ from an
American publisher. Some of the incidents of the internecine war between
the pirates themselves for control of the _Robert Elsmere_ market are
still worth recording. They were summed up in a well-informed article in
the _Manchester Guardian_ in March, 1889, entitled _The "Book-Rats" of
the United States_:
"In America the publisher's lot is not a happy one. If he is
honest, he pays his author, and upon the first assurance of success
sees nine-tenths of his lawful profits swept away by the incursions
of pirates. If he is dishonest, he does not pay his author, but in
hot haste reprints in cheap and nasty material, with one object
alone--to undersell the legitimate publisher. A host more follow
suit with new reprints in still cheaper and nastier material, till,
under the pretence of giving cheap literature to the million, the
culminating point is reached in the man who sells at a quarter of
cost price to drive his rivals out of the field. This is what
happened the other day in Boston over the sale of _Robert Elsmere_,
a book which has there achieved an unparalleled success, and
abundantly illustrates the inequality of the present system of no
copyright. In England between thirty and forty thousand copies have
already been sold in the nine months since it was published, and
the book is selling steadily at the rate of some 700 a week. In
America the sale is estimated at 200,000 copies, of which 150,000
are in pirated editions. One honest pirate purges his conscience by
the magnificent gift of £100, which is likely to be the first and
last instalment of that 'handsome competence which the American
reading public,' says a Rhode Island newspaper, 'owes to Mrs.
Ward.' A hundred pounds, representing just one shilling and
fourpence per hundred copies upon all the pirated editions! And the
author must be thankful for such mercies; rights she has none over
her own creation, which pervades the States from end to end, and
is not only a library in itself, but has called into existence so
much polemical literature that a leading New York paper gives
solemn warning to contributors that for the future sermons on
_Robert Elsmere_ will only be published at the ordinary
advertisement rates. A Buffalo advertisement cries, 'Who has yet
touched _Robert Elsmere_ at ten cents?' only to be taken down by
Jordan Marsh and Co., the 'Whiteleys' of Boston, who offered the
book at four cents. Twopence for a book which extends over 400
pages in close-printed octavo! The stroke told, almost too
successfully for its contrivers. It is said that next day the shop
doors were besieged by a crowd like the surging throng at the
entrance to the Lyceum pit on a first night. A queue extended
across the street. For three days the enterprising pirate had the
field to himself; then he raised his price again; he had lost some
ten cents on every copy, but he had crushed his rivals."
The achievement of one still more enterprising firm, however, escaped
the notice of this correspondent. The Balsam Fir Soap Co., being anxious
to launch their new soap upon the market, made the following
announcement:
TO THE PUBLIC
We beg to announce that we have purchased an edition of the Hyde
Park Company's _Robert Elsmere_, and also their edition of _Robert
Elsmere and the Battle of Belief_--a criticism by the Right Hon. W.
E. Gladstone, M.P.
These two books will be presented to each purchaser of a single
cake of Balsam Fir Soap.
Respectfully,
THE MAINE BALSAM FIR CO.
Thus was poor Robert, with his doubts and dreams, his labours and his
faith, given away with a cake of soap!
But this was not all, nor even the worst. When the boom was still at its
height, in the spring of 1889, Mrs. Ward was horrified to hear that a
full-blown dramatized version of the book, by William Gillette, had
actually been produced in Boston, with a "comedy element," as the
newspaper report described it, "involving an English exquisite and a
horsey husband," thrown in, the Squire and Grey eliminated, and Langham
"endowed with such nobility of character as ultimately to marry Rose."
She at once cabled her protest with some energy and succeeded in getting
the further performance of the play stopped; but hardly was this episode
ended than another followed on its heels.
"A writer in the New York _Tribune_," wrote the _Glasgow Herald_ in
April, 1889, "exposes a most barefaced trick of trading upon Mrs.
Humphry Ward's name. A continuation, he says, of _Robert Elsmere_
has already been begun by an American publisher, and advance
sheets, containing thrilling instalments of the romantic adventures
of _Robert Elsmere's Daughter_, are being scattered broadcast over
the length and breadth of the United States. The industrious agents
of the publisher of this sheet have been busily engaged in
inserting sample chapters of this new novel under the doors of
houses all over New York. This, however, is not the worst feature
of the trick. From the title of the story the impression sought to
be conveyed is that Mrs. Humphry Ward, the authoress of _Robert
Elsmere_, is responsible, too, for _Robert Elsmere's Daughter_, the
headings of the story being arranged in this specious shape:
'_Robert Elsmere's Daughter_--a companion story to _Robert
Elsmere_--by Mrs. Humphry Ward.'"
It was no wonder that the scandal of these events was used by the
promoters of the International Copyright Bill then before Congress as
one of their most powerful arguments; for there were many honourable
publishing firms in America which abhorred these proceedings and were
only anxious to regularize their relations with British authors. Mr.
George Haven Putnam, head of the firm of G. P. Putnam's Sons, and the
International Copyright Committee which he formed, had already been
working in this direction for some years; but the opposition was
strenuous, and it was only in March, 1891, that the Copyright Bill which
was to have so great an effect on Mrs. Ward's fortunes actually became
law in the United States. Even before that, however, very flattering
offers were made to her by American publishers--especially by Mr. S. S.
McClure, founder of the then youthful _McClure's Magazine_--for the
right of publishing the "authorized version" of her next book. Mr.
McClure tried to beguile her into writing him a "novelette," or a
"romance of Bible times," but Mrs. Ward was not to be moved. She had
already begun work upon her next book (_David Grieve_), and all she said
in writing to her sister (Mrs. Huxley) was: "This American, Mr. McClure,
is a wonderful man. He has offered me £1,000 for the serial rights of a
story as long as _Milly and Olly_! Naturally I am not going to do it,
but it is amusing." To her father she wrote in more serious mood about
the American boom:
"It is a great moral strain, this extraordinary success. I feel
often as though it were a struggle to preserve one's full
individuality, and one's sense of truth and proportion in the teeth
of it. There is no help but to look away from oneself and
everything that pertains to self, to the Eternal and Divine things,
to live penetrated with the feebleness and poverty of self and the
greatness of God."
Yet naturally she enjoyed the many letters from Americans of all ranks
and classes which reached her during the autumn and winter of 1888. The
veteran Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote to her in his most charming vein,
speaking of the book as a "medicated novel, which will do much to
improve the secretions and clear the obstructed channels of the decrepit
theological system." W. R. Thayer, afterwards the biographer of Cavour,
wrote:
"The extraordinary popularity of _Robert Elsmere_ is a most
significant symptom of the spiritual conditions of this country. No
book since _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ has had so sudden and wide a
diffusion among all classes of readers; and I believe that no other
book of equal seriousness ever had so quick a hearing. I have seen
it in the hands of nursery-maids, and of shop-girls behind the
counter; of frivolous young women, who read every novel that is
talked about; of business men, professors, students, and even
schoolboys. The newspapers and periodicals are still discussing it,
and, perhaps the best sign of all, it has been preached against by
the foremost clergymen of all denominations."
And a sturdy rationalist, Mr. W. D. Childs, thus recorded his protest:
"I regret the popularity of _Robert Elsmere_ in this country. Our
western people are like sheep in such matters. They will not see
that the book was written for a people with a State Church on its
hands, that a gross exaggeration of the importance of religion was
necessary. It will revive interest in theology and retard the
progress of rationalism.
"Am I not right in this? You surely cannot think it good for
individuals or for societies to take religion seriously, when there
is so much economic disorder in the world, when the mass of
physical and mental suffering is so obviously reducible only by
material means."
It was very delightful, of course, to be making a little money from the
book, after so many years of strenuous work, and though the sum she had
earned was still a modest one (about £3,200 by January, 1889), it
enabled her and her husband to make plans for the future and to embark
on the purchase of some land for building in the still unspoilt country
to the east of Haslemere. Here, on Grayswood Hill, overlooking the vast
tangle of the Weald as far as Chanctonbury Ring and the South Downs, a
red-brick house of moderate size, cunningly designed by Mr. Robson,
gradually arose during 1889 and the first part of 1890; but while it was
still building a fortunate accident placed in our way the chance of
living for three months in a far different habitation--John Hampden's
wonderful old house near Great Missenden, which was then in a state of
interregnum, and might be rented for a small sum.
"It will be quite an adventure," wrote Mrs. Ward to her publisher
in July, 1889, "for in spite of the beauty and romance of the place
there is hardly enough furniture of a ramshackle kind in it to
enable us to camp for three months in tolerable comfort! But by
dint of sending down a truck load of baths, carpets and saucepans
from home we shall get on, and our expenses will be less than if we
took a villa at Westgate."
And to Mrs. Johnson, of Oxford, who was coming with her whole family to
stay there, Mrs. Ward wrote three days after her arrival:
"The furniture of the house is decrepit, scanty and decayed, but it
has breeding and refinement, and is a thousand times preferable to
any luxurious modern stuff. I am _perfectly_ happy here, and bless
the lucky chance which drew our attention to the advertisement. I
will not spoil the old house and gardens and park for you by
describing them--but they are a dream, and the out-at-elbowness of
everything is an additional charm."
So for three months we stayed at Hampden, revelling in its beauty and
its spaciousness, learning to know the Chiltern country with its
chalk-downs and beech-woods, entertaining many visitors, including the
much-loved Professor Huxley, and watching anxiously for the ghost that
walked in the passage outside the tapestry-room on moonlight nights. It
never walked for us, though Mrs. Ward sat up many times to woo it, but
there were plenty of ghosts of another sort in a house that had
sheltered Queen Elizabeth on one of her "progresses," that still
possessed the chair in which John Hampden had sat when they came to
arrest him for ship-money, and that had guarded his body at the last,
when his Greencoats bore it thither from Thame to lie in the great hall
for one more night before its burial in the little church across the
garden. At first there were no lamps, and we groped about with stumps of
candles after dark, but gradually all the more glaring deficiencies were
remedied and Mrs. Ward settled down to a happy three months of work on
her new novel, _David Grieve_. But as she wrote of her two wild children
on the Derbyshire moors, or of young David and his books in Manchester,
the very different scene around her formed itself in her mind into a new
setting, from which arose in course of time _Marcella_.
Meanwhile it was not Hampden's ghost but Elsmere's that still haunted
her, in the sense that the "New Brotherhood" with which the novel ended
would not die with it, but struggled dumbly in the author's mind for
expression in some living form. Some time before she had been deeply
impressed by a visit she had paid to Toynbee Hall with "Max Creighton,"
as she wrote to her father, when she found that "in the library there
_R.E._ had been read to pieces, and in a workmen's club which had just
been started several ideas had been taken from the "New Brotherhood."
The experience had remained with her; she had brooded and dreamt over
it, and now when she returned to London in the autumn of 1889 she began
for the first time to try to work out the idea in consultation with
certain chosen friends. "Lord Carlisle came and had a long talk with M.
about a proposed Unitarian Toynbee somewhere in South London"--so wrote
the little sister-in-law (herself an orthodox Christian) in her journal
on November 11, 1889. And a little later: "Mr. Stopford Brooke came and
had a long talk with her about a 'New Brotherhood' they hope to start
with Lord Carlisle and a few others to help."
Was it to be a new religion, or a re-vivifying of the old? The impulse
to build up, to re-create, was hot within her; could she not appeal to
her generation to help her in following out this impulse towards some
practical goal? Was there not room for another Toynbee, inspired still
more definitely than the first with the ideals of a simpler
Christianity? The dæmon drove; surely the very success of her book
showed that this was the need of the new age in which she lived. She
plunged into the task, and only time and Fate were to reveal that the
"new religion" was doomed to take no outward form, but to work itself
out in ways undreamt of as yet by the author of _Robert Elsmere_.
CHAPTER V
UNIVERSITY HALL--_DAVID GRIEVE_ AND "STOCKS"
1889-1892
The conversations with Stopford Brooke and Lord Carlisle mentioned in
the last chapter contained the germ of all that public work which was to
claim henceforth so large a share of Mrs. Ward's life. Up to this point
she had hardly taken any part in London committees; indeed, those
spacious days were still comparatively free from them, and it is
remembered that when the first meeting of the group with whom she was
discussing her new scheme took place at Russell Square,[15] one
irreverent child in the schoolroom next door said to its fellow, "What's
a committee?" "Oh," said the elder, in the manner of one who imparts
information, "it's when the grown-ups get together, and first they
think, and then they talk, and then they think again." At the moment no
sound was audible through the wall. "They must be thinking now," said
the instructor carelessly, leaving his junior to the solemn belief, held
for many years, that a committee was a sort of prayer-meeting.
That first group, who discussed and finally approved Mrs. Ward's draft
circular announcing the foundation of a "Hall for Residents" in London,
consisted of the following men and women besides herself: Dr. Martineau,
Dr. James Drummond, of Manchester College, Oxford, Mr. Stopford Brooke,
Lord Carlisle, Rev. W. Copeland Bowie, Dr. Estlin Carpenter, Mr.
Frederick Nettlefold, the Dowager Countess Russell, Miss Frances Power
Cobbe, and lastly, Dr. Blake Odgers, Q.C., who acted as Hon. Treasurer.
Mr. Copeland Bowie, who helped Mrs. Ward for several months as a "kind
of assistant secretary," has recorded his impressions of those crowded
days in an article which he wrote for the _Inquirer_ on April 3, 1920:
"We met in the dining-room at Russell Square. Mrs. Ward was the
moving and executive force; the rest of us were simply admiring and
sympathetic spectators of her enterprise and zeal. It is delightful
to recall her abounding activity and enthusiasm. Difficulties were
overcome, criticisms were answered, work was carried on with
extraordinary devotion and skill. Several meetings were devoted to
the consideration of how to proceed, for the pathway was beset by
many difficulties. At last, early in March, 1890, a scheme for the
establishment of a Settlement at University Hall, Gordon Square, in
a part of the old building belonging to Dr. Williams's Trustees,
was agreed upon. The religious note is very prominent. University
Hall would encourage 'an improved popular teaching of the Bible and
the history of religion, in order to show the adaptability of the
faith of the past to the needs of the present.'"
The aims of the new movement were, in fact, set forth in the original
circular in these words:
"It has been determined to establish a Hall for residents in
London, somewhat on the lines of Toynbee Hall, with the following
objects in view:
"1. To provide a fresh rallying point and enlarged means of common
religious action for all those to whom Christianity, whether by
inheritance or process of thought, has become a system of practical
conduct, based on faith in God, and on the inspiring memory of a
great teacher, rather than a system of dogma based on a unique
revelation. Such persons especially, who, while holding this point
of view, have not yet been gathered into any existing religious
organization, are often greatly in want of those helps towards the
religious life, whether in thought or action, which are so readily
afforded by the orthodox bodies to their own members. The first aim
of the new Hall will be a religious aim.
[Illustration: MRS. WARD IN 1889 (Bassano, photo.)]
"2. The Hall will endeavour to promote an improved popular teaching
of the Bible and of the history of religion. To this end
continuous teaching will be attempted under its roof on such
subjects as Old and New Testament criticism, the history of
Christianity, and that of non-Christian religions. A special effort
will be made to establish Sunday teaching both at the Hall and, by
the help of the Hall residents, in other parts of London, for
children of all classes. The children of well-to-do parents are
often worse off in this matter of careful religious teaching than
those of their poorer neighbours. There can be little doubt that
many persons are deeply dissatisfied with the whole state of
popular religious teaching in England. Either it is purely
dogmatic, taking no account of the developments of modern thought
and criticism, or it is colourless and perfunctory, the result of a
compromise which satisfies and inspires nobody. Yet that a simpler
Christianity can be frankly and effectively taught, so as both to
touch the heart and direct the will, is the conviction and familiar
experience of many persons in England, America, France and Holland.
But the new teaching wants organizing, deepening and extending. It
should be the aim of the proposed Hall to work towards such an
end."
It was natural that such ideals as these should appeal in a peculiar way
to the Unitarian community, and we find in fact that the first
subscription list, which guaranteed an income of about £700 to
University Hall for three years, contains a preponderance of Unitarian
names. Lord Carlisle and Mr. Stopford Brooke were in favour of calling
it frankly a Unitarian Settlement. "There is a life and spirit about the
things which are done by Dissenters," wrote Lord Carlisle, "which I
believe can never be got out of people who have a lingering feeling for
the Church of England." But the majority on the Committee, including
Mrs. Ward and Dr. Martineau, thought that this would be setting
unnecessary limits to the movement, which they rather intended to be a
leaven permeating the lump both of orthodoxy and of indifferentism. It
was therefore agreed not to use the word in the preliminary circular,
though all the world could see from the names on the Committee that the
tone of the new Settlement would be largely that of the younger and
freer Unitarianism which had founded Manchester College, Oxford. It was
one of Mrs. Ward's most characteristic achievements that while she
herself never sympathized with Unitarianism as an organization, she was
yet able to work closely with Unitarians in this her first great
enterprise, sharing with them their enthusiasm for the Christian message
and their austere devotion to truth, while herself cherishing that
"lingering feeling for the Church of England" which forbade her to
identify herself with any outside body while there was still hope of
influencing and widening the national Church. Yet for all practical
purposes the breach between the "new religion," as its critics
contemptuously dubbed it, and the Establishment was complete enough, and
the foundation of University Hall only confirmed the orthodox in their
disapproval of Mrs. Ward and all her works.
Besides its definitely religious aim, the new Settlement was to have a
well-marked social side as well. This is set forth in another paragraph
of the circular:
"It is intended that the Hall shall do its utmost to secure for its
residents opportunities for religious and social work, and for the
study of social problems, such as are possessed by the residents at
Toynbee Hall or those at Oxford House. There will be a certain
number of rooms in the Hall which can be used for social purposes,
for lectures, for recreative and continuation classes and so on.
Though the Hall itself is in one of the West Central Squares, it is
surrounded on three sides by districts crowded with poor. A room
could be taken for workers from the Hall in any of these districts
or in the Drury Lane neighbourhood. In addition, the Hall is close
to Gower Street Station, so that it would be comparatively easy for
the residents to take part in any of the organizations already
existing in the East or South of London, for the help of the poor
and the study of social problems."
And in spite of the religious ardour of its founders, it was in this
aspect of the work of University Hall that the germ of future
developments really lay. But the future lay hidden as yet from Mrs. Ward
and her gifted band of associates and fellow-workers.
Many difficulties were encountered in the appointment of a suitable
Warden, for a combination of qualities was required which was not easy
to find, especially in the limited circle of those whose views in
matters of faith agreed broadly with those of the Committee. Month after
month went by while Mrs. Ward and Dr. Martineau interviewed many
candidates, often assisted by Canon Barnett, of Toynbee, whose interest
in the new venture was as sincere as it was generous. Applications from
possible residents came in fast, showing that the work would not lack
support in that direction, but even in August the Warden was still to
seek. At length, however, in September, the ideal choice was made in Mr.
Philip Wicksteed, who was then holding the office of minister at the
Unitarian chapel in Little Portland Street. He was already beginning to
be widely known outside his regular work as a lecturer on Biblical
subjects and on Dante, and Mrs. Ward had already sounded him once or
twice in this matter of the Wardenship. But he had hitherto evaded it on
the ground that his election would identify the Hall with Unitarianism.
At last, however, Mrs. Ward won his acceptance at an interview she had
with him at Russell Square, in which she greeted him with the words "I
want to _wrestle_ with you!" He dealt frankly with her on the subject of
the religious aims of the Hall, and in a letter written to her a few
days after his acceptance said:
"You remember when first you spoke to me on this matter how I told
you that I had never been clear as to the exact thing contemplated
in the Hall, and had never felt that it had any programme. Under
those circumstances I felt that it would be false to myself and in
reality false to you to allow myself to be overcome by your
splendid faith and enthusiasm and take it up without any true
inspiration in pity that so noble a 'quest' should find no
knight-errant to try it.
"My work with you has considerably cleared my vision, and has
inspired me with growing _hopes_ for the institution, but I cannot
honestly say that it has given me any deep _faith_ in its success.
You know how anxious I have been throughout about our audience for
lectures, and how doubtful about the existence of any large public
seriously interested in Biblical studies. My fears are not allayed;
though I hope the result may put them to shame."
With Mr. Wicksteed's acceptance of the Wardenship, the arrangements for
lectures and the preparations for the reception of Residents were
pushed on apace, while the Committee decided that a formal opening
ceremony must be held in order to plant the flag of the
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