THE LIFE OF
MRS. HUMPHRY WARD

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

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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 5s. 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 S^te 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 S^te 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.

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 6s. 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.

‘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 new Settlement’s faith and ideals. The Portman Rooms were taken for the purpose; the venerable Dr. Martineau consented to be in the chair, and Mrs. Ward was to make the principal speech. She had never spoken in public before, and was genuinely terrified at the prospect (three years later she put into Marcella’s experience in the East End her own horror of extempore speaking); but she prepared her address with great care, and was afterwards told that her voice carried to the farthest limits of the room, packed as it was with a keenly expectant audience. Her plea was that the time had come for a reconstruction of the basis of Christian belief; that the results both of Darwinian inquiry and of historical criticism must be faced, especially in the teaching of children, but that when the “search for an exacter truth, which is the fate and mission of humanity” had been met, a possibility of faith remained which would be the future hope of the world. To the elucidation of this faith the efforts of the Hall, on its teaching and lecturing side, would be devoted. And in speaking of the “social and practical effort which is an essential part of our scheme,” she pleaded that it was “yet not its most distinctive nor its most vital part. The need of urging it on public attention is recognized in all camps. Yet, meanwhile, there are hundreds of men and women who spend themselves in these works of charity and mercy who are all the time inwardly starved, crying for something else, something more, if they could but get it. What matters to them, first and foremost—what would give fresh life to all their efforts—would be the provision of a new motive power, a new hope for the individual life in God, a new respect for man’s destiny. Let me recall you for a moment from the gospel of works to the great Pauline gospel of faith, and the inner life! It is in the bringing back of faith—not the faith which confuses legend with history, or puts authority in the place of knowledge, but the faith which springs from moral and spiritual fact, and may be day after day, and hour after hour, again verified by fact—that the great task of our generation lies.”

Thus was the new venture launched, amid a mingled chorus of admiration and criticism from that section of the world which was affected by the movement of ideas. The lecturing at University Hall was soon in full swing, and was maintained at a very high level during the years 1891 and 1892, so that when Mrs. Ward went on a speaking tour to some of the northern towns in the autumn of the latter year in order to appeal for funds for a further period of three years (an appeal in which she was completely successful), she was able to give a very remarkable account of it. Many courses on both Old and New Testament criticism had been given, by Mr. Wicksteed, by Dr. Estlin Carpenter, by M. Chavannes, of Leyden; on the Fourth Gospel by that fine scholar, Mr. Charles Hargrove; on Theism by Prof. Knight, and on the Gospel of St. Luke by Dr. Martineau himself. These latter took place on Sunday afternoons during the spring of 1891. “Sunday after Sunday,” said Mrs. Ward, “the Hall of Dr. Williams’s Library was crowded to the doors, and, I believe by many to whom the line of thought followed in the lectures was of quite fresh help and service; and it will be long indeed before many of us forget the last Sunday—the venerable form, the beautiful voice, the note of unconquerable hope as to the future of faith, and yet of unconquerable courage as to the rights of the mind! I at least shall always look back to that hour as to a moment of consecration for our young Institution, disclosing to us at once its opportunities and its responsibilities.” In the non-Biblical sphere Mrs. J. R. Green had given a series of lectures on the development of the English towns[16]; Miss Beatrice Potter (soon to become Mrs. Sidney Webb) a course on the Co-operative Movement, which became the foundation of her great book on that subject; Mr. Graham Wallas on “The English Citizen”; Mr. Stopford Brooke on “The English Poets of the Nineteenth Century”; while the Warden lectured to large audiences on Dante, and “ground away” (in his own words) at political economy, thinking aloud before his band of students and “forging forward on new lines.” It was all very stimulating, very much alive; but whether, as the months passed on, it was exactly carrying out the aims and intentions of that opening day, some sympathetic observers began to doubt.

“I was uneasy all the time,” wrote Mr. Wicksteed afterwards to J. P. T., “because though I thought I was working honestly and in a way usefully, yet I could never quite feel that the Settlement was doing the work it set out to do, or that it was quite justifying its subscription list. But I don’t believe your mother, in spite of a great measure of personal disappointment, ever had the smallest doubt or misgiving in this matter. She thoroughly believed in the significance and value of what was being done, and cared for it with a vivid faith and affection, and supported it with an inventive enthusiasm, that have always seemed to me the expression of a generosity and magnanimity of a type and quality that were quite distinctive.”

An energetic attempt was made to interest the young men employed in the big shops of Tottenham Court Road in the Hall’s activities; but the times were premature; not until the Great War had loosed the foundations of our society did the young men of Tottenham Court Road find their way into the Y.M.C.A. “The young men of Tottenham Court Road,” wrote Mr. Copeland Bowie, “gave no sign that they wished to partake of the food provided for them at University Hall.” Then, somewhat apart from the lecturing scheme of the Hall, there grew up the body of Residents, young men of divers attainments and tastes who were hard to mould into the original scheme, some of whom were even greatly concerned to show that they depended in no way for their ideas on the author of Robert Elsmere. Occasionally there were difficult moments at the Council meetings, when the Residents’ views clashed with those of the older members, but it was at those moments, and generally in her gift for bowing to the inevitable when it came, that Mrs. Ward endeared herself most to her fellow-workers by her rare great-heartedness. During their first winter’s work at the Hall the Residents had discovered, in the squalid neighbourhood to the east of Tavistock Square, a dingy building that went by the name of Marchmont Hall, which they decided to take as the scene of their regular social activities. They raised a special fund for its expenses, and under the leadership of a young solicitor, who combined much shrewdness and ability with a glowing enthusiasm for the service of his fellow-men, the late Mr. Alfred Robinson, the suspicions of the neighbourhood were overcome and a fruitful programme of boys’ clubs, men’s clubs, concerts and lectures launched by the autumn of 1891. Mrs. Ward was deeply interested in the experiment, and hoped against hope that it might lead to those opportunities for Christian teaching which still lay very near her heart. A year later she was able to give the following account of their first attempts in that direction:

“The Sunday evening lectures are preceded by half an hour’s music, and have been from the first more definitely ethical and religious in tone than those given on Thursday. But it is only quite recently we have felt that we could speak freely, without danger of misunderstanding, upon those subjects which are generally identified by the working-classes with sectarian and ecclesiastical propaganda. Now that we are known we need have no fear; and on November 12 the Warden, who had already spoken on the prophets of Israel and other kindred topics, gave an address on the life and character of Jesus. It was received with warm feeling, and more lectures of the same kind have already been arranged for. Next term we hope a class in the Gospels, already begun, may take larger proportions. Among the boys and young men of the Hall, often intelligent and well-educated as they are, there is an extraordinary amount of sheer ignorance and indifference as to the Christian story and literature, even when they have had their full share of the usual Sunday School training. To some of us there could be no more welcome task, to be undertaken at once with eagerness and with trembling, than that of making old things new to eyes and hearts still capable of that ‘admiration, hope, and love’ by which alone we truly live.”

But the movement never developed, for in truth there was no Elsmere to lead it; Mrs. Ward herself went three times to take a boy’s class on Sunday afternoons, but could not, in the midst of her other work, maintain the effort; the Warden, versatile as he was, did not regard it as his first interest, while from the body of Residents came a dumb sense of antagonism, not amounting to direct opposition, but just as effective, which in the end prevailed. The “School” of Biblical studies at University Hall continued as before, appealing to a definite class of students and educated persons of the middle-class, but the attempt to fuse it with the social work at Marchmont Hall was doomed to succeed as little as the attempt to attract to it the half-educated shopmen of Tottenham Court Road. Gradually the human interest of the experiment, the sense of romance and adventure, went over from the lecturing side to the work at Marchmont Hall, where the popular lectures and discussions, the Saturday evening concerts and the Saturday morning “play-rooms” for children were making a real mark on the life of the district. But Mrs. Ward was fully able to recognize this, and accepted in an ungrudging spirit the different direction which circumstances had given to her own cherished dreams.

“It will be seen readily enough,” wrote Mr. Wicksteed in the memorial pamphlet issued by the Passmore Edwards Settlement, “that it was on the side of the School rather than on that of the Residence that Mrs. Ward’s ideals seemed to have the best chance of fulfilling themselves. Yet in truth it was in the Residence that the germ of future development lay. The greatness of Mrs. Ward’s character was shown in her recognition—painful and unwilling sometimes, but always brave and loyal—of this fact. She could not and did not relinquish her “Elsmerean” ideals. The romance of Richard Meynell, published twenty-three years after Robert Elsmere, shows them in unabated ardour. The failure of the Residence to amalgamate with the School was the source of deep distress to her. She sometimes suggested measures for overcoming it that did not approve themselves to her colleagues, but throughout she never suspected their loyalty, and never failed in her own. It needed rare magnanimity. Patience seems too passive a word to apply to so ardent a spirit, but something that did the work of patience was very truly there. And as she came to recognize that with the available material the Settlement could not be the embodiment of her full ideal, she withdrew her vital energies from the attempt to force a passage where none was possible, she steadily refused to let blood flow through a wound that could be and should be healed, and she threw all the strength of her inventive and resourceful mind—and what is more the full stream of her affection and joy in accomplished good—into the development of such branches of her purpose as by that agency could be furthered.”

By the year 1893 the situation as between University Hall and Marchmont Hall had become a curious one, since the former was too large and expensive for its purpose and the latter not nearly large enough. Mrs. Ward and her friends came to the conclusion that some scheme must be devised for combining the activities of both institutions under one roof; but since no suitable building existed anywhere in the neighbourhood of Marchmont Hall, where deep roots had been struck in the affections of the working population, it became obvious that the only solution was to build. Through the early spring of 1894 Mrs. Ward laboured to interest the old friends of University Hall in an appeal for a Building Fund of £5,000; but it was uphill work; her health had suffered greatly from the long strain, and there were moments when hope sank very low. Then, one evening in May of that year, the postman’s knock sounded below, and one of us went down as usual to fetch the letters. There was but a single dull-looking letter in an ordinary “commercial envelope.” “Only a bill,” announced the bearer, as it was placed in Mrs. Ward’s hands. She opened it, glanced at the signature, read it rapidly through, and then, with a little cry, exclaimed: “Mr. Passmore Edwards is going to build us a Settlement!”

She had written to him at last, knowing of him—as all that generation knew—mainly as the generous founder of Free Libraries, but without much hope that he would seriously take up the Marchmont Hall building scheme. At that time the Committee were in favour of a site in Somers Town, north of the Euston Road, the advantages of which Mrs. Ward had set forth in her letter to Mr. Edwards. His answer ran as follows:

May 30, 1894.

My dear Madam,—

Since I received your letter in Italy I have considered your suggestion in reference to the extension in ampler premises of University Hall Settlement, and thereby planting as you say a Toynbee Hall in the Somers Town district. I have also visited the district in and around Clarendon Sq., and am convinced that such an Institution is as much wanted in North London as it was wanted in East London. I therefore cheerfully respond to your appeal, and undertake to provide the necessary building within the limits of the sum you indicate, if somebody will provide a suitable site. The vacant place in Clarendon Sq. would, I consider, be a convenient spot for the Settlement. As a matter of course, provision must be made that the building shall be permanently devoted to the purpose now intended. In my opinion we have the two things most necessary in the Somers Town district for a Toynbee Hall: we have a numerous working population requiring educational assistance and advantages; and we have in the neighbourhood many able and willing workers ready to assist in works of intellectual, moral and social culture.

I remain,
Yours faithfully,
J. Passmore Edwards.

This was her first great victory on the road to the building of the Passmore Edwards Settlement. That road was still to be a long and difficult one, but she was not to be discouraged, and where many lesser souls would have fallen out by the wayside, wearied by ill-health and by the multiplication of obstacles, she persisted, and won in the end a vantage-ground in the fine buildings of the Settlement, whence, in the course of time, she could pass on to new and various achievements.

Heavy and exacting as the work of University Hall was during the first three years of its existence, and glum as the face of our coachman was wont to look at the reiterated orders to drive there (for he disapproved of his horse being kept waiting in the street while people were just talking), Mrs. Ward never allowed it to absorb her mind completely. Indeed, these years saw the writing of her second three-volume novel, The History of David Grieve, as well as many important developments in our domestic affairs. The house on Grayswood Hill, near Haslemere, was rising fast during the early months of 1890, while the principles of the new Settlement were being thrashed out in the study at Russell Square, and at length Mrs. Ward tore herself away from London, stipulating for a six weeks’ break from the affairs of University Hall, buried herself in a neighbouring house named “Grayswood Beeches,” wrote David hard, and kept a watchful eye on the plasterers and painters at work on “Lower Grayswood” below. She took the keenest interest in every detail of the new house, planning it out in daily letters to her husband, and yet as it drew near completion she could not help rebelling at its very newness, at the half-made garden and the plantations of birch and larch and pine which covered much of the nine acres of ground, while of real trees there was hardly one. Waves of longing would assail her for Hampden House, with its silence and its spaciousness, its old lawns and trees, and its complete absence of neighbours. “How I have been hankering after Hampden lately!” she writes to her father in June, 1890, and to her husband she confesses that she has been to the agent’s to inquire whether Hampden could be let for a term of years. “They don’t think so. I told them to inquire without mentioning our names at all.” Hampden, however, was not to be had, and when once she was established in Lower Grayswood, Mrs. Ward took more kindly to the house, which had from its windows one of the most astonishing views in all the South of England. Yet still she wrote to her father: “I doubt whether I shall be content ultimately without an old house and old trees! If one may covet anything, I think one may covet this kind of inheritance from the past to shelter one’s own later life in. Life seems so short to make anything quite fresh. Meanwhile, Lower Grayswood is very nice, and more than we deserve!”

The verdict of children and friends was indeed unanimous in praise of the poor new house, whence endless fishing expeditions were made to muddy little brooks in the plain below, almost compensating for the loss of Forked Pond and the other barbarian delights of Borough Farm. But even the children realized that there were “too many people about” for the health of their mother’s work. The pile of cards on the hall table grew ominously thick. Americans walked in, taking no denial, and once in mid-August, when the youngest child tactlessly won a junior race at the Lythe Hill Sports, with all Haslemere looking on, there were paragraphs in the evening papers. It would not do, and I think the house at Haslemere was doomed from that day onwards. Still, for two years it played its part delightfully in the web of Mrs. Ward’s life, giving her quiet, especially in the autumn and winter, for the writing of David Grieve, giving her deep draughts of beauty which were not forgotten in after years. The lodge was made a home for tired Londoners, whether boys or mothers or factory-girls, and the house itself was never long empty of guests.

There, too, in the book-lined room which she had made her study, she would on Sunday evenings carry out in practice those ideas on the teaching of the Bible which she had striven to inculcate at University Hall. The audience sat on low stools or lay on the floor, while she read to them usually a part of the Gospels, making the scene live again, as only she could make it, not only by her intimate knowledge of the times, but by her gift of presentation. Systematically, making us use our minds to follow her, she would work through a section of St. Mark or St. Matthew, comparing each with the other, showing the touches of the “later hand,” taking us deep into the fascinating intricacies of the Synoptic Problem. But all the time the central figure would grow clearer and clearer, in simple majesty of parable or act of healing, while at the greatest moments commentary fell away and only the old words broke the stillness. She was immensely interested in the problem of the Master’s own view of himself and his mission, following him step by step to the declaration at Cæsarea Philippi, then tracing the gathering conviction that in himself was to be fulfilled Isaiah’s prophecy of the Suffering Servant. She was inclined to reject the prophecies of the Second Coming as showing too obviously the feeling of the second generation, as being unworthy of him who said, “The Kingdom of God is within you.” But in later years she came to regard them as probably based on utterances of his own, for was he not, after all, the child of his time and country? With an episode like the Transfiguration she would show us the elements of popular legend from which it was put together, fitting piece into piece till the whole stood out with a new freshness, throwing its light backwards over the age-long Jewish expectations of the return of Moses and Elijah. So with the Resurrection stories; she bade us always remember the teeming soil from which they sprang, in that long-past childhood of the world; how none of them were written down till forty years, most of them not till sixty and seventy years, had passed since the Crucifixion; how the return from Hades on the third day is at least as old as Alcestis. These things, she said, forbade us to accept them as literal fact; but it was impossible to listen to her reading of the Walk to Emmaus, or the finding of the empty tomb, without coming under the spell of an emotion as deep as it was austere. For the fact that we in these latter days had outgrown our childhood and must distinguish truth from phantasy was no reason in her mind, why we should renounce the poetic value of scenes and pictures woven into the very fabric of our being. And so, Sunday after Sunday, our little minds drank in a teaching which she would fain believe could have been spread broadcast among our generation, could the ideals of University Hall but reach the masses. She did not realize how unique her teaching was, nor how few among her generation combined such knowledge as hers with such a power of instilling it into other minds and hearts.

The writing of David Grieve was a long-sustained effort, extending over the best part of three years, and too often performed under the handicap of writer’s cramp and sleeplessness. But Mrs. Ward was at the prime of her powers, and felt herself more thoroughly master of her material in this book than she had done in the case of Robert Elsmere, so that the revision, when it came, was a matter of weeks and not of months. Her visits to Manchester and Derbyshire for the local colour of the book had inspired her with a vivid faith in the working population of the north, which finds expression in a letter written to her father in September, 1890, in reply to criticisms which he, with his Catholic prepossessions, had made on the unloveliness of their lives:

‘You and I would not agree about New Mills, I am afraid! At least, if New Mills is like Bacup and the towns along the Irwell, as I suppose it is. After seeing those mill-colonies among the moors, I came home cheered and comforted in my mind for the future of England—so differently may the same things affect different people. Beatrice Potter told me that she had stayed for some time incog. as one of themselves with a family of mill-hands at Bacup, and that to her mind they were ‘the salt of the earth,’ so good and kind to each other, so diligent, so God-fearing, so truly unworldly. She attributed it to their religion, to those hideous chapels, which develop in them the keenest individual sense of responsibility to God and man, to their habit of combination for a common end as in their Co-op. Societies and Unions, and to their real sensitiveness to education and the things of the mind, up to a certain point, of course. And certainly all that I saw last autumn bore her out. I imagine that if you were to compare Lancashire with any other manufacturing district in Europe, with Belgium, with Lyons, with Catalonia, it would show favourably as regards the type of human character developed. All the better men and women are interested in the things that interested St. Paul—grace and salvation, and the struggle of the spirit against the flesh, and for the rest they work for their wives and children, and learn gradually to respect those laws of health which are, after all, as much ‘set in the world,’ to use Uncle Matt’s phrase, as beauty and charm, and in their own way as much a will and purpose of God. Read the books about Lancashire life a hundred years ago, and see if they have not improved—if they are not less brutal, less earthy, nearer altogether to the intelligent type of life. That they have far to go yet one cannot deny. But altogether, when London fills me with despair, I often think of Lancashire and am comforted for the future. I think of the people I had tea with at Bacup, all mill-hands, but so refined, gentle and good; and I think of the wonderful development of the civic sense in a town like Oldham, with all its public institutions, its combinations of workpeople for every possible object, and its generally happy and healthy tone. I wish the streets were less ugly, but after all, our climate is hard and drives people indoors three-parts of the year, and the race has very little artistic gift.”

Meanwhile, the Copyright Committee was again hard at work in the United States, arousing much anxious speculation in Mrs. Ward’s mind as to whether their Bill would be through Congress in time for her new book; but in the end the victory came more easily and swiftly than was expected. Congress passed it in November, 1890, and it became law in the following March. The effect on Mrs. Ward’s fortunes was not long in making itself felt. Mr. George Smith had been negotiating for her with an American firm that offered good but not magnificent terms for David Grieve; he was dissatisfied, and in his wise heart bethought him of her old friends the Macmillans, who had an “American house.” The sequel must be told in his own words:

15, Waterloo Place, S.W.
June 13, 1891.

DEAR MRS. HUMPHRY WARD,—

I met Frederick Macmillan in the Park this morning. It flashed on my mind that I would sell him the American copyright of your book, and after a long talk (which made me late for breakfast) I promised him that if he made me a firm offer of seven thousand pounds for the American copyright, including Canada, before one o’clock to-day, I would accept it on your behalf. He has just called here and written the enclosed note. I am rather pleased with myself, and I hope that you will not reproach me. I write in haste, for I shall feel rather anxious until I have a line from you on the subject.

Believe me,
Yours sincerely,
G. M. Smith.

Needless to say, the “line” was forthcoming, and Mrs. Ward was left to contemplate, with some emotion, the fact that she was mistress of a little fortune. Whether the Macmillans remained as contented with their bargain as she was is, however, a point of some obscurity. Certainly they desired her next book (Marcella), which amply made up to them for any shortcomings on David Grieve, but during the negotiations for it some uncomfortable tales leaked out. “Mr. Brett told me,” wrote Mrs. Ward to George Smith, eighteen months after the appearance of David, “that owing to the description of profit-sharing in David Grieve and the interest roused by it in America, their American branch adopted it last year for all their employés. Then in consequence of David there were no profits to divide! I don’t know whether to laugh or cry over the situation, and I am quite determined that if there are losses this time I will share them.”

But as yet the prospect was unclouded, and the summer of 1891 was spent in a hard wrestle with the remaining chapters of the book—with the tragedy of Lucy and the sombre fate of Louie Grieve—but at length, on September 24, the last words of David Grieve were written, and on October 16 she and Mr. Ward fled for nine weeks to Italy.

It was not their first visit, for in the spring of 1889 they had spent eight days in Rome, making their first Italian friendships and learning something of the spell of that city of old magic. “In eight days one can but scratch the surface of Rome,” she had written to her father on that occasion. “Still, I think Lord Acton was quite right when he said to us at Cannes, ‘If you have only three days, go!’ To have walked into St. Peter’s, to have driven up on to the Janiculan and seen the view of Rome, the Alban Hills, the Campagna and Soracte which you get from there, to have wandered about the Forum and Colosseum and to have climbed the Palatine and the Capitol, is something after all, even if one never saw this marvellous place again.”

Now this second time she was so tired that they passed Rome by on the outward journey and went instead to Naples, Amalfi and Ravello, where the good Signora Palumbo, landlady of the famous little inn, tended her as she lay quite fallow, browsing in books or gazing at sea and sky and sunny coast. But a visit to Pompeii could still arouse all her historical instincts:

“To sit in the Forum there,” she writes to her sister, Mrs. Leonard Huxley, “or in one of the bright gaily painted houses, or restaurants with the wine-jars still perfect in the marble counters, and to think that people were chatting and laughing in those very courts and under those very pictures while Jesus was before Pilate, or Paul was landing at Puteoli, on the same coast some twenty miles north, made an electric moment in life. It is so seldom one actually feels and touches the past. After seeing those temples with their sacrificial altars and cellæ, their priests’ sleeping-rooms and dining-rooms, I read this morning St. Paul’s directions to the Corinthians about meat offered to idols—in fact, the whole first letter—with quite different eyes.”

To the same beloved sister she was indebted for the inimitable tales of her small boy, Julian, which enliven the later pages of David Grieve; for Sandy Grieve was taken direct from this little grandson of the Professor—an “impet” indeed, in his mother’s expressive phrase. “Your stories of Julian have been killing,” wrote Mrs. Ward from Naples; “I was sorry one of them arrived too late for David. By the way, I have not yet written to Willie to say that Sandy is merely an imperfect copy of Julian. He writes ‘We both love Sandy.’ And I am sure when the book comes out that Sandy will be the making of some of the last part.”

A month after Mrs. Ward’s return to England, that is on January 22, 1892, David Grieve appeared, and was at once greeted with a chorus of praise, criticism and general talk. “Were there ever such contradictory judgments!” wrote Mrs. Ward to her publisher when the book had been out a week. “The Master of Balliol writes to me that it is ‘the best novel since George Eliot’—‘extraordinarily pathetic and interesting’—and that Louie is a sketch that Victor Hugo might have drawn. A sledgehammer article in the British Weekly to-night says ‘it is an almost absolute failure.’ Mr. Henry Grenfell and Mr. Haldane have been glued to it till they finished it. According to other people it is ‘ordinary and tedious.’ Well, one must possess one’s soul a little, I suppose, till the real verdict emerges.” The reviews were by no means all laudatory, much criticism being bestowed on the “Paris episode” of David’s entanglement with Elise Delaunay, but the general verdict certainly was that it showed a marked advance on Robert Elsmere in artistic treatment, as well as a power of character-drawing that had not been seen since Middlemarch. This feeling was summed up in Walter Pater’s sentence: “It seems to me to have all the forces of its predecessor at work in it, with perhaps a mellower kind of art—a more matured power of blending disparate literary gifts in one.” Letters poured in upon her again, both from old friends and strangers. “Max Creighton,” now Bishop of Peterborough, who was never tired of poking fun at Mrs. Ward about the “higher criticism,” found time to dash off ten closely written sheets of pseudo-solemn investigation into the authenticity of David’s life-story, beginning: “Though I am prepared to believe that David Grieve was a real personage, it is clear that many mythical elements have been incorporated into his history, and it is the function of criticism to disentangle the real man from the legendary accretions which have gathered round him.” Mrs. Ward replied in suitable vein, and confided to her friend that a few of the reviews had made her very sore. “I am very sorry to hear,” he replied, “that some criticism has been ungenerous.... But I think that we all have to learn the responsibility attached to undertaking the function of a teacher, and the inevitable antagonism which the claim arouses. It has been so always. No amount of rectitude or good intentions avail.”

But the warm admiration expressed by those for whose opinion she cared amply made up for the hostility of these reviews. As she said of it in her Recollections: “It has brought me correspondence from all parts and all classes, more intimate and striking perhaps than in the case of any other of my books.” Many pages might be filled with these letters, but at a distance of thirty years two only shall be saved from oblivion, for the sake of that mere quality of delight which pervades them both and which endeared their writers beyond other men to the company in which they moved. The first is from Professor Huxley; the second from Sir Edward Burne-Jones.

Hodeslea, Staveley Road,
Eastbourne.
February 1, 1892.

My dear Mary,—

You will think I have taken my time about thanking you for David Grieve; but a virtuous resolution to stick to a piece of work I have had on hand for a long time interfered with my finishing it before last night. The temptation was severe, and as I do not often stick to virtuous resolutions under these circumstances, I parade the fact.

I think the account of the Parisian episode of David’s life the strongest thing you have done yet. It is alive—every word of it—and without note or comment produces its ethical effect after the manner of that “gifted authoress,” Dame Nature, who never moralizes.