LIFE AT OXFORD
1867-1881
When Tom Arnold settled with his family at Oxford, in 1865, the old
University was still labouring under the repercussions, the thrills and
counter-thrills, of the famous Movement set on foot in 1833 by Keble's
sermon on _National Apostasy_. Keble, indeed, was withdrawn from the
scene, but Newman's conversion to Rome (1845) had made so prodigious a
stir that even twenty years later the religious world of England still
took its colour from that event. In the words of Mark Pattison, "whereas
other reactions accomplished themselves by imperceptible degrees, in
1845 the darkness was dissipated and the light was let in in an instant,
as by the opening of the shutters in the chamber of a sick man who has
slept till mid-day." So at least the crisis appeared to the Liberal
world; the mask had been torn from the Tractarians and their Romanizing
tendencies stood revealed to all beholders. In the opposite camp the
consternation was proportionate, but the formidable figure of Pusey
rallied the doubters and brought them back in good order to the _Via
Media_ of the Anglican communion; while the tender poetry of Keble and
the far-famed eloquence of Liddon fortified and adorned the High Church
cause. But the sudden ending of the Tractarian controversy opened the
way for another movement, slower and less sensational than that of
Newman, yet destined to have an even deeper effect upon the religious
life of England. The freedom of the human mind began to be insisted
upon, not only in the realm of science, or where science clashed with
the Book of Genesis, but in the whole field of the Interpretation of
Scripture. Slowly the results of fifty years of patient study of the
Bible by German scholars and historians began to penetrate here, and
even Oxford, stronghold and citadel of the Laudian establishment, felt
the stir of a new interest, a new challenge to accepted forms. A Liberal
school of theologians arose, led by Jowett, Mark Pattison and other
writers in _Essays and Reviews_ (1860), for whom the old letter of
"inspiration" no longer existed, though they stoutly maintained their
orthodoxy as members and ministers of the Church of England. The Church,
they said, must broaden her base so as to make room for the results of
science and of historical criticism, or else she would be left high and
dry while the forces of democracy passed on their way without her.
Jowett, in his famous essay "On the Interpretation of Scripture," boldly
summed up his argument in the precept, "Interpret the Scripture like any
other book." "The first step is to know the meaning, and this can only
be done in the same careful and impartial way that we ascertain the
meaning of Sophocles or Plato." "Educated persons are beginning to ask,
not what Scripture may be made to mean, but what it does mean."
The hubbub raised by these and similar expressions continued during the
three years of proceedings before the Court of Arches, the Judicial
Committee of the Privy Council, and finally Convocation, against two of
the contributors to _Essays and Reviews_, and had hardly died away when
the Arnolds came to take up their life in Oxford. And side by side with
the theoretical discussion went the insistent demand of the reforming
party, both at Oxford and in Parliament, for the abolition of the
disabilities that still weighed so heavily against Dissenters. For,
although the "Oxford University Act" of 1854 had admitted them to
matriculation and the B.A. degree, neither Fellowships nor the M.A. were
yet open to any save subscribers to the Thirty-nine Articles. All
through the 'sixties the battle raged, with an annual attempt in
Parliament to break down the defence of the guardians of tradition, and
not till 1871 was the "citadel taken."[5] Jowett and Arthur Stanley
stood forth among the Liberal champions at Oxford--the latter reckoning
himself always as carrying on the tradition of Arnold of Rugby, whose
pamphlet urging the inclusion of Dissenters in the National Church had
made so great a sensation in 1833. It was hardly possible, therefore,
for a little Arnold of Mary's temperament and traditions to escape the
atmosphere that surrounded her so closely, though we need not imagine
that at the age of sixteen she did more than imbibe it passively. But
there were certain things that were not passive in her memory--visions
of Dr. Newman in the streets of Edgbaston, passing gravely by upon his
business--business which the child so passionately resented because she
understood it to be responsible in some vague way for all the hardships
and misfortunes of her family. We may safely assume that if she was ever
taken into Oriel College and saw the many rows of portraits looking down
at her there, in Common-room and Hall, she would feel an instinctive
rallying to the standard of her grandfather rather than to that of his
mighty opponent.
Two other remarkable figures who dominated the Oxford world of that day,
though from opposite camps, were the silver-tongued Dr. Liddon, "Select
Preacher" at the University Church, and Mark Pattison, Rector of
Lincoln, whom his contemporaries looked on with awe as one of the most
learned scholars in Europe in matters of pure erudition, but in religion
a sad sceptic, though twenty years before, they knew, he had been a
brand only barely plucked from Newman's burning. Both were to have their
influence upon Mary Arnold, the former superficial, the latter deep and
lasting, and it is curious to find a letter from her father, written in
1865, before he had definitely left the Catholic communion, in which he
describes hearing both men preach on the same day in the University
Church.
"Pattison's sermon was certainly a most remarkable one," he writes;
"I could have sat another half-hour under him with pleasure. But he
has much more of the philosopher than the divine about him, and the
discourse had the effect of an able article in the _National_ or
_Edinburgh Review_, read to a cultivated audience in the academical
theatre, much more than of a sermon. In fact, the name either of
Jesus Christ or of one of the Apostles was not once mentioned
throughout. The subject was, the higher education; and the felicity
of the language accorded well with the clearness and beauty of the
thoughts. He condemned the Catholic system, and also the Positivist
system, and in speaking of the former he said, 'I cannot do better
than describe it in the words of one whose voice was once wont to
sound within these walls with thrilling power, but now, alas! can
never more be heard by us, who in his Treatise on University
Education--' and then he proceeded to quote at some length from Dr.
Newman. It was an extremely powerful sermon, but scandalized, I
think, the High Church and orthodox party. 'Do you often now,' I
asked Edwin Palmer with a smile, meeting him outside after it was
over, 'have University sermons in that style?' 'Oh dear no,' he
said, 'scarcely ever, except indeed from Pattison himself'; this
with some acidity of tone. I dined early; then thought I, in for a
penny, in for a pound, I'll go and hear the other University
sermon. I was punctual, but there was not a seat to be had, the
ladies mustered in overwhelming force. It was strange, but sermon
and preacher were now everything most opposite to those of the
morning. Liddon is a dark, black-haired little man--short,
straight, stubby hair--and with that shiny, glistening appearance
about his sallow complexion which one so often sees in Dissenting
ministers, and which the devotees no doubt consider a mark of
election. Liddon's whole sermon was an impassioned strain of
apologetic argument for the truth of the Resurrection, and of the
church doctrine generally. It was very clever certainly, but rather
too long, it extended to about an hour and twenty minutes. The tone
was earnest and devout; yet there were several sarcastic, one might
almost say irritable, flings at the liberal and rationalizing
party; and it was evident that he was thinking of the Oxford
congregation when he spoke pointedly of the 'educated sceptics who
at that time composed, or at any rate controlled, the Sanhedrin.'
These two," he continues, "were certainly sermons of more than
ordinary interest--each worthily representing a great stream of
thought and tendency, influential for good or evil at the present
moment upon millions of human beings."
It was under such influences as these that Mary Arnold passed the four
impressionable years of her girlhood, from sixteen to twenty, that
elapsed between her leaving school and her engagement to Mr. Humphry
Ward, of Brasenose. She plunged with zest into the Oxford life, making
friends, helping her father at the Bodleian in his researches into
early English literature and studying music to very good purpose under
James Taylor, the future organist of New College. But she had no further
regular education, and was free to roam and devour at will in that city
of books, guided only by the advice of a few friends and by her own
innate literary instincts. The Mark Pattisons early befriended her,
frequently asking her to supper with them on Sunday evenings--suppers at
which she sat, shy and silent, in a high woollen dress, with her black,
wavy hair brushed very smoothly back, listening to every word of the
eager talk around her and drinking in, no doubt, the Rector's caustic
remarks about Oxford scholarship. These were the years of battle between
the champions of research and the champions of the Balliol ideal of
turning out good men for the public service, and in her ardent
admiration for the Rector Mary Arnold threw herself whole-heartedly into
the former camp. "Get to the bottom of something," he used to say to
her; "choose a subject and know _everything_ about it!" And so she
plunged into early Spanish literature and history, working at it in the
Bodleian with the fervour that comes from knowing that your subject is
your very own, or at least that it has only been traversed before by
dear, musty German scholars. There was hard practice here in the reading
of German and Latin, let alone the Spanish poems and chronicles
themselves, but after a couple of years of it there was little she did
not know about the _Poema del Cid_, or the Visigothic invasion, or the
reign of _Alfonso el Sabio_. Her friend, J. R. Green, the historian, was
so much impressed with her work that he recommended her when she was
only twenty to Edward Freeman as the best person he could suggest for
writing a volume on Spain in an historical series that the latter was
editing. Mr. Freeman duly invited her, but by that time she was already
deep in the preparations for her marriage and was obliged to decline the
offer. She maintained her allegiance to the subject, however, through
all the years that followed, until, as will be seen hereafter, Dean Wace
made her the momentous proposition that she should undertake the lives
of the early Spanish kings and ecclesiastics for the _Dictionary of
Christian Biography_. And there, in the four volumes of the
_Dictionary_, her articles stand to this day, a monument to an early
enthusiasm lightly kindled by a word from a great man, but pursued with
all the patience and intensity of the true historian.
In the course of this work on the early Spaniards she developed an
extraordinary attachment to the Bodleian, with all the most secret
corners of which she soon became familiar, under the benevolent guidance
of the Librarian, Mr. Coxe. The charm of the noble building, with its
mellow lights and shades, its silences, its deep spaces of book-lined
walls, sank into her very soul and gave her that background of the love
of books and reading which became perhaps--next to her love of
nature--the strongest solace of her after-life. At the age of twenty she
wrote a little essay, called "A Morning in the Bodleian,"[6] which
reflects all the joy--nay, the pride--of her own long days of work among
the calf-bound volumes.
"As you slip into the chair set ready for you," she writes, "a deep
repose steals over you--the repose, not of indolence but of
possession; the product of time, work and patient thought only.
Literature has no guerdon for 'bread-students,' to quote the
expressive German phrase; let not the young man reading for his
pass, the London copyist or the British Museum illuminator, hope to
enter within the enchanted ring of her benignest influences; only
to the silent ardour, the thirst, the disinterestedness of the true
learner, is she prodigal of all good gifts. To him she beckons, in
him she confides, till she has produced in him that wonderful
many-sidedness, that universal human sympathy which stamps the true
literary man, and which is more religious than any form of creed."
A touch about the German students to be found there has its note of
prophecy: "In a small inner room are the Hebrew manuscripts; a German is
working there, another in shirt-sleeves is here--strange people of
innumerable tentacles, stretching all ways, from Genesis to the latest
form of the needle-gun." And in the last page we come upon her most
intimate reflections, the thoughts pressed together from her many months
of comradeship with those silent tomes, which show, better than any
letters, the quality of a mind but just emerging--as the years are
reckoned--from its teens:--
"Who can pass out of such a building without a feeling of profound
melancholy? The thought is almost too obvious to be dwelt upon; but
it is overpowering and inevitable. These shelves of mighty folios,
these cases of laboured manuscripts, these illuminated volumes of
which each may represent a life--the first, dominant impression
which they make cannot fail to be like that which a burial-ground
leaves--a Hamlet-like sense of 'the pity of it.' Which is the
sadder image, the dust of Alexander stopping a bung-hole, or the
brain and life-blood of a hundred monks cumbering the shelves of
the Bodleian? Not the former, for Alexander's dust matters little
where his work is considered, but these monks' work is in their
books; to their books they sacrificed their lives, and gave
themselves up as an offering to posterity. And posterity,
overburdened by its own concerns, passes them by without a look or
a word! Here and there, of course, is a volume which has made a
mark upon the world; but the mass are silent for ever, and zeal,
industry, talent, for once that they have had permanent results,
have a thousand times been sealed by failure. And yet men go on
writing, writing; and books are born under the shadow of the great
libraries just as children are born within sight of the tombs. It
seems as though Nature's law were universal as well as rigid in its
sphere--wide wastes of sand shut in the green oasis, many a seed
falls among thorns or by the wayside, many a bud must be sacrificed
before there comes the perfect flower, many a little life must
exhaust itself in a useless book before the great book is made
which is to remain a force for ever. And so we might as profitably
murmur at the withered buds, at the seed that takes no root, at the
stretch of desert, as at the unread folios. They are waste, it is
true; but it is the waste that is thrown off by Humanity in its
ceaseless process towards the fulfilment of its law."
No doubt her life was not all books during these four years, though
books gave it its tone and background; she took her part in the gaieties
of Oxford, in Eights Week and Commem. and in river parties to the
Nuneham woods, and it is to be feared that her stout resistance to the
"seductiveness of Oxford, its moonlight charms and Romeo and Juliet
character" was not of long duration. In one select Oxford pastime, the
game of croquet, she attained to real pre-eminence, becoming, after her
marriage, one of the moving spirits of the Oxford Croquet Club. But her
shyness made social events no special joy to her, and she was far
happier sitting at the feet of "Mark Pat" or helping "Mrs. Pat" with her
etching in the sitting-room upstairs than in making conversation with
the youth of Oxford.
One charming glimpse of her, however, at a social function remains to us
in the letters of M. Taine. The great Frenchman had come over in the
very spring of the _Commune_ (1871) to give a course of lectures at
Oxford; he met her one evening at the Master of Balliol's, being
introduced to her by Jowett himself. "'A very clever girl,' said
Professor Jowett, as he was taking me towards her. She is about twenty,
very nice-looking and dressed with taste (rather a rare thing here: I
saw one lady imprisoned in a most curious sort of pink silk sheath).
Miss Arnold was born out in Australia, where she was brought up till the
age of five. She knows French, German and Italian, and during this last
year has been studying old Spanish of the time of the Cid; also Latin,
in order to be able to understand the mediæval chronicles. All her
mornings she spends at the Bodleian Library--a most intellectual lady,
but yet a simple, charming girl. By exercise of great tact, I finally
led her on to telling me of an article--her first--that she was writing
for _Macmillan's Magazine_ upon the oldest romances. In extenuation of
it she said, 'Everybody writes or lectures here, and one must follow the
fashion. Besides, it passes the time, and the library is so fine and so
convenient.' Not in the least pedantic!"[7]
Mary's efforts at writing fiction, which had been many from her
school-days onwards, were far less successful at this stage than her
more serious essays; but she persisted in the attempt, for the pressure
on the family budget was always so great that she longed to make herself
independent of it by earning something with her pen. She sent one story,
at the age of eighteen, to Messrs. Smith & Elder, her future
publishers, but when it was politely declined by them she showed her
philosophy in the following note--
LALEHAM, OXFORD.
_October 1, 1869._
DEAR SIRS,--
I beg to thank you for your courteous letter. "Ailie" is a juvenile
production and I am not sorry you decline to publish it. Had it
appeared in print I should probably have been ashamed of it by and
by.
I remain,
Yours obediently,
MARY ARNOLD.
But at length no less a veteran than Miss Charlotte Yonge, who was then
editing a blameless magazine named the _Churchman's Companion_, accepted
a tale from her called "A Westmorland Story," and Mary's joy and pride
were unbounded. But the tale shows no glimpse, I think, of her future
power, and is as far removed from "A Morning in the Bodleian" as water
is from wine.
Sometimes the Forsters would invite her to stay with them in London, and
so it occurred that at the age of eighteen she was actually there, in
the Ladies' Gallery of the House of Commons, when her uncle brought in
his famous Education Bill. In after life she was always glad to recall
that day, and when in the fullness of time her own path led her among
the stunted lives of London's children she liked to think that she was
in a sense continuing her uncle's work.
In the winter of 1870-71 she first met Mr. T. Humphry Ward, Fellow and
Tutor of Brasenose College, between whom and herself an instant
attraction became manifest. Mr. Ward was the son of the Rev. Henry Ward,
Vicar of St. Barnabas, King Square, E.C., while his mother was Jane
Sandwith, sister of the well-known Army surgeon at the siege of Kars,
Humphry Sandwith, and herself a woman of remarkable charm and beauty of
character. By an odd chance, J. R. Green, the historian, had been curate
to Mr. Henry Ward in London for two years, had made himself the devoted
friend of all his numerous children and has left in his published
Letters a striking tribute to the great qualities of Mrs. Ward.[8] But
she died at the age of forty-two, and Mary Arnold never knew her. The
course of true love ran smoothly through the spring of 1871, and on June
16, five days after Mary's twentieth birthday, they became engaged.
Never was happiness more golden, and when the pair of lovers went to
stay at Fox How and the young man was introduced to all the well-beloved
places--Sweden Bridge and Loughrigg, Rydal Water and the
stepping-stones--she was quite puzzled, as she wrote to him afterwards,
by the change that had come over the mountains, by the "new relations
between Westmorland and me!" It was simply, as she said, that the
mountains had become the frame, instead of being, as hitherto, the
picture.
They were engaged for ten months, and then, on April 6, 1872, Dean
Stanley married them and they settled, a little later, in a house in
Bradmore Road (then No. 5, now 17), where they lived and worked for the
next nine years.
* * * * *
Strenuous and delightful years! In looking back over them her old
friends recall with amazement her intense vitality and energy, in spite
of many lapses of health; how she was always at work, writing articles
or reviewing books to eke out the family income, and how she seemed
besides to bear on her shoulders the cares of two families, her own and
her husband's. She was the eldest and he the third of a long string of
brothers and sisters, the younger of whom were still quite children and
much in need of shepherding. The house in Bradmore Road was always a
second home to them. Her own parents lived close by and she was much in
and out of their house, sharing in their anxieties and struggles and
helping whenever it was possible to help. For she was linked to her
father by a deep and instinctive devotion, much strengthened by these
years of companionship at Oxford, and to her mother by a more aching
sense of pity and longing. Tom Arnold was growing restless again in the
mid-'seventies, and when he went with his younger children to church at
St. Philip's they would nudge each other to hear him muttering under his
breath the Latin prayers of long ago--little thinking, poor babes, how
their very bread and butter might hang upon these mutterings! But in
1876 there came a day when his election to the Professorship of Early
English was almost a foregone conclusion; as the author of the standard
edition of Wycliffe's English Works he was by far the strongest
candidate in the field, and Julia looked forward eagerly to a time of
deliverance from their perpetual money troubles. For some months,
however, he had secretly made up his mind that he must re-enter the
Roman fold, and now that once more his worldly promotion depended on his
remaining outside it he decided that this was the moment to make his
re-conversion public. He announced it on the very eve of the election,
with the result that the majority of the electors decided against him.
Poor Mary heard the news early next morning and ran round in great
distress to her true friends, the T. H. Greens, pouring it out to them
with uncontrollable tears. And, indeed, it was the death-knell of the
Arnolds' prosperity at Oxford. Pupils came no longer to be taught by a
professing Catholic, and Julia was reduced to taking "boarders" in a
smaller house in Church Walk, while Tom earned what he could by
incessant writing and eventually took work again at the Catholic
University in Dublin. And then a still more terrible blow fell upon
Julia; she was discovered to have cancer, and an operation in the autumn
of 1877 left her a maimed and suffering invalid. All this could not fail
to leave a profound mark on the anxious and tender heart of her
daughter, in whom the capacity for human affection seemed to grow and
treble with the years; it made a dark background to her Oxford life,
otherwise so full to overflowing with the happiness of friends and home.
In her _Recollections_ she has given us once and for all a picture of
the Oxford of her day which in its brilliance and charm is not to be
matched by any later comer. All that can be attempted here is to fill in
to some extent the only gap that she has left in it--the portrait of
herself. How did she move among that small but gifted community, where
Walter Pater revolutionized the taste of Oxford with his Morris papers
and blue china, shocked the Oxford world with his paganizing tendencies
and would, besides, keep his sisters laughing the whole evening, when
they were quite alone, with his spontaneous fun; where Mandell
Creighton was leading and stimulating the teaching of history, with J.
R. Green to help him as Examiner in the Modern History Schools; where T.
H. Green was inspiring the younger generation with his own robust
idealism and the doctrine of the "duty of work," and the more venerable
figures of Jowett and Mark Pattison, Ruskin and Matthew Arnold, Stubbs
and Freeman dominated the intellectual scene? The impression that she
made upon this circle of friends seems first of all to have been one of
extraordinary energy and power of work, of great personal charm veiled
by a crust of shyness, of intellectual powers for which they had the
respect of equals and co-workers, and of a warm and generous sympathy
which was yet free from "gush." One of her closest friends in these
early years, Mrs. Arthur Johnson, has allowed me to use certain extracts
from her journal, in which the figure of "Mary Ward" stands out with the
clearness of absolute simplicity. Mrs. Johnson, besides having the
public spirit which has since made her the President of the Oxford Home
Students' Society, was also a charming artist, and in 1876 painted
Mary's portrait in water-colour, using the opportunities which the
sittings gave her to explore her friend's mind to the uttermost:
"July 22. Began her portrait. I was so excited that my head ached all
day afterwards. She talked of deep, most interesting subjects, and
attention to the arguments and drawing too was too much for one's head!
I was surprised at the full extent of her vague religion. Jowett is her
great admiration and Matt Arnold her guide for some things. She is great
on the rising Dutch and French and German school of religious thought,
very free criticism of the Bible, entire denial of miracle, our Lord
only a great teacher. I felt as if I had been beaten about, as I always
do after the excitement of such talks. And yet it is all a striving
after righteousness, sincerity, truth." Or, again: "Mary W. came to tea.
My visitor was charmed with her and truly she is a sweet, charming
person, full of gentleness and sympathy, with all her talent and
intelligence too. She had dined at the Pattisons' last night and had
felt appalled at the learning of Mrs. P. and Miss ----,' more in their
little fingers than I in my whole body!' But I felt that no one would
wish to change her for either of them."
Her music was a constant joy to her friends, and Mrs. Johnson makes
frequent mention of her playing of Bach and of her wonderful reading. It
was a possession that remained with her, to a certain extent, all her
life, in spite of writer's cramp and of a total inability to find time
to "keep it up." But even twenty and thirty years later than this date,
her playing of Beethoven or Brahms--on the rare occasions when she would
allow herself such indulgence--would astonish the few friends who heard
it.
Meanwhile the portrait prospered, and was at length presented to its
subject when she lay recovering from the birth of her second babe--a boy
whom they named Arnold--in November, 1876. "Humphry and I are full of
delight over the picture," writes Mary to Mrs. Johnson, "and of wonder
at the amount of true and delicate work you have put into it. It will be
a possession not only for us but for our children--see how easily the
new style comes!" These were prophetic words, for it is indeed the
portrait of her that still gives most pleasure to the beholder, though
in later years she was painted or drawn by many skilful hands.
Her two babies, Dorothy and Arnold, naturally absorbed a great deal of
her time and thoughts in these years, although it was possible in those
spacious days to live comfortably and to keep as many little
nursery-maids as one required on £800 or £900 a year, which was about
the income that husband and wife jointly earned. Her natural talent for
"doctoring" showed itself very early in the skill with which she fed her
babies or cured them of their ills when they were sick. Nor was she
content with her domestic success, but in days before "Infant Welfare"
had ever been thought of she wrote a leaflet entitled "Plain Facts on
Infant Feeding" and circulated it in the slums of Oxford. We will not,
however, rescue it from oblivion, lest it should be found to contain
heretical matter! But there was still time for other pursuits, and since
both she and her husband did their writing mainly at night, from nine to
twelve, Mary began to show her practical powers in other directions, and
to take a leading part in the movement for the higher education of women
which was then absorbing some of the best minds of Oxford. As early as
the winter of 1873-4 a committee was formed among this group of friends,
with Mrs. Ward and Mrs. Creighton (followed, on the latter's departure,
by Mrs. T. H. Green) as joint secretaries, for organizing regular
"Lectures for Women"--not in any connection with the University, for
this was as yet impossible, but in order to satisfy the growing demand
among the women residents of Oxford for more serious instruction in
history, or modern languages, or Latin. The first series of lectures was
held in the early spring of 1874, in the Clarendon Buildings, with Mr.
A. H. Johnson as lecturer; it was an immediate success, and the large
sum of 5_s._ which each member of the Committee had put down as a
guarantee could be triumphantly refunded. Further courses were arranged
in each succeeding winter, till in 1877 the same committee expanded into
an "Association for the Education of Women" (again with Mrs. Ward as
secretary[9]), which undertook still more important work. The idea of
the founding of Women's Colleges was already in the air, for Girton and
Newnham had led the way at Cambridge, and all through 1878 plans were
being discussed to this end. In the next year a special committee was
formed for the raising of funds towards the foundation of a "Hall of
Residence"; Mrs. Ward and Mrs. Augustus Vernon Harcourt were joint
secretaries, but since the latter soon fell ill the whole burden of
correspondence fell upon Mary's shoulders. "There seems no end to the
things I have to do just now," she writes to her father in June, 1879.
"All the secretary's work for Somerville Hall falls on me now as my
colleague, Mrs. Harcourt, is laid up, and yesterday and the day before I
have had the house full of girls being examined for scholarship at the
Hall, and have had to copy out examination papers and look after them
generally. Our Lady Principal, Miss Shaw-Lefevre, is here and she came
to dinner to-night to talk business about furnishing, etc. I think we
are getting on. Did you see in _The Times_ that the Clothworkers'
Company have given us 100 guineas?"
And thus the work went on, week after week, all through the year 1879. I
have before me a common-looking engagement-diary in which it is all
recorded, from the month of March to late in the month of October: all
the committee-meetings, all the letters written to newspapers, to
prospective students or to possible heads; the decision to purchase the
lease of "Walton House," "to be assigned to the President (Dr. Percival)
on August 1"; the builder's estimate for alterations ("£540 for raising
the roof and making twelve bedrooms"), the letters about drainage, or
cretonne, or armchairs and fenders, no less than the resolution passed
at Balliol on October 24 to "form a Company for the management of the
Hall under the Limited Liability Act of 1862, with a nominal capital of
£25,000." But by that time the Hall was already opened and the long
labour crowned; and a fortnight afterwards, on November 6, her youngest
child was born. It may be hoped that after this Mrs. Ward took a brief
holiday from the cares of Somerville.
Mrs. Ward remained a member of the original Council of Somerville Hall
long after her departure from Oxford, and during her last two years
there continued to be largely responsible, as one of the most active
members of the Association for the Education of Women, for the
organization of the teaching. All the lectures were arranged by the
Association--in consultation, of course, with the Principal--for it was
not until 1884 that women students were admitted to the smallest of the
University examinations, or to lectures at a few of the Colleges.
Thus had Mrs. Ward learnt her first lesson and won her first laurels in
the carrying out of a big piece of public work. It was an experience
that was to stand her in good stead in after years. But at this time her
ambitions were still largely historical, weaving themselves in dreams
and plans for the writing of that big book on the origins of modern
Spain of which she afterwards sketched the counterpart in Elsmere's
projected book on the origins of modern France. Very likely she would
have settled down to write it before the opening of Somerville, but as
early as October, 1877, she had received a very flattering offer from
Dean Wace, the general editor of the _Dictionary of Christian
Biography_, to take a large share in writing the lives of the early
Spanish ecclesiastics for that monumental work. It was an offer that she
could not refuse, and she always spoke with gratitude of the years of
hard and exacting work that followed, although once or twice she almost
broke down under the strain of it. "Sheer, hard, brain-stretching work,"
she calls it in her _Recollections_, and if anyone will look up her
articles on Joannes Biclarensis, or Idatius, or the Histories of Isidore
of Seville, they will see how triply justified she was in using the
term. "You have gone over the ground so thoroughly that there is no
gleaning left," wrote Mr. C. W. Boase, in those days one of the
best-known of Oxford history tutors, while Dean Wace himself, in the
many letters he wrote to her, showed by his kindness and consideration
how much he valued her contributions. Oxford began to think that she was
definitely committed to an historical career, when to its astonishment
she came out as the author of a children's story. "Milly and Olly" was
the record of her own "Holiday among the Mountains" with her children in
the summer of 1879, but the very simplicity of the tale has endeared it
to many generations of children and child-lovers, while the stories it
contains of Beowulf and the Spanish Queen give it a note of romance that
differentiates it from other nursery tales. She wrote it almost as a
relaxation in the summer of 1880; in the midst of her historical work it
showed that the story-telling instinct was already stirring within her.
And indeed the Oxford historical school was to be disappointed in her
after all, for her labours on the early Spaniards were in reality to
lead her into far other fields. Her interest in the problems of
Christianity had only gathered strength with the years, and were now
greatly stimulated by these researches into the early history of the
Spanish Church. She began to feel the enormous importance to the
believer of the _historical testimony_ on which the whole fabric rested,
while her keen historical imagination enabled her to grasp the mentality
of those distant ages which produced for us the literature of the New
Testament. A feeling of revolt against the arrogance of the orthodox
party, as it was represented in Oxford by Christchurch and Dr. Pusey,
grew and increased in her mind, while at the same time she became more
and more attracted by the romance and mystery of Christianity when
stripped of the coating of legend which pious hands had given it. As
early as 1871 she had written to Mr. Ward (à propos of a somewhat
fatuous sermon to which she had been listening): "How will you make
Christianity into a _motive_?--that is the puzzle. Traditional and
conventional Christianity is worked out--certainly as far as the great
artisan and intelligent working-class in England is concerned, and all
those who are young and touched, ever so vaguely and uncertainly, with
the thought-atmosphere, thought-currents of the day. Is there a
substitute which shall still be Christianity? Yes surely, but it is not
to be arrived at by mere arbitrary remoulding and petulant upsetting as
Mr. Voysey seems to think." And two years later she writes to her
father: "Just now it seems to me that one cannot make one's belief too
simple or hold what one does believe too strongly. Of dogmatic
Christianity I can make nothing. Nothing is clear except the personal
character of Christ and that view of Him as the founder and lawgiver of
a new society which struck me years ago in _Ecce Homo_. And the more I
read and think over the New Testament the more impossible it seems to me
to accept what is ordinarily called the scheme of Christianity."
But these reflections need never have led her in the direction of
writing _Robert Elsmere_ if it had not been for a personal incident. On
Sunday, March 6, 1881, she attended the first Bampton Lecture of the
Rev. John Wordsworth, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury. It was on "the
present unsettlement in religion," and the speaker castigated the
holders of unorthodox views as being very definitely guilty of sin.
Something in the tone of the sermon set Mary's heart on fire within her.
She walked home in a tumult of feeling. That this man with his confident
phrases should dare thus to arraign the leaders of the Liberal host--men
of such noble lives as T. H. Green, thinkers like Jowett and Matt
Arnold! She sat down and wrote, within a very few days, a reply to Dr.
Wordsworth entitled "Unbelief and Sin: a Protest addressed to those who
attended the Bampton Lecture of Sunday, March 6." A little pamphlet cast
in the form of a dialogue between two Oxford men, it was put up for sale
in Slatter & Rose's window and attracted considerable attention. But
before it had been selling for many hours a certain ecclesiastic took
the bookseller aside and pointed out that the pamphlet bore no printer's
name, which made the sale illegal. He politely threatened proceedings,
and the bookseller in alarm withdrew it from circulation and sent the
unsold copies up to Bradmore Road with an apology, but a firm intimation
that no further copies could be sold. Mary laughed and submitted, and
sent her anonymous offspring round to various friends, among them the
redoubtable Rector of Lincoln. He replied to her as follows:--
"No, I did not guess your secret. It was whispered to me in the
street, and I fancy was no secret within the first week of
publication.
"I admire your courage in attacking one of their strong places. The
doctrine of disbelief in Church principles being due to a
propensity to secret sins is one of the oldest tenets of the
Anglican party. It is also a fundamental principle of popular
Catholicism. I have heard it from the catholic pulpit so often that
it must have among them the character of a commonplace.
"There is, as you admit, a certain basis of fact for it--just as
'Patriotism' is often enough the trade of the egoist. 'Licence they
mean when they cry liberty.'
"More interesting even than your argument against the psychological
dogma, was your constructive hint as to the 'Church of the future.'
I wish I could follow you there! But that is an 'argumentum non
unius horæ.'
"Believe me, dear Mrs. Ward, to be
"Yr. attached friend,
"MARK PATTISON."
It was indeed an argument, not of a single hour, but of many long years.
But the spark had been set to a complex train of thought which was now
to work itself out through toil and stress towards its appointed end.