EARLY YEARS IN LONDON--THE WRITING OF _ROBERT ELSMERE_
1881-1888
It was in the early summer of 1880 that Mr. Ward was first approached by
Mr. Chenery, the editor, with a suggestion that he should join the staff
of _The Times_. The proposal was in many ways an attractive one, in
spite of the love of both husband and wife for Oxford, for Mr. Ward was
becoming known to a wider world than that of Oxford by his _English
Poets_, which had appeared in this year, nor was he a novice in
journalism. His wife, too, had many links with London through her visits
to the Forsters and her journalistic work. The experiment began in a
tentative way in the winter of 1880-81, she remaining in Oxford with the
children, and he being "tried" for leader-writing while staying in
Bloomsbury lodgings. Within a very few months it proved itself a
success, and, after some pleasant interviews with Mr. John Walter, he
was retained on the permanent staff of the paper. They began seriously
to plan their removal and to look for a house, and found one at length
in that comfortable Bloomsbury region, which was then innocent of big
hotels and offices, and where the houses in Russell Square had not yet
suffered embellishment in the form of pink terra-cotta facings to their
windows. They found that the oldest house in the Square, No. 61, was to
let, and in spite of the dirt of years with which it was encrusted,
perceived its possibilities at once, and came to an agreement with its
owner. A charming old house, built in 1745, its prettiest feature was a
small square entrance-hall, with eighteenth-century stucco-work on the
walls, from which a wide staircase ascended to the drawing-room, giving
an impression of space rare in a _bourgeois_ London house. At the back
was a good-sized strip of garden shaded by tall old plane-trees and
running down to meet the gardens of Queen Square, for No. 61 stood on
the east side of the square and adjoined the first house of Southampton
Row. Little powder-closets jutted out at the back, one of which Mrs.
Ward used as her writing-room, and upstairs the bedroom floors seemed to
expand as you ascended, reaching only to a third story, but giving us
rooms enough even so for ourselves, our maids, and a German governess,
besides the various relations who were constantly coming to stay. Wholly
pleasant are the memories connected with that benign old house, to us
children as well as to our elders, save only that to the youngest of us
there were always two lurking horrors, one on the second floor landing,
where a dark alcove gave harbourage to a little old man in Scotch kilts,
who might, if your legs were not swift enough, come after you as you
toiled up the last flight, and one--still more disquieting--on the top
landing itself, where the taps dripped in a dreadful little boxroom, and
if the taps dripped you knew that the water-bogy, _who lives in taps_,
might at any moment escape and overwhelm you. Since no self-respecting
child ever imparts its terrors to its elders, these nightmares went
unknown until one night, when all the maids were downstairs at supper,
the child in question could not make up its mind to cross the landing,
past the dark mouth of that box-room, from the room where it undressed
to the room where it slept, and was found an hour later, fast asleep in
a chair, with towels pinned over every inch of its small body lest the
bogy should come out and catch hold. After this crisis I think the
terrors declined, and now, alas! taps and box-room and dark alcove have
all disappeared together, with the pleasant rooms downstairs and the
gravelled garden where one made so many persevering expeditions with the
salt-cellar, after the tails of London's sparrows--all swept away and
vanished, and the air that they enclosed parcelled out once more into
the rectangles of the Imperial Hotel! Peace be to the ghost of that poor
house, for it gave happiness in its latter days for nine long years to
the human folk who inhabited it, and it watched the unfolding of a human
heart and mind which were to have no mean influence upon the generation
that encompassed them.
The house at Oxford was disposed of to the Henry Nettleships, at
Michaelmas, 1881, and in the following November the family moved in to
Russell Square. It was not without searchings of heart, I think, that
Mr. and Mrs. Ward embarked upon the larger venture, where all depended
on their retaining health and strength for their work; but they fondly
hoped that with the larger regular income from _The Times_ the burden on
both pairs of shoulders would be lessened.
"All will be well with us yet," wrote Mrs. Ward to her husband
three months before their move, "and if God is good to us there are
coming years of work indeed, but of less burden and strain. All
depends on you and me, and though I know the very thought depresses
us sometimes, it ought not to, for we have many good gifts within
and without, and a fair field, if not the fairest possible field to
use them in. It seems to me that all I want to be happy is to keep
my own heart and conscience clear, and to feel my way open into the
presence of God and the unseen. And surely to seek is to find."
Years of less burden and strain! She had, indeed, forgotten the spirit
within, which was to drive her on to ever new and greater efforts in the
more stimulating atmosphere of London. Though her work for the
_Dictionary of Christian Biography_ was almost over, she had by this
time made the acquaintance of Mr. Morley, then editor of the _Pall Mall
Gazette_, and was doing much reviewing of French and Spanish books for
him, while she continued to write weekly articles for the Church
_Guardian_ and the _Oxford Chronicle_. Nor were the authorities of _The
Times_ long in finding out that she too could write, and by the autumn
of 1882 many foreign books reached her for review from Printing House
Square. She complains in her letters that she cannot get through them
quickly enough. "Three or four volumes of these books a week is about
all I can do, and that seems to go no way." The inevitable expenses of
London life did in fact weigh upon her heavily within a year of their
migration, and the sense of "burden and strain" was never long absent.
But she could not have lived otherwise. It was her fundamental instinct
to work herself to the bone and then to share her good times with others
less fortunate, and since this process made away with her earnings she
would work herself to the bone again. In this atmosphere of unremitting
toil interruptions were of course discouraged, but when they occurred in
spite of all defences she never showed the irritation which so
frequently accompanies overwork. And in the many interruptions caused by
the childish illnesses of her small family her tenderness and devotion
were beyond all words. How she dosed us with aconite and belladonna,
watching over us and compelling us to throw off our fevers and colds!
Nor was anything allowed to interfere with the befriending of all
members of the family who wished to come to Russell Square. Her brother
Willie, who had by this time been appointed to the staff of the
_Manchester Guardian_, was a frequent visitor, renewing with each
appearance his literary _camaraderie_ with her and delighting in the
friends whom she would ask to meet him. Matthew Arnold, too, was
sometimes to be caught for an evening--great occasions, those, for Mrs.
Ward's relations with him were already of the most affectionate. He
influenced her profoundly in literary and critical matters, for she
imbibed from him both her respect for German thoroughness and her
passion for French perfection. These, indeed, were the years when she
saw most of "Uncle Matt," for Pains' Hill Cottage, at Cobham, was not
too far away for a Sunday visit, so that she and Mr. Ward would
sometimes fly down there for an afternoon of talk. Usually, however, she
would return full of blasphemies about his precious dogs, who had
diverted their master's attention all through the walk and prevented the
flow of his wit and wisdom. Therefore she preferred to get him safely to
herself at Russell Square!
Her two younger sisters, Julia and Ethel, were constantly in the house,
the elder of whom married in 1885 Mr. Leonard Huxley, and so brought
about a happy connection with the Professor and his wife, which gave
Mrs. Ward much joy for many years. Nor were her neighbours neglected.
When Christmas came round there was always a wonderful _Weihnachtsbaum_,
dressed with loving care by the good German governess, and by any uncles
and aunts who were within reach, and attended not only by all possible
relations and friends (including especially and always Mr. and Mrs. J.
R. Thursfield and their children), but also by the choirboys of St.
John's Church and by many of _their_ relations too. But behind all this
eager hospitality lay a far deeper longing. Her mother had, early in
1881, undergone a second operation for cancer, and though this gave her
a year's immunity from pain the malady returned. In March, 1882, she
wrote to her daughter with stoical courage that she foresaw what was in
store for her--"a hard ending to a hard life." Though she was devotedly
nursed by her youngest daughter, Ethel, her suffering overshadowed the
next six years of Mary's life like a cloud, but it became also Mrs.
Ward's keenest joy to be able to help her and to ease her path. Once
when she herself had been ill and suffering, she wrote her a few lines
which reveal her own inmost thoughts on the relation between pain and
faith:
"I am _so_ sorry, dearest, for your own suffering. This is a weary
world,--but there is good behind it, 'a holy will,' as Amiel says,
'at the root of nature and destiny,' and submission brings peace
because in submission the heart finds God and in God its rest.
There is no truth I believe in more profoundly."
Yet in spite of the unceasing round of work, what compensations there
were in the London life! The making of new friends can never fail to be
a delightful process, and it very soon became apparent that Mrs. Ward
was to be adopted to the heart of that London world which thought about
books and politics and which incidentally was making history. London was
smaller then than now, and if a new-comer had brains and modesty, and
above all a gift of sympathy that won all hearts, there were few doors
that did not open to her or him in time. Her connection with the
Forsters and with "Uncle Matt" brought her many friends to start with,
while Mr. Ward's work on _The Times_ took them naturally both into the
world of painters (for after 1884 he joined art criticism to his
political and other writing) and into the world of affairs. A letter
written to Mrs. A. H. Johnson in May, 1885, gives a typical picture of
the social side of her life three years after the move to London. The
occasion is the marriage of Alfred Lyttelton and Laura Tennant:
"The wedding function yesterday was very interesting. I am glad not
to have missed Gladstone's speech at the breakfast. What a wondrous
man it is! The intensity, the feeling of the speech were
extraordinary.... Life has been rather exciting lately in the way
of new friends, the latest acquisition being Mr. Goschen, to whom
I have quite lost my heart! There is a pliancy and a brilliancy
about him which make him one of the most delightful companions. We
dined there last Saturday and I have seldom had so much interesting
talk. Lord Arthur Russell, who sat next me, told me stories of how,
as a child at Geneva, he had met folk who in their youth had seen
Rousseau and known Voltaire, and had been intimate friends of Mme.
de Stael in middle life. And then, coming a little further down the
stream of time, he could describe to me having stayed at
Lamartine's château in the poet's old age, and so on. Mr. Goschen
is busy on a life of his grandfather, who was the publisher of
Goethe, Schiller and Wieland, and whose correspondence, which he is
now going through, covers the whole almost of the German literary
period,--so that after dinner the scene shifted to Germany, and we
talked away with an occasional raid into politics, till, to my
great regret, the evening was over."
Her own little dinner-parties very soon began to make their mark, while
not long after their establishment in London, she began the practice of
being at home on Thursday afternoons, and though at first her natural
shyness and lack of small talk made her openings somewhat formidable,
she soon warmed to the task, till within a very few months her Thursdays
became a much-appreciated institution. Men, as well as women, came to
them, for they always liked to make her talk and to hear her eager views
on all the topics of the day, from Irish coercion to the literary
personalities of France, or the need for prodding the Universities to
open their examinations to women. She still called herself a good
Radical in these days, but her devotion to Mr. Forster--whom she had
visited in Dublin during his Chief Secretaryship--gave the first
reservations to her Liberal faith, for she took his part in the matter
of his resignation, and felt that he had not been sufficiently supported
by the Cabinet. It was a great grief to her that Mr. Morley, in the
_Pall Mall Gazette_, found it necessary to attack Mr. Forster's Irish
administration with such persistent energy, and once, towards the end of
1882, she summoned up the courage to write him a remonstrance in good
set terms. Mr. Morley's reply is characteristic:
_Dec. 13, 82._
DEAR MRS. WARD,--
I have got your letter at last, and carefully read and digested it.
Need I say that its frank and direct vigour only increases my
respect for the writer? To answer it, as it deserves, is hardly
possible for me. It would take a day for me to set forth, with
proper reference to chapter and verse, all the reasons why I could
not follow Mr. Forster in his Irish administration. They were set
forth from time to time with almost tiresome iteration as events
moved forward.
In all that you say about Mr. Forster's unselfishness, his
industry, his strenuous desire to do what was right and best,
nobody agrees more cordially than I do. Personally I have always
had--if it is not impertinent in me to say so--a great liking for
him. He was always very kind and obliging to me, and nothing has
been more painful to me than to know that I was writing what would
wound a family for whom I have such sincere respect as I have for
his. But the occasion was grave. I have been thinking about Ireland
all my life, and that fashion of governing it is odious and
intolerable. If Sir Charles Dilke or Mr. Chamberlain had been Chief
Secretary, and carried out the Coercion Act as Mr. Forster carried
it out, I could not have attacked either of them, but I should have
resigned my editorship rather than have connived by silence or
otherwise at such mischief.
I may at times have seemed bitter and personal in my language about
Mr. Forster. One falls into this tone too readily, when fighting a
battle day after day, and writing without time for calm revision.
For that I am sorry, if it has been so, or seemed so. Mr. Forster's
friends--some of them--have been extremely unscrupulous in their
personalities against me, their charges of intrigue, conspiracy.
All that I do not care for one jot; my real regret, and it is a
very sincere one, is that I should seem unjust or vindictive to
people like you, who think honestly and calmly about politics, and
other things.
I hope that it is over, and that I shall never have to say a word
about Mr. Forster's Irish policy again.
Yours very sincerely,
JOHN MORLEY.
Such a letter only served to strengthen friendship. Mrs. Ward's literary
comradeship with Mr. Morley remained unbroken in spite of widening
differences in politics, and when, a few months later, he assumed the
editorship of _Macmillan's Magazine_ he proposed to her that she should
virtually take over its literary criticism:--
_March 22, 83._
DEAR MRS. WARD,--
My reign over "Macmillan" will begin in May. I want to know whether
you can help me to a literary article once a month--in the shape of
a _compte rendu_ of some new books, English or French. It is highly
desirable that the subject should be as lively and readable as
possible--not erudite and academic, but literary, or
socio-literary, as Ste Beuve was.
I don't see why a "causerie" from you once a month should not
become as marked a feature in our world, as Ste Beuve was to
France. In time, the articles would make matter for a volume, and
so you would strike the stars with your sublime head.
I hope my suggestion will commend itself to you. I have been
counting upon you, and shall be horribly discouraged if you say No.
Yours sincerely,
JOHN MORLEY.
Flattered as she was by the suggestion, she was never able to carry out
his whole behest, yet between February, 1883, and June, 1885, she wrote
no less than twelve articles for _Macmillan's_, on subjects ranging from
the young Spanish Romanticist, Gustavo Becquer, to Keats, Jane Austen,
Renan and the "Literature of Introspection" (à propos of Amiel's
_Journal Intime_), while the series was ended by a full-dress review of
Pater's _Marius the Epicurean_. These articles did much to assure her
position in the world of pure literature, as her Dictionary articles had
assured it in the world of scholarship, and she never ceased to be
grateful to Mr. Morley for the opportunities he had given her in
inviting them, for the encouragement of his praise and the bracing of
his occasional criticism.
But these articles were all written under the heaviest physical
disabilities. Early in 1883 she began to suffer from a violent form of
writer's cramp, which made her right hand almost useless at times, and
recurred at intervals all through her life, so that writing was usually
a far more arduous and painful process to her than it is to most of us.
Through the years 1883 and 1884 she was frequently reduced to writing
with her left hand, but she also dictated much to her young
sister-in-law, Gertrude Ward, who came to live with us at this time, and
became for the next eight years the prop and support of our household.
Many remedies were tried for the ailment, but nothing was really
effective until after two years a German "writing-master" came on the
scene, one Dr. Julius Wolff, who completely transformed her method of
writing by making her sit much higher than before, rest the whole
fore-arm on the table, and use an altogether different set of muscles.
Many curious exercises he gave her also, which she practised at
intervals for years afterwards, and by these means he succeeded in
giving her comparative immunity, though whenever she was specially
pressed with work the pain and weakness would recur. During the year
1884, however, before Dr. Wolff had appeared, her arm was practically
disabled, and she wore it much in a sling.
Yet it was during this year that she began her translation of Amiel's
_Journal_ and wrote her first novel, _Miss Bretherton_. The idea of it
was suggested by her first sight of the beautiful actress, Mary
Anderson, though she always maintained that, once created, Isabel
Bretherton became to her an absolutely distinct personality. The manner
of its writing is told in a fragment of Miss Gertrude Ward's journal:
"The book was written in about six weeks. She used to lie or sit
out of doors at Borough Farm, with a notebook and pencil, and
scrawl down what she could with her left hand; then she would come
in about twelve and dictate to me at a great rate for an hour or
more. In the afternoon and evening she would look over and correct
what was done, and I copied out the whole. The scene of Marie and
Kendal in his rooms was dictated in her bedroom; she lay on her
bed, and I sat by the window behind a screen."
The book was published by Messrs. Macmillan and appeared in December,
1884. It attracted a good deal of attention. The general verdict was
that it was a fine and delicate piece of work, but on too limited, too
intellectual a scale. This view was admirably put by her old friend, Mr.
Creighton (then Emmanuel Professor at Cambridge):
MY DEAR MRS. WARD,--
I have read _Miss Bretherton_ with much interest. It was hardly
fair on the book to know the plot beforehand, but I found myself
carried away by the delicate feeling with which the development of
character was traced. The Nuneham scene, the death-bed and the
final reconciliation were really touching and powerfully worked
out.
[Illustration: Borough Farm.]
At the same time it is not a novel of my sort. I demand that I
should have given me an entire slice of life, and that I should see
the mutual interaction of a number of characters. Your interest
centres entirely on one character: your characters all move in the
same region of ideas, and that a narrow one. Your book is dainty,
but it does not touch the great springs of life. Of course you
didn't mean it to do so: but I am putting before you what I
conceive to be the novelist's ideal. It seems to me that a novelist
must have seen much, must lay himself out to be conversant with
many sides of life, must have no line of his own, but must lend
himself to the life of those around him. This is the direct
opposite of the critic. I wonder if the two trades can be combined.
Have you ever read Sainte Beuve's solitary novel, _Volupté_? It is
instructive reading. You are a critic in your novel. Your object is
really to show how criticism can affect a nature capable of
receiving it. Now is this properly a subject of art? Is it not too
didactic? It is not so for me, for I am an old-fashioned moralist:
but the mass of people do not care for intellectual teaching in
novels. They want an emotional thrill. Remember that you have
deliberately put this aside. Kendal's love is not made to affect
his life, his character, his work. Miss Bretherton only feels so
far attracted to him as to listen to what he says.... I only say
this to show you what the book made me think, that you wrote as a
critic not as a creator. You threw into the form of a story many
critical judgments, and gave an excellent sketch of the possible
worth of criticism in an unregenerate world. This was worth doing
once: but if you are going on with novels you must throw criticism
to the winds and let yourself go as a partner of common joys,
common sorrows and common perplexities. There, I have told you what
I think just as I think it. I would not have done so to anyone else
save you, to whom I am always,
Your most affectionate,
M. CREIGHTON.
No doubt Mrs. Ward stored up this criticism for future use, for when she
next embarked upon a novel the canvas was indeed broad enough.
They had not been settled in London for much more than a year before
Mrs. Ward began to feel the need for some quiet and remote country place
to which she might fly for peace and work when the strain of London
became too great. Fortune favoured the quest, for in the summer of 1882
they took the rectory at Peper Harow, near Godalming (the "Murewell
Rectory" of _Robert Elsmere_), for a few weeks, and during that time
were taken by Lord Midleton, the owner of Peper Harow, to see a
delightful old farm in the heart of the lonely stretch of country that
lies between the Portsmouth Road and Elstead. They fell in love with it
at once, and during the following winter made an arrangement to take its
six or seven front rooms by the year. So from the summer of 1883 onwards
they possessed Borough Farm as a refuge and solace in the wilds, a
paradise for elders and children alike, where London and its turmoil
could be cast off and forgotten. It lay in a country of heather commons,
woods, rough meadows, streams and lakes--those "Hammer Ponds" which
remain as a relic of the iron-smelting days of Surrey, and in which we
children amused ourselves by the hour in fishing for perch with a bent
pin and a worm. Here Mrs. Ward would lie out whenever the sun shone in
the old sand-pit up the lane, where we had constructed a sort of terrace
for her long chair, or else under the ash-tree on the little hill,
writing or reading, while no sound came save the murmur of wind in the
gorse, or in the dry bells of the heather. If her physique had been
stronger she would, perhaps, have been too much tempted by the beauty of
the country ever to have lain still and worked for so many hours as she
did in that long chair; but she was never robust, she was extremely
susceptible to bad weather, cold winds and every form of chill, and her
longest expeditions were those which she took in a little pony-carriage
over Ryal or Bagmoor Commons to Peper Harow, or up the Portsmouth Road
to Thursley and Hindhead.
Here a few friends came at intervals to share the solitude with us:
Laura Tennant, on a wonderful day in May, 1884, when she seemed to her
dazzled hostess the very incarnation of the spring; M. Edmond Scherer,
her earliest French friend, who, in 1884, was helping her with her
translation of Amiel's _Journal_; Henry James, whose visit laid the
foundation of a friendship that was to ripen into one of the most
precious of all Mrs. Ward's possessions; Mlle. Souvestre, foundress of
the well-known girls' school at Wimbledon, and one of the keenest
intellects of her time; and once, for a whole fortnight, Miss Eugénie
Sellers,[10] who had for many months been teaching the family their
classics, and who now came down to superintend their Greek a little and
to roam the commons with them much. It was in 1886, just before this
visit, that Mrs. Ward began seriously to read Greek, usually with her
ten-year-old son; she bought a Thucydides in Godalming one day and was
delighted to find it easier than she expected. It was a passion that
grew upon her with the years, as any reader of her later books will
clearly perceive.
Then, though the solitude of the farm itself was profound, there were a
few, a very few, neighbours in the more eligible districts round about
who made it their pleasure sometimes to call upon us; there were the
Frederic Harrisons at Elstead, whose four boys dared us children to
horrid feats of jumping and climbing in the sand-pit, while our elders
were safely engaged elsewhere; John Morley also, for a few weeks in
1886, and in the other direction Lord and Lady Wolseley, who took a
house near Milford, and thence made their way occasionally down our
sandy track. But the neighbours who meant most to us were, after all,
our landlords, the Brodricks of Peper Harow; they were not only
endlessly kind, giving us leave to disport ourselves in all their
ponds, but took a sort of pride of possession, I believe, in their
pocket authoress, watching her struggles and her achievement with
paternal eyes. And when _Robert Elsmere_ at length appeared, old Lord
Midleton, pillar of Church and State as he was, came riding over to the
farm, sitting his horse squarely in spite of his white hairs and his
semi-blindness, and sent in word that the "Wicked Squire" was at the
gate!
Two letters written to her father from Borough Farm during these years,
give glimpses of her browsings in many books, and of her thoughts on
Shakespeare, evolution and kindred matters:
"I have been reading Joubert's _Pensées_ and _Correspondance_
lately, with a view to the Amiel introduction. You would be charmed
with the letters, and some of the _pensées_ are extraordinarily
acute. Now I am deep in Sénancour, and for miscellaneous reading I
have been getting through Horace's Epistles and dawdling a good
deal over Shakespeare. My feeling as to him gets stronger and
stronger, that he was, strictly speaking, a great poet, but not a
great dramatist! There's a remark over which I trust you will draw
a fatherly veil! But one can only say what one feels, and I am more
oppressed than I used to be by his faults of construction, his
carelessness, his excrescences, while at the same time much more
sensitive to his preternatural power as a poet and as a
psychological analyst. He gets at the root of his characters in a
marvellous way, he envisages them separately as no one else can,
but it is when he comes to bring them into action to represent the
play of outward circumstance and the interaction of character on
character that he seems to me comparatively--only comparatively, of
course--to fail. I have always felt it most strongly in Othello,
and of course in the last act of Hamlet, which, in spite of the
magnificent poetry in it, is surely a piece of dramatic
bungling....
"As to Renan it would be too long to argue it, but I think he very
much saves himself in the passage you quote by the qualifying word
'comme.' The Church is 'as it were' _un débris de l'Empire_. It is
only another way of putting what Harnack said in that article you
and I read at Sea View. 'The Empire built up the Church out of its
own substance, and destroyed itself in so doing,' or words to that
effect. I cannot help feeling that as far as organization and
institutions go it is very true, though I would never deny that God
was in the Church, as I believe He is in all human society,
moulding it to His will. Everything, from the critical and
scientific standpoint, seems to me so continuous and natural--no
sharp lines anywhere--one thing leading to another, event leading
to event, belief to belief--and God enwrapping and enfolding all.
But this is one general principle, and yours is quite another. I
quite agree that from your standpoint no explanation that Renan
could give of the Church can appear other than meagre or
grotesque."
Her translation of Amiel's _Journal Intime_ was a long and exacting
piece of work, but she enjoyed the struggle with the precise meaning of
the French phrases and always maintained that she owed much to it, both
in her knowledge of French and of English. She had begun it, with the
benevolent approval of its French editor, M. Scherer, early in 1884, and
took it up again after _Miss Bretherton_ came out; found it indeed a far
more troublesome task than she had foreseen, and was still wrestling
with the Introduction in the summer of 1885, when her head was already
full of her new novel, and she was fretting to begin upon it. But the
book appeared at length in December, 1885, and very soon made its mark.
The wonderful language of the Swiss mystic appealed to a generation more
occupied than ours with the things of the soul, while Mrs. Ward's
introduction gave a masterly sketch of the writer's strange personality
and the development of his mind. As Jowett wrote to her, "Shall I tell
you the simple truth? It is wonderful to me how you could have thought
and known so much about so many things." Mr. Talbot, the Warden of Keble
(now Bishop of Winchester), wrote of the "almost breathless admiration
of the truth and penetration of his thought" with which he had read the
book, while Lord Arthur Russell reported that he had "met Mr. Gladstone,
who spoke with great interest of Amiel, asked me whether I had compared
the translation with the original, and said that a most interesting
small volume might be extracted, of _Pensées_, quite equal to Pascal."
But it was, inevitably, "caviar to the general." Mrs. Ward's brother,
Willie Arnold, her close comrade and friend in all things literary,
wrote to her from Manchester a few months after its appearance: "I
served on a jury at the Assizes last week--two murder cases and general
horrors. I sat next to a Mr. Amiel--pronounced 'Aymiell'--a worthy
Manchester tradesman; no doubt his ancestor was a Huguenot refugee. I
had one of your vols. in my pocket, and showed him the passage about the
family. He was greatly interested, and borrowed it. Returned it next day
with the remark that it was 'too religious for him.' Alas, divine
philosophy!"
* * * * *
Ever since the previous winter the idea of a novel in which the clash
between the older and the younger types of Christianity should be worked
out in terms of human life, had been growing and fermenting in her mind.
_Miss Bretherton_ and Amiel's _Journal_ had given her a valuable
apprenticeship in the art of writing, while Amiel's luminous reflections
on the decadence and formalism of the churches had tended to confirm her
own passionate conviction that all was not well with the established
forms of religion. But the determining factor in the writing of _Robert
Elsmere_ was the close and continuous study which she had given ever
since her work for the _Dictionary of Christian Biography_ to the
problem of "Christian origins." She was fascinated by the intricacy and
difficulty of the whole subject, but more especially by such branches of
it as the Synoptic Problem, or the relation of the Fourth Gospel to the
rest; while the questions raised by the realization that the Books of
the New Testament were the products of an age steeped in miracle and
wholly uncritical of the records of it, struck her as vital to the whole
orthodox position. At the same time her immense tenderness for
Christianity, her belief that the life and teaching of the Founder were
still the "master-light of all our seeing," made her yearn for a
simplification of the creeds, so that the Message itself should once
more appeal to the masses without the intervention of formulæ that
perpetually challenged their reason. The argument of "Literature and
Dogma" culminates in the picture of mankind waiting for the lifting of
the burden of "Aberglaube" and dogmatism, with which the spirit of
Christianity had been crushed down for centuries, waiting for the
renewal that would come when the old coil was cast off. It was in that
spirit also that Mrs. Ward attacked the problem; her Robert was to her a
link in the chain of the liberators of all ages. Was her outlook too
intellectual? Did she overestimate the repugnance to obsolete forms that
possessed her generation? So it was said by many who rose up in startled
defence of those forms, many who had never felt the uttermost clash
between the things which they wished to believe and the things which
Truth allowed them to believe. Yet still the response of her generation
was to be greater than she ever dreamt. No doubt the renewal did not
come in the precise form in which she looked for it; creeds were to
prove tougher, the worship of the Risen Lord more vital than she
thought; yet still, in a hundred ways, the influence of the fermentation
caused by the ideas of _Robert Elsmere_ may be traced in the Church
to-day. "Biblical criticism" may now be out of fashion; but it is
because its victory has in reality been won. All this lay hidden from
the mind of the writer as she sat toiling over her task in the solitude
of Borough Farm, or in the little "powder-closet" overlooking the back
gardens of Russell Square; she wrote because she "could no other," and
only rarely did she allow herself to feel, with trembling, that the
_Zeitgeist_ might indeed be with her.
The book was begun in the autumn of 1885, with every hope that it would
be finished in less than a year. It was offered, when a few chapters had
been written, to the Macmillans for publication, since they had
published both _Miss Bretherton_ and the _English Poets_, but to the sad
disappointment of its author they rejected it on the ground that the
subject was not likely to appeal to the British public. In this dilemma
Mrs. Ward bethought herself of Mr. George Murray Smith, the publisher of
Charlotte Brontë, and in some trepidation offered the book to him. Mr.
Smith had greater faith than the Macmillans and accepted it at once,
sealing the bargain by making an advance of £200 upon it in May, 1886.
So began Mrs. Ward's connection with "George Smith," as she always
familiarly spoke of him: a friend and counsellor indeed, to whom she
owed incalculable things in the years that followed.
In the Preface to the "Westmorland Edition" of _Robert Elsmere_, issued
twenty-three years later, Mrs. Ward herself confessed to her models for
some of the principal characters--to the friend of her youth, Mark
Pattison, for the figure of the Squire (though not in his landowning
capacity!); to Thomas Hill Green, "the noblest and most persuasive
master of philosophic thought in modern Oxford," for that of Henry Grey;
and to Amiel himself, the hapless intellectual tortured by the paralysis
of will, for that of Langham. Both the Rector of Lincoln and Professor
Green had recently died, the latter in the prime of his life and work,
and Mrs. Ward sought both in the dedication and in her sketch of the
strong and lovable tutor of St. Anselm's, to express her lasting
admiration for this lost friend. But she claimed in each case the
artist's freedom to treat her creatures as her own, once they had
entered the little world of the novel: a thesis which she was to
maintain and develop in later years, when she occasionally went to the
past for her characters. Catherine was a more composite picture, drawn
from the "strong souls" she had known among her own kinswomen from
childhood up, and therefore, perhaps, more tenderly treated by the
author than the rules of artistic detachment would allow. She was a type
far more possible in the 'eighties than now, but it is perhaps
comforting to know that no single human being inspired her. As to the
scene in which these figures moved, it was on a sunny day at the end of
May, 1885, that Mrs. Ward's old friend, Mr. James Cropper, of
Ellergreen, took her for a drive up the valley of Long Sleddale, in a
lonely part of Westmorland. There she saw the farm at the head of the
dale, the vicarage, the Leyburns' house. Already her thoughts were busy
with her story, and from that day onwards she peopled the quiet valley
with her folk.
At first she was full of hope that the book would be finished before the
summer of 1886, although she admits to her mother that "it is very
difficult to write and the further I get the harder it is." In March of
that year she writes to her sister-in-law: "I have made up my mind to
come here [Borough Farm] for the whole of April, so as to get _Robert
Elsmere done_! It must and shall be done by the end of April, if I
expire in the attempt." In April she did indeed work herself nearly to
death, writing sixteen, eighteen and even twenty pages of manuscript in
the day, and a sort of confidence began to grow up in her mind that the
book would not speak its message in vain. "I think this book _must_
interest a certain number of people," she writes to her mother; "I
certainly feel as if I were writing parts of it with my heart's blood."
But the difficulties only increased, and actually it was the end of
October before even the first two volumes were finished. And then "the
more satisfied I become with the second volume the more discontented I
am with the first. It must be re-cast, alas!" Her arm was often
troublesome, especially in the autumn of this year, when she was staying
at the Forsters' house near Fox How, working very hard. "I am dreadfully
low about myself," she writes; "my arm has not been so bad since April,
when it took me practically a month's rest to get it right again. I have
been literally physically incapable of finishing my last chapter. And to
think of all the things I promised myself to do this week! And here I
have time, ideas, inclination, and I can do nothing. I will dictate if I
can to Gertrude, but I am so discouraged just at present I seem to have
no heart for it." Then a few days later it has taken a turn for the
better, and she is overjoyed: "The second volume was _finished_ last
night! The arm is _decidedly_ better, though still shaky. I sleep badly,
and rheumatism keeps flying about me, now here, now there, but I am not
at all doleful--indeed in excellent spirits now that the arm is better!"
So, in spite of the distractions of London, she struggled on with the
third volume all through that winter (1886-7), flying for a week in
December to Borough Farm in order to get complete isolation for her
task. "Oh, the quiet, the blissful quiet of it! It helps me most in
thinking out the book. I can _write_ in London; I seem to be unable to
think." Sometimes, however, her head was utterly exhausted. Returning to
London, she wrote to her mother: "I did a splendid day's work yesterday,
but it was fighting against headache all day, and this morning I felt
quite incapable of writing and have been lying down, reading, though my
wretched head is hardly fit for reading. It is not exactly pain, but a
horrid feeling of tension and exhaustion, as if one hadn't slept for
ever so long, which I don't at all approve of."
Often, when these fits of exhaustion came on, a small person would be
sent for from the schoolroom, in whose finger-tips a quaint form of
magic was believed to reside, and there she would sit for an hour,
stroking her mother's head, or her hands, or her feet, while the
"Jabberwock" on the Chinese cabinet curled his long tail at the pair in
silence. "Chatter to me," she used to say; but this was not always easy,
and a golden and friendly silence, peopled by many thoughts, usually lay
between the two.
At length, on March 9, 1887, the last words of the third volume were
written, there in the little powder-closet behind the back drawing-room.
But this did not mean the end. She was already painfully aware that the
book was too long, and Mr. George Smith, best and truest of advisers,
firmly indicated to her that the limits even of a three-volume novel had
been overstepped. She herself had already admitted to her brother Willie
that it was "not a novel at all," and she now plunged bravely into the
task of cutting and revision, fondly hoping that it would take her no
more than a fortnight's hard work. Instead it took her the best part of
a year. Publication first in the summer season, then in the autumn, had
to be given up, while her own fatigue increased so that sometimes for
days together she could not touch the book. The few friends to whom she
showed it were indeed encouraging, and her brother Willie was the first
to prophesy that it would "make a great mark." After reading the first
volume he wrote to Mrs. Arnold, "You may look forward to finding
yourself the mother of a famous woman!" But the mood of this year was
one of depression, while Mrs. Arnold's illness became an ever-increasing
sorrow. In the Long Vacation Mrs. Ward took the empty Lady Margaret
Hall, at Oxford, for a few weeks, in order to be near her mother--a step
which brought her unexpectedly another pleasure. On the very day after
they arrived she wrote: "I have had a great pleasure to-day, for at
three o'clock arrived a note from Jowett saying that he was in Oxford
for a day and would I come to tea? So I went down at five, stayed an
hour, then he insisted on walking up here, and sat in the garden
watching the children play tennis till about seven. Dear old man! I have
the most lively and filial affection for him. We talked about all sorts
of things--Cornwall, politics, St. Paul--and when I wanted to go he
would not let me. I think he liked it, and certainly I did."
Through the autumn and into the month of January, 1888, she struggled
with mountains of proofs, while Mr. Smith, though without much faith in
the popular prospects of the book, was always "kind and indulgent," as
she gratefully testifies in the _Recollections_. At length, towards the
end of January, she sent in the last batch, and on February 24 the book
appeared.
Six weeks later, in the little house in Bradmore Road, which had
witnessed so many years of suffering indomitably borne, Julia Arnold lay
dying. Through pain and exhaustion unspeakable she had yet kept her
intense interest in the human scene, and now the last pleasure which she
enjoyed on earth was the news that reached her of the growing success of
her daughter's book. With a hand so weak that the pen kept falling from
her fingers, she wrote her an account of the Oxford gossip on it; she
asked her, with a flash of the old malice, to let her know at once
should she hear what any of her aunts were saying. Alas, Julia knew
better than anyone else on earth what the religious temperament of the
Arnolds might mean; but before the answer came her poor tormented spirit
was at rest for ever.