_ROBERT ELSMERE_ AND AFTER
1888-1889
Three volumes, printed as closely as were those of _Robert Elsmere_,
penetrated somewhat slowly among the fraternity of reviewers. The
_Scotsman_ and the _Morning Post_ were the first to notice it on March
5, nine days after its appearance; the _British Weekly_ wept over it on
March 9; the _Academy_ compared it to _Adam Bede_ on the 17th; the
_Manchester Guardian_ gave it two columns on the 21st; the _Saturday_
"slated" it on the 24th; while Walter Pater's article in the Church
_Guardian_ on the 28th, calling it a "_chef d'œuvre_ of that kind of
quiet evolution of character through circumstance, introduced into
English literature by Miss Austen and carried to perfection in France by
George Sand," gave perhaps greater happiness to its author than any
other review. _The Times_ waited till April 7, being in no hurry to show
favour to one connected with its staff, but when it came the review duly
spoke of _Robert_ as "a clever attack upon revealed religion," and all
was well. By the end of March, however, the public interest in the book
had begun in earnest; the first edition of 500 copies was exhausted and
a second had appeared; this was sold out by the middle of April; a third
appeared on April 19 and was gone within a week; a fourth followed in
the same way. Matthew Arnold wrote from Wilton, the Pembrokes' house, a
week before his death (which occurred on April 15), that he found all
the guests there reading or intending to read it, and added, "George
Russell, who was staying at Aston Clinton with Gladstone, says it is all
true about his interest in the book. He talked of it incessantly and
said he thought he should review it for Knowles."
As a matter of fact, Mr. Gladstone had already written the first draft
of his article and was corresponding with Lord Acton on the various
points which he wished to raise or to drive home. His biographer hints
that Acton's replies were not too encouraging. But the old giant was not
to be deterred. The book had moved him profoundly and he felt impelled
to combat the all too dangerous conclusions to which it pointed. "Mamma
and I," he wrote to his daughter in March, "are each of us still
separately engaged in a death-grapple with _Robert Elsmere_. I
complained of some of the novels you gave me to read as too stiff, but
they are nothing to this. It is wholly out of the common order. At
present I regard with doubt and dread the idea of doing anything on it,
but cannot yet be sure whether your observations will be verified or
not. In any case it is a tremendous book." And to Lord Acton he wrote:
"It is not far from twice the length of an ordinary novel; and the
labour and effort of reading it all, I should say, sixfold; while one
could no more stop in it than in reading Thucydides." Early in April he
came to Oxford to stay with the Edward Talbots at Keble College, and
hearing that Mrs. Ward was also there, watching over her dying mother,
he expressed a desire to see her, and, if possible, to talk the book
over with her. She came on the day after her mother's death--April
8--towards evening, and waited for him alone in the Talbots'
drawing-room. That night she wrote down the following account of their
conversation:
"I arrived at Keble at 7.10. Gladstone was not in the drawing-room.
I waited for about three minutes when I heard his slow step coming
downstairs. He came in with a candle in his hand which he put out,
then he came up most cordially and quickly. 'Mrs. Ward--this is
most good of you to come and see me! If you had not come, I should
myself have ventured to call and ask after yourself and Mr.
Arnold.'
"Then he sat down, he on a small uncomfortable chair, where he
fidgeted greatly! He began to ask about Mamma. Had there been much
suffering? Was death peaceful? I told him. He said that though he
had seen many deaths, he had never seen any really peaceful. In all
there had been much struggle. So much so that 'I myself have
conceived what I will not call a terror of death, but a repugnance
from the idea of death. It is the rending asunder of body and soul,
the tearing apart of the two elements of our nature--for I hold the
body to be an essential element as well as the soul, not a mere
sheath or envelope.' He instanced the death of Sidney Herbert as an
exception. _He_ had said 'can this indeed be dying?'--death had
come so gently.
"Then after a pause he began to speak of the knowledge of Oxford
shown by _Robert Elsmere_, and we went on to discuss the past and
present state of Oxford. He mentioned it 'as one of the few points
on which, outside Home Rule, I disagree with Hutton,'[11] that
Hutton had given it as his opinion that Cardinal Newman and Matthew
Arnold had had more influence than any other men on modern Oxford.
Newman's influence had been supreme up to 1845--nothing since, and
he gathered from Oxford men that Professor Jowett and Mr. Green had
counted for much more than Matthew Arnold. M.A.'s had been an
influence on the general public, not on the Universities. How
Oxford had been torn and rent, what a 'long agony of thought' she
had gone through! How different from Cambridge!
"Then we talked again of Newman, how he had possessed the place,
his influence comparable only to that of Abelard on Paris--the
flatness after he left. I quoted Burne-Jones on the subject. Then I
spoke of Pattison's autobiography as illustrating Newman's hold. He
agreed, but said that Pattison's religious phase was so
disagreeable and unattractive that it did small credit to Newman.
He would much like to have seen more of the autobiography, but he
understood that the personalities were too strong. I asked him if
he had seen Pattison's last 'Confession of Faith,' which Mrs.
Pattison decided not to print, in MS. He said no. Then he asked me
whether I had pleasant remembrances of Pattison. I warmly said yes,
and described how kind he had been to me as a girl. 'Ah!' he
said--'Church would never cast him off; and Church is almost the
only person of whom he really speaks kindly in the Memoirs.'
"Then, from the state of Oxford, we passed to the state of the
country during the last half-century. 'It has been a _wonderful_
half-century! I often tell the young men who are coming on that we
have had a better time than they can have, in the next
half-century. Take one thing only--the abolition of slavery in the
world (outside Africa I suppose he meant). You are too young to
realize what that means. But I draw a distinction between the first
twenty-five years of the period and the second; during the first,
steady advance throughout all classes, during the second, distinct
recession, and retrogression, in the highest class of all. That
testing point, _marriage_, very disquieting. The scandals about
marriage in the last twenty years unparallelled in the first half
of the period. I don't trust my own opinion, but I asked two of the
keenest social observers, and two of the coolest heads I ever
knew--Lord Granville and the late Lord Clanwilliam--to tell me what
they thought and they strongly confirmed my impression.' (Here one
of the Talbot boys came in and stood by the fire, and Gladstone
glanced at him once or twice, as though conversation on these
points was difficult while he was there.) I suggested that more was
made of scandals nowadays by the newspapers. But he would not have
it--'When I was a boy--I left Eton in 1827--there were two papers,
the _Age_ and the _Satirist_, worse than anything which exists now.
But they died out about 1830, and for about forty years there was
_nothing of the kind_. Then sprang up this odious and deplorable
crop of Society papers.' He thought the fact significant.
"He talked of the modern girl. 'They tell me she is not what she
was--that she loves to be fast. I don't know. All I can bear
testimony to is the girl of my youth. _She_ was excellent!'
"'But,' I asked him, 'in spite of all drawbacks, do you not see a
gradual growth and diffusion of earnestness, of the social passion
during the whole period?' He assented, and added, 'With the decline
of the Church and State spirit, with the slackening of State
religion, there has unquestionably come about a quickening of the
State conscience, of the _social_ conscience. I will not say what
inference should be drawn.'
"Then we spoke of charity in London, and of the way in which the
rich districts had elbowed out their poor. And thereupon--perhaps
through talk of the _motives_ for charitable work--we came to
religion. 'I don't believe in any new system,' he said, smiling,
and with reference to _Robert Elsmere_; 'I cling to the old. The
great traditions are what attract me. I believe in a degeneracy of
man, in the Fall--in _sin_--in the intensity and virulence of sin.
No other religion but Christianity meets the sense of sin, and sin
is the great fact in the world to me.'
"I suggested that though I did not wish for a moment to deny the
existence of moral evil, the more one thought of it the more plain
became its connection with physical and social and therefore
_removable_ conditions. He disagreed, saying that the worst forms
of evil seemed to him to belong to the highest and most favoured
class 'of _educated_ people'--with some emphasis.
"I asked him whether it did not give him any confidence in 'a new
system'--i.e. a new construction of Christianity--to watch its
effect on such a life as T. H. Green's. He replied individuals were
no test; one must take the broad mass. Some men were born 'so that
sin never came near them. Such men never felt the need of
Christianity. They would be better if they were worse!'
"And as to difficulties, the great difficulties of all lay in the
way of Theism. 'I am surprised at men who don't feel this--I am
surprised at you!' he said, smiling. Newman had put these
difficulties so powerfully in the _Apologia_. The Christian system
satisfied all the demands of the conscience; and as to the
intellectual difficulties--well there we came to the question of
miracles.
"Here he restated the old argument against an _a priori_
impossibility of miracles. Granted a God, it is absurd to limit the
scope and range of the _will_ of such a being. I agreed; then I
asked him to let me tell him how I had approached the
question--through a long immersion in documents of the early
Church, in critical and historical questions connected with
miracles. I had come to see how miracles arise, and to feel it
impossible to draw the line with any rigidity between one
miraculous story and another.
"'The difficulty is'--he said slowly, 'if you sweep away miracles,
you sweep away _the Resurrection_! With regard to the other
miracles, I no longer feel as I once did that they are the most
essential evidence for Christianity. The evidence which now comes
_nearest_ to me is the evidence of Christian history, of the type
of character Christianity has produced----'
"Here the Talbots' supper bell rang, and the clock struck eight. He
said in the most cordial way it was impossible it could be so late,
that he must not put the Warden's household out, but that our
conversation could not end there, and would I come again? We
settled 9.30 in the morning. He thanked me, came with me to the
hall and bade me a most courteous and friendly good-bye."[12]
The next morning she duly presented herself after breakfast, and this
time they got to grips far more thoroughly than before with the question
of miracles and of New Testament criticism generally. In a letter to her
husband (published in the _Recollections_) she calls it "a battle royal
over the book and Christian evidences," and describes how "at times he
looked stern and angry and white to a degree, so that I wondered
sometimes how I had the courage to go on--the drawn brows were so
formidable!" But she stuck to her points and found, as she thought, that
for all his versatility he was not really familiar with the literature
of the subject, but took refuge instead in attacking her own Theistic
position, divested as it was of supernatural Christianity. "I do not say
or think you 'attack' Christianity," he wrote to her two days later,
"but in proposing a substitute for it, reached by reduction and
negation, I think (forgive me) you are dreaming the most visionary of
all human dreams."
He enclosed a volume of his _Gleanings_, marking the article on "The
Courses of Religious Thought." Mrs. Ward replied to him as follows:--
_April 15, 1888._
DEAR MR. GLADSTONE,--
Thank you very much for the volume of _Gleanings_ with its gracious
inscription. I have read the article you point out to me with the
greatest interest, and shall do the same with the others. Does not
the difference between us on the question of sin come very much to
this--that to you the great fact in the world and in the history of
man, is _sin_--to me, _progress_? I remember Amiel somewhere speaks
of the distinction as marking off two classes of thought, two
orders of temperament. In myself I see a perpetual struggle, in the
world also, but through it all I feel the "Power that makes for
righteousness." In the life of conscience, in the play of physical
and moral law, I see the ordained means by which sin is gradually
scourged and weakened both in the individual and in the human
society. And as to that sense of _irreparableness_, that awful
burden of evil both on the self and outside it, for which all
religions have sought an anodyne in the ceremonies of propitiation
and sacrifice, I think the modern who believes in God and cherishes
the dear memory of a human Christ will learn humbly, as Amiel says,
even "to accept himself," and life, as they are, at God's hands.
Constant and recurrent experience teaches him that the baser self
can only be killed by constant and recurrent effort towards good;
the action of the higher self is governed by an even stronger and
more prevailing law of self-preservation than that of the lower;
evil finds its appointed punishment and deterrent in pain and
restlessness; and as the old certainty of the Christian heaven
fades it will become clear to him that his only hope of an
immortality worth having lies in the developing and maturing of
that diviner part in him which can conceive and share the divine
life--of the soul. And for the rest, he will trust in the
indulgence and pity of the power which brought forth this strangely
mingled world.
So much for the minds capable of such ideas. For the masses, in the
future, it seems to me that charitable and social organization will
be all-important. If the simpler Christian ideas can clothe
themselves in such organization--and I believe they can and are
even now beginning to do it--their effect on the democracy may be
incalculable. If not, then God will fulfil Himself in other ways.
But "dream" as it may be, it seems to many of us, a dream worth
trying to realize in a world which contains your seven millions of
persons in France, who will have nothing to say to religious
beliefs, or the 200,000 persons in South London alone, amongst
whom, according to the _Record_, Christianity has practically no
existence.
And the letter ends with a plea that the faith which animated T. H.
Green might fitly be described by the words of the Psalm, "my soul is
athirst for God, for the living God."
To this Mr. Gladstone replied immediately:
ST. JAMES'S STREET.
_April 16, 1888._
MY DEAR MRS. WARD,--
I do not at all doubt that your conception of _Robert Elsmere_
includes much of what is expressed in the opening verses of Psalm
42. I am more than doubtful whether he could impart it to Elgood
St., and I wholly disbelieve that Elgood St. could hand it on from
generation to generation. You have much courage, but I doubt
whether even you are brave enough to think that, fourteen centuries
after its foundation, Elgood St. could have written the _Imitation
of Christ_.
And my meaning about Mr. Green was to hint at what seems to me the
unutterable strangeness of his passionately beseeching philosophy
to open to him the communion for which he thirsted, when he had a
better source nearer hand.
It is like a farmer under the agricultural difficulty who has to
migrate from England and plants himself in the middle of the
Sahara.
But I must abstain from stimulating you. At Oxford I sought to
avoid pricking you and rather laid myself open--because I thought
it not fair to ask you for statements which might give me points
for reply.
Mr. Gladstone evidently believed he had been as mild as milk--he knew
not the terror of his own "drawn brows!"
_Mrs. Ward to Mr. Gladstone._
_April 17, 1888._
I think I must write a few words in answer to your letter of
yesterday, in view of your approaching article which fills me with
so much interest and anxiety. If I put what I have to say badly or
abruptly, please forgive me. My thoughts are so full of this
terrible loss of my dear uncle Matthew Arnold, to whom I was deeply
attached, that it seems difficult to turn to anything else.
And yet I feel a sort of responsibility laid upon me with regard to
Mr. Green, whom you may possibly mention in your article. There are
many people living who can explain his thought much better than I
can. But may I say with regard to your letter of yesterday, that in
turning to philosophy, that is to the labour of reason and thought,
for light on the question of man's whence and whither, Mr. Green as
I conceive it, only obeyed an urgent and painful necessity. "The
parting with the Christian mythology is the rending asunder of
bones and marrow"--words which I have put into Grey's mouth--were
words of Mr. Green's to me. It was the only thing of the sort I
ever heard him say--he was a man who never spoke of his
feelings--but it was said with a penetrating force and sincerity
which I still remember keenly. A long intellectual travail had
convinced him that the miraculous Christian story was untenable;
but speculatively he gave it up with grief and difficulty, and
practically, to his last hour, he clung to all the forms and
associations of the old belief with a wonderful affection. With
regard to conformity to Church usage and repression of individual
opinion he and I disagreed a good deal.
If you do speak of him, will you look at his two Lay Sermons, of
which I enclose my copy?--particularly the second one, which was
written eight years after the first, and to my mind expresses his
thought more clearly.
Some of the letters which have reached me lately about the book
have been curious and interesting. A vicar of a church in the East
End, who seems to have been working among the poor for forty years,
says, "I could not help writing; in your book you seemed to grasp
me by the hand and follow me right on through my own life
experiences." And an Owens College Professor, who appears to have
thought and read much of these things, writes to a third person, à
propos of Elsmere, that the book has grasped "the real force at
work in driving so many to give up the Christian creed. It is not
the scientific (in the loose modern sense of the word), still less
the philosophical difficulties, which influence them, but it is the
education of the historic sense which is disintegrating
faith."--Only the older forms of faith, as I hold, that the new may
rise! But I did not mean to speak of myself.
When the famous article--entitled "Robert Elsmere and the Battle of
Belief"--appeared in the May _Nineteenth Century_, there was nothing but
courtesy between the two opponents. Mrs. Ward sent the G.O.M. a copy of
the book, with a picture of Catherine's valley bound into it, and he
replied that the volumes would "form a very pleasant recollection of
what I trust has been a 'tearless battle.'" Many of the papers now
reviewed both book and article together, and the _Pall Mall_ ironically
congratulated the Liberal Party on "Mr. Gladstone's new preoccupation."
"For two and a half years," it declared, the G.O.M. had been able to
think of nothing but Home Rule and Ireland. "But Mrs. Ward has changed
all that." The excitement among the reading public was very great. It
penetrated even to the streets, for one of us overheard a panting lady,
hugging a copy of the _Nineteenth Century_, saying to her companion as
she fought her way into an omnibus, "Oh, my dear, _have_ you read Weg on
Bobbie?" Naturally the sale received a fresh stimulus. Two more
three-volume editions disappeared during May, and a seventh and last
during June. Then there was a pause before the appearance of the Popular
or 6s. edition, which came out at the end of July with an impression of
5,000. It was immediately bought up; 7,000 more were disposed of during
August, and the sale went on till the end of the year at the rate of
about 4,000 a month. Even during 1889 it continued steadily, until by
January, 1890, 44,000 copies of the 6_s._ edition had been sold. But as
the sale had then slackened Mr. Smith decided to try the experiment of a
half-crown edition. 20,000 of this were sold by the following November,
but the drop had already set in and during 1891 the total only rose to
23,000. But even so, the sale of these three editions in the United
Kingdom alone had amounted to 70,500.
All through the spring and summer of 1888 letters poured in upon Mrs.
Ward by the score and the hundred, both from known and unknown
correspondents, so that her husband and sister-in-law had almost to
build a hedge around her and to insist that she should not answer them
all herself. Those which the book provoked from her old friends,
however, especially those of more orthodox views than her own, were
often of poignant interest. The Warden of Keble wrote her six sheets of
friendly argument and remonstrance. Mr. Creighton wrote her a letter
full of closely reasoned criticism of Elsmere's position, to which she
made the following reply:
_March 13, 1888._
MY DEAR MAX,--
I have been deeply interested by your letter, and am very grateful
to you for the fairness and candour of it. Perhaps it is an
affectation to say always that one likes candour!--but I certainly
like it from you, and should be aggrieved if you did not give it
me.
I think you only evade the whole issue raised by the book when you
say that Elsmere was never a Christian. Of course in the case of
every one who goes through such a change, it is easy to say this;
it is extremely difficult to prove it; and all probability is
against its being true in every case. What do you really fall back
upon when you say that if Elsmere had been a Christian he could not
have been influenced as he was? Surely on the "inward witness." But
the "inward witness," or as you call it "the supernatural life,"
belongs to every religion that exists. The Andaman islander even
believes himself filled by his God, the devout Buddhist and
Mahommedan certainly believe themselves under divine and
supernatural direction, and have been inspired by the belief to
heroic efforts and sufferings. What is, in essence and
fundamentally, to distinguish your "inner witness" from theirs? And
if the critical observer maintains that this "supernatural life" is
in all cases really an intense life of the imagination, differently
peopled and conditioned, what answer have you?
None, unless you appeal to the facts and _fruits_ of Christianity.
The Church has always done so. Only the Quaker or the Quietist can
stand mainly on the "inward witness."
The fruits we are not concerned with. But it is as to the _facts_
that Elsmere and, as I conceive, our whole modern time is really
troubled. An acute Scotch economist was talking to Humphry the
other day about the religious change in the Scotch lowlands. "It is
so pathetic," he said: "when I was young religion was the main
interest, the passionate occupation of the whole people. Now when I
go back there, as I constantly do, I find everything changed. The
old keenness is gone, the people's minds are turning to other
things; there is a restless consciousness, coming they know not
whence, but invading every stratum of life, that _the evidence is
not enough_." There, on another scale, is Elsmere's experience writ
large. Why is he to be called "very ill-trained," and his
impressions "accidental" because he undergoes it?... What convinced
_me_ finally and irrevocably was two years of close and constant
occupation with the materials of history in those centuries which
lie near to the birth of Christianity, and were the critical
centuries of its development. I then saw that to adopt the witness
of those centuries to matters of fact, without translating it at
every step into the historical language of our own day--a language
which the long education of time has brought closer to the
realities of things--would be to end by knowing nothing, actually
and truly, about their life. And if one is so to translate
Augustine and Jerome, nay even Suetonius and Tacitus, when they
talk to you of raisings from the dead, and making blind men to see,
why not St. Paul and the Synoptics?
I don't think you have ever felt this pressure, though within the
limits of your own work I notice that you are always so translating
the language of the past. But those who have, cannot escape it by
any appeal to the "inward witness." They too, or many of them,
still cling to a religious life of the imagination, nay perhaps
they live for it, but it must be one where the expansive energies
of life and reason cannot be always disturbing and tormenting,
which is less vulnerable and offers less prey to the plunderer than
that which depends on the orthodox Christian story.
Another old friend, Mrs. Edward Conybeare, wrote to contend that the
"mere life and death of the carpenter's son of Nazareth could never have
proved the vast historical influence for good which you allow it to be,"
had that life ended in
"nothing but a Syrian grave."
Mrs. Ward replied to her as follows:--
_May 16, 1888._
MY DEAR FRANCES,
It was very interesting to me to get your letter about _Robert
Elsmere_. I wish we could have a good talk about it. Writing is
very difficult to me, for the letters about it are overwhelming,
and I am always as you know more or less hampered by writer's
cramp.
I am thinking of "A Conversation" for one of the summer numbers of
the _Nineteenth Century_, in which some of the questions which are
only suggested in the book may be carried a good deal further. For
the more I think and read the more plain the great lines of that
distant past become to me, the more clearly I see God at work
there, through the forms of thought, the beliefs, the capacities of
the first three centuries, as I see Him at work now, through the
forms of thought, the beliefs and capacities of our own.
Christianity was the result of many converging lines of thought and
development. The time was ripe for a moral revolution, and a great
personality, and the great personality came. That a life of
importance and far-reaching influence could have been lived within
the sphere of religion at that moment, or for centuries afterwards,
without undergoing a process of miraculous amplification, would, I
think, have been impossible. The generations before and the
generations after supply illustration after illustration of it.
That Jesus, our dear Master, partly shared this tendency of his
time and was partly bewildered and repelled by it, is very plain to
me.
As to the belief in the Resurrection, I have many things to say
about it, and shall hope to say them in public when I have pondered
them long enough. But I long to say them not negatively, for
purposes of attack, but positively, for purposes of
reconstruction. It is about the new forms of faith and the new
grounds of combined action that I really care intensely. I want to
challenge those who live in doubt and indecision from year's end to
year's end, to think out the matter, and for their children's sake
to count up what remains to them, and to join frankly for purposes
of life and conduct with those who are their spiritual fellows. It
is the levity or the cowardice that will not think, or the
indolence and self-indulgence that is only too glad to throw off
restraints, which we have to fear. But in truth for religion, or
for the future, I have no fear at all. God is his own vindication
in human life.
But apart from the religious argument, the characters in _Robert
Elsmere_ aroused the greatest possible interest, especially perhaps that
of Catherine.
"As an observer of the human ant-hill, quite impartial by this
time," wrote Prof. Huxley, "I think your picture of one of the
deeper aspects of our troubled times admirable. You are very hard
on the philosophers: I do not know whether Langham or the Squire is
the more unpleasant--but I have a great deal of sympathy with the
latter, so I hope he is not the worse.
"If I may say so, I think the picture of Catherine is the gem of
the book. She reminds me of her namesake of Siena--and would as
little have failed in any duty, however gruesome. You remember
Sodoma's picture?"
The appreciation of her French friends was always very dear to Mrs.
Ward, and amongst them too the book was eagerly read by a small circle,
though, as Scherer warned her, the subject could never become a popular
one in France. But both he and M. Taine were greatly excited by it,
while M. André Michel of the Louvre, to whom she had entrusted the copy
which she desired to present to M. Taine, wrote her a delightful account
of his embassy:
PARIS.
_ce 31 janvier, 1889._
CHERE MADAME,--
Votre lettre m'a été une bien agréable surprise et une bien
intéressante lecture. Je l'ai immédiatement communiquée à M.
Taine, en lui remettant l'exemplaire que vous lui destiniez de
_Robert Elsmere_ et je vous avoue qu'en me rendant chez lui à cet
effet, je me _rengorgeais_ un peu, très-fier de servir
d'intermédiaire entre l'auteur de _Robert Elsmere_ et celui de la
_Littérature Anglaise_. L'âne portant des reliques chez son évêque
ne marchait pas plus solennellement!
M. Taine a été très-touché de cet hommage venant de vous, et je
pense qu'il vous en a déjà remercié lui-même. J'aurais voulu que
vous eussiez pu entendre--incognito--avec quelle vivacité de
sympathie et d'admiration il parlait de votre livre. Pendant
plusieurs jours, il n'a pas été question d'autre chose chez lui.
The cumulative effect of all these letters, both approving and
disapproving; of the preachings on Robert's opinions that began with Mr.
Haweis in May, and continued at intervals throughout the summer; of the
general atmosphere of celebrity that began to surround her, was
extremely upsetting to so sensitive a nature as Mrs. Ward's, and much of
it was and remained distasteful to her. But fame had its lighter sides.
There were the inevitable sonnets, beginning
"I thank you, Lady, for your book so pure,"
or
"Hail to thee, gentle leader, puissant knight!"--
there were inquiries as to the address of the "New Brotherhood of
Christ," "so that next time we are in London we may attend some of its
meetings," and there was a gentleman who demanded to know "the opus no.
of the Andante and Scherzo of Beethoven mentioned on p. 239, and of Hans
Sachs's Immortal Song quoted on p. 177. I am in want of a little fresh
music for one of my daughters and shall esteem your kind reply." And
finally there was the following letter, which must be transcribed in
full:
DEAR MADAM,--
Trusting to your Clemency, in seeking your advice, knowing my
sphere in life, to be so far below your's. My Mother, who is a
Cook-Housekeeper, but very fond of Literature, Poetry
("unfortunately"), in her younger days brought out a small volume,
upon her own account, a copy of which Her Majesty graciously
accepted. Tennyson considered it most "meritorious," Caryle most
"creditable." But what I am asking your advice upon is her
"Autography," her Cook's Career, which has been a checquered one.
She feels quite sure, that if it were brought out by an abler hand,
it would be widely sought and read, at least by two classes "my
Ladies" and Cooks. The matter would be truth, names and places
strictously ficticious. With much admiration and respect,
I am, Madam,
Yours Obediently,
A. A.
History does not record what reply Mrs. Ward made to this interesting
proposal, but no doubt she took it all as part of the great and amusing
game that Fate was playing with her. As to that game--"I have still
constant letters and reviews," she wrote to her father on July 17, "and
have been more lionized this last month than ever.--But a little
lionizing goes a long way! One's sense of humour protests, not to speak
of anything more serious, and I shall be _very_ glad to get to Borough
next week. As to my work, it is all in uncertainty. For the present Miss
Sellers is coming to me in the country, and I shall work hard at Latin
and Greek, especially the Greek of the New Testament."
And to her old friend, Mrs. Johnson, she wrote: "Being lionized, dear
Bertha, is the foolishest business on earth; I have just had five weeks
of it, and if I don't use it up in a novel some day it's a pity. The
book has been strangely, wonderfully successful and has made me many new
friends. But I love my old ones so much best!" This latter sentiment is
expressed again in a letter to Mr. Ward: "Strange how tenacious are
one's first friendships! No other friends can ever be to me quite like
Charlotte or Louise or Bertha or Clara.[13] They know all there is to
know, bad and good--and with them one is always at ease."
That autumn they went off on a round of visits, staying first at
Merevale with Mrs. Dugdale, whose husband had been killed three years
before in his own mine near by--a story of simple heroism which moved
Mrs. Ward profoundly, so that years afterwards she used it in her own
tale of _George Tressady_. Then to Sir Robert and Lady Cunliffe, with
whom they went over to see the "old wizard" of Hawarden, and spent a
wonderful hour in his company.
To her old friend, J. R. Thursfield (a staunch Home Ruler), she wrote
the following account of it:
_September 14, 1888._
"Where do you think we spent the afternoon of the day before
yesterday? You would have been _so_ much worthier of it than we!
The Cunliffes took us over to tea at Hawarden and the G.O.M. was
delightful. First of all he showed us the old Norman keep, skipping
up the steps in a way to make a Tory positively ill to see, talking
of every subject under the sun--Sir Edward Watkin and their new
line of railway, border castles, executions in the sixteenth
century, Villari's _Savonarola_, Damiens and his tortures--'all for
sticking half-an-inch of penknife into that beast Louis
XV!'--modern poetry, Tupper, Lewis Morris, Lord Houghton and Heaven
knows what besides, and all with a charm, a courtesy, an _élan_, an
eagle glance of eye that sent regretful shivers down one's Unionist
backbone. He showed us all his library--his literary table, and his
political table, and his new toy, the strong fire-proof room he has
just built to hold his 60,000 letters, the papers which will some
day be handed over to his biographer. His vigour both of mind and
body was astonishing--he may well talk, as he did, of 'the foolish
dogmatism which refuses to believe in centenarians.'"
À propos of this last remark, Mrs. Ward filled in the tale on her return
by telling us how he turned upon her with flashing eye and demanded:
"Did it ever occur to you, Mrs. Ward, that Lord Palmerston was Prime
Minister at 81?" He himself was to surpass that record by returning to
power at 82.
From the Cunliffes' they also made an expedition to the Peak country,
which Mrs. Ward wished to explore for purposes of her next book (_David
Grieve_), now already taking shape in her mind--and then travelled up to
Scotland to stay at a great house to whose mistress, Lady Wemyss, she
was devoted. From one who was afterwards to be known as the portrayer of
English country-house life the following impressions may be of interest:
_To Mrs. A. H. Johnson_
FOX GHYLL, AMBLESIDE,
_October 21, 1888_.
...Yes, we had many visits and on the whole very pleasant ones. In
Derbyshire I saw a farm and a moorland which I shall try to make
the British public see some day. Then on we went to the Lyulph
Stanleys', saw them, and Castle Howard and Rivaulx, and journeyed
on by the coast to Redcar and the Hugh Bells. There we found Alice
Green, and had a merry time. Afterwards came a week at Gosford,
whereof the pleasure was mixed. Lady Wemyss I love more than ever,
but the party in the house was large and very smart, and with the
best will in the world on both sides it is difficult for plain
literary folk who don't belong to it to get much entertainment out
of a circle where everybody is cousin of everybody else, and on
Christian name terms, and where the women at any rate, though
pleasant enough, are taken up with "places," jewels and Society
with a big S. I don't mean to be unfair. Most of them are good and
kindly, and have often unsuspected "interests," but naturally the
paraphernalia of their position plays a large part in their lives,
and makes a sort of hedge round them through which it is hard to
get at the genuine human being.
Perhaps our most delightful visit was a Saturday to Monday with Mr.
Balfour, at Whittinghame. There life is lived, intellectually, on
the widest and freest of all possible planes, and the master of it
all is one to whom nature has given a peculiar charm and magnetism,
in addition to all that he has made for himself by toil and
trouble.
...I am a little disturbed by the announcement of a _Quarterly_
article on _R.E._ It must be hostile--perhaps an attack in the old
_Quarterly_ fashion: well, if so I shall be in good company! But I
don't want to have to answer--I want to be free to think new
thoughts and imagine fresh things.
When the _Quarterly_ article appeared a few days later she found it
courteous enough in tone, but its attitude of complacent superiority
towards the whole critical process, which it described as "a phase of
thought long ago lived through and practically dead," stung her to
action and made her feel that some reply--to this and Gladstone
together--was now unavoidable. She owed it to her own position--not as a
scholar, for she never claimed that title, but as an interpreter of
scholars and their work to the modern public. But "If I do reply," she
wrote to her husband, "I shall make it as substantive and constructive
as possible. All the attacking, destructive part is so distasteful to
me. I can only go through with it as a necessary element in a whole
which is not negative but positive." But she could not be induced even
by Mr. Knowles's persuasions to make it a regular "reply" to Mr.
Gladstone, whose name is not once mentioned throughout the article[14];
she threw her argument instead into dialogue form, so keeping the
artistic ground which she had used in the novel, and replying to the
_Quarterly_ or to the G.O.M. rather by allusion than by direct argument.
The article was very widely read and certainly carried her cause a stage
further; it was felt that here was something that had come to stay, that
must be reckoned with, and her skilful use of the admissions made in the
Church Congress that year as to the date and authorship of certain books
of the Old Testament filled her readers with a vague feeling that
perhaps after all these things must be faced for the New Testament also.
* * * * *
Meanwhile in America the hubbub produced by _Robert Elsmere_ had far
exceeded anything that occurred on this side of the Atlantic. Those were
the days before International Copyright, when any American publisher was
free to issue the works of British authors without their consent and
without payment, and when if an "authorized edition" was issued by some
reputable firm which had paid the author for his rights, it could be
undersold the next day by some adventurous "pirate." Messrs. Macmillan
had bought the American rights of _Robert Elsmere_ for a small sum and
had issued it at $1.50 in April, but as soon as it began to excite
attention, and especially after the appearance of Gladstone's article,
the pirate firms rushed in and raged furiously with each other and with
Macmillan's to get the book out at the lowest possible price. One
firm--Messrs. Lowell & Co.--which had sold tens of thousands of copies,
magnanimously sent the author a cheque for £100, but this was the only
payment which Mrs. Ward ever received for _Robert Elsmere_ from an
American publisher. Some of the incidents of the internecine war between
the pirates themselves for control of the _Robert Elsmere_ market are
still worth recording. They were summed up in a well-informed article in
the _Manchester Guardian_ in March, 1889, entitled _The "Book-Rats" of
the United States_:
"In America the publisher's lot is not a happy one. If he is
honest, he pays his author, and upon the first assurance of success
sees nine-tenths of his lawful profits swept away by the incursions
of pirates. If he is dishonest, he does not pay his author, but in
hot haste reprints in cheap and nasty material, with one object
alone--to undersell the legitimate publisher. A host more follow
suit with new reprints in still cheaper and nastier material, till,
under the pretence of giving cheap literature to the million, the
culminating point is reached in the man who sells at a quarter of
cost price to drive his rivals out of the field. This is what
happened the other day in Boston over the sale of _Robert Elsmere_,
a book which has there achieved an unparalleled success, and
abundantly illustrates the inequality of the present system of no
copyright. In England between thirty and forty thousand copies have
already been sold in the nine months since it was published, and
the book is selling steadily at the rate of some 700 a week. In
America the sale is estimated at 200,000 copies, of which 150,000
are in pirated editions. One honest pirate purges his conscience by
the magnificent gift of £100, which is likely to be the first and
last instalment of that 'handsome competence which the American
reading public,' says a Rhode Island newspaper, 'owes to Mrs.
Ward.' A hundred pounds, representing just one shilling and
fourpence per hundred copies upon all the pirated editions! And the
author must be thankful for such mercies; rights she has none over
her own creation, which pervades the States from end to end, and
is not only a library in itself, but has called into existence so
much polemical literature that a leading New York paper gives
solemn warning to contributors that for the future sermons on
_Robert Elsmere_ will only be published at the ordinary
advertisement rates. A Buffalo advertisement cries, 'Who has yet
touched _Robert Elsmere_ at ten cents?' only to be taken down by
Jordan Marsh and Co., the 'Whiteleys' of Boston, who offered the
book at four cents. Twopence for a book which extends over 400
pages in close-printed octavo! The stroke told, almost too
successfully for its contrivers. It is said that next day the shop
doors were besieged by a crowd like the surging throng at the
entrance to the Lyceum pit on a first night. A queue extended
across the street. For three days the enterprising pirate had the
field to himself; then he raised his price again; he had lost some
ten cents on every copy, but he had crushed his rivals."
The achievement of one still more enterprising firm, however, escaped
the notice of this correspondent. The Balsam Fir Soap Co., being anxious
to launch their new soap upon the market, made the following
announcement:
TO THE PUBLIC
We beg to announce that we have purchased an edition of the Hyde
Park Company's _Robert Elsmere_, and also their edition of _Robert
Elsmere and the Battle of Belief_--a criticism by the Right Hon. W.
E. Gladstone, M.P.
These two books will be presented to each purchaser of a single
cake of Balsam Fir Soap.
Respectfully,
THE MAINE BALSAM FIR CO.
Thus was poor Robert, with his doubts and dreams, his labours and his
faith, given away with a cake of soap!
But this was not all, nor even the worst. When the boom was still at its
height, in the spring of 1889, Mrs. Ward was horrified to hear that a
full-blown dramatized version of the book, by William Gillette, had
actually been produced in Boston, with a "comedy element," as the
newspaper report described it, "involving an English exquisite and a
horsey husband," thrown in, the Squire and Grey eliminated, and Langham
"endowed with such nobility of character as ultimately to marry Rose."
She at once cabled her protest with some energy and succeeded in getting
the further performance of the play stopped; but hardly was this episode
ended than another followed on its heels.
"A writer in the New York _Tribune_," wrote the _Glasgow Herald_ in
April, 1889, "exposes a most barefaced trick of trading upon Mrs.
Humphry Ward's name. A continuation, he says, of _Robert Elsmere_
has already been begun by an American publisher, and advance
sheets, containing thrilling instalments of the romantic adventures
of _Robert Elsmere's Daughter_, are being scattered broadcast over
the length and breadth of the United States. The industrious agents
of the publisher of this sheet have been busily engaged in
inserting sample chapters of this new novel under the doors of
houses all over New York. This, however, is not the worst feature
of the trick. From the title of the story the impression sought to
be conveyed is that Mrs. Humphry Ward, the authoress of _Robert
Elsmere_, is responsible, too, for _Robert Elsmere's Daughter_, the
headings of the story being arranged in this specious shape:
'_Robert Elsmere's Daughter_--a companion story to _Robert
Elsmere_--by Mrs. Humphry Ward.'"
It was no wonder that the scandal of these events was used by the
promoters of the International Copyright Bill then before Congress as
one of their most powerful arguments; for there were many honourable
publishing firms in America which abhorred these proceedings and were
only anxious to regularize their relations with British authors. Mr.
George Haven Putnam, head of the firm of G. P. Putnam's Sons, and the
International Copyright Committee which he formed, had already been
working in this direction for some years; but the opposition was
strenuous, and it was only in March, 1891, that the Copyright Bill which
was to have so great an effect on Mrs. Ward's fortunes actually became
law in the United States. Even before that, however, very flattering
offers were made to her by American publishers--especially by Mr. S. S.
McClure, founder of the then youthful _McClure's Magazine_--for the
right of publishing the "authorized version" of her next book. Mr.
McClure tried to beguile her into writing him a "novelette," or a
"romance of Bible times," but Mrs. Ward was not to be moved. She had
already begun work upon her next book (_David Grieve_), and all she said
in writing to her sister (Mrs. Huxley) was: "This American, Mr. McClure,
is a wonderful man. He has offered me £1,000 for the serial rights of a
story as long as _Milly and Olly_! Naturally I am not going to do it,
but it is amusing." To her father she wrote in more serious mood about
the American boom:
"It is a great moral strain, this extraordinary success. I feel
often as though it were a struggle to preserve one's full
individuality, and one's sense of truth and proportion in the teeth
of it. There is no help but to look away from oneself and
everything that pertains to self, to the Eternal and Divine things,
to live penetrated with the feebleness and poverty of self and the
greatness of God."
Yet naturally she enjoyed the many letters from Americans of all ranks
and classes which reached her during the autumn and winter of 1888. The
veteran Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote to her in his most charming vein,
speaking of the book as a "medicated novel, which will do much to
improve the secretions and clear the obstructed channels of the decrepit
theological system." W. R. Thayer, afterwards the biographer of Cavour,
wrote:
"The extraordinary popularity of _Robert Elsmere_ is a most
significant symptom of the spiritual conditions of this country. No
book since _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ has had so sudden and wide a
diffusion among all classes of readers; and I believe that no other
book of equal seriousness ever had so quick a hearing. I have seen
it in the hands of nursery-maids, and of shop-girls behind the
counter; of frivolous young women, who read every novel that is
talked about; of business men, professors, students, and even
schoolboys. The newspapers and periodicals are still discussing it,
and, perhaps the best sign of all, it has been preached against by
the foremost clergymen of all denominations."
And a sturdy rationalist, Mr. W. D. Childs, thus recorded his protest:
"I regret the popularity of _Robert Elsmere_ in this country. Our
western people are like sheep in such matters. They will not see
that the book was written for a people with a State Church on its
hands, that a gross exaggeration of the importance of religion was
necessary. It will revive interest in theology and retard the
progress of rationalism.
"Am I not right in this? You surely cannot think it good for
individuals or for societies to take religion seriously, when there
is so much economic disorder in the world, when the mass of
physical and mental suffering is so obviously reducible only by
material means."
It was very delightful, of course, to be making a little money from the
book, after so many years of strenuous work, and though the sum she had
earned was still a modest one (about £3,200 by January, 1889), it
enabled her and her husband to make plans for the future and to embark
on the purchase of some land for building in the still unspoilt country
to the east of Haslemere. Here, on Grayswood Hill, overlooking the vast
tangle of the Weald as far as Chanctonbury Ring and the South Downs, a
red-brick house of moderate size, cunningly designed by Mr. Robson,
gradually arose during 1889 and the first part of 1890; but while it was
still building a fortunate accident placed in our way the chance of
living for three months in a far different habitation--John Hampden's
wonderful old house near Great Missenden, which was then in a state of
interregnum, and might be rented for a small sum.
"It will be quite an adventure," wrote Mrs. Ward to her publisher
in July, 1889, "for in spite of the beauty and romance of the place
there is hardly enough furniture of a ramshackle kind in it to
enable us to camp for three months in tolerable comfort! But by
dint of sending down a truck load of baths, carpets and saucepans
from home we shall get on, and our expenses will be less than if we
took a villa at Westgate."
And to Mrs. Johnson, of Oxford, who was coming with her whole family to
stay there, Mrs. Ward wrote three days after her arrival:
"The furniture of the house is decrepit, scanty and decayed, but it
has breeding and refinement, and is a thousand times preferable to
any luxurious modern stuff. I am _perfectly_ happy here, and bless
the lucky chance which drew our attention to the advertisement. I
will not spoil the old house and gardens and park for you by
describing them--but they are a dream, and the out-at-elbowness of
everything is an additional charm."
So for three months we stayed at Hampden, revelling in its beauty and
its spaciousness, learning to know the Chiltern country with its
chalk-downs and beech-woods, entertaining many visitors, including the
much-loved Professor Huxley, and watching anxiously for the ghost that
walked in the passage outside the tapestry-room on moonlight nights. It
never walked for us, though Mrs. Ward sat up many times to woo it, but
there were plenty of ghosts of another sort in a house that had
sheltered Queen Elizabeth on one of her "progresses," that still
possessed the chair in which John Hampden had sat when they came to
arrest him for ship-money, and that had guarded his body at the last,
when his Greencoats bore it thither from Thame to lie in the great hall
for one more night before its burial in the little church across the
garden. At first there were no lamps, and we groped about with stumps of
candles after dark, but gradually all the more glaring deficiencies were
remedied and Mrs. Ward settled down to a happy three months of work on
her new novel, _David Grieve_. But as she wrote of her two wild children
on the Derbyshire moors, or of young David and his books in Manchester,
the very different scene around her formed itself in her mind into a new
setting, from which arose in course of time _Marcella_.
Meanwhile it was not Hampden's ghost but Elsmere's that still haunted
her, in the sense that the "New Brotherhood" with which the novel ended
would not die with it, but struggled dumbly in the author's mind for
expression in some living form. Some time before she had been deeply
impressed by a visit she had paid to Toynbee Hall with "Max Creighton,"
as she wrote to her father, when she found that "in the library there
_R.E._ had been read to pieces, and in a workmen's club which had just
been started several ideas had been taken from the "New Brotherhood."
The experience had remained with her; she had brooded and dreamt over
it, and now when she returned to London in the autumn of 1889 she began
for the first time to try to work out the idea in consultation with
certain chosen friends. "Lord Carlisle came and had a long talk with M.
about a proposed Unitarian Toynbee somewhere in South London"--so wrote
the little sister-in-law (herself an orthodox Christian) in her journal
on November 11, 1889. And a little later: "Mr. Stopford Brooke came and
had a long talk with her about a 'New Brotherhood' they hope to start
with Lord Carlisle and a few others to help."
Was it to be a new religion, or a re-vivifying of the old? The impulse
to build up, to re-create, was hot within her; could she not appeal to
her generation to help her in following out this impulse towards some
practical goal? Was there not room for another Toynbee, inspired still
more definitely than the first with the ideals of a simpler
Christianity? The dæmon drove; surely the very success of her book
showed that this was the need of the new age in which she lived. She
plunged into the task, and only time and Fate were to reveal that the
"new religion" was doomed to take no outward form, but to work itself
out in ways undreamt of as yet by the author of _Robert Elsmere_.