_HELBECK OF BANNISDALE_--CATHOLICS AND UNITARIANS--_ELEANOR_ AND THE
VILLA BARBERINI
1896-1900
_Helbeck of Bannisdale_ is probably that one among Mrs. Ward's books on
which her fame as a novelist will stand or fall. Though it sold less in
England and much less in America than her previous novels at the time of
its publication, it has outlasted all the others in the extent of its
circulation to-day. In this the opinion of those critics for whose word
she cared has been borne out, for they prophesied that it had in it,
more than her other books, the element of permanence. "I know not
another book that shows the classic fate so distinctly to view," wrote
George Meredith, and some years later, in a long talk with a younger
friend about Mrs. Ward's work, repeated his profound admiration for
_Helbeck_. "The hero, if hero he be, is as fresh a creation as
Ravenswood or Rochester," said another critic, Lord Crewe, "and what a
luxury it is to hang a new portrait on one's walls in this age of old
figures in patched garments! I have no idea yet how the story will end,
but though the atmosphere is so much less lurid and troubled, I have
something of the _Wuthering Heights_ sense of coming disaster. I think
the Brontës would have given your story the most valuable admiration of
all--that of writers who have succeeded in a rather similar, though by
no means the same, field."
The theme of the book was, as all Mrs. Ward's readers know, the eternal
clash between the mediæval and the modern mind in the persons of Alan
Helbeck, the Catholic squire, and Laura Fountain, the child of science
and negation; while beyond and behind their tragic loves stands the
"army of unalterable law" in the austere northern hills, the bog-lands
of the estuary, the river in gentleness and flood. Almost, indeed, can
it be said that there are but three characters in _Helbeck_--Alan
himself, Laura, and the river, which in the end takes her tormented
spirit. The idea of such a novel had presented itself to Mrs. Ward
during a visit that she paid in the autumn of 1896 to her old friends,
Mr. James Cropper and his daughter, in that beautiful South Westmorland
country which she had known only less well than the Lake District itself
ever since her childhood. There the talk turned one day on the fortunes
of an old Catholic family (the Stricklands), who had owned Sizergh
Castle, near Sedgwick, for more than three centuries, steadfastly
enduring the persecutions of earlier days, and, now that persecutions
had ceased, fighting a sad and losing battle against poverty and
mortgages. "The vision of the old squire and the old house--of all the
long vicissitudes of obscure suffering, and dumb clinging to the faith,
of obstinate, half-conscious resistance to a modern world, that in the
end had stripped them of all their gear and possessions, save only this
'I will not' of the soul--haunted me when the conversation was
done."[19] By the end of the long railway-journey from Kendal to London
next day she had thought out her story. The deepest experiences of her
own life went to the making of it, for had she not been brought up with
a Catholic father, made aware from her earliest childhood of the
irremediable chasm there between two lovers? The situation in _Helbeck_
was of course wholly different, but in the working out of it Mrs. Ward
had the advantage of a certain inborn familiarity with the Catholic
mind, which made the characters of this book peculiarly her own.
All through the winter of 1896-7 Mrs. Ward was steeping herself in
Catholic literature; then in the early spring--again by the good offices
of Mr. Cropper--she became aware that Levens Hall, the wonderful old
Tudor house near the mouth of the Kent, which belonged to Capt.
Josceline Bagot, might be had for a few weeks or months. She determined
to migrate thither as soon as possible and to write her story amid the
very scenes which she had planned for it. How well do I remember the
grey spring evening (it was the 6th of March) on which--after delays and
confusions far beyond our small deserts--we drove up to the river front
of the old house; the hurried rush through glorious dark rooms, and a
half timid exploration of the garden, peopled with gaunt shapes of
clipped and tortured yews. Levens was to us just such another adventure
as Hampden House had been, eight years before, but this time there was
no bareness, no dilapidation, nothing but the ripe product of many
centuries of peaceful care. Yet Levens was famous for its crooked
descent, its curse and its "grey lady"--an accessory, this latter, of
sadly modern origin, as we found on inquiring into her local history.
Mrs. Ward, however, wove her skilfully into her story, as she wove the
fell-farm of the family of "statesmen" to whom Miss Cropper introduced
her, or the mournful peat-bogs of the estuary, or the daffodils crowding
up through the undergrowth in Brigsteer Wood, or covering with sheets of
gold the graves round Cartmel Fell Chapel.
Yet Bannisdale itself is "a house of dream," as Mrs. Ward herself
described it[20]; neither wholly Levens nor wholly Sizergh, placed
somewhere in the recesses of Levens Park, and looking south over the
Kent. "And just as Bannisdale, in my eyes, is no mortal house, and if I
were to draw it, it would have outlines and features all its own, so the
story of the race inhabiting it, and of Helbeck its master, detached
itself wholly from that of any real person or persons, past or present.
Those who know Levens will recognize many a fragment here and there that
has been worked into Bannisdale: and so with Sizergh. But Helbeck's
house, as it stands in the book, is his and his alone. And in the same
way the details and vicissitudes of the Helbeck ancestry, and the
influences that went to build up Helbeck himself, were drawn from many
fields, then passed through the crucible of composition, and scarcely
anything now remains of those original facts from which the book
sprang."
Many Catholic books, in which she browsed "with what thoughts," as
Carlyle would say, followed her to Levens, giving her that grip of
detail in matters of belief or ritual, without which she could not have
approached her subject, but which she had now learnt to absorb and
re-fashion far more skilfully than in the days of _Robert Elsmere_. She
loved to discuss these matters with her father, from whom she had no
secrets, in spite of their divergencies of view; when he came to visit
us at Levens--still a tall and beautiful figure, in spite of his
seventy-three years--they talked of them endlessly, and when he returned
to Dublin she wrote him such letters as the following:
"One of the main impressions of this Catholic literature upon me is
to make me perceive the enormous intellectual pre-eminence of
Newman. Another impression--I know you will forgive me for saying
quite frankly what I feel--has been to fill me with a perfect
horror of asceticism, or rather of the austerities--or most of
them--which are indispensable to the Catholic ideal of a saint. We
must talk this over, for of course I realize that there is much to
be said on the other side. But the simple and rigid living which I
have seen, for various ideal purposes, in friends of my own--like
T. H. Green--seems to me both religious and reasonable, while I
cannot for the life of me see anything in the austerities, say of
the Blessed Mary Alacoque, but hysteria and self-murder. The Divine
Power occupies itself for age on age in the development of all the
fine nerve-processes of the body, with their infinite potencies for
good or evil. And instead of using them for good, the Catholic
mystic destroys them, injures her digestion and her brain, and is
then tortured by terrible diseases which she attributes to every
cause but the true one--her own deliberate act--and for which her
companions glorify her, instead of regarding them as
what--surely--they truly are, God's punishment. No doubt directors
are more careful nowadays than they were in the seventeenth
century, but her life is still published by authority, and the
ideal it contains is held up to young nuns.
"Don't imagine, dearest, that I find myself in antagonism to all
this literature. The truth in many respects is quite the other way.
The deep personal piety of good Catholics, and the extent to which
their religion enters into their lives, are extraordinarily
attractive. How much we, who are outside, have to learn from them!"
To an ex-Catholic friend, Mr. Addis, who had undertaken to look over
the manuscript for her, she wrote some time later, when the book was
nearly finished:
"In my root-idea of him, Helbeck was to represent the old Catholic
crossed with that more mystical and enthusiastic spirit, brought in
by such converts as Ward and Faber, under Roman and Italian
influence. I gather, both from books and experience, that the more
fervent ideas and practices, which the old Catholics of the
'forties disliked, have, as a matter of fact, obtained a large
ascendancy in the present practice of Catholics, just as Ritualism
has forced the hands of the older High Churchmen. And I thought one
might, in the matter of austerities, conceive a man directly
influenced by the daily reading of the Lives of the Saints, and
obtaining in middle life, after probation and under special
circumstances, as it were, leave to follow his inclinations.
"I take note most gratefully of all your small corrections. What I
am really anxious about now is the points--in addition to pure
jealous misery--on which Laura's final breach with Helbeck would
turn. I _think_ on the terror of confession--on what would seem to
her the inevitable uncovering of the inner life and yielding of
personality that the Catholic system involves--and on the
foreignness of the whole idea of _sin_, with its relative, penance.
But I find it extremely hard to work out!"
As the weeks of our stay at Levens passed by, while the sea-trout came
up the Kent and challenged the barbarian members of the family to many a
tussle in the Otter-pool, or the "turn-hole," or the bend of the river
just above the bridge, Mrs. Ward plunged ever deeper into her subject,
though the difficulties under which she laboured in the sheer writing of
her chapters were almost more disabling than ever. "For a week my arm
has been almost useless, alas!" she wrote in May; "I have had it in a
sling and bandaged up. I partly strained it in rubbing A., but I must
also have caught cold in it. Anyhow it has been very painful, and I have
been in quite low spirits, looking at Chapter III, which would not move!
The chairs and tables here don't suit it at all--the weather is
extremely cold--and altogether I believe I am pining for Stocks!" But
before we left the wonderful old house many friends had come to stay
with us there, renewing their own tired spirits in its beauty and
charm, and in the society of its temporary mistress. Henry James and the
Henry Butchers, Katharine Lyttelton and her Colonel, Bron Herbert and
Victor Lytton, fishers of sea-trout,--and, on Easter Monday, "Max
Creighton" himself, now Bishop of London, much worn by the antics of Mr.
Kensit and his friends, but otherwise only asking to "eat the long
miles" in walks along Scout Scar, or over the "seven bens and seven
fens" that lay between us and the lovely little Chapel of St. Anthony on
Cartmel Fell. Such talks as they had, he and Mrs. Ward, at all times
when she was not deliberately burying herself in her study to escape the
temptation! The rest of us would listen fascinated, watching for that
gesture of his, when he would throw back his head so that the under side
of his red beard appeared to view--a gesture of triumph over his
opponent, as he fondly thought, until her next remark showed him there
was still much to win. Henry James was more demure in his tastes,
walking beside the pony-tub when Mrs. Ward went for her afternoon drive
through Levens Park, or along the Brigsteer lane, and "letting fall
words of wisdom as we went" (for so it is recorded by the driver of the
tub). Ah, if those words could but have been gathered up and saved from
all-swallowing oblivion! Mr. James's friendship for Mrs. Ward had
already endured for ten or twelve years before this visit to Levens, but
these days in the old house gave it a deeper and more intimate tone,
which it never lost thenceforward. He never wholly approved of her art
as a novelist--how could he, when it differed so fundamentally from his
own?--but his admiration for her as a woman, his affection for her as a
friend, knew very few limits indeed. And her feeling for him was to grow
and deepen through another twenty years of happy friendship, ripening
towards that day when, in England's darkest time, he chose to make
himself a son of England, and then, soon afterwards, followed the many
lads whom he had loved "where track there is none."
[Illustration: MRS. WARD IN 1898
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY MISS ETHEL ARNOLD]
Mrs. Ward finally quitted Levens before the end of her lease, owing to a
prolonged attack of influenza, which spoilt her last weeks there, but
she always looked back to her stay in the "Border Castle," as Mr. James
had dubbed it, as an enchanting episode, taking her back to the
fell-country and its people with an intimacy she had not known since
those long-past childish days, when she would dance up the path to
Sweden Bridge, the grown-ups loitering behind. For the remainder of this
year (1897) she was pressing on with her book, in spite of
ever-recurring waves of ill-health and of constant over-pressure with
the affairs of the Settlement. By the autumn, when the new buildings
were actually open, this pressure became so formidable that she was
obliged to take a small house at Brighton for three months, in order to
spend three days of each week there in complete seclusion. The book
prospered fairly well, but the formal opening of the Settlement, which
had been fixed for February 12, 1898, was very much on her mind--at
least until she had succeeded in persuading Mr. Morley to make the
principal speech. This, however, he consented to do with all the
graciousness inspired by his old friendship for its founder; and when
the ceremony was actually over Mrs. Ward retired to Stocks for a final
struggle with the last chapters of _Helbeck_. "Except, perhaps, in the
case of "Bessie Costrell," she wrote in her _Recollections_, "I was
never more possessed by a subject, more shut in by it from the outer
world." And in these last few weeks of the long effort she walked as in
a dream, though the dream was too often broken by cruel attacks of her
old illness. She fought them down, however, and emerged victorious on
March 25,--more dead than alive, in the rueful opinion of her family.
But the usual remedy of a flight to Italy was tried again with sovereign
effect, and at Cadenabbia on Lake Como, in Florence and on Maggiore, she
felt the flooding back of a sense of physical ease. The book did not
appear until the month of June, when both Press and friends received it
with so warm an enthusiasm as to "produce in me that curious mood, which
for the artist is much nearer dread than boasting--dread that the best
is over, and that one will never earn such sympathy again." One
discordant note was, however, struck by a review in the _Nineteenth
Century_ by a certain Father Clarke, violently attacking _Helbeck_ as a
caricature of Catholicism, and picking various small holes in its
technicalities of Catholic practice. The article was answered in the
next number of the _Nineteenth Century_ by another Catholic, Mr. St.
George Mivart, and Mrs. Ward's fairness to Catholicism vindicated;
indeed, many of the other reviews had accused her of making the ancient
faith too attractive in the person of Helbeck. Mr. C. E. Maurice wrote
to her to protest against Father Clarke's attack, remarking incidentally
that "if any religious body have cause of complaint against you for this
book, it is the Protestant Nonconformists" and asking her in the course
of his letter "what point you generally start from in deciding to write
a novel; whether from the wish to work out a special thesis, or from the
desire to deal with certain characters who have interested you, or from
being impressed by a special _story_, actual or possible?" Mrs. Ward
replied to him as follows:
"I think a novel with me generally springs from the idea of a
situation involving two or three characters. _Helbeck_ arose from a
fragment of conversation heard in the North, and was purely human
and not controversial in its origin. It is in these conflicts
between old and new, as it has always seemed to me, that we moderns
find our best example of compelling fate,--and the weakness of the
personal life in the grip of great forces that regard it not, or
seem to regard it not, is just as attractive as ever it was to the
imagination--do you not think so? The forms are different, the
subject is the same."
To Mr. Mivart himself she wrote:
"I hear with great interest from Mr. Knowles that you are going to
break a lance with Father Clarke on poor _Helbeck's_ behalf in the
forthcoming _Nineteenth Century_. I need not say that I shall read
very diligently what you have to say. Meanwhile I am venturing to
send you these few Catholic reviews, as specimens of the very
different feelings that seem to have been awakened in many quarters
from those expressed by Father Clarke. It amuses me to put the
passages from Father Vaughan's sermon that concern Helbeck himself
side by side with Father Clarke's onslaught upon him.
"The story that the orphan tells to Laura, which Father Clarke
calls 'detestable, extravagant and objectionable,' that no
instructed Catholic would dream of telling to his juniors, is told
by Father Law, S.J., to his younger brothers and sisters, and is
given in the very interesting _Life of Father Law_, by Ellis
Schreiber. I have only shortened it.
"Father Clarke does not seem to have the dimmest notion of what is
meant by writing in character. I had a hearty laugh over his
really absurd remarks about Laura and St. Francis Borgia's
children."
Some years later, when her feeling about the book's reception had
settled down and crystallized, she wrote in more meditative mood to her
son-in-law, George Trevelyan:
"Yes, it was a good subject, and I shall hardly come across one
again so full both of intellectual and human interest.... I like
your 'dear and dreadful!' In my case it is quite true. Catholicism
has an enormous attraction for me,--yet I could no more be a
Catholic than a Mahometan. Only, never let us forget how much of
Catholicism is based, as Uncle Matt would have said, on 'Natural
truth'--truth of human nature, and truth of moral experience. The
visible, imperishable Society--the Kingdom of Heaven in our
midst--no greater idea, it seems to me, was ever thrown into the
world of men. Its counterpart is to be found in the Logos
conception from which all Liberalism descends, and which is the
perpetual corrective of the Catholic idea. But these things would
take us far!"
Meanwhile, to Bishop Creighton, who had written to her far less
critically than usual of her new book, she replied with a long letter,
in which, after the first sheet, she reverted to the subjects which were
always of the deepest interest to this pair of friends--the barriers set
around the National Church, which Mrs. Ward complained kept out too many
of the faithful, or at least too many of those who, like herself, would
willingly proclaim their faith in a spiritual Christ.
STOCKS, TRING,
_August 9, 1898_.
..."I have been desperately, perhaps disproportionately interested
in a meeting of Liberal Churchmen as to which I cannot get full
particulars--in which the great need of the day was said to be not
ritual, but 'the re-statement and re-interpretation of dogma in the
light of the knowledge and criticism of our day.' It makes me once
more conscious of all sorts of claims and cravings that I have
often wished to talk over with you--not as Bishop of London!--but
as one with whom, in old days at any rate, I used to talk quite
freely. If only the orthodox churchmen would allow us on our side a
little more freedom, I, at any rate, should be well content to let
the Ritualists do what they please! Every year I live I more and
more resent the injustice which excludes those who hold certain
historical and critical opinions from full membership in the
National Church, above all from participation in the Lord's Supper.
Why are we _all_ always to be bound by the formularies of a past
age, which avowedly represent a certain state of past opinion, a
certain balance of parties?--privately and personally I mean. The
public and ceremonial use of formularies is another matter where
clearly the will of the majority should decide. The minority may be
well content to accept the public and ceremonial use, if it may
accept it in its own way. But here the Church steps in with a
test--several tests--the Catechism, the Creed, the Confirmation
service. And the tendency of the last generation of churchpeople
has been all towards tightening these tests, probably under two
influences--a deepened Christian devotion, and the growing pressure
of the alternative view of Christianity. But is it not time the
alternative view were brought in and assimilated,--to the
strengthening of Christian love and fellowship? What _ought_ to
prevent anyone who accepts the Lord's own test of the 'two great
commandments,' or the Pauline test of 'all who love the Lord Jesus
Christ,' from breaking the bread and drinking the wine which
signify the headship and sacrifice, and mystical fellowship of
Christ? But such an one may hold it solemnly and sacredly
impossible to recite matters of supposed history such as 'born of
the Virgin Mary,' or 'on the third day He rose again--and ascended
to the Father,' as personally true of himself. He may be quite
wrong--that is not the point. Supposing that his historical
conscience is clearly and steadily convinced on the one side, and
on the other he only asks that he and his children may pass into
the national Christian family, and join hands with all who believe
in God, who 'love the Lord Jesus' and hope in immortality, what
should keep him out? Would it not be an immense strengthening of
the Church to include, on open and honourable terms, those who can
now only share in her Eucharist on terms of concealment and
evasion? Why should there not be an alternative baptismal and
confirmation service, to be claimed under a conscience clause by
those who desire it? At present no one can have his children
confirmed who is not prepared to accept, or see them accept,
certain historical statements, which he and they may perhaps not
believe. And except as a matter of private bargain and
sufferance--always liable to scandal--neither he nor they, unless
these tests have been passed, can join in the commemoration of
their Master's death, which should be to them the food and stimulus
of life. Nothing honestly remains to them but exclusion, and
hunger--or the falling back upon a Unitarianism, which has too
often unlearned Christ, and to which, at its best, they may not
naturally belong."
Mrs. Ward might, perhaps, have added that what remains to the majority
of those whom these tests keep out, is a gradual _loss of hunger_--a
making up with other things, which cannot but be a fatal loss to the
National Church. But she was thinking of her own case, and to her, I
think, the "hunger" for admission to the Church (though always on her
own terms!) remained for long years a living force, leading her in the
end to write that best and most vivid among her later books, _The Case
of Richard Meynell_. Meanwhile her relations with Unitarianism,
mentioned in this letter, remained somewhat anomalous, for while
agreeing with its tenets, she was always impatient of its old-fashioned
isolation, and of its neglect to seize the opportunity presented to it
by the march of modern thought, which seemed to her to summon it to take
the lead in the movement towards a free Christian fellowship. She was
never so hard on the Unitarian body as Stopford Brooke, who once
exclaimed in a letter to her that "they cling to ancient uglinesses as
if they were sweethearts!" But Mrs. Ward had had a brush with them in
1893, when she wrote to the _Manchester Guardian_ after the opening of
Manchester College, Oxford, lamenting the bareness of the service, the
extempore prayers, the relics of old Puritanism, instead of the appeal
to colour and imagination and modern thought. Her letter provoked many
answers, both public and private, and to one of these, a kind and
generous argument from Dr. Estlin Carpenter, she replied with a fuller
explanation of her feeling:
_November 2, 1893._
..."My own feeling, the child of course of early habit and
tradition, is strongly on the side of ritual throughout, though I
would infinitely rather have _new_ ritual, like Dr. Martineau's two
services, than a modified edition of the Anglican prayers, such as
we have at Mr. Brooke's. But I don't think I should have ventured
to put forward the view I did so strongly as I did, with regard to
any other place in the world than Oxford. I knew Oxford intimately
for fifteen years, and still, of course, have many friends there. I
am convinced that Manchester College has a real mission towards an
Oxford which is not yet theirs, but which ought to become so. But I
am also certain that Oxford cannot be reached through the forms
that have been so far adopted. You may say, as Mr. ---- does in
effect, in a letter to me: 'Oxford must take us with our Puritanism
as we are, or leave us.' But surely to say this is to refuse a real
mission, a real call. It is the very opposite of St. Paul's spirit,
of making himself all things to all men, 'that I may by any means
gain some.' It is putting adherence to a form, about which there
is, after all, serious difference of opinion in your own body,
between you and a great future. At least that is how it looks to
me, and I think I have some means of judging. The religious
message, the thoughts, the conceptions that you have to give
Oxford, especially to the young men, not of your own body, who may
be attracted to you through the Chapel, are, it seems to me, the
all-important thing, and any fears of imitating the Church, or
dislike of abandoning Puritan tradition, which may hold you back
from the best means of bringing those thoughts and faiths into the
current life of Oxford, will be a disaster to us all. It is because
I have thought so much about this settlement of yours, in the place
where I myself often starved for lack of religious fellowship, that
I was drawn to write with the vehemence I did. But one had better
never be vehement!"
In the following year the Unitarians forgave her and asked her to
deliver the "Essex Hall Lecture," which she did with a brilliant and
suggestive paper entitled "Unitarians and the Future." Her relations
with many Unitarians all through the period of University Hall were, as
we have seen, of the most intimate and friendly character, and now,
after the publication of _Helbeck of Bannisdale_, she showed her
goodwill to Unitarianism once more by journeying down to Norwich to give
an address in aid of the famous old Octagon Chapel there. The address
was typical of many others that she gave in these years of her
increasing fame; carefully and even elaborately prepared beforehand--for
she would never trust herself to speak extempore--it lived for long in
the memory of her hearers as a model of its kind, while the outspoken
opinions it expressed gave rise to a good deal of controversy in the
religious Press. The demands on her time for speeches and addresses in
aid of every possible good cause were by this time incessant. She
refused nineteen out of twenty, but the twentieth was usually so
persuasively put that she succumbed, and then she would live in an agony
of apprehension and of accumulated overwork, until the effort was safely
over. One of her most finished literary performances was the address she
gave in Glasgow in February, 1897, on "the Peasant in Literature"; while
her paper on the Transfiguration, entitled "Gospel Interpretation--a
Fragment," given at the Leicester Unitarian Conference in 1900, remains
to this day, with some of her audience, as a new and startling
revelation of the critical methods which had, for her, thrown so vivid a
light on the dark places of the Gospel story. All these
carefully-prepared essays--for such, indeed, they were--added enormously
to the burden of work which Mrs. Ward already carried, but she loved her
audiences and loved to feel that she had pleased and interested, or even
shocked them a little. "I want to poke them up," she would say
sometimes, with that flash of mischief or "trotzigkeit" (the word is
untranslatable), that endeared her so much to those who knew her well;
and poke them up she surely did whenever the subject of her address was
a religious one.
But the pace at which she lived during this year (1898), when the work
of the Settlement was expanding in every direction, and the preparations
for the Invalid Children's School were going on throughout the winter,
led her to feel that in order to write her next book she must have a
complete change of scene and, if possible, a far more complete seclusion
than that of Stocks, with its accessibility to posts and telegrams. The
great subject of Catholicism still held her fascinated, but she was
tempted to explore it this second time rather from the artistic than the
religious point of view. She had been reading much of Châteaubriand and
Mme de Beaumont during the winter, and had felt her imagination kindled
by the relationship between the two; why should she not migrate to Rome
and there, in the ancient scene, weave anew the old tale of the conquest
of "outworn, buried age" by the forces of youth? So while the
preparations for the Cripples' School were hastening forward, in
February, 1899, negotiations were also going on with the owners of the
vast old Villa Barberini, at Castel Gandolfo, in the Alban Hills, for
the taking of its first floor, and various friends in Rome were helping
us with advice as to how to make it habitable. It was just such an
adventure as Mrs. Ward loved with her whole heart, and when we finally
arrived at the little station overlooking the Alban Lake, on March 23,
packed ourselves and our luggage into three _vetture_ and drove up to
the somewhat forbidding entrance of the Villa, we felt that here,
indeed, was a new kingdom--a place to dream of, not to tell!
Never, indeed, will those who took part in it forget the sensations of
that arrival--the floods of welcome poured upon us by the delightful
little butler, Alessandro, and his stately sister Vittoria, who had been
engaged to minister to our wants, our own faltering Italian, and the
procession across the gloomy entrance-hall and up the uncarpeted stone
staircase, to the rooms of our floor above. A dozen rooms clustering
round two huge central _saloni_, all with tiled floors, exiguous strips
of carpet, and wonderfully ugly wall-papers, formed our _appartamento_;
but at each end, east and west, were glorious balconies, the one
overlooking the Alban Lake and Monte Cavo, the other the vast sweep of
the Campagna, stretching from our falling olive-gardens to the sea. Long
we hung over those balconies, forgetting our unpacking, and when at last
we left our book-boxes behind and wandered out into the mile-long
garden, clothing the side of the hill on the Campagna side, it was only
to suffer fresh thrills of wonder and delight. For there, beyond the
ilex avenue, that led like a cool green tunnel to the further mysteries,
ran a great wall of _opus reticulatum_, banking up the hill on that side
and crowned by overhanging olives, which had formed part of the villa
built on this ridge by the Emperor Domitian, just eighteen hundred years
before. And there, to the right, on another substructure of Domitian's,
ran the balustraded terrace laid out by the rascally Barberini Pope,
Urban VIII (or more probably by one of his still more rascally nephews),
from which you beheld, rolling away to the sea, fold after fold of sad
Campagna, and far away to the north, between two stone pines, the white
dome of St. Peter's. Mrs. Ward thus described the scene, four days after
our arrival, in a letter to her son:
"VILLA BARBERINI,"
_March 27, 1899_.
"To-day, you never saw anything so enchanting in the world, as this
house and its outlook. At our feet, looking west, lies the rose and
green Campagna, melting into the sea on the horizon line, and as it
approaches the hills, climbing towards us through all imaginable
beauty of spreading olive-groves, and soaring pinewoods--brown
pinkish earth, just upturned by the white ploughing oxen,--here and
there on the spurs of the hills, great ruined strongholds of the
Savelli and Orsini, or fragments of Roman tombs: close below the
house a green sloping olive garden, white with daisies under the
grey mist of the olives--while if you lean out of window and crane
your neck a little, far to the north beyond the descending stone
pines, the æthereal sun-steeped plain takes here a consistence in
something, which is Rome.
"We have just come in from wandering along the sunny hill-side
towards Albano, past ruins of the Domitian Villa, overgrown with
ilex and creepers, through long shady ilex-avenues, and then out
into the warmth of the olive-yards, where the cyclamen are coming
out and the grass is full of white and blue and pink anemones. Such
a deep draught of beauty--of _bien-être_ physical and mental--one
has not had for years. But only to-day! Two days ago we woke up to
find a world in snow, or rather all the hills white, the Alban Lake
lying like steel in its snowy ring, and the _silvæ laborantes_
under the weight. And oh! the cold of these vast bare rooms at
night! We spent the day in Rome, where, of course, there was no
snow and much shelter, but when we came home, we sat and shivered
at dinner, and presently we all dragged the table up to the fire in
hope of cheating the draughts a little. Then the north wind howled
round us all night, and our spirits were low. But to-day the
transformation scene is complete!... We have put in baths and
stoves, and carpets and spring mattresses, bought some linen and
electro-plate, hired some armchairs--and here we are, not luxurious
certainly, but with a fair amount of English comfort about
us--quite enough, I fear, to make the Italians stare, who think we
must be mad, anyway, to come here in March, and still madder to
spend any money on an apartment that we take for three months! The
cook, a white-capped, white-jacketed gentleman whom I have only
seen once, sends us up excellent meals--except that on one occasion
he so far forgot himself as to offer us for dinner, first, pâté de
foie gras, and then "movietti," which, being explained, are small
birds, probably siskins. Father and I were too hungry to desist,
the poor little things being anyway fried and past praying for, but
J. sat by, starving and lofty. And _we_ were punished by finding
nothing to eat! So for many reasons, ideal and other, the cook will
have to be told to keep his hands off _movietti_."
Here, then, we established ourselves, and here, either in the little
_salotto_ that we furnished for her, or walking up and down that
marvellous terrace, Mrs. Ward thought out her tale of _Eleanor_,
infusing into it strains old and new--Papal, Italian, English,
American--but, above all, steeping the whole scene in her own love for
the Italy of to-day, as well as for the old, the immemorial Italy.
Those were the times--how far away they seem now, and how small the
troubles!--when things were not going happily for the new-made Italian
Kingdom, when the country still smarted under the misery and failure of
the Abyssinian campaign, and when English visitors were wont to express
themselves with insular frankness on the shortcomings of the New Italy,
whose squalid activities so impudently disturbed, in their eyes, the
shades of the Old. The glamour of the _Risorgimento_ had somehow
departed, in the forty years that followed Cavour's death, so that the
Englishman travelling for his pleasure in the former territories of the
Pope, was ready enough to criticize the defects of the new Government,
while forgetting that if they had remained under the Pope, he would have
found therein no Government, in the modern sense, at all. Many elderly
people still remained who could remember Rome before _Venti Settembre_,
when the Cardinals drove in state down the Corso, and Pio Nono could be
seen taking his part in the processions of _Corpus Domini_ or _San
Giovanni_. Sentimentalists wept at the vandalisms of the Savoyards, who
had built a new city, all in squares and rectangles, on the heights of
the Esquiline, away from the sights and smells of Old Rome, had put up a
huge "Palace of Finance" to record their yearly deficits, and were now
cleaning up the Colosseum and the Forum, so that no æsthetic tourist
would ever wish to set foot in them again.
Mrs. Ward heard plenty of this sort of talk from English friends, who
came out to see us at the Villa, but she, by the simple process of
falling in love, headlong, with Italy and the Italians, avoided these
pitfalls and was enabled to see with a far truer eye than they the
essential soundness of Italian life, whether in town or country--the new
ever jostling the old, rudely sometimes, but with the rudeness of life
and growth, and the old still influencing and encompassing all things.
"Nothing could be worse than the state of things here between
Liberals and Clericals," she wrote to her son, "yet people seem to
rub along and will, I believe, go on rubbing along in much the same
way for many a long year. We read the _Tribuna_ and the _Civiltà
Cattolica_, which on opposite sides breathe fire and flame. But
life goes on and insensibly certain links grow up, even between the
two extremes. For instance, there is a certain priest in Rome,
rector of San Lorenzo in Lucina, who has started charitable work
rather on the English pattern--no indiscriminate alms, careful
inquiry, provision of work, exercise, recreation, country holidays,
etc., in fine 'Settlement' style. And his workers include people of
all beliefs or none--Jews even. But as he is perfectly correct in
doctrine and observance, and does not meddle with any disputed
points, he is let alone, and the experiment produces a quiet but
very real effect. Yesterday our _parroco_, Padre Ruelli, came to
see us here, an enchanting little man, with something of the old
maid and the child and the poet all combined. He recited to us
Leopardi, and explained some poems in Roman dialect, with an ease,
a vivacity, a perfect simplicity, that charmed us all. Then he
remembered his function, and before he left gave us a discourse on
charity, containing a quotation from the Gospels, largely invented
by himself, and so departed."
As the weeks went on in our bare, wind-swept _palazzo_, it became
impossible to resist a community in which everyone, from Alessandro to
this dear _padre parroco_, combined to show us that we were not only
tolerated, but _welcomed_. Our Italian was sadly to seek during those
first weeks, consisting largely in agonized consultations with Nutt's
Pocket Dictionary, and in practising its phrases over with Alessandro;
but his courtesy and patience never failed, so that before long our
sentences began to put forth wings and soar. But never, alas, to any
great heights, and even when Mrs. Ward was able to carry on animated
conversations with our drivers about the traditions of the Alban Hills,
she would find herself sitting tongue-tied and exasperated, or
descending into French, at luncheon-parties in Rome!
Yet those luncheon-parties, and the visits which we persuaded the new
friends, whom we made there, to pay us on our heights, laid the
foundations of certain friendships which influenced Mrs. Ward's whole
attitude towards the new Italy, and gave her the conviction, which she
never lost in the years that followed, that there exists between the
best English and the best Italian minds a certain natural affinity,
which transcends the differences of habits and of speech more surely
than is the case between ourselves and any other of our Continental
neighbours. She put this feeling into the mouth of her ideal Ambassador
in _Eleanor_--that slight but charming sketch which was, I believe,
based upon the figure of Lord Dufferin--when he speaks to the American
Lucy of the Marchesa Fazzoleni, symbol and type of Italian womanhood.
"Look well at her," he says to Lucy, "she is one of the mothers of the
new Italy. She has all the practical sense of the north, and all the
subtlety of the south. She is one of the people who make me feel that
Italy and England have somehow mysterious affinities that will work
themselves out in history. It seems to me that I could understand all
her thoughts--and she mine, if it were worth her while. She is a modern
of the moderns; and yet there is in her some of the oldest stuff in the
world. She belongs, it is true, to a nation in the making--but that
nation, in its earlier forms, has already carried the whole weight of
European history!"
Figures such as these began, when the storms of an inhospitable April
had passed away, to haunt the cool ilex avenue and the terrace beyond,
filling Mrs. Ward's eager mind with new impressions, new perceptions of
the infinite variety and delightsomeness of the human race; and the old
walls of Domitian's villa re-echoed to many an animated talk of Pope and
Kingdom, Church and State, as well as to Lanciani's full-voiced
exclamations on the buried treasures--nay, even Alba Longa itself!--that
must lie at our feet there, only a few yards below the surface! Then,
once or twice, we took these guests of ours further afield, to the Lake
of Nemi, in its circular crater-cup--"Lo Specchio di Diana"--with the
ruined walls of the Temple of Diana rising amid their beds of
strawberries at its further end. This was indeed a place of enchantment,
and readers of _Eleanor_ will remember how the _motif_ of the "Priest
who slew the slayer" is woven into the fabric of the story, while the
turning-point in the drama of the three--Eleanor, Lucy and Manisty--is
reached during an expedition to the Temple. Here it was that Count Ugo
Balzani, best of friends and mentors, bought from the strawberry-pickers
for a few francs a whole basketful of little terra-cotta heads--votive
offerings of the Tiberian age--and gave them to Mrs. Ward; and here that
Henry James, during the few precious days that he spent with us at the
Villa, found the peasant youth with the glorious name, Aristodemo, and
set him talking of Lord Savile's diggings, and of the marble head that
he himself had found--yes, he!--with nose and all complete, in his own
garden, while the sun sank lower towards the crater-rim, and the rest of
us sat spell-bound, listening to the dialogue.
Naturally, however, with Rome only fifteen miles away, we did not always
remain upon our hill-top, and the days that Mrs. Ward spent in the city,
making new friends and seeing old sights, were probably among the
richest in her whole experience. The great ceremony in St. Peter's, when
Leo XIII celebrated the twenty-first anniversary of his accession, is
too well described in _Eleanor_ to need any mention here, but there were
days of mere wandering about the streets, shopping, exploring old
churches and talking to the sacristans, when she breathed the very
spirit of Rome and let its beauty sink into her soul. And there was one
day when a kind and condescending Cardinal--_not_ an Italian--offered to
take her over the crypt of St. Peter's--a privilege not then easy to
obtain for ladies--and to show her the treasures it contained. Little,
however, did the poor Cardinal guess what a task he had undertaken. "The
very kind Cardinal knew nothing whatever about the crypt, which was a
little sad," wrote D. W. that evening, and Mrs. Ward herself thus
described it to her husband: "It was very funny! The Cardinal was very
kind, and astonishingly ignorant. Any English Bishop going over St.
Peter's would, I think, have known more about it, would have been
certainly more intelligent and probably more learned. You would have
laughed if you could have seen your demure spouse listening to the
Cardinal's explanations. But I said not a word--and came home and read
Harnack!" A lamentable result, surely, of His Eminence's courteous
efforts to grapple with the tombs of the Popes.
Through April, May, and half through June we stayed at the Villa, till
the sun grew burning hot, and we were fain to adopt the customs of the
country, keeping windows and shutters closed against the fierce mid-day.
During the hot weather Mrs. Ward made an excursion, for purposes of
_Eleanor_, to the wonderful forest-country in the valley of the Paglia,
north of Orvieto, where the Marchese di Torre Alfina, a nephew of Mr.
Stillman, had placed his agent's house at her disposal, and charged his
people to look after her. There, with her husband and daughter, she
spent two or three days exploring the forest roads and the volcanic
torrent-bed, down which the Paglia rushes, learning all she could of the
life and traditions of the village and of the Maremma country beyond.
It was a district wholly unknown to her and full of attraction and
romance, which she has infused into the last chapters of _Eleanor_; it
gave her, too, a feeling of the inexhaustible wealth of the Italian soil
and race which reinforced her growing love for this land of her
adoption. As the chapters of _Eleanor_ swelled during the remainder of
this year, so its theme took form and presence in the writer's mind--the
eternal theme of the supplanting of the old by the young, whether in the
history of States or of persons. Steadily Mrs. Ward's faith in the
destiny of that vast Italy into whose life she had looked, if only for a
moment, grew and strengthened, till she put it into words in the mouth
of her Marchesa Fazzoleni, speaking to a group gathered in the Villa
Borghese garden: "I tell you, Mademoiselle," she says to Lucy, "that
what Italy has done in forty years is colossal--not to be believed!
Forty years--not quite--since Cavour died. And all that time Italy has
been like that cauldron--you remember?--into which they threw the
members of that old man who was to become young. There has been a
bubbling, and a fermenting! And the scum has come up--and up. And it
comes up still, and the brewing goes on. But in the end the young,
strong nation will step forth!" And Manisty himself, the upholder of the
Old against the New, the contemner of Governments and officials, admits
at last that Italy has defeated him, because, as he confesses to Lucy,
"your Italy is a witch." "As I have been going up and down this
country," so runs his recantation, "prating about their poverty, and
their taxes, their corruption, the incompetence of their leaders, the
folly of their quarrel with the Church; I have been finding myself
caught in the grip of things older and deeper--incredibly, primævally
old!--that still dominate everything, shape everything here. There are
forces in Italy, forces of land and soil and race, only now fully let
loose, that will re-make Church no less than State, as the generations
go by. Sometimes I have felt as though this country were the youngest in
Europe; with a future as fresh and teeming as the future of America. And
yet one thinks of it at other times as one vast graveyard; so thick it
is with the ashes and the bones of men."
Thus Mrs. Ward wove into her book, as was her wont, all the rich
experience of her own mind, as she had gathered and brooded over it
during these months in Italy, and then, when all was finished, gave to
it the prophetic dedication which has made her name beloved by many an
Italian reader:
"To Italy the beloved and beautiful,
Instructress of our past,
Delight of our present,
Comrade of our future--
The heart of an Englishwoman
Offers this book."