LIFE AT STOCKS, 1908-1914--_THE CASE OF RICHARD MEYNELL_--THE OUTBREAK
OF WAR
Stocks, during the first sixteen years that Mrs. Ward inhabited it, was
a dear but provoking house. Built in 1772 by the Duncombe family, at the
expense of the earlier manor-house at the foot of the hill, it had been
added to in the mid-nineteenth century in a spirit of small economy, so
that the visitor as he drove up beheld an unlovely eastern side, with a
squalid porch jutting out into the drive and a mean little block of
"bachelors' rooms" joined on to the main Georgian building. Though Mrs.
Ward loved the southern and western sides of the house, the eastern side
was always an offence to her; she longed to tear down the porch and to
plan some simple scheme for unifying its whole aspect. After many
hesitations, the plunge was finally made in 1907. The family retired to
Stocks Cottage, the little house among the steep hanging woods of
Moneybury Hill where the Neville Lytteltons had stayed so many summers,
and thence watched the slow disintegration and rebuilding of the "big
house." For, of course, once the process was begun, three-quarters of
the Georgian structure was found to be in a state of decomposition, with
floors and ceilings that would have crumbled at another touch, so that
long before it was finished the visit to America had come and gone and
the Anti-Suffrage campaign was launched. When at length the new Stocks
could be inhabited, in the autumn of 1908, the alterations were
beautiful indeed, but had been expensive. There was thenceforward an
unknown burden in the way of upkeep which at times oppressed even Mrs.
Ward's buoyant spirit.
And yet how she loved every inch of the place--house and garden
together--especially after this rebuilding, which stamped it so clearly
as her and her husband's twin possession. Whether in solitude or in
company, Stocks was to her the place of consolation which repaid her for
all the fatigues and troubles of her life. Not that she went to it for
rest, for the day's work there was often harder than it was in London,
but the little walks that she could take in the intervals of work, down
to the kitchen-garden, or up and down the lime-avenue, or through the
wood behind the house, brought refreshment to her spirit and helped her
to surmount the labours that for ever weighed upon her. Here it was that
the near neighbourhood of her cousins of "Barley End"--Mr. and Mrs.
Whitridge in summer and Lord and Lady Sandhurst in winter--meant so much
to her, for they could share these brief half-hours of leisure and give
her, in the precious intimacy of gossip, that relaxation which her mind
so sorely needed. Then, in summer, there were certain spots in the long
grass under the scattered beeches where wild strawberries grew and
multiplied; these gave her exquisite delight, bringing back to her the
hungry joys of her childhood, when she would seek and find the secret
strawberry-beds that grew on the outcrop of rock in Fox How garden. But
the more sybaritic delights of Stocks were very dear to her too--the
scent of hyacinths and narcissus that greeted her as she entered the
house at Christmas-time, or the banks of azalea placed there by Mr.
Keen, the incomparable head-gardener. Keen had already been at Stocks
for fifteen years before we came to it in 1892, and he lived to gather
the branches of wild cherry that decked his mistress's grave in 1920. In
summer he would work for fifteen hours a day, in spite of all that Mrs.
Ward could say to him; his simple answer was that he could not bear to
see his plants die for lack of watering. So Keen toiled at his garden,
and Mrs. Ward toiled at her books, her speeches and her correspondence,
each holding for the other the respect that only the toilers of this
world can know.
Her habits of work when she was settled at Stocks were somewhat
peculiar, for method was not her strong point, and it often seemed as
though the day's quota was accomplished in a series of rushes rather
than in a steady approach and fulfilment. No breakfast downstairs at
8.30 and then a solid morning's work for her, but a morning beginning
often at 5.30 a.m., with the reading of Greek, or writing of letters, or
much reading, for the reading of many books was still her greatest
solace and delight. "For reading, I have been deep in Emile Faguet's
_Dix-huitième Siècle_," she wrote to Mrs. Creighton in August, 1908,
"comparing some of the essays in it with Sainte-Beuve, the reactionary
with the Liberal; reading Raleigh's Wordsworth, and Homer and Horace as
usual. If I could only give three straight months to Greek now I should
be able to read most things easily, but I never get time enough--and
there are breaks when one forgets what one knew before."
Greek literature meant more and more to her as the years went on, and
though she could give so little time to it, the half-hour before
breakfast which she devoted, with her husband, to Homer, or Euripides,
or the _Agamemnon_, became gradually more precious to her than any other
fraction of the day. She was of course no scholar, in the ordinary
sense, and her "quantities" both in Greek and Latin frequently produced
a raucous cry from her husband, to whom the correct thing was, somehow,
second nature; but the literary sense in her responded with a thrill
both to the glories and the restraints of Greek verse, so that such a
passage as Clytemnestra's description of the beacons moved her with a
power that she could hardly explain to herself. The influence which
Greek tragedy had obtained upon her thought is well seen in the opening
chapter of _Diana Mallory_.
Then, at eight o'clock, would come breakfast and post, and, with the
post, the first visits from the rest of us and the planning of the day's
events. Usually she did not appear downstairs till after ten, and if, as
so often happened, there were friends or relations staying in the house
she would linger talking with them for another half-hour before
disappearing finally into her writing-room. Then there would be a short
but intensive morning's work--sometimes wasted on Anti-Suffrage, as she
would wrathfully confess!--lunch and a brief interval for driving on the
Common or in Ashridge Park, after which work would begin again before
four o'clock and continue, with only a nominal break for tea, till well
after eight. She rarely returned to her task after dinner, for this
would infallibly bring on a bad night, and indeed the long spell in the
afternoon left her with little energy for anything but talk or silence
in the evening.
Such, in approximate outline, was her day when nothing from outside
caused an unusual interruption, but life at Stocks seemed often fated to
consist of interruptions. First and foremost there might be guests in
the house, who must be taken for a picnic on the Ivinghoe Downs or on
Ringshall Common, or else there might be visitors from town on
business--the Warden of the Settlement, an American publisher, a
theatrical manager; telegrams would come up the drive from the little
village post-office (for the telephone was not installed till 1914),
while always and ever there was the tyranny of the post. One Sunday the
contribution of Stocks to the village post-bag was duly certified at
eighty-five letters, while forty to fifty was a very usual number. The
evening post left at 6.30, and not till this was out of the way could
Mrs. Ward enjoy that fragment of the day which she regarded as the best
for real work, when letters and all other interruptions were cleared
from the horizon. Her sitting-room was always a mass of papers,
wonderfully kept in order by Dorothy or Miss Churcher; but in spite of
the neatness of the packets, there would come days when the one letter
or sheet of manuscript that she wanted could _not_ be found, and the
house would resound with the clamour of the searchers. Indeed Mrs. Ward
could never be trusted to keep her small possessions, unaided, for very
long, for being entirely without pockets she was reduced to the
inevitable "little bag," which naturally spent much of its time down
cracks of chairs and in other occult places. When her advancing years
made spectacles necessary for reading and writing, these added another
complication to life, but fortunately there was always some willing
slave at hand to aid in recovering the lost--or rather her family would
half unconsciously arrange their days so that there should be some one.
Once she declared with pride to a friend that she had travelled home
_alone_ from Paris to London without mishap, but on inquiry it was found
that "alone" included the faithful Lizzie, and only meant that, for
once, neither husband nor daughter had accompanied her.
Her letters to Mrs. Creighton during these years give many glimpses of
her life.
"I am writing to you very early in the morning--6.30--," she wrote
on August 4, 1910, "a time when I often find one can get a _real_
letter done, or a difficult bit of work. These weeks since the
middle of June have been unusually strenuous for me. Anti-Suffrage
has been a heavy burden, especially the effort to give the movement
a more constructive and positive side. Play Centres have been
steadily increasing, and there were three Vacation Schools to
organize. The Care Committees under the L.C.C. are beginning to
wake up to Play Centres, and lately I have had three applications
to start Centres in one week. Then I have also begun a new book
[_The Case of Richard Meynell_] and even completed and sent off the
first number. But I am very harassed about the book, which does not
lie clear before me by any means. Still, I have been able to read a
good deal--William James, and Tyrrell, and Claude Montefiore's book
on the Synoptics, and some other theology and history.
"Life is _too_ crowded!--don't you feel it so? Every year brings
its fresh interests and claims, and one can't let go the old. Yet I
hope there may be time left for some resting, watching years at the
end of it all--when one may sit in the chimney corner, look on--and
think!"
"Some resting, watching years"! The gods were indeed asleep when Mrs.
Ward breathed this prayer, or was it that they knew, better than she,
that life without toil would have been no life to her?
Among the self-imposed labours which Mrs. Ward added to her burden
during the year 1910, was that of taking an active part in the two
General Elections of that _annus mirabilis_. Her son had been adopted as
Unionist candidate for the West Herts Division, in which Stocks lay, and
Mrs. Ward was so disgusted by what she conceived to be the violence and
unfairness of the leaflets issued by both sides that she decided to sit
down and write a series of her own, intended primarily for the villages
round Stocks and written in simple but persuasive language. These
"Letters to my Neighbours," as they were entitled, dealt with all the
burning questions of the day--the rejection of the Budget by the House
of Lords, Tariff Reform, the new Land Taxes, Home Rule for Ireland and
so forth; but their fame did not remain confined to the villages of West
Herts, but spread first to Sheffield and thence to many other great
towns and county divisions. Mrs. Ward was by this time a convinced
Tariff Reformer, and set forth the case in favour of Protection in lucid
and attractive style; she had learnt the way to do this in the course of
certain "Talks with Voters" which she had held in the little village
schoolroom at Aldbury and in which she had penetrated with her usual
sympathy and directness into the recesses of the rustic mind. The whole
thing was, of course, a direct attempt to influence public opinion on a
political issue, on the part of one who had no vote, and as such was not
missed by the sharp eye of Mrs. Fawcett. The Suffrage leader twitted
Mrs. Ward with her inconsistency in a speech to a Women's Congress in
the summer of 1910, drawing from Mrs. Ward a reply in _The Times_ which
showed that her withers were quite unwrung. Her contention was, in fact,
that the minority of women who cared about politics had as good a right
as anyone else to influence opinion, _if they could_, and would succeed
"as men succeed, in proportion to their knowledge, their energy and
their patience.... That a woman member of the National Union of
Teachers, that the wives and daughters of professional and working men,
that educated women generally, should try to influence the votes of male
voters towards causes in which they believe, seems to me only part of
the general national process of making and enforcing opinion." At any
rate in the village of Aldbury and far outside it, Mrs. Ward was
accepted as a "maker of opinion" because the people loved her, and
because at the end of her little "Talks with Voters" she never failed to
remind her hearers that the ballot was secret. Her son was duly elected
for West Herts--a result which Mrs. Ward could not be expected to take
with as much philosophy as Mrs. Dell, our village oracle, whose only
remark was, "Lumme, sech a fustle and a bustle! And when all's say and
do one's out and the other's in!"
The election made Mrs. Ward more intimate than she had been before with
the village folk and with her county neighbours--amongst whom she had
many close friends--but her real delight still was to receive her
relations and friends, to stay in the house, and there to make much of
them. Among these her sister Ethel was a constant visitor, together with
her great friend Miss Williams-Freeman, whose knowledge of France and of
French people was always a delight to Mrs. Ward. Then there were those
whom she would beguile from London on shorter visits--so far as she
could afford the time to entertain them! Not every Sunday, by any means,
could she allow herself this pleasure, but her instinct for hospitality
was so strong that she stretched many points in this direction, paying
for her indulgence afterwards by a still harder "grind." There were
red-letter days when she persuaded her oldest friends of all, Mrs. T. H.
Green or the Arthur Johnsons, to uproot themselves from Oxford and come
to talk of all things in heaven and earth with her; Mrs. Creighton was
an annual visitor, usually for several days in the autumn; Miss Cropper,
of Kendal, and the Hugh Bells, of Rounton, were among the few whom Mrs.
Ward not only loved to have at Stocks, but with whom she in her turn
would go to stay, reviving in Westmorland and Yorkshire her love for the
North. Then there was Henry James, whose rarer visits made him each time
the more beloved, and with whom Mrs. Ward maintained all through these
years a correspondence which might have delighted posterity, but of
which he, alas, destroyed her share before he died. Many, too, were the
friends from the world of politics or journalism who found their way to
Stocks: Mr. Haldane and Alfred Lyttelton; Oakeley Arnold-Forster, her
cousin, whose career in the Unionist Cabinet was cut short by death in
1909; Sir Donald Wallace, the George Protheros and Mr. Chirol, and ever
and anon some friend from Italy or France--Count Ugo Balzani and his
daughters, Carlo Segrè or André Chevrillon, whose presence only made the
talk leap faster and more joyously. The sound and the flavour of their
talk is gone for ever, but the memory of those days, and of their
hostess, must still be green in the hearts of many.
[Illustration: MRS. WARD AND HENRY JAMES IN THE GARDEN AT STOCKS
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY MISS DOROTHY WARD]
Young people, too, were always welcomed by Mrs. Ward, especially the
many nieces and nephews who were now growing up around her and who were
accustomed to look to Stocks almost as to a second home. Amongst these
were the whole Selwyn family, children of her sister Lucy, who had died
in 1894; both children and father (Dr. E. C. Selwyn, Headmaster of
Uppingham School) were very dear to Mrs. Ward and frequently came to
fill the house at Stocks. Two splendid sons of this family, Arthur
and Christopher, were to give up their lives in the War. Their
stepmother, who had been Mrs. Ward's favourite cousin on the Sorell
side, Miss Maud Dunn, occupied after her marriage a still more intimate
place in her affections. One little boy she had, George, to whom Mrs.
Ward was much attached for his quaint and serious character, but he too
was doomed to die in France, of influenza, in the last month of the War.
That member of her own family, however, to whom Mrs. Ward was most
deeply attached, her sister Julia (Mrs. Leonard Huxley), fell a victim
in the year 1908, at the age of only 46, to a swift and terrible form of
malignant disease. With her perished not only the gifted foundress of
the great girls' school at Priors' Field, but Mrs. Ward's most intimate
friend--the person with whom she shared all joys and sorrows, and whom
it was an ever-new delight to receive at Stocks, with her brood of
brilliant children. She had been amongst the first guests to visit the
house in 1892; she was there within two months of her death in 1908.
Such a shock went very deep with Mrs. Ward, but she spent herself all
the more in devotion to "Judy's" children, whom she loved next to her
own and who had always, since their babyhood, spent a large part of each
year's holidays at Stocks. And they on their side were not ashamed to
return her affection. Julian and Trevenen, Aldous and Margaret became to
her almost a second family, leaning on her and loving and chaffing her
as only the keen-witted children of a house know how to do.
For if Stocks was a Paradise to the tired week-end visitor from London,
or to the stalwart young ones who could play cricket or tennis on its
lawns, it was still more the Paradise of little children. Mrs. Ward was
never really happy unless there were children in the house, the younger
the better, and one of the joys of the re-building was that it provided
her, on the transformed eastern side, with a pair of nurseries which
only asked thenceforward to be tenanted. Her grandchildren, Mary,
Theodore and Humphry, were naturally the most frequent tenants, and
there accumulated a store of ancient treasures to which they looked
forward with unfailing joy each time that they returned. Usually, too,
they found that "Gunny" (as they had early christened her) had
surreptitiously added to the store during their absence, which was
unorthodox, but pleasant. How she loved to fill their red mouths with
strawberries or grapes, to hear their voices on the stairs, or their
shrill shrieks as they played hide-and-seek on the lawn with some
captive grown-up! The two elders, Mary and Theodore, paid her a visit
every morning, with the regularity of clockwork, just as her
breakfast-tray arrived, and then sat on the bed, with sly, expectant
faces, waiting for the execution of the egg--a drama that was performed
each day with a prescribed ritual, varying only in the intensity of the
egg's protests against decapitation. The invaders usually ended by
consuming far more than their share of Gunny's breakfast. And as they
grew in stature and delightsomeness, Mrs. Ward became only the more
devoted to them, till when Theo was four and Mary five and a half, they
would pay for their 'bits of egg' by show performances of _Horatius_,
declaiming it there on the big bed till the room re-echoed with their
noise. Or else they would act the coming of King Charles into the House
of Commons in search of the five members, Mary being the Speaker and
Theo the disgruntled King, or, now and then, descend to modern politics
by singing her derisive ditties such as--
"Tariff Reform means work for all,
Work for all, work for all;
Tariff Reform means work for all,
Chopping up wood in the Workhouse."
"Gunny" would become quite limp with laughing at the wickedness and
point which Theodore would throw into the singing of this song, for the
rascal knew full well that she had succumbed to what Mrs. Dell, after a
village meeting, had christened "Tarridy-form."
Whenever one of their long visits to Stocks came to an end, Mrs. Ward
would be most disconsolate. "_How_ I miss the children," she wrote to J.
P. T. in January, 1911, "--it is quite foolish. I can never pass the
nursery door without a pang." Three months later, while she was staying
at an Italian villa in the Lucchese hills, the news fell upon her that
the beloved grandson whose every look and gesture was to her "an
embodied joy," would be hers no longer. He had died beside the sea,
...φἱη ἑν πατρἱδι γαἱη,
and the fells which stand around the little church in the Langdale
valley looked down upon another grave.
It was long before Mrs. Ward could surmount this grief. That summer
(1911) she was busied with the organization of her Playgrounds for the
thousands upon thousands of London children who had no Stocks to play
in.
"Sometimes," she wrote, "when I think of the masses of London
children I have been going through I seem to imagine him beside me,
his eager little hand in mine, looking at the dockers' children,
ragged, half-starved, disfigured, with his grave sweet eyes, eyes
so full already of humanity and pity. Is it so that his spirit
lives with us--the beloved one--part for ever of all that is best
in us, all that is nearest to God, in whom, I must believe, he
lives."
During these years between her visit to America and the outbreak of War,
Mrs. Ward produced no less than six novels, including the two on America
and Canada which we have already mentioned. She also issued, in the
autumn of 1911, with Mr. Reginald Smith's help and guidance, the
"Westmorland Edition" of her earlier books (from _Miss Bretherton_ to
_Canadian Born_), contributing to them a series of critical and
autobiographical Prefaces which, as the _Oxford Chronicle_ said, "to a
great extent disarm criticism because in them Mrs. Ward appears as her
own best critic." Time and again, in these Introductions, we find her
seizing upon the weak point in her characters or her constructions: how
_Robert Elsmere_ "lacks irony and detachment," how _David Grieve_ is
"didactic in some parts and amateurish in others," how in _Sir George
Tressady_ Marcella "hovers incorporate and only very rarely finds her
feet." This candour made the new edition all the more acceptable to her
old admirers, and set the critics arguing once more on their old theme,
as to whether Mrs. Ward possessed or not a sense of humour. If it may be
permitted to one so near to her to venture an opinion on this point, it
is that Mrs. Ward, like all those who possess the ardent temperament,
the will to move the world, worked first and foremost by the methods of
direct attack rather than by the subtler shafts of humour; but no one
could live beside her, especially in these years of her maturity,
without falling under the spell of something which, if not humour, was
at least a vivid gift of "irony and detachment," asserting itself
constantly at the expense of herself and her doings and finding its way,
surely, into so many of her later books. Her minor characters are
usually instinct with it; they form the chorus, or the "volley of
silvery laughter" for ever threatening her too ardent heroes from the
Meredithian "spirit up aloft," and show that she herself is by no means
totally carried away by the ardours she creates. My own feeling is that
this gift of "irony and detachment" grew stronger with the years,
perhaps as the original motive force grew weaker, and though she
maintained to the end her unconquerable fighting spirit, as shown in her
struggle against the Suffrage and her keen interest in politics, these
things were crossed more frequently by humorous returns upon herself
which made her all the more delightful to those who knew her well. And
in the little things of life, no one was ever more easy to move to
helpless laughter over her own foibles. When she had bought no less than
five hats for her daughter on a motor-drive from Stocks to London--"on
spec, darling, at horrid little cheap shops in the Edgware Road"--or
when at Cadenabbia, she had actually sallied forth _unattended_ in order
to buy a pair of the peasants' string shoes, and had gone through a
series of harrowing adventures, no one who heard her tell the tale could
doubt that she was richly endowed with the power of laughing at herself.
In her writings she was, perhaps, a little sensitive about the point.
"_Am_ I so devoid of humour?" she wrote to Mr. Reginald Smith, in
September, 1911. "I was looking at _David Grieve_ again the other
day--surely there is a good deal that is humorous there. And if I
may be egotistical and repeat them, I heard such pleasing things
about _David_ from Lord Arran in Dublin the other day. He knows it
absolutely by heart, and he says that when he was campaigning in
South Africa two battered copies of _David_ were read to pieces by
him and his brother-officers, and every night they discussed it
round the camp fires."
The inference being, no doubt, that a set of hard-bitten British
officers would hardly have wasted their scanty leisure on a book that
totally lacked the indispensable national ingredient.
The last novel with a definitely religious tendency to which Mrs. Ward
set her hand was her well-known sequel to _Robert Elsmere_, the "Case"
of the Modernist clergyman, Richard Meynell. It was by far the most
considerable work of her later years and represented the fruit of her
ripest meditations on the evolution of religious thought and practice in
the twenty years that had elapsed since _Robert's_ day. Ever since the
Loisy case she had been deeply possessed by the literature of Modernism,
seeing in it the force which would, she believed, in the end regenerate
the churches.
"What interests and touches me most, in religion, at the present
moment," she wrote to Mrs. Creighton, in September, 1907, "is
Liberal Catholicism. It has a bolder freedom than anything in the
Anglican Church, and a more philosophic and poetic outlook. It
seems to me at any rate to combine the mystical and scientific
powers in a wonderful degree. If I only could believe that it would
last, and had a future!"
She was deep in the writings of Father Tyrrell, of Bergson and of
William James during these years, but while she allowed herself,
perhaps, as time went on, a more mystical interpretation of the Gospel
narratives, she was still as convinced as ever of the necessity for
historical criticism.
_To J. P. T._
"VALESCURE,
"_Easter Day, 1910_.
..."It is good to be alive on spring days like this! I have been
reading William James on this very point--the worth of being
alive--and before that the Emmaus story and the appearance to the
Maries. I more and more believe that the whole resurrection story,
as a story, arose from the transference of the body by the
Romans--at Jewish bidding, no doubt--to a hidden sepulchre to avoid
a local cult. The vacant grave seems to me historic fact,--next to
it, the visions in Galilee, perhaps springing from _one_ vivid
dream of a disciple such as I had both of my father and mother
after their deaths--and then theology, and poetry, environment and
inherited belief did the rest. Yet what an amazing thing the rest
is, and how impossible to suppose that it--or any other great
religion--means nothing in the scheme of things."
She had been much excited, also, by the instances of revolt in a Liberal
direction which were occurring at this time within the English Church,
such as that of Mr. Thompson of Magdalen; and so, out of these various
elements, she wove her tale of _Richard Meynell_. When she was already
deep in the writing of the book she came, quite by chance, upon a
country parish in Cheshire where a similar drama was going on.
_To Reginald Smith_
"STOCKS,
"_October 11, 1910_.
..."I have returned home a great deal better than when I went, I am
glad to say. And on Sunday I heard Meynell preach!--in Alderley
church, in the person of Mr. Hudson Shaw. An astonishing sermon,
and a crowded congregation. 'I shall not in future read the
Athanasian Creed, or the cursing psalms or the Ten Commandments, or
the Exhortation at the beginning of the Marriage Service--and I
shall take the consequences. The Baptismal Service ought to be
altered--so ought the Burial Service. And how you, the laity, can
tolerate us--the clergy--standing up Sunday after Sunday and saying
these things to you, I cannot understand. But I for one will do it
no more, happen what may.'
"I really felt that _Richard Meynell_ was likely to be in the
movement!"
Richard Meynell, as the readers of this book will remember, makes
himself the leader of a crusade for modernizing and re-vivifying the
services of the Church, in accordance with the new preaching of "the
Christ of to-day,"--finds his message taken up by hundreds of his fellow
priests and hundreds of thousands of eager souls throughout the
country,--comes into collision with the higher powers of the Church,
takes his trial in the Court of Arches, and, when the inevitable
judgment goes against him, leaves us, on a note of hope, carrying his
appeal to the Privy Council, to Parliament and to the people of England.
The whole book is written in a vein of passionate inspiration--save for
the few touches, here and there, which convey the note of irony or
contemplation--; the reader may disagree, but he cannot help being
carried away, for the time at least, by the infectious enthusiasm of
Meynell and his movement.
* * * * *
"Perhaps the strongest impression," declared one of the reviewers, "at
once the most striking and the most profound, created by _The Case of
Richard Meynell_, is its religious optimism. One finds oneself
marvelling how any writer, in so sceptical an age as this, can picture a
Modernist religious movement with so inspired, so fervent a pen, as to
kindle a factitious flame even in hearts grown cold to religious
inspiration and to religious hope."
* * * * *
Others, again, pronounced the book to be, on the whole, a failure. "And
yet," said the _Dublin Review_, "there is a certain force in Mrs.
Humphry Ward that enables her to push her defective machine into motion;
_Richard Meynell_ is the work of a forcible, if tired, imagination. This
fact may be wrong, and that detail ugly, and another phrase offensive to
the sense of the ridiculous; but as a whole it ranks higher than many
and many a production that is lightly touched in and delicately edged
with satire. Spiritual sufferings, a yearning after truth,
self-restraint, revolt, the helpless wish to aid those who will not be
helped, the texture of fine souls, such things are brought home to us in
_Richard Meynell_. This is not done by the vitality of the author's
personages, for they never wholly escape from bondage to the main
intention of the book, but it is done by contact with a remarkable mind
tuned to fine issues."
The reappearance of Catherine Elsmere, far less overwhelming and more
attractive than in the earlier book, endeared this tale to all who
remembered Robert's wife; her death in the little house in Long Sleddale
where Robert had first found her was felt to be a masterpiece that Mrs.
Ward had never surpassed.
The writer did not disguise from herself and her friends that she looked
forward with unusual interest to the reception of this book. Would it in
truth find itself "in the movement"? Would it kindle into a flame the
dull embers of religious faith and freedom?
"What I should like to do this winter," she wrote to Mrs.
Creighton, in September, 1911 (six weeks before the book's
appearance), "is to write a volume of imaginary 'Sermons and
Journals of Richard Meynell,' going in detail into many of the
points only touched in the book. If the book has the great success
the publishers predict, I could devote myself to handling in
another form some of the subjects that have been long in my mind.
But of course it may have no such success at all. I sometimes think
that, as Mr. Holmes maintains in his extraordinarily interesting
book,[33] the church teaching of the last twenty years has gone a
long way towards paganizing England--together of course with the
increase of wealth and hurry."
These "Sermons and Journals of Richard Meynell" were, however, never
written. The book certainly aroused interest and even controversy in
England, but it did not sweep the country and set all tongues wagging,
as _Elsmere_ had done, while in America the populace refused to be
roused by what they regarded as the domestic affairs of the English
Church. Mrs. Ward never spoke of Meynell's reception as a
disappointment, but she must have felt it so, and within six months of
its appearance she was at work, as usual, upon its successor.
Yet a piece of work which brought her two such letters as the following
(amongst many others) cannot be said to have gone unrewarded:--
_From Frederic Harrison_
"I am one of those to whom your book specially appeals, as I know
so much of the literature, the persons, the questions it dealt
with. It has given me the most lively interest both as romance--as
fine as anything since _Adam Bede_--and also as controversy--as
important as anything since _Essays and Reviews_. Meynell seems to
me a far higher type than Elsmere, both as a man and as a book, and
I am sure will have a greater permanent value--even if its
popularity for the hour is not so rapid--for it appeals to a higher
order of reader, and is of a larger kind of art."
_From André Chevrillon_
"On est heureux d'y retrouver ce qui nous a paru si longtemps une
des principales caractéristiques de la littérature anglaise: ce
sentiment de la beauté morale, cette émotion devant la qualité de
la conduite qui prennent par leur intensité même une valeur
esthétique. C'est la tradition de vos écrivains les plus anglais,
celle des Browning, des Tennyson, des George Eliot. Elle fait la
portée et l'originalité des œuvres de cette époque victorienne,
contre laquelle on a l'air, malheureusement, d'être en réaction en
Angleterre aujourd'hui--réaction que je ne crois pas durable--qui
cessera dès que le recule sera suffisant pour que la force et la
grandeur de cette littérature apparaisse.
"Le problème religieux que vous posez là est vital, et la solution
que vous y prévoyez dans votre pays, cette possibilité d'un
christianisme évolué, adapté, qui conserverait les formes anciennes
avec leur puissance si efficace de prestige, tout en attribuant de
plus en plus aux vieilles formules, aux vieux rites une valeur de
symbole--cette solution est celle que l'on peut espérer du
protestantisme, lequel est relativement peu cristalisé et peut
encore évoluer. Même dans l'anglicanisme la part de
l'interprétation personnelle a toujours été assez grande. J'ai peur
que l'avenir de la religion soit plus douteux dans ceux des pays
catholiques où la culture est avancée. Nous sommes là comme des
vivants liés à des cadavres, ou comme des grandes personnes que
l'on astreindrait au régime de la _nursery_. Les mêmes formules,
les mêmes articles de foi, le même catéchisme, les mêmes
interprétations, doivent servir à la fois à des peuple de mentalité
encore primitive et semi-païenne et à des sociétés aussi
intellectuelles et civilisées que la nôtre. Nous n'avons le choix
qu'entre le culte des reliques, la foi aux eaux miraculeuses, et
l'agnosticisme pur, ou du moins, une religiosité amorphe, sans
système ni discipline."
The writing of _Richard Meynell_ left Mrs. Ward very tired, and all the
next year (1912) she "puddled along" as Mrs. Dell would have put it,
accomplishing her tasks with all her old devotion, but suffering from
sleeplessness and knowing that the novel of that year, _The Mating of
Lydia_, was not really up to standard. Mr. Ward, too, fell ill, and
remained in precarious health for the next four years, which gravely
added to his wife's anxieties. The burdens of life pressed upon her,
while the maintenance of her Play Centres seemed sometimes an almost
impossible addition. Italy was still the best restorative for all these
ills. Every spring she fled across the Alps, enjoying a week or two of
holiday and then settling, with her daughter, in some Villa where she
might work undisturbed. In 1909 she went for the last time to the Villa
Bonaventura at Cadenabbia, the place which was to her, I think, the
high-water mark of earthly bliss. This time her stay was marked by one
long-remembered day--a flying visit paid her from Milan by Contessa
Maria Pasolini, the friend for whom, amongst all her Italian
aquaintance, Mrs Ward felt the strongest devotion. She could watch her,
or listen to her talk, for hours with unfailing delight; for she seemed
to embody in herself both the wisdom and the charm, the age and the
youth, of Italy. It was a friendship worthy of two noble spirits. Never
again was Mrs. Ward able to rise to the Villa Bonaventura, but she
explored other parts of Italy with almost equal delight, settling at the
Villa Pazzi, outside Florence, in April, 1910, at a bare but fascinating
Villa in the Lucchese hills in the next year, and in a fragment of a
palace on the Grand Canal in 1912. It was during this stay in Venice
that Mr. Reginald Smith obtained for her, from Mr. Pen Browning,
permission to camp and work in the empty Rezzonico Palace, a privilege
which she greatly valued and which gave her many romantic hours. While
savouring thus the delights of Venice she was enabled, too, to witness
the formal inauguration of the new-built Campanile, watching the
splendid ceremony from a seat in the Piazzetta.
"Venice has been delirious to-day," she wrote to Reginald Smith on
St. Mark's Day, April 25, "and the inauguration of the Campanile
was really a most moving sight. 'Il Campanile è morto--viva il
Campanile!' The letting loose of the pigeons--the first sound of
the glorious bells after these ten years of silence--the thousands
of children's voices--the extraordinary beauty of the setting--the
splendour of the day--it was all perfect, and one feels that Italy
may well be proud."
[Illustration: MRS. WARD BESIDE THE LAKE OF LUCERNE. 1912
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY MISS DOROTHY WARD]
Her great relaxation during all these sojourns, but especially during a
stay of six weeks at Rydal Mount during the autumn of 1911, was to play
with brushes and paint, for she had skill enough in the problems of
colour and line to throw off all other cares in their pursuit, while her
inevitable imperfections only spurred her to fresh efforts. Dorothy
would call it her "public-house," for she could not keep away from it
and would exhaust herself, sometimes, in the pursuit of the ideal,
but the results were full of charm and are much treasured by their few
possessors.
* * * * *
In 1913, as though to confound her critics, Mrs. Ward produced the book
which contained, perhaps, the most brilliant character-drawing that she
had ever attempted--_The Coryston Family_. She was pleased with its
success, which was indeed needed to reassure her, for at this time
occurred some serious losses, not of her making, which had to be faced,
and, if possible, repaired. She was already sixty-two and her health, as
we know, was more than precarious, but she set herself to work perhaps
harder than ever. "Courage!" she wrote in July 1913, "and perhaps this
time next year, if we are all well, the clouds will have rolled away."
When that time came, when the Archduke Francis Ferdinand had been
murdered at Serajevo and we in England, no less than the Serbian peasant
and the French _piou-piou_, found ourselves face to face with a horror
never known before, the crisis found Mrs. Ward at a low ebb of health
and spirits. Attacks of giddiness led the doctors to pronounce that she
was suffering from "heart fatigue." Mr. Ward's illness had increased
rather than diminished; Stocks was abandoned for a time (though to a
charming tenant and a sister novelist, Mrs. Wharton), and the three had
migrated to a small and unattractive house in Fifeshire, where Mrs. Ward
applied herself once more to writing. There the blow fell. Her first
reaction to it was one of mere revolt, a cry of blind human misery.
"What madness is it that drives men to such horrors?--not for great
causes, but for dark diplomatic and military motives only understood by
the ruling class, and for which hundreds of thousands will be sent to
their death like sheep to the slaughter! Germany, Russia and Austria
seem to me all equally criminal." Then, as the news came rolling in,
from the "dark motives" there seemed to detach itself one clear,
stabbing thought. France! France invaded, perhaps overwhelmed!
"To me she is still the France of Taine, and Renan, and Pasteur, of an
immortal literature, and a history that, blood-stained as it is, makes a
page that humanity could ill spare. No, I am with her, heart and soul,
and to see her wiped out by Germany would put out for me one of the
world's great lights."