The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward Part 10

The use found for Lord Northbrook's gift was in tidying and beautifying the garden at the back of the Settlement--a piece of land, shaded by fine old plane trees, which the Duke kept in his own hands, but allowed the Settlement to use for a nominal fee. It was now laid down in gra.s.s, and became a vital element in the carrying out of Mrs. Ward's further schemes for the welfare of her London children. It was there that she opened her first "Vacation School" in 1902 for children left to play and quarrel in the streets during the August holiday, and there too that she could see health returning to the faces of her cripples, after the opening of the "Invalid Children's School" in February, 1899.

In looking back over the origin of Mrs. Ward's interest in crippled and invalid children, the vision of our old house in Russell Square rises once more before me, with its gravelled garden at the rear running back to meet the Queen Square gardens to the east of us, for there, across those old plane-shaded s.p.a.ces, rose the modest buildings of the "Alexandra Hospital for Diseases of the Hip"--or, as we used to call it for short, the "Hip Hospital." What "Diseases of the Hip" exactly were was an obscure point to our childish minds, but we knew that our mother cared very much for the children lying there, that all our old toys went to amuse them, and that sometimes a lame boy or girl would appear at the cottage down the lane past Borough Farm, which was Mrs. Ward's earliest attempt at a convalescent home for ailing Londoners. No doubt many another Bloomsbury family did just as much as we for these helpless little ones, but the sight of them kindled in her the spark of imagination, of creative force or what you will, that would not accept their condition pa.s.sively, but after many years forged from time and circ.u.mstance the opportunity for a fundamental improvement of their lives.

The opportunity presented itself in the tempting emptiness of the Settlement rooms during the day-time. From five o'clock onwards they were used to the uttermost, but all the morning and early afternoon they stood tenantless, asking for occupation. Mrs. Ward had heard of a little cla.s.s for crippled children carried on at the Women's University Settlement, Southwark, by Miss Sparkes, and of another in Stepney organized by Mr. and Mrs. G. T. Pilcher, and before the new Settlement was a year old she was already making inquiries from her friends on the London School Board as to whether it might be possible to obtain the Board's a.s.sistance in opening a small school for Crippled Children at the Pa.s.smore Edwards Settlement. Already London possessed a few Special Schools for the "mentally defective"; the Progressive party was in the ascendant on the School Board, and among its chiefs were certain old friends of Mrs. Ward's--Mr. Lyulph Stanley (now Lord Sheffield) and Mr.

Graham Wallas, who knew something of her powers and of the probability that anything to which she set her hand in earnest would be carried through. Mrs. Ward on her side believed that the number of crippled but educable children scattered through London was far greater than anyone supposed, and moreover that the policy of drafting them into the new schools for the mentally defective (as was being done in some cases) was fundamentally unsound. In the summer of 1898, therefore, she formed a sub-committee of the Settlement Council, which undertook to carry out a thorough inquiry in the neighbourhood of Tavistock Place into the numbers of invalid children living at home and not attending ordinary school, whose infirmities would yet permit them to attend a special centre of the type that she had in mind. The help of all the neighbouring hospitals was asked for and most ungrudgingly given, in the supplying of lists of suitable children, while the Invalid Children's Aid a.s.sociation actively helped in the work of visiting, and the School Board directed their Attendance Officers to a.s.sist Mrs. Ward by providing the names of children exempted on the ground of ill-health from attending school. Sad indeed were the secrets revealed by this inquiry--of helpless children left at home all day, perhaps with a little food within reach, while mother and father were out at work, with _nothing on earth to do_, and only the irregular and occasional visits of some kind-hearted neighbour to look forward to.

"I have a vivid recollection," writes one of the most devoted workers of the I.C.A.A., Mrs. Townsend, "of being asked by a neighbour to visit two small boys in a particularly dirty and unsavoury street. I found the door open, felt my way along a pitch-dark pa.s.sage, and found at the end of it a small dark room, very barely furnished: in one corner was a bed, on which lay a boy of ten with spinal trouble; in the other corner were two kitchen chairs, on one of which sat a boy of seven, with hip disease, his leg propped on the other. Between them stood a small table, and on it a tumbler of water and a plate with slices of bread and jam. The mother of these two was at work all day: at 6 a.m. she put their food for the day on the table and went off, leaving them all alone until she got home from work dead tired at 8 p.m. At least there were two of them, which made it a little less dreary for them than for another spinal case in the next street, who was left in the same way and was dependent on a kindly but very busy neighbour for any sight of human beings for fourteen hours of each day. I could quote case after case of these types--the children untaught and undisciplined, without hope or prospect in life, sometimes neglected because mother's whole time was spent in trying to earn enough to support them, more often spoilt and petted just because they were cripples, with their disability continually before them, and made the excuse for averting all the ordinary troubles of life. The attempts to place such children when they grew up were despairing--they were unused to using their hands and brains, unused to looking after themselves, supremely conscious that they were different from other people. The days before Special Schools seem almost too bad to look back upon even!"

From the reports on such cases which Mrs. Ward received from her helpers throughout the summer of 1898 she formed the opinion that no school could be successful unless it maintained a nurse to look after the children's ailments, and an ambulance to convey them to and from their homes. But she felt confident of being able to raise the money (200-220 a year) for these purposes, if the School Board would provide furniture and pay a teacher. Accordingly, by October, 1898, her committee forwarded to the School Board a carefully-sifted schedule of twenty-five names, together with a formal application that the Board should take up the proposed cla.s.s, provide it with a teacher, and supply suitable furniture for the cla.s.s-rooms, while the Settlement undertook to provide rooms free of charge, to pay a nurse-superintendent, and to maintain a special ambulance for the use of the school. Some correspondence followed with the School Management Committee, of which Mr. Graham Wallas was Chairman, and which was besieged at the same time by those who thought such schools totally unnecessary, since all invalid children whom it was possible to educate at all could attend the Infants' (i.e. ground floor) departments of ordinary schools, where the teachers would look after them. But Mrs. Ward collected much evidence to show that this course could not possibly be pursued with any but the slighter cases. "We have heard very pitiful things of the risks run by these spinal and hip-disease cases in the ordinary schools," she wrote to Mr. Stanley, "and of such children's terror of the hustling and bustling of the playgrounds," and early in December she summed up the arguments on this head in another memorandum to the Board. The atmosphere was favourable, and indeed Mrs. Ward had marshalled her evidence and put the case for the school so convincingly that no serious opposition was possible. The School Board gave its consent early in January, 1899; the approval of the Board of Education followed promptly, and nothing remained but to provide the ambulance, and the set of special furniture which was to fill the two rooms set aside for the children at the Settlement.

The ambulance was presented by no less a well-wisher than Sir Thomas Barlow, the great physician, while Mrs. Burgwin, the Board's Superintendent of Special Schools, and Miss McKee, a member of the Board, busied themselves in procuring and ordering a set of ingenious invalid furniture--little cane arm-chairs with sliding foot-rests, couches for the spinal cases, a go-cart for the play-ground, and so forth--such as no Public Education Authority had ever occupied itself with before. Preparations were made at the Settlement for serving the daily dinner, which was to be an integral part of the arrangements, and which, in those happy days, was to cost the children no more than three-halfpence a head. At last, on February 28, 1899, all was ready--save indeed the ambulance, for which an omnibus with an improvised couch had to be subst.i.tuted during the first few weeks. The nurse, too, had been taken ill, so that on this first day the children were fetched and safely delivered at the Settlement by Mrs. Ward's secretary, Miss Churcher. It was pitiful to see their excitement and delight at the new adventure, their joy in the "ride" and their wonder at the pretty, unfamiliar rooms, each with its open fire, its flowers from Stocks, and its set of Caldecott pictures on the walls, which greeted them at the end of their journey. Mrs. Ward was, of course, among the small group of those who welcomed them. Two medical officers from the Board were there to admit them officially, and after this ceremony they were handed over to the care of Miss Milligan, their teacher--a woman whose special gifts in the handling of these delicate children were to be devoted to the service of this school for nearly twenty years. It is to be feared that little in the way of direct instruction was imparted to them on that first day. But there they now were, safe within the benevolent shelter of that most human of inst.i.tutions, the London School Board, and in a fair way to become--though few of us realized it fully then--useful members of a community from which they had received little till then but capricious petting or heart-rending neglect.

The arrangements for the children's dinners and for the hour of play-time afterwards were a subject of constant interest and delight to Mrs. Ward. The housekeeper at the Settlement put all her ingenuity into making the children's pence go as far as they could possibly be stretched in covering the cost of a wholesome meal, and for a long time the sum of 3_s._ 6_d._ a day was sufficient to pay for dinners of meat, potatoes and pudding for twenty-five to thirty children. Their health visibly improved, and the grat.i.tude of their parents was touching to see and hear. Nevertheless, Mrs. Ward was not satisfied. Some of the children were very capricious in their appet.i.tes, and although most of them did learn to eat milk puddings (at least when washed down with treacle!), there were some who could hardly manage the plain wholesome food, and others who could have eaten more than we had to give. It was tempting to try the experiment of a larger and more varied dietary upon them, and in days when the C.O.S. still reigned supreme, and the policy of "free meals for necessitous children" was hardly breathed by the most advanced, Mrs. Ward had the courage to carry it out. She described the results in a letter to _The Times_, in September, 1901:

"It was pointed out to the managers that a more liberal and varied dietary might have marked effects upon the children's health. The experiment was tried. More hot meat, more eggs, milk, cream, vegetables and fruit were given. In consequence the children's appet.i.tes largely increased, and the expenses naturally increased with them. The children's pence in May amounted to 3 13_s._ 6_d._, and the cost of food was 4 7_s._ 2_d._; in June, after the more liberal scale had been adopted, the children's payments were still 3 13_s._ 10_d._, but the expenses had risen to 5 7_s._ 8_d._ Meanwhile, the physical and mental results of the increased expenditure are already unmistakable. Partially paralysed children have been recovering strength in hands and limbs with greater rapidity than before. A child who last year often could not walk at all, from rickets and extreme delicacy, and seemed to be fading away--who in May was still languid and feeble--is now racing about in the garden on his crutches; a boy who last year could only crawl on hands and feet is now steadily and rapidly learning to walk, and so on. The effect, indeed, is startling to those who have watched the experiment. Meanwhile the teachers have entered in the log-book of the school their testimony to the increased power of work that the children have been showing since the new feeding has been adopted. Hardly any child now wants to lie down during school time, whereas applications to lie down used to be common; and the children both learn and remember better."

It may be added that while the minimum payment of 1-1/2_d._ for these dinners was still maintained at the Settlement School, payments of 2_d._ and even 3_d._ were asked from those who could afford it, and were in many cases willingly given, while there were always a few children who were excused all payment on the ground of poverty at home.

Another element that contributed largely to the success of the school from the very beginning was that of the "dinner-hour helpers"--a panel of ladies who took it in turns to wait on the children at dinner and to superintend their play-time afterwards. They came with remarkable regularity, and became deeply attached, many of them, to their frail little charges. When the School Board extended the Cripples' Schools to other parts of London they were careful to copy this development of ours, by insisting that local committees of managers, half of whom should be women, must be attached to each school. Here, surely, in this simple but effective inst.i.tution, may be seen the germ of the Care Committee of future days!

The success of the school in Tavistock Place--the roll of which soon increased to some forty children--naturally attracted a good deal of attention, and it had hardly been running a year before the pros and cons of setting up similar schools in other districts began to be debated within the London School Board. Some members inevitably s.h.i.+ed at the prospect of the increasing expense to the rates, especially if the whole cost of premises, ambulance and nurse were to be borne by the public authority, and a definite movement arose, either for bringing the crippled children into the ordinary schools, with some provision in the way of special couches, etc., or for brigading the crippled and invalid children with the "Mentally Defectives" in the special centres which had already been opened for the latter. Much encouragement was given to this latter view by the official report of one of the Medical Officers of the School Board, who was instructed, in the spring of 1900, to examine and report upon all cases of crippled children not attending school, and submitted a report recommending that "those cases whom it is advisable to permit to attend school at all" should be sent to the Mentally Defective Centres, while neither nurse nor ambulance were, in the opinion of the writer, required.

Mrs. Ward and her friends on the School Board were obliged to fight very strenuously against these views, which, if they had prevailed, would have prevented the establishment of "Physically Defective Centres" as we know them to-day. It is perhaps unprofitable to go into the details of that long-past controversy, the echoes of which have so completely died away; suffice it to say that a Special Conference appointed by the Board to consider the Medical Officer's Report recommended, in October, 1900, that "The Board do make provision for children who, by reason of physical defect, are incapable of receiving proper benefit from the instruction in the ordinary public elementary schools, but are not incapable by reason of such defect of receiving benefit from instruction in special cla.s.ses or schools"; and "that children of normal intelligence be not taught with mentally defective children." A little later it recommended the provision of both ambulance and nurse. These resolutions--which were accepted by the Board--cleared the way for the establishment of new centres for "Physically Defective" children, as they now began to be called; but in order to make her case invincible, and to accelerate the work of the School Board, Mrs. Ward undertook, all through the autumn and winter of 1900-1901, a complete investigation into the numbers and condition of the invalid children not attending school in some of the largest and poorest London boroughs. In consultation with the trained workers whom she employed for the purpose, she had special forms printed for use in the inquiry, and I remember well her eager comments as the statistics came in, and her consternation at the ever-increasing numbers of crippled children which the inquiry revealed. Finally this investigation extended to nine out of the ten School Board divisions of London, and embraced a total of some 1,800 children, of whom 1,000, in round numbers, were recommended by her as suitable for invalid schools. Of the rest, a substantial proportion were reported as fit for ordinary school with a little additional care on the part of teachers and managers; some were too ill for any school, and some were both mentally and physically defective, and therefore recommended for the "M.D." Centres. Meanwhile, the Special Schools Sub-Committee of the School Board, under their Chairman, the Hon. Maude Lawrence, had been at work since February, 1901, in making inquiries into possible sites and buildings for the new schools, and by the middle of March the Board were able to inform Mrs. Ward that sites for four Centres had been agreed upon, while two more were to be located in Kennington and Battersea "on the const.i.tution of your returns, which have now been marked on the map by the Divisional Superintendents."

Four ambulances had also been ordered, and it was decided to appoint nurses at each of the Centres at a salary of 75 a year. Kitchens were, of course, to be provided at all the Centres, so that the hot midday meal which had proved so successful at the Settlement might be supplied.

The first two Centres to be opened by the School Board--in Paddington and Bethnal Green--were ready by September, 1901, and both drew their children entirely from those on Mrs. Ward's lists. It may be imagined with what intense satisfaction she had followed every step taken by the School Board towards this consummation. Finally she gathered up the whole story of the Settlement School and of the School Board's adoption of responsibility for London's crippled children in the letter to _The Times_ mentioned above, pleading for the extension of the movement to other large towns, and describing certain efforts made at the Settlement School for the industrial and artistic training of the older children.

Her final paragraph ran as follows:

"The happiness of the new schools is one of their most delightful characteristics. Freed from the dread of being jostled on stairs or knocked down in the crowd of the playground, with hours, food and rest proportioned to their need, these maimed and fragile creatures begin to expand and unfold like leaves in the sun. And small wonder! They have either been battling with ordinary school on terribly unequal terms, or else, in the intervals of hospital and convalescent treatment, their not uncommon lot has been to be locked up at home alone, while the normal members of the family were at work. I can recall one case of a child, lame and constantly falling, with brain irritation to boot--the result of infant convulsions--locked up for hours alone while its mother was at work; and another, of a poor little lad, whose back had been injured by an accident, alone all day after his discharge from hospital, feebly dragging himself about his room, in cold weather, to find a few sticks for fire, with the tears running down his cheeks from pain. His father and sister were at work, and he had no mother. It could not be helped. But he has been gathered into one of the new schools, where he has become another being. Scores of children in as sore need as his will, I hope, be reached and comforted by this latest undertaking of the Board.

"And for some, all we shall be able to do, perhaps, will be to gladden a few months or years before the little life goes out. From them there will be no economic return, such as we may hope for in the great majority of cases. But even so, will it not be worth while?"

As the efforts of the School Board and--after 1903--of the Education Committee of the London County Council to spread the "Special Schools for Physically Defective Children" over London grew more and more effective, and the number of the new schools rose steadily, Mrs. Ward and her princ.i.p.al helpers concentrated their attention mainly upon the training of the children for suitable employment on their leaving school. As early as 1900 a little committee was formed for this purpose at the Settlement, which engaged special teachers of drawing and design for the boys and of art needlework for the girls--for these delicate children were often found to possess artistic apt.i.tudes which made up to them in a certain degree for their other disabilities. Presently this committee developed into the "Crippled Children's Training and Dinner Society," presided over by Miss Maude Lawrence, of the London School Board, a Committee which did hard pioneer work in the organizing of careers for these crippled children, whose numbers stood revealed beyond all expectation as the Special Schools spread to every quarter of London. By the year 1906 the numbers of schools had risen to twenty-three, and of children on the rolls to 1,767; by 1909 the figures were thirty and 2,452 respectively. The dark-brown ambulances conveying their happy load of children to and from the schools became a familiar sight of the London streets. But, though Mrs. Ward's experiment had grown in these ten years with such astonis.h.i.+ng rapidity, it had not lost its original character. She had impressed it too deeply with her own broad and sane humanity for the Special Schools Department of the L.C.C.

to become lost in red tape or officialdom, and under the wise reign of Mrs. Burgwin and Miss Collard (Superintendents of Special Schools under the Council) the traditions that had gathered round the first Invalid Children's School were carried on and perpetuated. And to this day the Boards of Managers that watch over the "P.D." Schools seem to be inspired by a tenderer and more personal feeling than any other of the multifarious committees that take thought for the children of the State.

The secret, in fact, of Mrs. Ward's success in this as in her other public undertakings lay in the fact that her action was founded on a real and urgent human need, and that she combined a power of presenting and urging that need in forcible manner with an unfailing tenderness for the individual child. As one of her colleagues expressed it once in homely phrase: "The fact is, she had the brain of a man and the heart of a woman." Nor did the heart dissolve itself in "gush," but showed its quality rather in a disinterestedness that cared not where the _hudos_ went, so long as the thing itself were done--in an eager desire to bring others forward and to give them a full share of whatever credit were to be had.

The view of the School Board authorities was summed up long afterwards in these sentences from the pen of Mr. Graham Wallas: "She brought to the task not only imagination and sympathy, but a steady and systematic industry, which is the most valuable of all qualities in public life.

She was never disheartened, and never procrastinated."

What was felt of her spirit by those who worked with her more intimately, who saw her week by week in contact with the children themselves, is harder to put into words. Perhaps this little vision of her, recorded by the teacher of the school, Miss Milligan, comes nearest to saving what is, after all, an intangible essence, that once had form and being and is now vanished into air:

"But above and beyond all else Mrs. Ward was--what she was always called amongst us--'The Fairy G.o.dmother.' In the early days before the school grew so big, every child knew this Fairy G.o.dmother personally, and loved her, and we remember how on the occasion of one Christmas Party Mrs. Ward was unable to be present through illness, and the children were so sad that even the Christmas tree could hardly console them. When she had recovered and came again to see them, _they_ gave _her_ a delightful little tea-party, even the poorest children giving half-pence and farthings to buy a bunch of Parma violets, and a sponge-cake--having first ascertained what sort of cake she liked. It was a pretty sight to see them all cl.u.s.tering round her, and her kind, beautiful face whenever she was amongst the children will haunt one for years."

CHAPTER VIII

_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 cla.s.sic 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 Brontes 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 mediaeval 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 pa.s.sed 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-fas.h.i.+on 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, G.o.d'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 ma.n.u.script 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 pa.s.sed 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 friends.h.i.+p, 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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 princ.i.p.al speech. This, however, he consented to do with all the graciousness inspired by his old friends.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sages from Father Vaughan's sermon that concern Helbeck himself side by side with Father Clarke's onslaught upon him.