The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward Part 18

Others, again, p.r.o.nounced 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 surpa.s.sed.

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 Andre Chevrillon_

"On est heureux d'y retrouver ce qui nous a paru si longtemps une des princ.i.p.ales caracteristiques de la litterature anglaise: ce sentiment de la beaute morale, cette emotion devant la qualite de la conduite qui prennent par leur intensite meme une valeur esthetique. C'est la tradition de vos ecrivains les plus anglais, celle des Browning, des Tennyson, des George Eliot. Elle fait la portee et l'originalite des uvres de cette epoque victorienne, contre laquelle on a l'air, malheureus.e.m.e.nt, d'etre en reaction en Angleterre aujourd'hui--reaction que je ne crois pas durable--qui cessera des que le recule sera suffisant pour que la force et la grandeur de cette litterature apparaisse.

"Le probleme religieux que vous posez la est vital, et la solution que vous y prevoyez dans votre pays, cette possibilite d'un christianisme evolue, adapte, 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 esperer du protestantisme, lequel est relativement peu cristalise et peut encore evoluer. Meme dans l'anglicanisme la part de l'interpretation personnelle a toujours ete a.s.sez grande. J'ai peur que l'avenir de la religion soit plus douteux dans ceux des pays catholiques ou la culture est avancee. Nous sommes la comme des vivants lies a des cadavres, ou comme des grandes personnes que l'on astreindrait au regime de la _nursery_. Les memes formules, les memes articles de foi, le meme catechisme, les memes interpretations, doivent servir a la fois a des peuple de mentalite encore primitive et semi-paenne et a des societes aussi intellectuelles et civilisees que la notre. Nous n'avons le choix qu'entre le culte des reliques, la foi aux eaux miraculeuses, et l'agnosticisme pur, ou du moins, une religiosite amorphe, sans systeme 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, accomplis.h.i.+ng 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 friends.h.i.+p worthy of two n.o.ble 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 Ca.n.a.l 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 e 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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 rea.s.sure 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 p.r.o.nounce 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 Fifes.h.i.+re, 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 cla.s.s, 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."

CHAPTER XIV

THE WAR, 1914-1917--MRS. WARD'S FIRST TWO JOURNEYS TO FRANCE

Mrs. Ward's feeling about the Germans, before the thunderbolt of 1914, had been one of sincere respect and admiration for a nation of patient brain-workers who, she believed, were honest with the truth, and had delved farther into certain obscure fields of history in which she herself was deeply interested than any of their contemporaries. But her acquaintance with Germany was a book-acquaintance only. She had indeed paid one or two visits to the Rhine and to South Germany during her married life, and had been astonished to mark, in 1900, the growth of wealth and prosperity in the Rhine towns, due, she was told, to scientific protection and to the skilful use of the French indemnity.

But she had no personal friends.h.i.+ps with Germans, and her knowledge of their state of mind was derived only from books and newspapers and the reports of others. Still, these had become disquieting enough, as all the world remembers, between 1911 and 1914, but Mrs. Ward clung to the optimistic view that the hatred and envy of England, so apparent in German newspaper writing, was but the creed of a clique, and that the heart of the laborious and thrifty German people was still sound. In April, 1913, a delegation of German Professors came over to London to take part in a historical congress; Mrs. Ward willingly a.s.sisted in entertaining them, giving a large evening party in their honour at Grosvenor Place. Perhaps the atmosphere was already a little strained, but we mustered our forgotten German as best we might, and flattered ourselves at the end that things had not gone badly. Little more than a year afterwards the names of nearly all our guests were to be found in the manifesto of the ninety-three German Professors--the p.r.o.nouncement which above all others in those grim days stirred Mrs. Ward's indignation. She expressed her sense of the "bitter personal disillusionment which I, and so many Englishmen and Englishwomen, have suffered since this war began," in a Preface which she wrote, in 1916, to the German edition of _England's Effort_--an edition which was intended for circulation in German Switzerland, but found its way also, as we afterwards heard, to a good many centres within Germany itself:

"We were lifelong lovers and admirers of a Germany which, it seems now, never really existed except in our dreams. In the article 'A New Reformation,' which I published in the _Nineteenth Century_ in 1889, in answer to Mr. Gladstone's critique of _Robert Elsmere_, and in many later utterances, I have rendered whole-hearted homage to that critical and philosophical Germany which I took to be the real Germany, and hailed as the home of liberal and humane ideas.

And now! In that amazing manifesto of the German Professors at the opening of the War, there were names of men--that of Adolf Harnack, for instance--which had never been mentioned in English scholarly circles before August, 1914, except with sympathy and admiration, even by those who sharply differed from the views they represented.

We held them to be servants of truth, incapable therefore of acquiescence in a tyrannous lie. We held them also to be scholars, incapable therefore of falsifying facts and ignoring doc.u.ments in their own interest. But in that astonis.h.i.+ng manifesto, not only was the cry of Belgium wholly repulsed, but those very men who had taught Europe to respect evidence and to deal scrupulously with doc.u.ments, when it was a question of Cla.s.sical antiquity, or early Christianity, now, when it was a question of justifying the crime of their country, of defending the Government of which they were the salaried officials, threw evidence and doc.u.ments to the winds.

How many of those who signed the professorial manifesto had ever read the British White Paper, and the French Yellow Book, or, if they had read them, had ever given to those d.a.m.ning records of Germany's attack on Europe, and of the vain efforts of the Allies to hold her back, one fraction of that honest and impartial study of which a newly discovered Greek inscription, or a fragment of a lost Gospel, would have been certain at their hands?"

It was this feeling of the betrayal of high standards and ideals which had meant much to her in earlier life, coupled with the emergence of a native ferocity unguessed before (for _we_ had not lived through 1870), that went so deep with Mrs. Ward. But there were at least no personal friends.h.i.+ps to break. With France, on the other hand, her ties had, as we know, been close and intimate from the beginning, so that her heart went out to the trials and agonies of her French friends with a peculiar poignancy. M. Chevrillon, her princ.i.p.al correspondent, gave her in a series of letters, from November, 1914, onwards, a wonderful picture of the sufferings, the heroisms and the moods of France; she replied--to this lover of Meredith!--with her reading of the English scene:

"STOCKS, "_November 23, 1914_.

"We are indeed no less absorbed in the War than you. And yet, perhaps, there is not that _unrelenting_ pressure on nerve and recollection in this country, 'set in the silver sea' and so far inviolate, which there must be for you, who have this cruel and powerful enemy at your gates and in your midst, and can never forget the fact for a moment. That, of course, is the explanation of the recent slackening of recruiting here. The cla.s.ses to whom education and social life have taught imagination are miserable and shamed before these great football gatherings, which bring no recruits--'but my people do not understand, and Israel doth not consider. They have eyes and see not; ears have they but they hear not.' One little raid on the East Coast--a village burnt, a few hundred men killed on English soil--then indeed we should see an England in arms. Meanwhile, compared with any England we have ever seen, it _is_ an England in arms. Every town of any size has its camp, the roads are full of soldiers, and they are billeted in our houses. No such sight, of course, has ever been seen in our day.

And yet how quickly one accustoms oneself to it, and to all the other accompaniments of war! The new recruits are mostly excellent material. Dorothy and I motored over early one morning last week to Aston Clinton Park to see the King inspect a large gathering of recruits. It was a beautiful morning, with the misty Chilterns looking down upon the wide stretches of the park, and the bodies of drilling men. The King must have been up early, for he had inspected the camp at ten (thirty-five miles from London) and was in the park by eleven. There was no ceremony whatever, and only a few neighbours and children looking on. It had been elaborately announced that he would inspect troops that day in Norfolk! The men were only in the early stages, but they were mostly of fine physique--miners from Northumberland a great many of them. The difficulty is officers. They have to accept them now, either so young, or so elderly! And these well-to-do workmen of twenty-five or thirty don't like being ordered about by lads of nineteen. But the lads of nineteen are shaping, too, very fast.

"We are so sorry for your poor niece, and for all the other sufferers you tell us of. I have five nephews fighting, and of course innumerable friends. Arnold is in Egypt with his Yeomanry.

One dreads to open _The Times_, day after day. The most tragic loss I know so far is that of the Edward Cecils' only boy--grandson of the late Lord Salisbury, and Admiral Maxse, the Beauchamp of _Beauchamp's Career_. I saw him last as a delightful chattering boy of eleven--so clever, so handsome, just what Beauchamp might have been at his age! He was missing on September 2, and was only announced as killed two days ago."

The first year and a half of the War was a time of great anxiety and strain for Mrs. Ward, both in the literary and the practical fields.

Besides her unremitting literary work she pushed through, by means of the "Joint Advisory Committee," an exhaustive inquiry into the working of the existing system of soldiers' pensions and pressed certain recommendations, as a result, upon the War Office; she was confronted by a partial falling-off in the subscriptions to her Play Centres, and was obliged to introduce economies and curtailments which cost her much anxious thought; she converted the Settlement into a temporary hostel for Belgian Refugees; and, above all, she carried through, between October, 1914, and the summer of 1915, a complete reorganization of the Pa.s.smore Edwards Settlement, converting it from a men's into a women's settlement. There were many reasons, even apart from the growing pressure on men of military age to enlist in the New Armies, which had for some time made such a change desirable in the eyes of Mrs. Ward and of a majority of the Council; chief among these being the need for a body of trained voluntary workers to carry out, for St. Pancras, the ma.s.s of social legislation that had been pa.s.sed since the foundation of the Settlement, and to take their part in the work of School Care Committees, Schools for Mothers and so forth. Male Residents, being occupied with their own work during the day, were not available for such things; but amongst women it was believed that a body possessing sufficient leisure and enthusiasm for social service to make a real mark in the life of the neighbourhood, would not be difficult to find. The change was not accomplished without strenuous opposition from the existing Warden and some of the Residents, but Mrs. Ward went methodically to work, getting the Council to appoint a Committee with powers to inquire and report. She found also that her old friend and supporter, the Duke of Bedford, was strongly in favour of the change, and would be ready to provide, for three years, about two-thirds of the annual sum required for the maintenance of a Women's Settlement. This argument was decisive, and the Council finally adopted the Report of the Special Committee in May, 1915. Mrs. Ward had the happiness of seeing, during the remaining years of the War, her hopes for the usefulness of the new venture very largely fulfilled, under the able guidance of Miss Hilda Oakeley, who was appointed Warden of the Settlement in August, 1915.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Ward felt herself in danger of seeing her usual means of livelihood cut from beneath her feet during this first period of the War. For one result of the vast upheaval in our social conditions was that the circulation of all novels went down with a run, and it was not until the War had made a certain dismal routine of its own, in the needs of hospitals, munition-centres, soldiers' and officers' clubs and the like, that the national taste for the reading of fiction rea.s.serted itself. Till then Mrs. Ward relied mainly on her American public, which was still untouched; but the pressure of work was never for an instant relaxed, and fortunately she still found her greatest solace and relief from present cares in the writing of books. "I never felt more inclined to spin tales, which is a great comfort," she wrote in January, 1915, but as yet she could not face the thought of weaving the War into their fabric, and took refuge instead in the summer of that year in the making of a story of Oxford life, as she had known it in her youth--an occupation that gave her a quiet joy, providing a "wind-warm s.p.a.ce" into which she could retreat from the horrors of the outer world. The compulsory retrenchments of the War years came also to her aid, in reducing the _personnel_ employed at Stocks, while Stocks itself was usually let in the summer and Grosvenor Place in the winter; but still the struggle was an arduous one, leaving its mark upon her in the growing whiteness of her hair, the growing fragility and pallor of her look. Sleeplessness became an ever greater difficulty in these years, but on the other hand her old complaint in the right side had grown less troublesome, so that standing and walking were more possible than of old. Had it not been for this improvement she would have been physically incapable of carrying out the task laid upon her, swiftly and unexpectedly, in January, 1916, when Theodore Roosevelt wrote to her from Oyster Bay to beg her to tell America what England was doing in the War.

_December 27, 1915._

MY DEAR MRS. WARD,--

The War has been, on the whole, well presented in America from the French side. We do not think justice has been done to the English side. I attribute this in part to the rather odd working of the censors.h.i.+p in hands not accustomed to the censors.h.i.+p. I wish that some writer like yourself could, in a series of articles, put vividly before our people what the English people are doing, what the actual life of the men in the trenches is, what is actually being done by the straight and decent capitalist, who is not concerned with making a profit, but with serving his country, and by the straight and decent labouring man, who is not thinking of striking for higher wages, but is trying to help his comrades in the trenches. What I would like our people to visualize is the effort, the resolution and the self-sacrifice of the English men and women who are determined to see this war through. Just at present England is in much the same strait that we were in in our Civil War toward the end of 1862, and during the opening months of 1863. That was the time when we needed to have our case put before the people of England--when men as diverse as Gladstone, Carlyle and the after-time Marquis of Salisbury were all strongly against us. There is not a human being more fitted to present this matter as it should be presented than you are. I do hope you will undertake the task.

Faithfully yours, THEODORE ROOSEVELT.

The letter reached Mrs. Ward at Stocks on Monday, January 10, 1916, by the evening post. She felt at once that she must respond to such a call, though the manner of doing so was still dim to her. But she consulted her friends, C. F. G. Masterman and Sir Gilbert Parker, at "Wellington House" (at that time the Government Propaganda Department), and found that they took Mr. Roosevelt's letter quite as seriously as she did herself. They showed her specimens of what the American papers were saying about England, her blunders, her slackers and her s.h.i.+rkers, till Mrs. Ward thrilled to the task and felt a longing to be up and at it.

The next step was to see Sir Edward Grey (then Foreign Minister), to whom she had also sent a copy of the letter. He asked her to come to his house in Eccleston Square, whither accordingly she went early on January 20.

"They showed me into the dining-room," she wrote to J. P. T., "and he came down to say that he had asked Lord Robert Cecil and Sir Arthur Nicolson to come too, and that they were upstairs. So then we went into his library sitting-room, a charming room full of books, and there were the other two. They all took Roosevelt's letter very seriously, and there is no question but that I must do my best to carry it out. I simply felt after Edward Grey had spoken his mind that, money or no money, strength or fatigue, I was under orders and must just go on. I said that I should like to go to France, just for the sake of giving some life and colour to the articles--and that a novelist could not work from films, however good. They agreed.

"'And would you like to have a look at the Fleet?' said Lord Robert.

"I said that I had not ventured to suggest it, but that of course anything that gave picturesqueness and novelty--i.e. a woman being allowed to visit the Fleet--would help the articles.

"I gave a little outline of what I proposed, beginning with the unpreparedness of England. On that Edward Grey spoke at some length--the utter absence of any wish for war in this country, or thought of war. Even those centres that had suffered most from German compet.i.tion had never thought of war. No one wished for it.

I thought of his long, long struggle for peace. It was pathetic to hear him talking so simply--with such complete conviction.