The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward Part 4

The next morning she duly presented herself after breakfast, and this time they got to grips far more thoroughly than before with the question of miracles and of New Testament criticism generally. In a letter to her husband (published in the _Recollections_) she calls it "a battle royal over the book and Christian evidences," and describes how "at times he looked stern and angry and white to a degree, so that I wondered sometimes how I had the courage to go on--the drawn brows were so formidable!" But she stuck to her points and found, as she thought, that for all his versatility he was not really familiar with the literature of the subject, but took refuge instead in attacking her own Theistic position, divested as it was of supernatural Christianity. "I do not say or think you 'attack' Christianity," he wrote to her two days later, "but in proposing a subst.i.tute for it, reached by reduction and negation, I think (forgive me) you are dreaming the most visionary of all human dreams."

He enclosed a volume of his _Gleanings_, marking the article on "The Courses of Religious Thought." Mrs. Ward replied to him as follows:--

_April 15, 1888._

DEAR MR. GLADSTONE,--

Thank you very much for the volume of _Gleanings_ with its gracious inscription. I have read the article you point out to me with the greatest interest, and shall do the same with the others. Does not the difference between us on the question of sin come very much to this--that to you the great fact in the world and in the history of man, is _sin_--to me, _progress_? I remember Amiel somewhere speaks of the distinction as marking off two cla.s.ses of thought, two orders of temperament. In myself I see a perpetual struggle, in the world also, but through it all I feel the "Power that makes for righteousness." In the life of conscience, in the play of physical and moral law, I see the ordained means by which sin is gradually scourged and weakened both in the individual and in the human society. And as to that sense of _irreparableness_, that awful burden of evil both on the self and outside it, for which all religions have sought an anodyne in the ceremonies of propitiation and sacrifice, I think the modern who believes in G.o.d and cherishes the dear memory of a human Christ will learn humbly, as Amiel says, even "to accept himself," and life, as they are, at G.o.d's hands.

Constant and recurrent experience teaches him that the baser self can only be killed by constant and recurrent effort towards good; the action of the higher self is governed by an even stronger and more prevailing law of self-preservation than that of the lower; evil finds its appointed punishment and deterrent in pain and restlessness; and as the old certainty of the Christian heaven fades it will become clear to him that his only hope of an immortality worth having lies in the developing and maturing of that diviner part in him which can conceive and share the divine life--of the soul. And for the rest, he will trust in the indulgence and pity of the power which brought forth this strangely mingled world.

So much for the minds capable of such ideas. For the ma.s.ses, in the future, it seems to me that charitable and social organization will be all-important. If the simpler Christian ideas can clothe themselves in such organization--and I believe they can and are even now beginning to do it--their effect on the democracy may be incalculable. If not, then G.o.d will fulfil Himself in other ways.

But "dream" as it may be, it seems to many of us, a dream worth trying to realize in a world which contains your seven millions of persons in France, who will have nothing to say to religious beliefs, or the 200,000 persons in South London alone, amongst whom, according to the _Record_, Christianity has practically no existence.

And the letter ends with a plea that the faith which animated T. H.

Green might fitly be described by the words of the Psalm, "my soul is athirst for G.o.d, for the living G.o.d."

To this Mr. Gladstone replied immediately:

ST. JAMES'S STREET.

_April 16, 1888._

MY DEAR MRS. WARD,--

I do not at all doubt that your conception of _Robert Elsmere_ includes much of what is expressed in the opening verses of Psalm 42. I am more than doubtful whether he could impart it to Elgood St., and I wholly disbelieve that Elgood St. could hand it on from generation to generation. You have much courage, but I doubt whether even you are brave enough to think that, fourteen centuries after its foundation, Elgood St. could have written the _Imitation of Christ_.

And my meaning about Mr. Green was to hint at what seems to me the unutterable strangeness of his pa.s.sionately beseeching philosophy to open to him the communion for which he thirsted, when he had a better source nearer hand.

It is like a farmer under the agricultural difficulty who has to migrate from England and plants himself in the middle of the Sahara.

But I must abstain from stimulating you. At Oxford I sought to avoid p.r.i.c.king you and rather laid myself open--because I thought it not fair to ask you for statements which might give me points for reply.

Mr. Gladstone evidently believed he had been as mild as milk--he knew not the terror of his own "drawn brows!"

_Mrs. Ward to Mr. Gladstone._

_April 17, 1888._

I think I must write a few words in answer to your letter of yesterday, in view of your approaching article which fills me with so much interest and anxiety. If I put what I have to say badly or abruptly, please forgive me. My thoughts are so full of this terrible loss of my dear uncle Matthew Arnold, to whom I was deeply attached, that it seems difficult to turn to anything else.

And yet I feel a sort of responsibility laid upon me with regard to Mr. Green, whom you may possibly mention in your article. There are many people living who can explain his thought much better than I can. But may I say with regard to your letter of yesterday, that in turning to philosophy, that is to the labour of reason and thought, for light on the question of man's whence and whither, Mr. Green as I conceive it, only obeyed an urgent and painful necessity. "The parting with the Christian mythology is the rending asunder of bones and marrow"--words which I have put into Grey's mouth--were words of Mr. Green's to me. It was the only thing of the sort I ever heard him say--he was a man who never spoke of his feelings--but it was said with a penetrating force and sincerity which I still remember keenly. A long intellectual travail had convinced him that the miraculous Christian story was untenable; but speculatively he gave it up with grief and difficulty, and practically, to his last hour, he clung to all the forms and a.s.sociations of the old belief with a wonderful affection. With regard to conformity to Church usage and repression of individual opinion he and I disagreed a good deal.

If you do speak of him, will you look at his two Lay Sermons, of which I enclose my copy?--particularly the second one, which was written eight years after the first, and to my mind expresses his thought more clearly.

Some of the letters which have reached me lately about the book have been curious and interesting. A vicar of a church in the East End, who seems to have been working among the poor for forty years, says, "I could not help writing; in your book you seemed to grasp me by the hand and follow me right on through my own life experiences." And an Owens College Professor, who appears to have thought and read much of these things, writes to a third person, a propos of Elsmere, that the book has grasped "the real force at work in driving so many to give up the Christian creed. It is not the scientific (in the loose modern sense of the word), still less the philosophical difficulties, which influence them, but it is the education of the historic sense which is disintegrating faith."--Only the older forms of faith, as I hold, that the new may rise! But I did not mean to speak of myself.

When the famous article--ent.i.tled "Robert Elsmere and the Battle of Belief"--appeared in the May _Nineteenth Century_, there was nothing but courtesy between the two opponents. Mrs. Ward sent the G.O.M. a copy of the book, with a picture of Catherine's valley bound into it, and he replied that the volumes would "form a very pleasant recollection of what I trust has been a 'tearless battle.'" Many of the papers now reviewed both book and article together, and the _Pall Mall_ ironically congratulated the Liberal Party on "Mr. Gladstone's new preoccupation."

"For two and a half years," it declared, the G.O.M. had been able to think of nothing but Home Rule and Ireland. "But Mrs. Ward has changed all that." The excitement among the reading public was very great. It penetrated even to the streets, for one of us overheard a panting lady, hugging a copy of the _Nineteenth Century_, saying to her companion as she fought her way into an omnibus, "Oh, my dear, _have_ you read Weg on Bobbie?" Naturally the sale received a fresh stimulus. Two more three-volume editions disappeared during May, and a seventh and last during June. Then there was a pause before the appearance of the Popular or 6s. edition, which came out at the end of July with an impression of 5,000. It was immediately bought up; 7,000 more were disposed of during August, and the sale went on till the end of the year at the rate of about 4,000 a month. Even during 1889 it continued steadily, until by January, 1890, 44,000 copies of the 6_s._ edition had been sold. But as the sale had then slackened Mr. Smith decided to try the experiment of a half-crown edition. 20,000 of this were sold by the following November, but the drop had already set in and during 1891 the total only rose to 23,000. But even so, the sale of these three editions in the United Kingdom alone had amounted to 70,500.

All through the spring and summer of 1888 letters poured in upon Mrs.

Ward by the score and the hundred, both from known and unknown correspondents, so that her husband and sister-in-law had almost to build a hedge around her and to insist that she should not answer them all herself. Those which the book provoked from her old friends, however, especially those of more orthodox views than her own, were often of poignant interest. The Warden of Keble wrote her six sheets of friendly argument and remonstrance. Mr. Creighton wrote her a letter full of closely reasoned criticism of Elsmere's position, to which she made the following reply:

_March 13, 1888._

MY DEAR MAX,--

I have been deeply interested by your letter, and am very grateful to you for the fairness and candour of it. Perhaps it is an affectation to say always that one likes candour!--but I certainly like it from you, and should be aggrieved if you did not give it me.

I think you only evade the whole issue raised by the book when you say that Elsmere was never a Christian. Of course in the case of every one who goes through such a change, it is easy to say this; it is extremely difficult to prove it; and all probability is against its being true in every case. What do you really fall back upon when you say that if Elsmere had been a Christian he could not have been influenced as he was? Surely on the "inward witness." But the "inward witness," or as you call it "the supernatural life,"

belongs to every religion that exists. The Andaman islander even believes himself filled by his G.o.d, the devout Buddhist and Mahommedan certainly believe themselves under divine and supernatural direction, and have been inspired by the belief to heroic efforts and sufferings. What is, in essence and fundamentally, to distinguish your "inner witness" from theirs? And if the critical observer maintains that this "supernatural life" is in all cases really an intense life of the imagination, differently peopled and conditioned, what answer have you?

None, unless you appeal to the facts and _fruits_ of Christianity.

The Church has always done so. Only the Quaker or the Quietist can stand mainly on the "inward witness."

The fruits we are not concerned with. But it is as to the _facts_ that Elsmere and, as I conceive, our whole modern time is really troubled. An acute Scotch economist was talking to Humphry the other day about the religious change in the Scotch lowlands. "It is so pathetic," he said: "when I was young religion was the main interest, the pa.s.sionate occupation of the whole people. Now when I go back there, as I constantly do, I find everything changed. The old keenness is gone, the people's minds are turning to other things; there is a restless consciousness, coming they know not whence, but invading every stratum of life, that _the evidence is not enough_." There, on another scale, is Elsmere's experience writ large. Why is he to be called "very ill-trained," and his impressions "accidental" because he undergoes it?... What convinced _me_ finally and irrevocably was two years of close and constant occupation with the materials of history in those centuries which lie near to the birth of Christianity, and were the critical centuries of its development. I then saw that to adopt the witness of those centuries to matters of fact, without translating it at every step into the historical language of our own day--a language which the long education of time has brought closer to the realities of things--would be to end by knowing nothing, actually and truly, about their life. And if one is so to translate Augustine and Jerome, nay even Suetonius and Tacitus, when they talk to you of raisings from the dead, and making blind men to see, why not St. Paul and the Synoptics?

I don't think you have ever felt this pressure, though within the limits of your own work I notice that you are always so translating the language of the past. But those who have, cannot escape it by any appeal to the "inward witness." They too, or many of them, still cling to a religious life of the imagination, nay perhaps they live for it, but it must be one where the expansive energies of life and reason cannot be always disturbing and tormenting, which is less vulnerable and offers less prey to the plunderer than that which depends on the orthodox Christian story.

Another old friend, Mrs. Edward Conybeare, wrote to contend that the "mere life and death of the carpenter's son of Nazareth could never have proved the vast historical influence for good which you allow it to be,"

had that life ended in

"nothing but a Syrian grave."

Mrs. Ward replied to her as follows:--

_May 16, 1888._

MY DEAR FRANCES,

It was very interesting to me to get your letter about _Robert Elsmere_. I wish we could have a good talk about it. Writing is very difficult to me, for the letters about it are overwhelming, and I am always as you know more or less hampered by writer's cramp.

I am thinking of "A Conversation" for one of the summer numbers of the _Nineteenth Century_, in which some of the questions which are only suggested in the book may be carried a good deal further. For the more I think and read the more plain the great lines of that distant past become to me, the more clearly I see G.o.d at work there, through the forms of thought, the beliefs, the capacities of the first three centuries, as I see Him at work now, through the forms of thought, the beliefs and capacities of our own.

Christianity was the result of many converging lines of thought and development. The time was ripe for a moral revolution, and a great personality, and the great personality came. That a life of importance and far-reaching influence could have been lived within the sphere of religion at that moment, or for centuries afterwards, without undergoing a process of miraculous amplification, would, I think, have been impossible. The generations before and the generations after supply ill.u.s.tration after ill.u.s.tration of it.

That Jesus, our dear Master, partly shared this tendency of his time and was partly bewildered and repelled by it, is very plain to me.

As to the belief in the Resurrection, I have many things to say about it, and shall hope to say them in public when I have pondered them long enough. But I long to say them not negatively, for purposes of attack, but positively, for purposes of reconstruction. It is about the new forms of faith and the new grounds of combined action that I really care intensely. I want to challenge those who live in doubt and indecision from year's end to year's end, to think out the matter, and for their children's sake to count up what remains to them, and to join frankly for purposes of life and conduct with those who are their spiritual fellows. It is the levity or the cowardice that will not think, or the indolence and self-indulgence that is only too glad to throw off restraints, which we have to fear. But in truth for religion, or for the future, I have no fear at all. G.o.d is his own vindication in human life.

But apart from the religious argument, the characters in _Robert Elsmere_ aroused the greatest possible interest, especially perhaps that of Catherine.

"As an observer of the human ant-hill, quite impartial by this time," wrote Prof. Huxley, "I think your picture of one of the deeper aspects of our troubled times admirable. You are very hard on the philosophers: I do not know whether Langham or the Squire is the more unpleasant--but I have a great deal of sympathy with the latter, so I hope he is not the worse.

"If I may say so, I think the picture of Catherine is the gem of the book. She reminds me of her namesake of Siena--and would as little have failed in any duty, however gruesome. You remember Sodoma's picture?"