The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward Part 17

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 gra.s.s 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 f.a.guet's _Dix-huitieme Siecle_," 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 "quant.i.ties" 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 pa.s.sage 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 ma.s.s 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 ma.n.u.script 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 hara.s.sed 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 G.o.ds 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 ent.i.tled, 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 Yorks.h.i.+re 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 Segre or Andre 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 acc.u.mulated 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 surrept.i.tiously 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 succ.u.mbed 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 pa.s.s 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,

...f?? ?? pat??d? ?a??,

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 ma.s.ses 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 G.o.d, 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," a.s.serting 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 Ches.h.i.+re 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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sionate 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 fact.i.tious flame even in hearts grown cold to religious inspiration and to religious hope."