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