Part 8 (2/2)
_May 6, 1894._
MY DEAR MR. GLADSTONE,--
It was charming of you to write to me,--one of those kindnesses which, apart from all your greatness, win to you the hearts of so many. I am so glad that the eyes are better for a time, and that you have shaken off your influenza.
We have just come back from a delightful seven weeks in Italy, at Rome, Siena and Florence, and I am much rested, though still, I am vexed to say, very lame and something of an invalid. The success of _Marcella_, however, has been a most pleasant tonic, though I always find the first few weeks after the appearance of a book an agitating and trying time, however smoothly things go! The great publicity which our modern conditions involve seems to wear one's nerves; and I suppose it is inevitable that women should feel such things more than men, who so often, through the training of school and college and public life, get used to them from their childhood.
Your phrase about ”prospective work” gave me real delight. I have been enjoying and pondering over the translations of Horace in the _Nineteenth Century_. Horace is the one Latin poet whom I know fairly well, and often read, though this year, in Italy, I think I realized the spell of Virgil more than ever before. Will you go on, I wonder, from the love-poems to a gathering from the others? I wanted to claim of you three or four in particular, but as I turn over the pages I see in two or three minutes at least twenty that jostle each other to be named, so it is no good!
Believe me, Yours most sincerely, MARY A. WARD.
_Marcella_, like her two predecessors, first appeared in three-volume form, but Mrs. Ward's quarrel with the big libraries for starving their subscribers, which had been simmering ever since _David Grieve_, became far more acute over the new book. She reported to George Smith on May 24 that ”Sir Henry Cunningham told us last night that he had made a tremendous protest to Mudie's against their behaviour in the matter of _Marcella_--which he seems to have told them he regarded as a fraud on the public, or rather on their subscribers, whom they were _bound_ to supply with new books!” This feud, together with the desire of the American _Century Magazine_ to publish her next novel in serial form, provided it were only half the length of _Marcella_, induced her to consider seriously the question of writing shorter books. ”It would be difficult for me, with my tendency to interminableness,” she admitted to George Smith, ”to promise to keep within such limits. However, it might be good for me!” Soon afterwards the decision was made, and with it the knell of the three-volume novel sounded, for other novelists soon followed Mrs. Ward's example. The resulting brevity of modern novels (always excepting Mr. William de Morgan and Mr. Conrad) is thus largely due to the flaming up of an old quarrel between librarians on the one side and publishers and authors on the other, as it occurred in the case of Mrs. Ward's _Marcella_.
The summer of 1894 was a period of comparative physical ease, during which Mrs. Ward found that although she was still unable to walk more than a very little, she could ride an old pony we possessed with much profit and pleasure, of course at a foot pace. Thus she was enabled to explore some of the woods and hill-sides around Stocks which she had never yet visited, a pastime which gave her exquisite delight. But by the following winter both her persistent plagues had reappeared in aggravated form. ”My hand is extremely troublesome, alas!” she wrote to her father, ”and the internal worry has been worse again lately. It is so trying week after week never to feel well, or like other people! One lives one's life, but it makes it all more of a struggle. And as there is this organic cause for it, one can only look forward to being sometimes better and less conscious of it than at others, but never to being quite well. However, one needn't grumble, for I manage to enjoy my life greatly in spite of it, and to fill the days pretty full.” And to her husband, who was away on a lecturing-tour in America, she wrote in February, 1895: ”Alas! for my hand. It is more seriously disabled than it has been for months and months, and I really ought to give it a month's complete rest. If it were not for the _Century_ I would!”
This unusual disablement was due no doubt to the extraordinary concentration of effort which she had just put forth in the writing of her village tale of _Bessie Costrell_--a tale based on an actual occurrence in the village of Aldbury, the tragic details of which absorbed her so much as to amount almost to possession. She finished it in fifteen days, and gave it to George Smith, who always cherished a special affection for this ”grimy little tale,” as Mrs. Ward called it.
When he had brought it out, the world devoured it with enthusiasm--so much so that her true friend and mentor, Henry James, whose opinion she valued more highly than any other, thought fit to address a friendly admonition to her:
”May 8, 1895. I think the tale very straight-forward and powerful--very direct and vivid, full of the real and the _juste_.
I like your unalembicated rustics--they are a tremendous rest after Hardy's--and the infallibility of your feeling for village life.
Likewise I heartily hope you will labour in this field and farm again. _But_ I won't pretend to agree with one or two declarations that have been wafted to me to the effect that this little tale is ”the best thing you've done.” It has even been murmured to me that _you_ think so. This I don't believe, and at any rate I find, for myself, your best in your dealings with _data_ less simple, on a plan less simple. This means, however, mainly, that I hope you won't abandon _anything_ that you have shewn you can do, but only go on with this _and_ that--and the other--especially the other!
Yours, dear Mrs. Ward, most truly, HENRY JAMES.”
Meanwhile, in spite of the drawback of her continued ill-health, she derived throughout these years an ever-increasing pleasure from the friends.h.i.+ps with which she was surrounded. Both in the London house, which they had acquired early in 1891 (25 Grosvenor Place), and at Stocks, she loved to gather many friends about her, though the effort of entertaining them was often a sore tax upon her slender strength. Her Sunday parties at Stocks brought together men and women from many different worlds--political, literary and philanthropic--with whom the talk ranged over all the questions and persons of the day from breakfast till lunch, from lunch till tea, and from tea till dinner; but after dinner, in sheer exhaustion, the party would usually take refuge in what were known, derisively, as ”intellectual games.” Mrs. Ward herself was not particularly good at these diversions, but she loved to watch the efforts of others, and they did give a rest, after all, from the endless talk! On one such occasion the game selected was the variety known as ”riddle game,” in which a name and a thing are written down at random by different players, and the next tries to give a reason why the person should be like the thing. Lord Acton, who had that day devoured ten books of Biblical criticism that Mrs. Ward had placed in his room, and would infinitely have preferred to go on talking about them, found himself confronted by the question: ”Why is Lord Rothschild like a poker?” For a long time he sat contemplating the paper, then scribbled down in desperation: ”Because he is upright,” and retired impenetrably behind an eleventh book. But Mr. Asquith made up for all deficiencies by his ingenuity in this form of nonsense. ”Why is Irving like a wheelbarrow?” demanded one of the little papers that came round to him, and while the rest of us floundered in heavy jokes Mr. Asquith found the exact answer: ”Because he serves to fill up the pit and carry away the boxes.”
Politics were of absorbing interest to Mrs. Ward, and though her own views remained decidedly Unionist on the Irish question, in home affairs they were sufficiently mixed to make free discussion not only possible, but delightful to her. She still retained her old friends.h.i.+p for Mr.
Morley, and probably the majority of her Parliamentary friends at this time were of the Liberal persuasion. 1895 was the year of the ”cordite division” and the fall of Lord Rosebery's Government, involving many of these friends in the catastrophe. Mr. Morley was defeated at Newcastle and went to recover his serenity in the Highlands, whither Mrs. Ward sent him a copy of _Bessie Costrell_, provoking the following letter from her old friend and master:
_August 6, 1895._
MY DEAR MRS. WARD,--
It was most pleasant to me to receive the little volume, in its pretty dress, and with the friendly dedication. It will take its place among my personal treasures, and I am truly grateful to you for thinking of me.
The story is full of interest to me, and in the vein of a true realism, humanising instead of brutalising. The ”severity” of the poor dead woman's look, and the whole of that page, redeems with a note of just pity all the sordid elements.... We are quartered in one of the most glorious of highland glens, five and twenty miles from a railway, and nearly as many hours from London. Now and then my thoughts wander to Westminster, pa.s.sing round by way of Newcastle, but I quickly cast Satan behind me--and try to cultivate a steady-eyed equanimity, which shall not be a stupid insensibility to either one's personal catastrophe or to the detriment which the commonwealth has just suffered. If life were not so short--I sometimes think it is far too long--I should see some compensations in the deluge that has come upon the Liberal party. It will do them good to be sent to adjust their compa.s.ses. The steering had been very blind in these latter days. Perhaps some will tell you that my own bit of steering was the very blindest of all. I know that you are disposed to agree with such folk, and I know that Irish character (for which English government, by the way, is wholly responsible), is difficult stuff to work with. But the policy was right, and I beg you not to think--as I once told the H. of C.--that the Irish sphinx is going to gather up her rags, and depart from your gates in meekness.
During these months another Liberal friend, Mr. Sydney Buxton, was taking infinite pains to pilot Mrs. Ward through the intricacies of the Parliamentary situation required for the book she was now writing, _Sir George Tressady_--drawing her a coloured plan of the House and the division-lobbies for the scene of Tressady's ”ratting,” and generally supervising the details of Marcella Maxwell's Factory Bill. ”I am sure it is owing to you,” wrote Mrs. Ward to him afterwards, ”that the political framework has not at any rate stood in the way of the book's success, as I feared at one time it might.” She herself had regularly put herself to school to learn every detail of the system of sweated homework prevalent in the East End of London at that time; wading through piles of Blue-books, visiting the actual scenes under the care of a Factory Inspector, or of Lord Rothschild's Jewish secretary; learning much from her Fabian friends, Mrs. Sidney Webb and Mr. Graham Wallas.
”As to Maxwell's Bill itself,” she wrote to Mr. Buxton, ”after my talk with you and Mr. Gerald Balfour, I took the final idea of it from some evidence of Sidney Webb's before the Royal Commission.
There he says that he can perfectly well imagine, and would like to see tried, a special Factory Act for East London, and I find the same thing foreshadowed in various other things on Factory Law I have been reading. And some weeks ago I talked over the idea with Mr. Haldane, who thought it quite conceivable, and added that 'London would bear quietly what would make Nottingham or Leeds revolt.' If such a Bill is possible or plausible, that I think is all a novelist wants. For of course one cannot describe _the real_, and yet one wants something which is not merely fanciful, but might be, under certain circ.u.mstances. The whole situation lies as it were some ten years ahead, and I have made use of a remark of Gerald Balfour's to me on the Terrace, when we had been talking over the new Factory Bill. 'There is not much difference between Parties,' he said, agreeing with you--'but I should not wonder if, within the next few years, we saw some reaction in these matters,'
by which I suppose he meant if the Home Office power were over-driven, or the Acts administered too vexatiously.
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