Part 10 (2/2)

_Helbeck of Bannisdale_ is probably that one among Mrs. Ward's books on which her fame as a novelist will stand or fall. Though it sold less in England and much less in America than her previous novels at the time of its publication, it has outlasted all the others in the extent of its circulation to-day. In this the opinion of those critics for whose word she cared has been borne out, for they prophesied that it had in it, more than her other books, the element of permanence. ”I know not another book that shows the cla.s.sic fate so distinctly to view,” wrote George Meredith, and some years later, in a long talk with a younger friend about Mrs. Ward's work, repeated his profound admiration for _Helbeck_. ”The hero, if hero he be, is as fresh a creation as Ravenswood or Rochester,” said another critic, Lord Crewe, ”and what a luxury it is to hang a new portrait on one's walls in this age of old figures in patched garments! I have no idea yet how the story will end, but though the atmosphere is so much less lurid and troubled, I have something of the _Wuthering Heights_ sense of coming disaster. I think the Brontes would have given your story the most valuable admiration of all--that of writers who have succeeded in a rather similar, though by no means the same, field.”

The theme of the book was, as all Mrs. Ward's readers know, the eternal clash between the mediaeval and the modern mind in the persons of Alan Helbeck, the Catholic squire, and Laura Fountain, the child of science and negation; while beyond and behind their tragic loves stands the ”army of unalterable law” in the austere northern hills, the bog-lands of the estuary, the river in gentleness and flood. Almost, indeed, can it be said that there are but three characters in _Helbeck_--Alan himself, Laura, and the river, which in the end takes her tormented spirit. The idea of such a novel had presented itself to Mrs. Ward during a visit that she paid in the autumn of 1896 to her old friends, Mr. James Cropper and his daughter, in that beautiful South Westmorland country which she had known only less well than the Lake District itself ever since her childhood. There the talk turned one day on the fortunes of an old Catholic family (the Stricklands), who had owned Sizergh Castle, near Sedgwick, for more than three centuries, steadfastly enduring the persecutions of earlier days, and, now that persecutions had ceased, fighting a sad and losing battle against poverty and mortgages. ”The vision of the old squire and the old house--of all the long vicissitudes of obscure suffering, and dumb clinging to the faith, of obstinate, half-conscious resistance to a modern world, that in the end had stripped them of all their gear and possessions, save only this 'I will not' of the soul--haunted me when the conversation was done.”[19] By the end of the long railway-journey from Kendal to London next day she had thought out her story. The deepest experiences of her own life went to the making of it, for had she not been brought up with a Catholic father, made aware from her earliest childhood of the irremediable chasm there between two lovers? The situation in _Helbeck_ was of course wholly different, but in the working out of it Mrs. Ward had the advantage of a certain inborn familiarity with the Catholic mind, which made the characters of this book peculiarly her own.

All through the winter of 1896-7 Mrs. Ward was steeping herself in Catholic literature; then in the early spring--again by the good offices of Mr. Cropper--she became aware that Levens Hall, the wonderful old Tudor house near the mouth of the Kent, which belonged to Capt.

Josceline Bagot, might be had for a few weeks or months. She determined to migrate thither as soon as possible and to write her story amid the very scenes which she had planned for it. How well do I remember the grey spring evening (it was the 6th of March) on which--after delays and confusions far beyond our small deserts--we drove up to the river front of the old house; the hurried rush through glorious dark rooms, and a half timid exploration of the garden, peopled with gaunt shapes of clipped and tortured yews. Levens was to us just such another adventure as Hampden House had been, eight years before, but this time there was no bareness, no dilapidation, nothing but the ripe product of many centuries of peaceful care. Yet Levens was famous for its crooked descent, its curse and its ”grey lady”--an accessory, this latter, of sadly modern origin, as we found on inquiring into her local history.

Mrs. Ward, however, wove her skilfully into her story, as she wove the fell-farm of the family of ”statesmen” to whom Miss Cropper introduced her, or the mournful peat-bogs of the estuary, or the daffodils crowding up through the undergrowth in Brigsteer Wood, or covering with sheets of gold the graves round Cartmel Fell Chapel.

Yet Bannisdale itself is ”a house of dream,” as Mrs. Ward herself described it[20]; neither wholly Levens nor wholly Sizergh, placed somewhere in the recesses of Levens Park, and looking south over the Kent. ”And just as Bannisdale, in my eyes, is no mortal house, and if I were to draw it, it would have outlines and features all its own, so the story of the race inhabiting it, and of Helbeck its master, detached itself wholly from that of any real person or persons, past or present.

Those who know Levens will recognize many a fragment here and there that has been worked into Bannisdale: and so with Sizergh. But Helbeck's house, as it stands in the book, is his and his alone. And in the same way the details and vicissitudes of the Helbeck ancestry, and the influences that went to build up Helbeck himself, were drawn from many fields, then pa.s.sed through the crucible of composition, and scarcely anything now remains of those original facts from which the book sprang.”

Many Catholic books, in which she browsed ”with what thoughts,” as Carlyle would say, followed her to Levens, giving her that grip of detail in matters of belief or ritual, without which she could not have approached her subject, but which she had now learnt to absorb and re-fas.h.i.+on far more skilfully than in the days of _Robert Elsmere_. She loved to discuss these matters with her father, from whom she had no secrets, in spite of their divergencies of view; when he came to visit us at Levens--still a tall and beautiful figure, in spite of his seventy-three years--they talked of them endlessly, and when he returned to Dublin she wrote him such letters as the following:

”One of the main impressions of this Catholic literature upon me is to make me perceive the enormous intellectual pre-eminence of Newman. Another impression--I know you will forgive me for saying quite frankly what I feel--has been to fill me with a perfect horror of asceticism, or rather of the austerities--or most of them--which are indispensable to the Catholic ideal of a saint. We must talk this over, for of course I realize that there is much to be said on the other side. But the simple and rigid living which I have seen, for various ideal purposes, in friends of my own--like T. H. Green--seems to me both religious and reasonable, while I cannot for the life of me see anything in the austerities, say of the Blessed Mary Alacoque, but hysteria and self-murder. The Divine Power occupies itself for age on age in the development of all the fine nerve-processes of the body, with their infinite potencies for good or evil. And instead of using them for good, the Catholic mystic destroys them, injures her digestion and her brain, and is then tortured by terrible diseases which she attributes to every cause but the true one--her own deliberate act--and for which her companions glorify her, instead of regarding them as what--surely--they truly are, G.o.d's punishment. No doubt directors are more careful nowadays than they were in the seventeenth century, but her life is still published by authority, and the ideal it contains is held up to young nuns.

”Don't imagine, dearest, that I find myself in antagonism to all this literature. The truth in many respects is quite the other way.

The deep personal piety of good Catholics, and the extent to which their religion enters into their lives, are extraordinarily attractive. How much we, who are outside, have to learn from them!”

To an ex-Catholic friend, Mr. Addis, who had undertaken to look over the ma.n.u.script for her, she wrote some time later, when the book was nearly finished:

”In my root-idea of him, Helbeck was to represent the old Catholic crossed with that more mystical and enthusiastic spirit, brought in by such converts as Ward and Faber, under Roman and Italian influence. I gather, both from books and experience, that the more fervent ideas and practices, which the old Catholics of the 'forties disliked, have, as a matter of fact, obtained a large ascendancy in the present practice of Catholics, just as Ritualism has forced the hands of the older High Churchmen. And I thought one might, in the matter of austerities, conceive a man directly influenced by the daily reading of the Lives of the Saints, and obtaining in middle life, after probation and under special circ.u.mstances, as it were, leave to follow his inclinations.

”I take note most gratefully of all your small corrections. What I am really anxious about now is the points--in addition to pure jealous misery--on which Laura's final breach with Helbeck would turn. I _think_ on the terror of confession--on what would seem to her the inevitable uncovering of the inner life and yielding of personality that the Catholic system involves--and on the foreignness of the whole idea of _sin_, with its relative, penance.

But I find it extremely hard to work out!”

As the weeks of our stay at Levens pa.s.sed by, while the sea-trout came up the Kent and challenged the barbarian members of the family to many a tussle in the Otter-pool, or the ”turn-hole,” or the bend of the river just above the bridge, Mrs. Ward plunged ever deeper into her subject, though the difficulties under which she laboured in the sheer writing of her chapters were almost more disabling than ever. ”For a week my arm has been almost useless, alas!” she wrote in May; ”I have had it in a sling and bandaged up. I partly strained it in rubbing A., but I must also have caught cold in it. Anyhow it has been very painful, and I have been in quite low spirits, looking at Chapter III, which would not move!

The chairs and tables here don't suit it at all--the weather is extremely cold--and altogether I believe I am pining for Stocks!” But before we left the wonderful old house many friends had come to stay with us there, renewing their own tired spirits in its beauty and charm, and in the society of its temporary mistress. Henry James and the Henry Butchers, Katharine Lyttelton and her Colonel, Bron Herbert and Victor Lytton, fishers of sea-trout,--and, on Easter Monday, ”Max Creighton” himself, now Bishop of London, much worn by the antics of Mr.

Kensit and his friends, but otherwise only asking to ”eat the long miles” in walks along Scout Scar, or over the ”seven bens and seven fens” that lay between us and the lovely little Chapel of St. Anthony on Cartmel Fell. Such talks as they had, he and Mrs. Ward, at all times when she was not deliberately burying herself in her study to escape the temptation! The rest of us would listen fascinated, watching for that gesture of his, when he would throw back his head so that the under side of his red beard appeared to view--a gesture of triumph over his opponent, as he fondly thought, until her next remark showed him there was still much to win. Henry James was more demure in his tastes, walking beside the pony-tub when Mrs. Ward went for her afternoon drive through Levens Park, or along the Brigsteer lane, and ”letting fall words of wisdom as we went” (for so it is recorded by the driver of the tub). Ah, if those words could but have been gathered up and saved from all-swallowing oblivion! Mr. James's friends.h.i.+p for Mrs. Ward had already endured for ten or twelve years before this visit to Levens, but these days in the old house gave it a deeper and more intimate tone, which it never lost thenceforward. He never wholly approved of her art as a novelist--how could he, when it differed so fundamentally from his own?--but his admiration for her as a woman, his affection for her as a friend, knew very few limits indeed. And her feeling for him was to grow and deepen through another twenty years of happy friends.h.i.+p, ripening towards that day when, in England's darkest time, he chose to make himself a son of England, and then, soon afterwards, followed the many lads whom he had loved ”where track there is none.”

[Ill.u.s.tration: MRS. WARD IN 1898

FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY MISS ETHEL ARNOLD]

Mrs. Ward finally quitted Levens before the end of her lease, owing to a prolonged attack of influenza, which spoilt her last weeks there, but she always looked back to her stay in the ”Border Castle,” as Mr. James had dubbed it, as an enchanting episode, taking her back to the fell-country and its people with an intimacy she had not known since those long-past childish days, when she would dance up the path to Sweden Bridge, the grown-ups loitering behind. For the remainder of this year (1897) she was pressing on with her book, in spite of ever-recurring waves of ill-health and of constant over-pressure with the affairs of the Settlement. By the autumn, when the new buildings were actually open, this pressure became so formidable that she was obliged to take a small house at Brighton for three months, in order to spend three days of each week there in complete seclusion. The book prospered fairly well, but the formal opening of the Settlement, which had been fixed for February 12, 1898, was very much on her mind--at least until she had succeeded in persuading Mr. Morley to make the princ.i.p.al speech. This, however, he consented to do with all the graciousness inspired by his old friends.h.i.+p for its founder; and when the ceremony was actually over Mrs. Ward retired to Stocks for a final struggle with the last chapters of _Helbeck_. ”Except, perhaps, in the case of ”Bessie Costrell,” she wrote in her _Recollections_, ”I was never more possessed by a subject, more shut in by it from the outer world.” And in these last few weeks of the long effort she walked as in a dream, though the dream was too often broken by cruel attacks of her old illness. She fought them down, however, and emerged victorious on March 25,--more dead than alive, in the rueful opinion of her family.

But the usual remedy of a flight to Italy was tried again with sovereign effect, and at Cadenabbia on Lake Como, in Florence and on Maggiore, she felt the flooding back of a sense of physical ease. The book did not appear until the month of June, when both Press and friends received it with so warm an enthusiasm as to ”produce in me that curious mood, which for the artist is much nearer dread than boasting--dread that the best is over, and that one will never earn such sympathy again.” One discordant note was, however, struck by a review in the _Nineteenth Century_ by a certain Father Clarke, violently attacking _Helbeck_ as a caricature of Catholicism, and picking various small holes in its technicalities of Catholic practice. The article was answered in the next number of the _Nineteenth Century_ by another Catholic, Mr. St.

George Mivart, and Mrs. Ward's fairness to Catholicism vindicated; indeed, many of the other reviews had accused her of making the ancient faith too attractive in the person of Helbeck. Mr. C. E. Maurice wrote to her to protest against Father Clarke's attack, remarking incidentally that ”if any religious body have cause of complaint against you for this book, it is the Protestant Nonconformists” and asking her in the course of his letter ”what point you generally start from in deciding to write a novel; whether from the wish to work out a special thesis, or from the desire to deal with certain characters who have interested you, or from being impressed by a special _story_, actual or possible?” Mrs. Ward replied to him as follows:

”I think a novel with me generally springs from the idea of a situation involving two or three characters. _Helbeck_ arose from a fragment of conversation heard in the North, and was purely human and not controversial in its origin. It is in these conflicts between old and new, as it has always seemed to me, that we moderns find our best example of compelling fate,--and the weakness of the personal life in the grip of great forces that regard it not, or seem to regard it not, is just as attractive as ever it was to the imagination--do you not think so? The forms are different, the subject is the same.”

To Mr. Mivart himself she wrote:

”I hear with great interest from Mr. Knowles that you are going to break a lance with Father Clarke on poor _Helbeck's_ behalf in the forthcoming _Nineteenth Century_. I need not say that I shall read very diligently what you have to say. Meanwhile I am venturing to send you these few Catholic reviews, as specimens of the very different feelings that seem to have been awakened in many quarters from those expressed by Father Clarke. It amuses me to put the pa.s.sages from Father Vaughan's sermon that concern Helbeck himself side by side with Father Clarke's onslaught upon him.

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