Part 11 (2/2)
Naturally, however, with Rome only fifteen miles away, we did not always remain upon our hill-top, and the days that Mrs. Ward spent in the city, making new friends and seeing old sights, were probably among the richest in her whole experience. The great ceremony in St. Peter's, when Leo XIII celebrated the twenty-first anniversary of his accession, is too well described in _Eleanor_ to need any mention here, but there were days of mere wandering about the streets, shopping, exploring old churches and talking to the sacristans, when she breathed the very spirit of Rome and let its beauty sink into her soul. And there was one day when a kind and condescending Cardinal--_not_ an Italian--offered to take her over the crypt of St. Peter's--a privilege not then easy to obtain for ladies--and to show her the treasures it contained. Little, however, did the poor Cardinal guess what a task he had undertaken. ”The very kind Cardinal knew nothing whatever about the crypt, which was a little sad,” wrote D. W. that evening, and Mrs. Ward herself thus described it to her husband: ”It was very funny! The Cardinal was very kind, and astonis.h.i.+ngly ignorant. Any English Bishop going over St.
Peter's would, I think, have known more about it, would have been certainly more intelligent and probably more learned. You would have laughed if you could have seen your demure spouse listening to the Cardinal's explanations. But I said not a word--and came home and read Harnack!” A lamentable result, surely, of His Eminence's courteous efforts to grapple with the tombs of the Popes.
Through April, May, and half through June we stayed at the Villa, till the sun grew burning hot, and we were fain to adopt the customs of the country, keeping windows and shutters closed against the fierce mid-day.
During the hot weather Mrs. Ward made an excursion, for purposes of _Eleanor_, to the wonderful forest-country in the valley of the Paglia, north of Orvieto, where the Marchese di Torre Alfina, a nephew of Mr.
Stillman, had placed his agent's house at her disposal, and charged his people to look after her. There, with her husband and daughter, she spent two or three days exploring the forest roads and the volcanic torrent-bed, down which the Paglia rushes, learning all she could of the life and traditions of the village and of the Maremma country beyond.
It was a district wholly unknown to her and full of attraction and romance, which she has infused into the last chapters of _Eleanor_; it gave her, too, a feeling of the inexhaustible wealth of the Italian soil and race which reinforced her growing love for this land of her adoption. As the chapters of _Eleanor_ swelled during the remainder of this year, so its theme took form and presence in the writer's mind--the eternal theme of the supplanting of the old by the young, whether in the history of States or of persons. Steadily Mrs. Ward's faith in the destiny of that vast Italy into whose life she had looked, if only for a moment, grew and strengthened, till she put it into words in the mouth of her Marchesa Fazzoleni, speaking to a group gathered in the Villa Borghese garden: ”I tell you, Mademoiselle,” she says to Lucy, ”that what Italy has done in forty years is colossal--not to be believed!
Forty years--not quite--since Cavour died. And all that time Italy has been like that cauldron--you remember?--into which they threw the members of that old man who was to become young. There has been a bubbling, and a fermenting! And the sc.u.m has come up--and up. And it comes up still, and the brewing goes on. But in the end the young, strong nation will step forth!” And Manisty himself, the upholder of the Old against the New, the contemner of Governments and officials, admits at last that Italy has defeated him, because, as he confesses to Lucy, ”your Italy is a witch.” ”As I have been going up and down this country,” so runs his recantation, ”prating about their poverty, and their taxes, their corruption, the incompetence of their leaders, the folly of their quarrel with the Church; I have been finding myself caught in the grip of things older and deeper--incredibly, primaevally old!--that still dominate everything, shape everything here. There are forces in Italy, forces of land and soil and race, only now fully let loose, that will re-make Church no less than State, as the generations go by. Sometimes I have felt as though this country were the youngest in Europe; with a future as fresh and teeming as the future of America. And yet one thinks of it at other times as one vast graveyard; so thick it is with the ashes and the bones of men.”
Thus Mrs. Ward wove into her book, as was her wont, all the rich experience of her own mind, as she had gathered and brooded over it during these months in Italy, and then, when all was finished, gave to it the prophetic dedication which has made her name beloved by many an Italian reader:
”To Italy the beloved and beautiful, Instructress of our past, Delight of our present, Comrade of our future-- The heart of an Englishwoman Offers this book.”
CHAPTER IX
MRS. WARD AS CRITIC AND PLAYWRIGHT--FRENCH AND ITALIAN FRIENDS--THE SETTLEMENT VACATION SCHOOL
1899-1904
In spite of the close and continuous toil that she put into the writing of _Eleanor_ during the year 1899, Mrs. Ward found time, in the course of that year, for an effort of literary criticism to which she devoted the best powers of her mind, but which has never, perhaps, received the recognition it deserves. I refer to the Prefaces that she wrote to Messrs. Smith & Elder's ”Haworth Edition” of the Bronte novels.
Mrs. Ward had always had a peculiarly vivid feeling for the genius and tragedy of the Bronte sisters, so that when Mr. George Smith asked her in 1898 to undertake these Prefaces she felt it impossible to resist a task not only attractive in itself, but presented to her in persuasive phrase by ”Dr. John.” For it is by this time a commonplace of Bronte lore that Lucy Snowe's first friend in the wilderness of Villette is no other than the young publisher who had first recognized Charlotte's greatness, though the situation between Lucy and Dr. John bears no resemblance to the actual friends.h.i.+p that arose between Mr. George Smith and his client. Still, the letters which Mr. Smith placed at Mrs. Ward's disposal for this task were sufficiently interesting to arouse her curiosity (one of them even described how Charlotte and he had gone together to the celebrated phrenologist, Dr. Brown, to have their heads examined!), and, taking her courage in both hands, she boldly asked him whether he had ever been in love with Charlotte Bronte? His reply is delightful as ever:
_August 18, 1898._
MY DEAR MRS. HUMPHRY WARD,--
...I was amused at your questions. No, I never was in the least bit in love with Charlotte Bronte. I am afraid that the confession will not raise me in your opinion, but the truth is, I never could have loved any woman who had not some charm or grace of person, and Charlotte Bronte had none. I liked her and was interested by her, and I admired her--especially when she was in Yorks.h.i.+re and I was in London. I never was c.o.xcomb enough to suppose that she was in love with me. But I believe that my mother was at one time rather alarmed.
So with much toil and in the intervals of her other work, Mrs. Ward accomplished the four admirable Prefaces to Charlotte's novels, enjoying this return to her old critical work of the eighties and becoming more and more deeply possessed by the strange power of the Haworth sisters.
Then in the winter she took up _Wuthering Heights_ and _Wildfell Hall_, writing her introduction to the former under a stress of feeling so profound as to produce in her, for the first and last time since childhood, the desire to express herself in verse. Early one January morning she reached out for pencil and paper and wrote down this sonnet, sending it afterwards to George Smith to deal with as he would. He printed it in the _Cornhill Magazine_ of February, 1900.
CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTe.
Pale sisters! reared amid the purple sea Of windy moorland, where, remote, ye plied All household arts, meek, pa.s.sion-taught, and free, Kins.h.i.+p your joy, and Fantasy your guide!-- Ah! who again 'mid English heaths shall see Such strength in frailest weakness, or so fierce Behest on tender women laid, to pierce The world's dull ear with burning poetry?-- Whence was your spell?--and at what magic spring, Under what guardian Muse, drank ye so deep That still ye call, and we are listening; That still ye plain to us, and we must weep?-- Ask of the winds that haunt the moors, what breath Blows in their storms, outlasting life and death!
Her introductions duly appeared in the bulky volumes of the Haworth Edition, and there, unfortunately, they lie buried. The edition was doomed by its unwieldy _format_, and since the copyright had already disappeared, these ”library volumes” were soon displaced by the lighter and handier productions of less stately publis.h.i.+ng firms. But the Prefaces had made their mark. The literary world was delighted to welcome Mrs. Ward again among the critics, with whom she had earned her earliest successes, and pa.s.sages such as the following, which gives her view of the ultimate position of women novelists and women poets, were much quoted and discussed:
”What may be said to be the main secret, the central cause, not only of Charlotte's success, but, generally, of the success of women in fiction, during the present century? In other fields of art they are still either relatively amateurs, or their performance, however good, awakens a kindly surprise. Their position is hardly a.s.sured; they are still on sufferance. Whereas in fiction the great names of the past, within their own sphere, are the equals of all the world, accepted, discussed, a.n.a.lysed, by the masculine critic, with precisely the same keenness and under the same canons as he applies to Thackeray or Stevenson, to Balzac or Loti.
”The reason, perhaps, lies first in the fact that, whereas in all other arts they are comparatively novices and strangers, having still to find out the best way in which to appropriate traditions and methods not created by women, in the art of speech, elegant, fitting, familiar speech, women are and have long been at home.
They have practised it for generations, they have contributed largely to its development. The arts of society and of letter-writing pa.s.s naturally into the art of the novel. Madame de Sevigne and Madame du Deffand are the precursors of George Sand; they lay her foundations, and make her work possible. In the case of poetry, one might imagine, a similar process is going on, but it is not so far advanced. In proportion, however, as women's life and culture widen, as the points of contact between them and the manifold world multiply and develop, will Parna.s.sus open before them. At present those delicate and n.o.ble women who have entered there look still a little strange to us. Mrs. Browning, George Eliot, Emily Bronte, Marcelline Desbordes-Valmore--it is as though they had wrested something that did not belong to them, by a kind of splendid violence. As a rule, so far, women have been poets in and through the novel--Cowper-like poets of the common life like Miss Austen, or Mrs. Gaskell, or Mrs. Oliphant; Lucretian or Virgilian observers of the many-coloured web like George Eliot, or, in some phases, George Sand; romantic or lyrical artists like George Sand again, or like Charlotte and Emily Bronte. Here no one questions their citizens.h.i.+p; no one is astonished by the place they hold; they are here among the recognized masters of those who know.
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