Part 17 (2/2)
”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.”
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