Part 18 (1/2)

Others, again, p.r.o.nounced 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 surpa.s.sed.

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 Andre Chevrillon_

”On est heureux d'y retrouver ce qui nous a paru si longtemps une des princ.i.p.ales caracteristiques de la litterature anglaise: ce sentiment de la beaute morale, cette emotion devant la qualite de la conduite qui prennent par leur intensite meme une valeur esthetique. C'est la tradition de vos ecrivains les plus anglais, celle des Browning, des Tennyson, des George Eliot. Elle fait la portee et l'originalite des uvres de cette epoque victorienne, contre laquelle on a l'air, malheureus.e.m.e.nt, d'etre en reaction en Angleterre aujourd'hui--reaction que je ne crois pas durable--qui cessera des que le recule sera suffisant pour que la force et la grandeur de cette litterature apparaisse.

”Le probleme religieux que vous posez la est vital, et la solution que vous y prevoyez dans votre pays, cette possibilite d'un christianisme evolue, adapte, 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 esperer du protestantisme, lequel est relativement peu cristalise et peut encore evoluer. Meme dans l'anglicanisme la part de l'interpretation personnelle a toujours ete a.s.sez grande. J'ai peur que l'avenir de la religion soit plus douteux dans ceux des pays catholiques ou la culture est avancee. Nous sommes la comme des vivants lies a des cadavres, ou comme des grandes personnes que l'on astreindrait au regime de la _nursery_. Les memes formules, les memes articles de foi, le meme catechisme, les memes interpretations, doivent servir a la fois a des peuple de mentalite encore primitive et semi-paenne et a des societes aussi intellectuelles et civilisees que la notre. Nous n'avons le choix qu'entre le culte des reliques, la foi aux eaux miraculeuses, et l'agnosticisme pur, ou du moins, une religiosite amorphe, sans systeme 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, accomplis.h.i.+ng 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 friends.h.i.+p worthy of two n.o.ble 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 Ca.n.a.l 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 e 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.”

[Ill.u.s.tration: MRS. WARD BESIDE THE LAKE OF LUCERNE. 1912

FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY MISS DOROTHY WARD]

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 rea.s.sure 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 p.r.o.nounce 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 Fifes.h.i.+re, 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 cla.s.s, 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.”

CHAPTER XIV

THE WAR, 1914-1917--MRS. WARD'S FIRST TWO JOURNEYS TO FRANCE

Mrs. Ward's feeling about the Germans, before the thunderbolt of 1914, had been one of sincere respect and admiration for a nation of patient brain-workers who, she believed, were honest with the truth, and had delved farther into certain obscure fields of history in which she herself was deeply interested than any of their contemporaries. But her acquaintance with Germany was a book-acquaintance only. She had indeed paid one or two visits to the Rhine and to South Germany during her married life, and had been astonished to mark, in 1900, the growth of wealth and prosperity in the Rhine towns, due, she was told, to scientific protection and to the skilful use of the French indemnity.