The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward Part 11

"The story that the orphan tells to Laura, which Father Clarke calls 'detestable, extravagant and objectionable,' that no instructed Catholic would dream of telling to his juniors, is told by Father Law, S.J., to his younger brothers and sisters, and is given in the very interesting _Life of Father Law_, by Ellis Schreiber. I have only shortened it.

"Father Clarke does not seem to have the dimmest notion of what is meant by writing in character. I had a hearty laugh over his really absurd remarks about Laura and St. Francis Borgia's children."

Some years later, when her feeling about the book's reception had settled down and crystallized, she wrote in more meditative mood to her son-in-law, George Trevelyan:

"Yes, it was a good subject, and I shall hardly come across one again so full both of intellectual and human interest.... I like your 'dear and dreadful!' In my case it is quite true. Catholicism has an enormous attraction for me,--yet I could no more be a Catholic than a Mahometan. Only, never let us forget how much of Catholicism is based, as Uncle Matt would have said, on 'Natural truth'--truth of human nature, and truth of moral experience. The visible, imperishable Society--the Kingdom of Heaven in our midst--no greater idea, it seems to me, was ever thrown into the world of men. Its counterpart is to be found in the Logos conception from which all Liberalism descends, and which is the perpetual corrective of the Catholic idea. But these things would take us far!"

Meanwhile, to Bishop Creighton, who had written to her far less critically than usual of her new book, she replied with a long letter, in which, after the first sheet, she reverted to the subjects which were always of the deepest interest to this pair of friends--the barriers set around the National Church, which Mrs. Ward complained kept out too many of the faithful, or at least too many of those who, like herself, would willingly proclaim their faith in a spiritual Christ.

STOCKS, TRING, _August 9, 1898_.

..."I have been desperately, perhaps disproportionately interested in a meeting of Liberal Churchmen as to which I cannot get full particulars--in which the great need of the day was said to be not ritual, but 'the re-statement and re-interpretation of dogma in the light of the knowledge and criticism of our day.' It makes me once more conscious of all sorts of claims and cravings that I have often wished to talk over with you--not as Bishop of London!--but as one with whom, in old days at any rate, I used to talk quite freely. If only the orthodox churchmen would allow us on our side a little more freedom, I, at any rate, should be well content to let the Ritualists do what they please! Every year I live I more and more resent the injustice which excludes those who hold certain historical and critical opinions from full membership in the National Church, above all from partic.i.p.ation in the Lord's Supper.

Why are we _all_ always to be bound by the formularies of a past age, which avowedly represent a certain state of past opinion, a certain balance of parties?--privately and personally I mean. The public and ceremonial use of formularies is another matter where clearly the will of the majority should decide. The minority may be well content to accept the public and ceremonial use, if it may accept it in its own way. But here the Church steps in with a test--several tests--the Catechism, the Creed, the Confirmation service. And the tendency of the last generation of churchpeople has been all towards tightening these tests, probably under two influences--a deepened Christian devotion, and the growing pressure of the alternative view of Christianity. But is it not time the alternative view were brought in and a.s.similated,--to the strengthening of Christian love and fellowship? What _ought_ to prevent anyone who accepts the Lord's own test of the 'two great commandments,' or the Pauline test of 'all who love the Lord Jesus Christ,' from breaking the bread and drinking the wine which signify the headship and sacrifice, and mystical fellowship of Christ? But such an one may hold it solemnly and sacredly impossible to recite matters of supposed history such as 'born of the Virgin Mary,' or 'on the third day He rose again--and ascended to the Father,' as personally true of himself. He may be quite wrong--that is not the point. Supposing that his historical conscience is clearly and steadily convinced on the one side, and on the other he only asks that he and his children may pa.s.s into the national Christian family, and join hands with all who believe in G.o.d, who 'love the Lord Jesus' and hope in immortality, what should keep him out? Would it not be an immense strengthening of the Church to include, on open and honourable terms, those who can now only share in her Eucharist on terms of concealment and evasion? Why should there not be an alternative baptismal and confirmation service, to be claimed under a conscience clause by those who desire it? At present no one can have his children confirmed who is not prepared to accept, or see them accept, certain historical statements, which he and they may perhaps not believe. And except as a matter of private bargain and sufferance--always liable to scandal--neither he nor they, unless these tests have been pa.s.sed, can join in the commemoration of their Master's death, which should be to them the food and stimulus of life. Nothing honestly remains to them but exclusion, and hunger--or the falling back upon a Unitarianism, which has too often unlearned Christ, and to which, at its best, they may not naturally belong."

Mrs. Ward might, perhaps, have added that what remains to the majority of those whom these tests keep out, is a gradual _loss of hunger_--a making up with other things, which cannot but be a fatal loss to the National Church. But she was thinking of her own case, and to her, I think, the "hunger" for admission to the Church (though always on her own terms!) remained for long years a living force, leading her in the end to write that best and most vivid among her later books, _The Case of Richard Meynell_. Meanwhile her relations with Unitarianism, mentioned in this letter, remained somewhat anomalous, for while agreeing with its tenets, she was always impatient of its old-fashioned isolation, and of its neglect to seize the opportunity presented to it by the march of modern thought, which seemed to her to summon it to take the lead in the movement towards a free Christian fellowship. She was never so hard on the Unitarian body as Stopford Brooke, who once exclaimed in a letter to her that "they cling to ancient uglinesses as if they were sweethearts!" But Mrs. Ward had had a brush with them in 1893, when she wrote to the _Manchester Guardian_ after the opening of Manchester College, Oxford, lamenting the bareness of the service, the extempore prayers, the relics of old Puritanism, instead of the appeal to colour and imagination and modern thought. Her letter provoked many answers, both public and private, and to one of these, a kind and generous argument from Dr. Estlin Carpenter, she replied with a fuller explanation of her feeling:

_November 2, 1893._

..."My own feeling, the child of course of early habit and tradition, is strongly on the side of ritual throughout, though I would infinitely rather have _new_ ritual, like Dr. Martineau's two services, than a modified edition of the Anglican prayers, such as we have at Mr. Brooke's. But I don't think I should have ventured to put forward the view I did so strongly as I did, with regard to any other place in the world than Oxford. I knew Oxford intimately for fifteen years, and still, of course, have many friends there. I am convinced that Manchester College has a real mission towards an Oxford which is not yet theirs, but which ought to become so. But I am also certain that Oxford cannot be reached through the forms that have been so far adopted. You may say, as Mr. ---- does in effect, in a letter to me: 'Oxford must take us with our Puritanism as we are, or leave us.' But surely to say this is to refuse a real mission, a real call. It is the very opposite of St. Paul's spirit, of making himself all things to all men, 'that I may by any means gain some.' It is putting adherence to a form, about which there is, after all, serious difference of opinion in your own body, between you and a great future. At least that is how it looks to me, and I think I have some means of judging. The religious message, the thoughts, the conceptions that you have to give Oxford, especially to the young men, not of your own body, who may be attracted to you through the Chapel, are, it seems to me, the all-important thing, and any fears of imitating the Church, or dislike of abandoning Puritan tradition, which may hold you back from the best means of bringing those thoughts and faiths into the current life of Oxford, will be a disaster to us all. It is because I have thought so much about this settlement of yours, in the place where I myself often starved for lack of religious fellowship, that I was drawn to write with the vehemence I did. But one had better never be vehement!"

In the following year the Unitarians forgave her and asked her to deliver the "Ess.e.x Hall Lecture," which she did with a brilliant and suggestive paper ent.i.tled "Unitarians and the Future." Her relations with many Unitarians all through the period of University Hall were, as we have seen, of the most intimate and friendly character, and now, after the publication of _Helbeck of Bannisdale_, she showed her goodwill to Unitarianism once more by journeying down to Norwich to give an address in aid of the famous old Octagon Chapel there. The address was typical of many others that she gave in these years of her increasing fame; carefully and even elaborately prepared beforehand--for she would never trust herself to speak extempore--it lived for long in the memory of her hearers as a model of its kind, while the outspoken opinions it expressed gave rise to a good deal of controversy in the religious Press. The demands on her time for speeches and addresses in aid of every possible good cause were by this time incessant. She refused nineteen out of twenty, but the twentieth was usually so persuasively put that she succ.u.mbed, and then she would live in an agony of apprehension and of acc.u.mulated overwork, until the effort was safely over. One of her most finished literary performances was the address she gave in Glasgow in February, 1897, on "the Peasant in Literature"; while her paper on the Transfiguration, ent.i.tled "Gospel Interpretation--a Fragment," given at the Leicester Unitarian Conference in 1900, remains to this day, with some of her audience, as a new and startling revelation of the critical methods which had, for her, thrown so vivid a light on the dark places of the Gospel story. All these carefully-prepared essays--for such, indeed, they were--added enormously to the burden of work which Mrs. Ward already carried, but she loved her audiences and loved to feel that she had pleased and interested, or even shocked them a little. "I want to poke them up," she would say sometimes, with that flash of mischief or "trotzigkeit" (the word is untranslatable), that endeared her so much to those who knew her well; and poke them up she surely did whenever the subject of her address was a religious one.

But the pace at which she lived during this year (1898), when the work of the Settlement was expanding in every direction, and the preparations for the Invalid Children's School were going on throughout the winter, led her to feel that in order to write her next book she must have a complete change of scene and, if possible, a far more complete seclusion than that of Stocks, with its accessibility to posts and telegrams. The great subject of Catholicism still held her fascinated, but she was tempted to explore it this second time rather from the artistic than the religious point of view. She had been reading much of Chateaubriand and Mme de Beaumont during the winter, and had felt her imagination kindled by the relationship between the two; why should she not migrate to Rome and there, in the ancient scene, weave anew the old tale of the conquest of "outworn, buried age" by the forces of youth? So while the preparations for the Cripples' School were hastening forward, in February, 1899, negotiations were also going on with the owners of the vast old Villa Barberini, at Castel Gandolfo, in the Alban Hills, for the taking of its first floor, and various friends in Rome were helping us with advice as to how to make it habitable. It was just such an adventure as Mrs. Ward loved with her whole heart, and when we finally arrived at the little station overlooking the Alban Lake, on March 23, packed ourselves and our luggage into three _vetture_ and drove up to the somewhat forbidding entrance of the Villa, we felt that here, indeed, was a new kingdom--a place to dream of, not to tell!

Never, indeed, will those who took part in it forget the sensations of that arrival--the floods of welcome poured upon us by the delightful little butler, Alessandro, and his stately sister Vittoria, who had been engaged to minister to our wants, our own faltering Italian, and the procession across the gloomy entrance-hall and up the uncarpeted stone staircase, to the rooms of our floor above. A dozen rooms cl.u.s.tering round two huge central _saloni_, all with tiled floors, exiguous strips of carpet, and wonderfully ugly wall-papers, formed our _appartamento_; but at each end, east and west, were glorious balconies, the one overlooking the Alban Lake and Monte Cavo, the other the vast sweep of the Campagna, stretching from our falling olive-gardens to the sea. Long we hung over those balconies, forgetting our unpacking, and when at last we left our book-boxes behind and wandered out into the mile-long garden, clothing the side of the hill on the Campagna side, it was only to suffer fresh thrills of wonder and delight. For there, beyond the ilex avenue, that led like a cool green tunnel to the further mysteries, ran a great wall of _opus reticulatum_, banking up the hill on that side and crowned by overhanging olives, which had formed part of the villa built on this ridge by the Emperor Domitian, just eighteen hundred years before. And there, to the right, on another substructure of Domitian's, ran the bal.u.s.traded terrace laid out by the rascally Barberini Pope, Urban VIII (or more probably by one of his still more rascally nephews), from which you beheld, rolling away to the sea, fold after fold of sad Campagna, and far away to the north, between two stone pines, the white dome of St. Peter's. Mrs. Ward thus described the scene, four days after our arrival, in a letter to her son:

"VILLA BARBERINI,"

_March 27, 1899_.

"To-day, you never saw anything so enchanting in the world, as this house and its outlook. At our feet, looking west, lies the rose and green Campagna, melting into the sea on the horizon line, and as it approaches the hills, climbing towards us through all imaginable beauty of spreading olive-groves, and soaring pinewoods--brown pinkish earth, just upturned by the white ploughing oxen,--here and there on the spurs of the hills, great ruined strongholds of the Savelli and Orsini, or fragments of Roman tombs: close below the house a green sloping olive garden, white with daisies under the grey mist of the olives--while if you lean out of window and crane your neck a little, far to the north beyond the descending stone pines, the aethereal sun-steeped plain takes here a consistence in something, which is Rome.

"We have just come in from wandering along the sunny hill-side towards Albano, past ruins of the Domitian Villa, overgrown with ilex and creepers, through long shady ilex-avenues, and then out into the warmth of the olive-yards, where the cyclamen are coming out and the gra.s.s is full of white and blue and pink anemones. Such a deep draught of beauty--of _bien-etre_ physical and mental--one has not had for years. But only to-day! Two days ago we woke up to find a world in snow, or rather all the hills white, the Alban Lake lying like steel in its snowy ring, and the _silvae laborantes_ under the weight. And oh! the cold of these vast bare rooms at night! We spent the day in Rome, where, of course, there was no snow and much shelter, but when we came home, we sat and shivered at dinner, and presently we all dragged the table up to the fire in hope of cheating the draughts a little. Then the north wind howled round us all night, and our spirits were low. But to-day the transformation scene is complete!... We have put in baths and stoves, and carpets and spring mattresses, bought some linen and electro-plate, hired some armchairs--and here we are, not luxurious certainly, but with a fair amount of English comfort about us--quite enough, I fear, to make the Italians stare, who think we must be mad, anyway, to come here in March, and still madder to spend any money on an apartment that we take for three months! The cook, a white-capped, white-jacketed gentleman whom I have only seen once, sends us up excellent meals--except that on one occasion he so far forgot himself as to offer us for dinner, first, pate de foie gras, and then "movietti," which, being explained, are small birds, probably siskins. Father and I were too hungry to desist, the poor little things being anyway fried and past praying for, but J. sat by, starving and lofty. And _we_ were punished by finding nothing to eat! So for many reasons, ideal and other, the cook will have to be told to keep his hands off _movietti_."

Here, then, we established ourselves, and here, either in the little _salotto_ that we furnished for her, or walking up and down that marvellous terrace, Mrs. Ward thought out her tale of _Eleanor_, infusing into it strains old and new--Papal, Italian, English, American--but, above all, steeping the whole scene in her own love for the Italy of to-day, as well as for the old, the immemorial Italy.

Those were the times--how far away they seem now, and how small the troubles!--when things were not going happily for the new-made Italian Kingdom, when the country still smarted under the misery and failure of the Abyssinian campaign, and when English visitors were wont to express themselves with insular frankness on the shortcomings of the New Italy, whose squalid activities so impudently disturbed, in their eyes, the shades of the Old. The glamour of the _Risorgimento_ had somehow departed, in the forty years that followed Cavour's death, so that the Englishman travelling for his pleasure in the former territories of the Pope, was ready enough to criticize the defects of the new Government, while forgetting that if they had remained under the Pope, he would have found therein no Government, in the modern sense, at all. Many elderly people still remained who could remember Rome before _Venti Settembre_, when the Cardinals drove in state down the Corso, and Pio Nono could be seen taking his part in the processions of _Corpus Domini_ or _San Giovanni_. Sentimentalists wept at the vandalisms of the Savoyards, who had built a new city, all in squares and rectangles, on the heights of the Esquiline, away from the sights and smells of Old Rome, had put up a huge "Palace of Finance" to record their yearly deficits, and were now cleaning up the Colosseum and the Forum, so that no aesthetic tourist would ever wish to set foot in them again.

Mrs. Ward heard plenty of this sort of talk from English friends, who came out to see us at the Villa, but she, by the simple process of falling in love, headlong, with Italy and the Italians, avoided these pitfalls and was enabled to see with a far truer eye than they the essential soundness of Italian life, whether in town or country--the new ever jostling the old, rudely sometimes, but with the rudeness of life and growth, and the old still influencing and encompa.s.sing all things.

"Nothing could be worse than the state of things here between Liberals and Clericals," she wrote to her son, "yet people seem to rub along and will, I believe, go on rubbing along in much the same way for many a long year. We read the _Tribuna_ and the _Civilta Cattolica_, which on opposite sides breathe fire and flame. But life goes on and insensibly certain links grow up, even between the two extremes. For instance, there is a certain priest in Rome, rector of San Lorenzo in Lucina, who has started charitable work rather on the English pattern--no indiscriminate alms, careful inquiry, provision of work, exercise, recreation, country holidays, etc., in fine 'Settlement' style. And his workers include people of all beliefs or none--Jews even. But as he is perfectly correct in doctrine and observance, and does not meddle with any disputed points, he is let alone, and the experiment produces a quiet but very real effect. Yesterday our _parroco_, Padre Ruelli, came to see us here, an enchanting little man, with something of the old maid and the child and the poet all combined. He recited to us Leopardi, and explained some poems in Roman dialect, with an ease, a vivacity, a perfect simplicity, that charmed us all. Then he remembered his function, and before he left gave us a discourse on charity, containing a quotation from the Gospels, largely invented by himself, and so departed."

As the weeks went on in our bare, wind-swept _palazzo_, it became impossible to resist a community in which everyone, from Alessandro to this dear _padre parroco_, combined to show us that we were not only tolerated, but _welcomed_. Our Italian was sadly to seek during those first weeks, consisting largely in agonized consultations with Nutt's Pocket Dictionary, and in practising its phrases over with Alessandro; but his courtesy and patience never failed, so that before long our sentences began to put forth wings and soar. But never, alas, to any great heights, and even when Mrs. Ward was able to carry on animated conversations with our drivers about the traditions of the Alban Hills, she would find herself sitting tongue-tied and exasperated, or descending into French, at luncheon-parties in Rome!

Yet those luncheon-parties, and the visits which we persuaded the new friends, whom we made there, to pay us on our heights, laid the foundations of certain friendships which influenced Mrs. Ward's whole att.i.tude towards the new Italy, and gave her the conviction, which she never lost in the years that followed, that there exists between the best English and the best Italian minds a certain natural affinity, which transcends the differences of habits and of speech more surely than is the case between ourselves and any other of our Continental neighbours. She put this feeling into the mouth of her ideal Amba.s.sador in _Eleanor_--that slight but charming sketch which was, I believe, based upon the figure of Lord Dufferin--when he speaks to the American Lucy of the Marchesa Fazzoleni, symbol and type of Italian womanhood.

"Look well at her," he says to Lucy, "she is one of the mothers of the new Italy. She has all the practical sense of the north, and all the subtlety of the south. She is one of the people who make me feel that Italy and England have somehow mysterious affinities that will work themselves out in history. It seems to me that I could understand all her thoughts--and she mine, if it were worth her while. She is a modern of the moderns; and yet there is in her some of the oldest stuff in the world. She belongs, it is true, to a nation in the making--but that nation, in its earlier forms, has already carried the whole weight of European history!"

Figures such as these began, when the storms of an inhospitable April had pa.s.sed away, to haunt the cool ilex avenue and the terrace beyond, filling Mrs. Ward's eager mind with new impressions, new perceptions of the infinite variety and delightsomeness of the human race; and the old walls of Domitian's villa re-echoed to many an animated talk of Pope and Kingdom, Church and State, as well as to Lanciani's full-voiced exclamations on the buried treasures--nay, even Alba Longa itself!--that must lie at our feet there, only a few yards below the surface! Then, once or twice, we took these guests of ours further afield, to the Lake of Nemi, in its circular crater-cup--"Lo Specchio di Diana"--with the ruined walls of the Temple of Diana rising amid their beds of strawberries at its further end. This was indeed a place of enchantment, and readers of _Eleanor_ will remember how the _motif_ of the "Priest who slew the slayer" is woven into the fabric of the story, while the turning-point in the drama of the three--Eleanor, Lucy and Manisty--is reached during an expedition to the Temple. Here it was that Count Ugo Balzani, best of friends and mentors, bought from the strawberry-pickers for a few francs a whole basketful of little terra-cotta heads--votive offerings of the Tiberian age--and gave them to Mrs. Ward; and here that Henry James, during the few precious days that he spent with us at the Villa, found the peasant youth with the glorious name, Aristodemo, and set him talking of Lord Savile's diggings, and of the marble head that he himself had found--yes, he!--with nose and all complete, in his own garden, while the sun sank lower towards the crater-rim, and the rest of us sat spell-bound, listening to the dialogue.

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 astonishingly 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 friendship 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 Yorkshire 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, Kinship 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 publishing 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 citizenship; no one is astonished by the place they hold; they are here among the recognized masters of those who know.