The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward Part 8

"You know how we have always hankered after an old place with old trees," she wrote to her brother Willie, "and when the Thursfields made us come down and see the place and declared we must and should take it we couldn't in the end resist! It has such an old walled garden, such a beautiful lime avenue, such delicious old hollies and oaks, such woods behind it and about it! The house is bigger in the way of bedrooms than Haslemere, but otherwise not more formidable, and though the inside has no particular features (the outside is charming) we shall manage I think to make it habitable and pretty. One great attraction to me is that it is so near Euston and therefore to the Hall and all its works. I don't mean to say that we are taking it on any but the most ordinary selfish principles!--but still, I like to think that I can make Marchmont Hall, and the people who congregate about it, free of it as I cannot do of Haslemere, and that there is a hungry demand in that part of London for the fruit and flowers with which the place must overflow in the summer. I believe also that the change will help me a good deal in my work, and that at Stocks I shall be able to see something of the genuine English country life which I never could at Haslemere. But we had got to love Haslemere all the same, and it is an up-rooting."

The little house on Grayswood Hill was indeed loath to let her go. She went there alone at the end of February, when plain and hill lay steeped in a flood of spring sunshine. "If only the place had not looked so lovely yesterday and to-day!" she wrote. "We have been hung in infinite air over the most ethereal of plains." But when Stocks finally received her, at midsummer, 1892, she knew in her heart that all was well; that "something" deep down in her nature "that stands more rubs than anything else in our equipment" was satisfied--satisfied with the quiet lines of the chalk hills, with the beechwoods that clothed their sides, and stretched away, she knew, for miles beyond the horizon; with the neighbourhood of that ancient life of the soil that surrounded her in village and scattered farm. She had found her home; she was to live in it and love it for eight-and-twenty years.

CHAPTER VI

THE STRUGGLE WITH ILL-HEALTH--_MARCELLA_ AND _SIR GEORGE TRESSADY_--THE BUILDING OF THE Pa.s.sMORE EDWARDS SETTLEMENT

1892-1897

The acquisition of Stocks in the summer of 1892 was a landmark in Mrs.

Ward's life for more reasons than one, for it coincided with the advent of a mysterious ailment, or disability, from which she was never to be wholly free for the rest of her life. She had hardly been in the new house a fortnight before she succ.u.mbed to a violent attack of internal pain, showing symptoms of gastric catarrh, but also affecting the nerves of the right leg. It crippled her for many weeks and exercised the minds of both the local and the London doctors. Some believed that the cause of it must be a "floating kidney," others that the pain was merely neuralgic, while Mrs. Ward herself, with that keen interest in the human organism and that instinct for self-doctoring which made her so embarra.s.sing a patient, watched the effect of each remedy and suggested others with pathetic ingenuity. She had her better days, when she was able to go down to the old walled kitchen-garden--about 300 yards from the house--in a bath-chair, but whenever she tried to walk, even a little, the pain returned in aggravated form. Only those who watched her through those two summer months knew what heroic efforts she made to master it and to throw herself into the writing of her new book, _Marcella_, or how her "spirit grew" as the days of comparative relief were followed ever and again by days of collapse. While she was still in the thick of the struggle she received a visit from her American friend, Miss Sarah Orne Jewett, whose impressions of the day were written immediately to Mrs. Whitman, in Boston, and give a vivid picture of Mrs. Ward as she appeared at that time to so shrewd and sympathetic an observer.[17] (Aug. 20, 1892).

"Yesterday we spent the day with Mrs. Humphry Ward, who has been ill for a while and is just getting better. Somehow, she seemed so much younger and more girlish than I expected. I long to have you know Mrs. Ward. She is very clear and shining in her young mind, brilliant and full of charm, and with a lovely simplicity and sincerity of manner. I think of her with warmest affection, and a sacred expectation of what she is sure to do if she keeps strong, and sorrow does not break her eager young heart too soon. Her life burns with a very fierce flame, and she has not in the least done all that she can do, but just now it seems to me that her vigour is a good deal spent."

The "spent vigour" was only another word for bodily illness, but some weeks after Miss Jewett's visit the first signs of relief appeared. Her London doctor introduced her to a new drug, phenacetin, which worked wonders with the sore side and leg. Phenacetin and all its kindred "tabloids" came into common use at Stocks from that time onwards, in spite of the mockery of her friends. Mrs. Ward developed an extraordinary skill in the use of these "little drugs," and would often baffle her doctors by her theories of their effects. At any rate, they bore a remarkable part in the complicated struggle between her work and her health, which was to occupy the next few years, and Mrs. Ward always staunchly believed in them.

The improvement continued steadily, so that she was able, that autumn, to undertake a speaking-tour in Lancashire and Yorkshire on behalf of University Hall, finding wherever she went the most astonishing welcome.

At Manchester she went, after her own meetings were over, to a great Unitarian gathering in the Free Trade Hall, stipulating that she was not to speak; but at the end she was entrapped, nevertheless. Her husband received the following account of it.

"Then at the very end, to my sorrow, the chairman announced that Mrs. Humphry Ward was present, and had been asked to speak, but was not well enough to do so! Whereupon there were such groans from the audience, and I felt it so absurd to be sitting there pleading illness that I could only move up to the desk, wondering whether I could possibly make myself heard in such a place. Then they all rose, and such applause as you never heard! It was a good thing that a certain number of people had left to catch early trains, or it would have been still more overwhelming to me. I just managed to say half a dozen words, and I think I said them with sufficient ease, but whether they carried to the back of the hall I don't know. It certainly must be very exciting to be able to speak easily to such a responsive mult.i.tude."

At Leeds the same kind of experience awaited her, though on a smaller scale. "I should not have been mortal if I had not been deeply touched by their feeling towards me and towards the books," she wrote. "And what a strong independent world of its own all this north-country Nonconformity is! I feel as though these experiences were invaluable to me as a novelist. One never dreamt of all this at Oxford."

The improvement in health, which had enabled her to face the strain of this tour, was not of long duration. Many letters in the winter complain of the "dragging pain" in the right leg, which prevents her from walking more than fifty yards without being "brought up sharp till the pain and stiffness have gone off again--which they do with resting." By the following June (1893) she was as ill as ever she had been in the preceding summer. The London doctor adopted the theory of the "shifting kidney," but encouraged her to allow herself to be carried up and downstairs at Stocks, so as to lie in the summer garden. "I am afraid this tendency may mean times of pain for me in the future," she writes, "but it is not dangerous, and need not prevent my working just as usual.

I _am_ so enjoying the sight of the flowers again, and this afternoon I shall somehow get to the lime on the lawn. It had given me quite a pang at my heart to think the lime-blossom would go and I not see it! One has fewer years to waste now."

She was hard at work on the writing of _Marcella_ throughout this year, but the fact that she could not sit up at a table without bringing on a "wild fit of pain," as she described it once, meant that she had to cultivate the art of writing in bed or in her garden chair, a proceeding which was very apt to produce attacks of writer's cramp. Elaborate erections of writing-boards had to be built up around her, so as to enable as many as possible of Dr. Wolff's precepts to be carried out, but it was a weary business, and often the hand would drop lame for a while, in spite of the author's longing to be "at" her characters. This joy of creation was, however, her princ.i.p.al stay during these months of pain and weakness.

_To Mr. George Murray Smith_.

_September 8, 1893._

"I, alas! cannot get well, though I am no doubt somewhat better than when you were here. The horrid ailment, whatever it is, will not go away, and work is rather a struggle. Still it is also my great stand-by and consolation,--by the help of it I manage to avoid the depression which otherwise this long _malaise_ and weakness must have brought with it. A walk to the kitchen-garden and back yesterday gave me a bad night and fresh pain to-day, and I cannot travel with any comfort. But I can get along, and soon we shall be in London and I must try some fresh doctoring. Meanwhile I have written nearly a volume since we came down, which is not so bad."

All through the autumn of this year she grew more and more absorbed in her story, while her health improved slightly, though walking was still an unattainable joy. The life of the little village of Aldbury, half a mile from the house, which she wove into so many scenes of _Marcella_, had an immense fascination for her. She would drive down in her pony-carriage, whenever she could find time, to spend an hour with old Mrs. Swabey or Mrs. Bradsell, or with Johnny Dolt, the postmaster, gleaning from their old-world gossip the elemental life-story of the country-side, or hearing the echoes of the b.l.o.o.d.y tragedy which had convulsed the village just before we came to it, in December, 1891. For while the old lady of Stocks (Mrs. Bright) lay dying, a murderous affray had occurred in the wood, not a mile from the house, between the gamekeeper and his lad on the one side, and a band of poachers on the other. The keeper was shot dead, and the lad, who fled for his life into the open, down towards a spreading beech in the hollow below, was followed and beaten to death with the b.u.t.t-end of a gun. No wonder that Mrs. Ward took the tale and made it the dominating theme of her story, weaving into it new threads that the sordid tragedy itself did not possess--of the poacher Hurd, the dying child, the piteous little wife.

The village itself was somewhat agape, we used to think, over the proceedings of the new mistress of Stocks, who would have "grand folks"

down from London to spend their Sundays with her, but who had also taken a cottage on purpose for the reception of tired people from the back streets, and who was constantly having parties down from "some place in London" to enjoy the garden and the shady trees. The place in question was Marchmont Hall, for whose cricket team we children preserved a private but invincible contempt; but the elderly a.s.sociates became real friends, and soon learnt to know Stocks and its environs with more than a pa.s.sing knowledge. Sometimes they would come down just for a day's outing, but more often they, or the club-girls, or some ailing mother and baby would stay for a fortnight at the Convalescent Cottage under the care of the loquacious Mrs. Dell, whose memory must still be green in many London hearts. A natural philosopher, reared on the Bible and her own shrewd observation of life, Mrs. Dell was the ideal matron for the London folk who were sent down to her; she took them all in under her large embrace, though her opinion of their "draggled" faces when they arrived was anything but complimentary. She was wont to express herself, in fact, with considerable freedom about London life. Once one of her guests--a working-man--had gone back to town for the week-end, feeling bored in the country. "And pray what can 'e do in London?" she asked with magnificent scorn. "Nothin' but t.i.tter-totter on the paves!"

And besides the Convalescent Cottage, there stood on the same steep slope of hill, just under the hanging wood, with its mixture of beech, ash and wild cherry, another little house, known simply as Stocks Cottage, which Mr. Ward acquired to round off the miniature estate early in 1895. It became a source of unmixed joy to Mrs. Ward, for she could lend or let it to many different friends, from Graham Wallas and Bernard Shaw, who came to it during one of her absences abroad, and thence roamed the downs with the daughter she had left behind, preaching collectivism and Jaeger clothes--to the Neville Lytteltons, who spent seven consecutive summers in the little place, from 1895 to 1901. The Cottage, indeed, became a very intimate part of Mrs. Ward's life at Stocks, and its mistress, Mrs. Lyttelton, one of her closest friends.

_Marcella_ was finished, after a long struggle against sleeplessness, headache and a bad bout of writer's cramp, on January 31, 1894. A characteristic pa.s.sage occurred between the author and her publisher immediately afterwards. Mr. Smith had sent her, according to promise, a considerable sum in advance of royalty, setting forth at the same time, with his habitual candour, the exact sum which his firm expected to make from the same number of copies. Mrs. Ward thought it not enough, and wrote at once to propose a decrease of royalty on the first 2,000 copies. "I hardly know what to say," replied Mr. Smith. "It is not often that a publisher receives such a letter from an author." But after mutual bargainings--all of an inverted character--they arrived at a satisfactory agreement.

Mrs. Ward fled to Italy with husband and daughter to escape the appearance of the book, and saw herself flaunted on the posters of the English papers in the Piazza di Spagna early in April. It was indeed an exhilarating time for her, for there were few harsh voices among the reviewers on this occasion, while the many letters from her friends were as kind as ever. A typical opinion was that of Sir Francis Jeune: "I was charmed with sentence after sentence of perfect finish and point, such as no other writer of fiction in the present day ever attempts and certainly could not sustain. They are a delight in themselves, and the care bestowed on them is the highest compliment to a reader. May I add that I think the dramatic force of some scenes--I single out the morning of Hurd's execution, and the death of Hallin, but there are several more--is greatly in advance of anything even you have done, and touches a very high point in comparison with any scenes in English fiction. I think George Eliot never surpa.s.sed them." In her _Recollections_ Mrs.

Ward describes the coming out of _Marcella_ as "perhaps the happiest date in my literary life," for it not only gave her unalloyed joy in itself, but it coincided also with a comparative return to health--though always with ups and downs. Yet the immense publicity which the success of the book brought her was also a grievous burden, and she gives vent to this feeling in a letter to Mr. Gladstone, written in reply to his own words of thanks for the gift of the book:

25, GROSVENOR PLACE.

_May 6, 1894._

MY DEAR MR. GLADSTONE,--

It was charming of you to write to me,--one of those kindnesses which, apart from all your greatness, win to you the hearts of so many. I am so glad that the eyes are better for a time, and that you have shaken off your influenza.

We have just come back from a delightful seven weeks in Italy, at Rome, Siena and Florence, and I am much rested, though still, I am vexed to say, very lame and something of an invalid. The success of _Marcella_, however, has been a most pleasant tonic, though I always find the first few weeks after the appearance of a book an agitating and trying time, however smoothly things go! The great publicity which our modern conditions involve seems to wear one's nerves; and I suppose it is inevitable that women should feel such things more than men, who so often, through the training of school and college and public life, get used to them from their childhood.

Your phrase about "prospective work" gave me real delight. I have been enjoying and pondering over the translations of Horace in the _Nineteenth Century_. Horace is the one Latin poet whom I know fairly well, and often read, though this year, in Italy, I think I realized the spell of Virgil more than ever before. Will you go on, I wonder, from the love-poems to a gathering from the others? I wanted to claim of you three or four in particular, but as I turn over the pages I see in two or three minutes at least twenty that jostle each other to be named, so it is no good!

Believe me, Yours most sincerely, MARY A. WARD.

_Marcella_, like her two predecessors, first appeared in three-volume form, but Mrs. Ward's quarrel with the big libraries for starving their subscribers, which had been simmering ever since _David Grieve_, became far more acute over the new book. She reported to George Smith on May 24 that "Sir Henry Cunningham told us last night that he had made a tremendous protest to Mudie's against their behaviour in the matter of _Marcella_--which he seems to have told them he regarded as a fraud on the public, or rather on their subscribers, whom they were _bound_ to supply with new books!" This feud, together with the desire of the American _Century Magazine_ to publish her next novel in serial form, provided it were only half the length of _Marcella_, induced her to consider seriously the question of writing shorter books. "It would be difficult for me, with my tendency to interminableness," she admitted to George Smith, "to promise to keep within such limits. However, it might be good for me!" Soon afterwards the decision was made, and with it the knell of the three-volume novel sounded, for other novelists soon followed Mrs. Ward's example. The resulting brevity of modern novels (always excepting Mr. William de Morgan and Mr. Conrad) is thus largely due to the flaming up of an old quarrel between librarians on the one side and publishers and authors on the other, as it occurred in the case of Mrs. Ward's _Marcella_.

The summer of 1894 was a period of comparative physical ease, during which Mrs. Ward found that although she was still unable to walk more than a very little, she could ride an old pony we possessed with much profit and pleasure, of course at a foot pace. Thus she was enabled to explore some of the woods and hill-sides around Stocks which she had never yet visited, a pastime which gave her exquisite delight. But by the following winter both her persistent plagues had reappeared in aggravated form. "My hand is extremely troublesome, alas!" she wrote to her father, "and the internal worry has been worse again lately. It is so trying week after week never to feel well, or like other people! One lives one's life, but it makes it all more of a struggle. And as there is this organic cause for it, one can only look forward to being sometimes better and less conscious of it than at others, but never to being quite well. However, one needn't grumble, for I manage to enjoy my life greatly in spite of it, and to fill the days pretty full." And to her husband, who was away on a lecturing-tour in America, she wrote in February, 1895: "Alas! for my hand. It is more seriously disabled than it has been for months and months, and I really ought to give it a month's complete rest. If it were not for the _Century_ I would!"

This unusual disablement was due no doubt to the extraordinary concentration of effort which she had just put forth in the writing of her village tale of _Bessie Costrell_--a tale based on an actual occurrence in the village of Aldbury, the tragic details of which absorbed her so much as to amount almost to possession. She finished it in fifteen days, and gave it to George Smith, who always cherished a special affection for this "grimy little tale," as Mrs. Ward called it.

When he had brought it out, the world devoured it with enthusiasm--so much so that her true friend and mentor, Henry James, whose opinion she valued more highly than any other, thought fit to address a friendly admonition to her:

"May 8, 1895. I think the tale very straight-forward and powerful--very direct and vivid, full of the real and the _juste_.

I like your unalembicated rustics--they are a tremendous rest after Hardy's--and the infallibility of your feeling for village life.

Likewise I heartily hope you will labour in this field and farm again. _But_ I won't pretend to agree with one or two declarations that have been wafted to me to the effect that this little tale is "the best thing you've done." It has even been murmured to me that _you_ think so. This I don't believe, and at any rate I find, for myself, your best in your dealings with _data_ less simple, on a plan less simple. This means, however, mainly, that I hope you won't abandon _anything_ that you have shewn you can do, but only go on with this _and_ that--and the other--especially the other!

Yours, dear Mrs. Ward, most truly, HENRY JAMES."

Meanwhile, in spite of the drawback of her continued ill-health, she derived throughout these years an ever-increasing pleasure from the friendships with which she was surrounded. Both in the London house, which they had acquired early in 1891 (25 Grosvenor Place), and at Stocks, she loved to gather many friends about her, though the effort of entertaining them was often a sore tax upon her slender strength. Her Sunday parties at Stocks brought together men and women from many different worlds--political, literary and philanthropic--with whom the talk ranged over all the questions and persons of the day from breakfast till lunch, from lunch till tea, and from tea till dinner; but after dinner, in sheer exhaustion, the party would usually take refuge in what were known, derisively, as "intellectual games." Mrs. Ward herself was not particularly good at these diversions, but she loved to watch the efforts of others, and they did give a rest, after all, from the endless talk! On one such occasion the game selected was the variety known as "riddle game," in which a name and a thing are written down at random by different players, and the next tries to give a reason why the person should be like the thing. Lord Acton, who had that day devoured ten books of Biblical criticism that Mrs. Ward had placed in his room, and would infinitely have preferred to go on talking about them, found himself confronted by the question: "Why is Lord Rothschild like a poker?" For a long time he sat contemplating the paper, then scribbled down in desperation: "Because he is upright," and retired impenetrably behind an eleventh book. But Mr. Asquith made up for all deficiencies by his ingenuity in this form of nonsense. "Why is Irving like a wheelbarrow?" demanded one of the little papers that came round to him, and while the rest of us floundered in heavy jokes Mr. Asquith found the exact answer: "Because he serves to fill up the pit and carry away the boxes."

Politics were of absorbing interest to Mrs. Ward, and though her own views remained decidedly Unionist on the Irish question, in home affairs they were sufficiently mixed to make free discussion not only possible, but delightful to her. She still retained her old friendship for Mr.

Morley, and probably the majority of her Parliamentary friends at this time were of the Liberal persuasion. 1895 was the year of the "cordite division" and the fall of Lord Rosebery's Government, involving many of these friends in the catastrophe. Mr. Morley was defeated at Newcastle and went to recover his serenity in the Highlands, whither Mrs. Ward sent him a copy of _Bessie Costrell_, provoking the following letter from her old friend and master:

_August 6, 1895._

MY DEAR MRS. WARD,--

It was most pleasant to me to receive the little volume, in its pretty dress, and with the friendly dedication. It will take its place among my personal treasures, and I am truly grateful to you for thinking of me.

The story is full of interest to me, and in the vein of a true realism, humanising instead of brutalising. The "severity" of the poor dead woman's look, and the whole of that page, redeems with a note of just pity all the sordid elements.... We are quartered in one of the most glorious of highland glens, five and twenty miles from a railway, and nearly as many hours from London. Now and then my thoughts wander to Westminster, pa.s.sing round by way of Newcastle, but I quickly cast Satan behind me--and try to cultivate a steady-eyed equanimity, which shall not be a stupid insensibility to either one's personal catastrophe or to the detriment which the commonwealth has just suffered. If life were not so short--I sometimes think it is far too long--I should see some compensations in the deluge that has come upon the Liberal party. It will do them good to be sent to adjust their compa.s.ses. The steering had been very blind in these latter days. Perhaps some will tell you that my own bit of steering was the very blindest of all. I know that you are disposed to agree with such folk, and I know that Irish character (for which English government, by the way, is wholly responsible), is difficult stuff to work with. But the policy was right, and I beg you not to think--as I once told the H. of C.--that the Irish sphinx is going to gather up her rags, and depart from your gates in meekness.

During these months another Liberal friend, Mr. Sydney Buxton, was taking infinite pains to pilot Mrs. Ward through the intricacies of the Parliamentary situation required for the book she was now writing, _Sir George Tressady_--drawing her a coloured plan of the House and the division-lobbies for the scene of Tressady's "ratting," and generally supervising the details of Marcella Maxwell's Factory Bill. "I am sure it is owing to you," wrote Mrs. Ward to him afterwards, "that the political framework has not at any rate stood in the way of the book's success, as I feared at one time it might." She herself had regularly put herself to school to learn every detail of the system of sweated homework prevalent in the East End of London at that time; wading through piles of Blue-books, visiting the actual scenes under the care of a Factory Inspector, or of Lord Rothschild's Jewish secretary; learning much from her Fabian friends, Mrs. Sidney Webb and Mr. Graham Wallas.

"As to Maxwell's Bill itself," she wrote to Mr. Buxton, "after my talk with you and Mr. Gerald Balfour, I took the final idea of it from some evidence of Sidney Webb's before the Royal Commission.

There he says that he can perfectly well imagine, and would like to see tried, a special Factory Act for East London, and I find the same thing foreshadowed in various other things on Factory Law I have been reading. And some weeks ago I talked over the idea with Mr. Haldane, who thought it quite conceivable, and added that 'London would bear quietly what would make Nottingham or Leeds revolt.' If such a Bill is possible or plausible, that I think is all a novelist wants. For of course one cannot describe _the real_, and yet one wants something which is not merely fanciful, but might be, under certain circ.u.mstances. The whole situation lies as it were some ten years ahead, and I have made use of a remark of Gerald Balfour's to me on the Terrace, when we had been talking over the new Factory Bill. 'There is not much difference between Parties,' he said, agreeing with you--'but I should not wonder if, within the next few years, we saw some reaction in these matters,'

by which I suppose he meant if the Home Office power were over-driven, or the Acts administered too vexatiously.