Janet Penrose Trevelyan

“ 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. ”

“ Figures such as these began, when the storms of an inhospitable April had passed 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! ”

“ Yet in spite of the unceasing round of work, what compensations there were in the London life! The making of new friends can never fail to be a delightful process, and it very soon became apparent that Mrs. Ward was to be adopted to the heart of that London world which thought about books and politics and which incidentally was making history. London was smaller then than now, and if a new-comer had brains and modesty, and above all a gift of sympathy that won all hearts, there were few doors that did not open to her or him in time. ”

“ But altogether, when London fills me with despair, I often think of Lancashire and am comforted for the future. I think of the people I had tea with at Bacup, all mill-hands, but so refined, gentle and good; and I think of the wonderful development of the civic sense in a town like Oldham, with all its public institutions, its combinations of workpeople for every possible object, and its generally happy and healthy tone. I wish the streets were less ugly, but after all, our climate is hard and drives people indoors three-parts of the year, and the race has very little artistic gift. ”

“ The air on the roof-playground was like Margate, and the children’s happiness and good-temper delightful to see. There were flowers all about, and sunny views over East London to distant country, and round games, and little ones happy with toys, and all sorts of nice things. Downstairs a splendid game of hand-ball in the playground, and a cool hall full of boys playing games and reading. As for the Settlement, it has never been so enchanting. There are 1,150 children daily, and all the teachers say it is better than ever. ”

“ She was much touched, and the friendship was cemented, a few days later, by a return visit that he paid to Stocks, all in its May green, when he could not contain himself on the beauty of the place, or the incomparable advantages it possessed over “such a British Museum as Mentmore!”
England’s Effort reached a dejected world in the nick of time. Our national habit of “grousing” in public, and of hanging our dirty linen on every possible clothes-line, had naturally disposed both ourselves and the outer world to under-estimate our vast achievements. ”

“ Ward received a good deal of sympathy and encouragement from those to whom she sent her leaflet, and dreamt, in her indomitable way, of summoning a meeting later on if the response were sufficient. But she knew in her heart that her own strength would no longer suffice to lead such a crusade, and she appealed with a certain wistfulness to the young “to pour into it their life, their courage and their love.” ”

“ It seems as though Nature’s law were universal as well as rigid in its sphere—wide wastes of sand shut in the green oasis, many a seed falls among thorns or by the wayside, many a bud must be sacrificed before there comes the perfect flower, many a little life must exhaust itself in a useless book before the great book is made which is to remain a force for ever. ”

“ 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! ”

“ For if Stocks was a Paradise to the tired week-end visitor from London, or to the stalwart young ones who could play cricket or tennis on its lawns, it was still more the Paradise of little children. Mrs. Ward was never really happy unless there were children in the house, the younger the better, and one of the joys of the re-building was that it provided her, on the transformed eastern side, with a pair of nurseries which only asked thenceforward to be tenanted. ”

“ To draw on the conceptions or the phrases that have once passed through the warm minting of another’s brain, is for us moderns at any rate, the literary crime of crimes. But to the teller of stories, all that is recorded of the real life of men, as well as all that his own eyes can see, is offered for the enrichment of his tale. This is a clear and simple principle; yet it has been often denied. To insist upon it is, in my belief, to uphold the true flag of Imagination, and to defend the wide borders of Romance. ”

“ The impression that she made upon this circle of friends seems first of all to have been one of extraordinary energy and power of work, of great personal charm veiled by a crust of shyness, of intellectual powers for which they had the respect of equals and co-workers, and of a warm and generous sympathy which was yet free from “gush.” One of her closest friends in these early years, Mrs. Arthur Johnson, has allowed me to use certain extracts from her journal, in which the figure of “Mary Ward” stands out with the clearness of absolute simplicity. ”

“ James’s friendship for Mrs. Ward had already endured for ten or twelve years before this visit to Levens, but these days in the old house gave it a deeper and more intimate tone, which it never lost thenceforward. He never wholly approved of her art as a novelist—how could he, when it differed so fundamentally from his own?—but his admiration for her as a woman, his affection for her as a friend, knew very few limits indeed. ”

“ Every breath was life-giving—everything one saw was beauty. And the people are so kind, so clever, so friendly—so different from this France malveillante, between whom and us as it seems to me, Fashoda, Dreyfus and the Transvaal have opened a gulf that it will take a generation to fill. In Rome we saw many people and I had much conversation that will be of use for the revision of Eleanor. The country is progressing enormously, the Anno Santo is a comparative failure, and the Jesuit hatred of England flourishes and abounds. ”

“ Schools seem to be inspired by a tenderer and more personal feeling than any other of the multifarious committees that take thought for the children of the State. The secret, in fact, of Mrs. Ward’s success in this as in her other public undertakings lay in the fact that her action was founded on a real and urgent human need, and that she combined a power of presenting and urging that need in forcible manner with an unfailing tenderness for the individual child. As one of her colleagues expressed it once in homely phrase: “The fact is, she had the brain of a man and the heart of a woman.” ”

“ 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 butt-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 vigour of life, the animation, the activity of eye and hand that she displays are astonishing. Her brown hair in its abundance is the admiration of everybody.” At a year old she is “passionate but not peevish, sensitive to the least harshness in word or gesture, but usually full of merriment and gladsomeness. She is like a sparkling fountain or a gay flower in the house, filling it with light and freshness.” She has many childish ailments, but conquers them all in a manner strangely prophetic of her later power of resisting illness. ”

“ Her grandchildren, Mary, Theodore and Humphry, were naturally the most frequent tenants, and there accumulated a store of ancient treasures to which they looked forward with unfailing joy each time that they returned. Usually, too, they found that “Gunny” (as they had early christened her) had surreptitiously added to the store during their absence, which was unorthodox, but pleasant. How she loved to fill their red mouths with strawberries or grapes, to hear their voices on the stairs, or their shrill shrieks as they played hide-and-seek on the lawn with some captive grown-up! ”

“ Yet, as we fully realize, the self-respecting and industrious artisan has instincts towards the beauties and dignities of life. He likes spacious rooms, and soft colour, and pictures to look at, as much as anyone else; he wants society, art, music, a quiet chair after hard work, stimulus for the brain after manual labour, amusement after effort, just like his neighbour in Mayfair or Kensington. The young men and maidens want decent places other than the streets and the public-house in which to meet and dance and amuse each other. ”

“ As an old friend, Mrs. Halsey, wrote to Dorothy, “I remember Mlle Souvestre saying more than thirty years ago, ‘Ah! the books I admire—but it’s the woman Mary Ward that I love.’” “Mrs. Ward’s Recollections are of priceless value,” said the Contemporary Review; “all the famous names are here, but that is nothing; the people themselves are here moving about and veritably alive—great men and women of whom posterity will long to hear.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ To her, of course, the human interest of the scene was the all-important thing—the spectacle of the mixture of classes in the vast factories, the high-school mistresses, the parsons, the tailors’ and drapers’ assistants handling their machines as lovingly as the born engineers—the enormous sheds-full of women and girls of many diverse types working together with one common impulse, and protesting against the cutting down of their twelve hours’ day! ”

“ Ever since the previous winter the idea of a novel in which the clash between the older and the younger types of Christianity should be worked out in terms of human life, had been growing and fermenting in her mind. Miss Bretherton and Amiel’s Journal had given her a valuable apprenticeship in the art of writing, while Amiel’s luminous reflections on the decadence and formalism of the churches had tended to confirm her own passionate conviction that all was not well with the established forms of religion. ”

“ In one select Oxford pastime, the game of croquet, she attained to real pre-eminence, becoming, after her marriage, one of the moving spirits of the Oxford Croquet Club. But her shyness made social events no special joy to her, and she was far happier sitting at the feet of “Mark Pat” or helping “Mrs. Pat” with her etching in the sitting-room upstairs than in making conversation with the youth of Oxford.
One charming glimpse of her, however, at a social function remains to us in the letters of M. Taine. ”

“ We must talk this over, for of course I realize that there is much to be said on the other side. But the simple and rigid living which I have seen, for various ideal purposes, in friends of my own—like T. H. Green—seems to me both religious and reasonable, while I cannot for the life of me see anything in the austerities, say of the Blessed Mary Alacoque, but hysteria and self-murder. The Divine Power occupies itself for age on age in the development of all the fine nerve-processes of the body, with their infinite potencies for good or evil. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Children’s Happy Evenings’ committee thereupon decided, in dignified fashion, that their work was ended, and dissolved their Association. Peace be to its ashes! It had given joy, much joy, to many thousands of London children, as Mrs. Ward always most fully recognized, and if in the end it stood in the way of the new and younger power which was capable of giving an almost indefinite extension to the children’s pleasure, could it but have a free field, the reluctance of the Association to cede any ground was only, after all, a very natural affair. ”

“ Ward felt herself in danger of seeing her usual means of livelihood cut from beneath her feet during this first period of the War. For one result of the vast upheaval in our social conditions was that the circulation of all novels went down with a run, and it was not until the War had made a certain dismal routine of its own, in the needs of hospitals, munition-centres, soldiers’ and officers’ clubs and the like, that the national taste for the reading of fiction reasserted itself. ”

“ She did not realize how unique her teaching was, nor how few among her generation combined such knowledge as hers with such a power of instilling it into other minds and hearts.
The writing of David Grieve was a long-sustained effort, extending over the best part of three years, and too often performed under the handicap of writer’s cramp and sleeplessness. But Mrs. Ward was at the prime of her powers, and felt herself more thoroughly master of her material in this book than she had done in the case of Robert Elsmere, so that the revision, when it came, was a matter of weeks and not of months. ”