“I am so sorry, dearest, for your own suffering. This is a weary world,—but there is good behind it, ‘a holy will,’ as Amiel says, ‘at the root of nature and destiny,’ and submission brings peace because in submission the heart finds God and in God its rest. There is no truth I believe in more profoundly.”
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. Her connection with the Forsters and with “Uncle Matt” brought her many friends to start with, while Mr. Ward’s work on The Times took them naturally both into the world of painters (for after 1884 he joined art criticism to his political and other writing) and into the world of affairs. A letter written to Mrs. A. H. Johnson in May, 1885, gives a typical picture of the social side of her life three years after the move to London. The occasion is the marriage of Alfred Lyttelton and Laura Tennant:
‘The wedding function yesterday was very interesting. I am glad not to have missed Gladstone’s speech at the breakfast. What a wondrous man it is! The intensity, the feeling of the speech were extraordinary.... Life has been rather exciting lately in the way of new friends, the latest acquisition being Mr. Goschen, to whom I have quite lost my heart! There is a pliancy and a brilliancy about him which make him one of the most delightful companions. We dined there last Saturday and I have seldom had so much interesting talk. Lord Arthur Russell, who sat next me, told me stories of how, as a child at Geneva, he had met folk who in their youth had seen Rousseau and known Voltaire, and had been intimate friends of Mme. de Stael in middle life. And then, coming a little further down the stream of time, he could describe to me having stayed at Lamartine’s château in the poet’s old age, and so on. Mr. Goschen is busy on a life of his grandfather, who was the publisher of Goethe, Schiller and Wieland, and whose correspondence, which he is now going through, covers the whole almost of the German literary period,—so that after dinner the scene shifted to Germany, and we talked away with an occasional raid into politics, till, to my great regret, the evening was over.”
Her own little dinner-parties very soon began to make their mark, while not long after their establishment in London, she began the practice of being at home on Thursday afternoons, and though at first her natural shyness and lack of small talk made her openings somewhat formidable, she soon warmed to the task, till within a very few months her Thursdays became a much-appreciated institution. Men, as well as women, came to them, for they always liked to make her talk and to hear her eager views on all the topics of the day, from Irish coercion to the literary personalities of France, or the need for prodding the Universities to open their examinations to women. She still called herself a good Radical in these days, but her devotion to Mr. Forster—whom she had visited in Dublin during his Chief Secretaryship—gave the first reservations to her Liberal faith, for she took his part in the matter of his resignation, and felt that he had not been sufficiently supported by the Cabinet. It was a great grief to her that Mr. Morley, in the Pall Mall Gazette, found it necessary to attack Mr. Forster’s Irish administration with such persistent energy, and once, towards the end of 1882, she summoned up the courage to write him a remonstrance in good set terms. Mr. Morley’s reply is characteristic:
Dec. 13, 82.
DEAR MRS. WARD,—
I have got your letter at last, and carefully read and digested it. Need I say that its frank and direct vigour only increases my respect for the writer? To answer it, as it deserves, is hardly possible for me. It would take a day for me to set forth, with proper reference to chapter and verse, all the reasons why I could not follow Mr. Forster in his Irish administration. They were set forth from time to time with almost tiresome iteration as events moved forward.
In all that you say about Mr. Forster’s unselfishness, his industry, his strenuous desire to do what was right and best, nobody agrees more cordially than I do. Personally I have always had—if it is not impertinent in me to say so—a great liking for him. He was always very kind and obliging to me, and nothing has been more painful to me than to know that I was writing what would wound a family for whom I have such sincere respect as I have for his. But the occasion was grave. I have been thinking about Ireland all my life, and that fashion of governing it is odious and intolerable. If Sir Charles Dilke or Mr. Chamberlain had been Chief Secretary, and carried out the Coercion Act as Mr. Forster carried it out, I could not have attacked either of them, but I should have resigned my editorship rather than have connived by silence or otherwise at such mischief.
I may at times have seemed bitter and personal in my language about Mr. Forster. One falls into this tone too readily, when fighting a battle day after day, and writing without time for calm revision. For that I am sorry, if it has been so, or seemed so. Mr. Forster’s friends—some of them—have been extremely unscrupulous in their personalities against me, their charges of intrigue, conspiracy. All that I do not care for one jot; my real regret, and it is a very sincere one, is that I should seem unjust or vindictive to people like you, who think honestly and calmly about politics, and other things.
I hope that it is over, and that I shall never have to say a word about Mr. Forster’s Irish policy again.