The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward

by Janet Penrose Trevelyan

They had not been settled in London for much more than a year before Mrs. Ward began to feel the need for some quiet and remote country place to which she might fly for peace and work when the strain of London became too great. Fortune favoured the quest, for in the summer of 1882 they took the rectory at Peper Harow, near Godalming (the “Murewell Rectory” of Robert Elsmere), for a few weeks, and during that time were taken by Lord Midleton, the owner of Peper Harow, to see a delightful old farm in the heart of the lonely stretch of country that lies between the Portsmouth Road and Elstead. They fell in love with it at once, and during the following winter made an arrangement to take its six or seven front rooms by the year. So from the summer of 1883 onwards they possessed Borough Farm as a refuge and solace in the wilds, a paradise for elders and children alike, where London and its turmoil could be cast off and forgotten. It lay in a country of heather commons, woods, rough meadows, streams and lakes—those “Hammer Ponds” which remain as a relic of the iron-smelting days of Surrey, and in which we children amused ourselves by the hour in fishing for perch with a bent pin and a worm. Here Mrs. Ward would lie out whenever the sun shone in the old sand-pit up the lane, where we had constructed a sort of terrace for her long chair, or else under the ash-tree on the little hill, writing or reading, while no sound came save the murmur of wind in the gorse, or in the dry bells of the heather. If her physique had been stronger she would, perhaps, have been too much tempted by the beauty of the country ever to have lain still and worked for so many hours as she did in that long chair; but she was never robust, she was extremely susceptible to bad weather, cold winds and every form of chill, and her longest expeditions were those which she took in a little pony-carriage over Ryal or Bagmoor Commons to Peper Harow, or up the Portsmouth Road to Thursley and Hindhead.

Here a few friends came at intervals to share the solitude with us: Laura Tennant, on a wonderful day in May, 1884, when she seemed to her dazzled hostess the very incarnation of the spring; M. Edmond Scherer, her earliest French friend, who, in 1884, was helping her with her translation of Amiel’s Journal; Henry James, whose visit laid the foundation of a friendship that was to ripen into one of the most precious of all Mrs. Ward’s possessions; Mlle. Souvestre, foundress of the well-known girls’ school at Wimbledon, and one of the keenest intellects of her time; and once, for a whole fortnight, Miss Eugénie Sellers,[10] who had for many months been teaching the family their classics, and who now came down to superintend their Greek a little and to roam the commons with them much. It was in 1886, just before this visit, that Mrs. Ward began seriously to read Greek, usually with her ten-year-old son; she bought a Thucydides in Godalming one day and was delighted to find it easier than she expected. It was a passion that grew upon her with the years, as any reader of her later books will clearly perceive.

Then, though the solitude of the farm itself was profound, there were a few, a very few, neighbours in the more eligible districts round about who made it their pleasure sometimes to call upon us; there were the Frederic Harrisons at Elstead, whose four boys dared us children to horrid feats of jumping and climbing in the sand-pit, while our elders were safely engaged elsewhere; John Morley also, for a few weeks in 1886, and in the other direction Lord and Lady Wolseley, who took a house near Milford, and thence made their way occasionally down our sandy track. But the neighbours who meant most to us were, after all, our landlords, the Brodricks of Peper Harow; they were not only endlessly kind, giving us leave to disport ourselves in all their ponds, but took a sort of pride of possession, I believe, in their pocket authoress, watching her struggles and her achievement with paternal eyes. And when Robert Elsmere at length appeared, old Lord Midleton, pillar of Church and State as he was, came riding over to the farm, sitting his horse squarely in spite of his white hairs and his semi-blindness, and sent in word that the “Wicked Squire” was at the gate!

Two letters written to her father from Borough Farm during these years, give glimpses of her browsings in many books, and of her thoughts on Shakespeare, evolution and kindred matters:

‘I have been reading Joubert’s Pensées and Correspondance lately, with a view to the Amiel introduction. You would be charmed with the letters, and some of the pensées are extraordinarily acute. Now I am deep in Sénancour, and for miscellaneous reading I have been getting through Horace’s Epistles and dawdling a good deal over Shakespeare. My feeling as to him gets stronger and stronger, that he was, strictly speaking, a great poet, but not a great dramatist! There’s a remark over which I trust you will draw a fatherly veil! But one can only say what one feels, and I am more oppressed than I used to be by his faults of construction, his carelessness, his excrescences, while at the same time much more sensitive to his preternatural power as a poet and as a psychological analyst. He gets at the root of his characters in a marvellous way, he envisages them separately as no one else can, but it is when he comes to bring them into action to represent the play of outward circumstance and the interaction of character on character that he seems to me comparatively—only comparatively, of course—to fail. I have always felt it most strongly in Othello, and of course in the last act of Hamlet, which, in spite of the magnificent poetry in it, is surely a piece of dramatic bungling....

‘As to Renan it would be too long to argue it, but I think he very much saves himself in the passage you quote by the qualifying word ‘comme.’ The Church is ‘as it were’ un débris de l’Empire. It is only another way of putting what Harnack said in that article you and I read at Sea View. ‘The Empire built up the Church out of its own substance, and destroyed itself in so doing,’ or words to that effect. I cannot help feeling that as far as organization and institutions go it is very true, though I would never deny that God was in the Church, as I believe He is in all human society, moulding it to His will. Everything, from the critical and scientific standpoint, seems to me so continuous and natural—no sharp lines anywhere—one thing leading to another, event leading to event, belief to belief—and God enwrapping and enfolding all. But this is one general principle, and yours is quite another. I quite agree that from your standpoint no explanation that Renan could give of the Church can appear other than meagre or grotesque.”

Her translation of Amiel’s Journal Intime was a long and exacting piece of work, but she enjoyed the struggle with the precise meaning of the French phrases and always maintained that she owed much to it, both in her knowledge of French and of English. She had begun it, with the benevolent approval of its French editor, M. Scherer, early in 1884, and took it up again after Miss Bretherton came out; found it indeed a far more troublesome task than she had foreseen, and was still wrestling with the Introduction in the summer of 1885, when her head was already full of her new novel, and she was fretting to begin upon it. But the book appeared at length in December, 1885, and very soon made its mark. The wonderful language of the Swiss mystic appealed to a generation more occupied than ours with the things of the soul, while Mrs. Ward’s introduction gave a masterly sketch of the writer’s strange personality and the development of his mind. As Jowett wrote to her, “Shall I tell you the simple truth? It is wonderful to me how you could have thought and known so much about so many things.” Mr. Talbot, the Warden of Keble (now Bishop of Winchester), wrote of the “almost breathless admiration of the truth and penetration of his thought” with which he had read the book, while Lord Arthur Russell reported that he had “met Mr. Gladstone, who spoke with great interest of Amiel, asked me whether I had compared the translation with the original, and said that a most interesting small volume might be extracted, of Pensées, quite equal to Pascal.”

But it was, inevitably, “caviar to the general.” Mrs. Ward’s brother, Willie Arnold, her close comrade and friend in all things literary, wrote to her from Manchester a few months after its appearance: “I served on a jury at the Assizes last week—two murder cases and general horrors. I sat next to a Mr. Amiel—pronounced ‘Aymiell’—a worthy Manchester tradesman; no doubt his ancestor was a Huguenot refugee. I had one of your vols. in my pocket, and showed him the passage about the family. He was greatly interested, and borrowed it. Returned it next day with the remark that it was ‘too religious for him.’ Alas, divine philosophy!”

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. But the determining factor in the writing of Robert Elsmere was the close and continuous study which she had given ever since her work for the Dictionary of Christian Biography to the problem of “Christian origins.” She was fascinated by the intricacy and difficulty of the whole subject, but more especially by such branches of it as the Synoptic Problem, or the relation of the Fourth Gospel to the rest; while the questions raised by the realization that the Books of the New Testament were the products of an age steeped in miracle and wholly uncritical of the records of it, struck her as vital to the whole orthodox position. At the same time her immense tenderness for Christianity, her belief that the life and teaching of the Founder were still the “master-light of all our seeing,” made her yearn for a simplification of the creeds, so that the Message itself should once more appeal to the masses without the intervention of formulæ that perpetually challenged their reason. The argument of “Literature and Dogma” culminates in the picture of mankind waiting for the lifting of the burden of “Aberglaube” and dogmatism, with which the spirit of Christianity had been crushed down for centuries, waiting for the renewal that would come when the old coil was cast off. It was in that spirit also that Mrs. Ward attacked the problem; her Robert was to her a link in the chain of the liberators of all ages. Was her outlook too intellectual? Did she overestimate the repugnance to obsolete forms that possessed her generation? So it was said by many who rose up in startled defence of those forms, many who had never felt the uttermost clash between the things which they wished to believe and the things which Truth allowed them to believe. Yet still the response of her generation was to be greater than she ever dreamt. No doubt the renewal did not come in the precise form in which she looked for it; creeds were to prove tougher, the worship of the Risen Lord more vital than she thought; yet still, in a hundred ways, the influence of the fermentation caused by the ideas of Robert Elsmere may be traced in the Church to-day. “Biblical criticism” may now be out of fashion; but it is because its victory has in reality been won. All this lay hidden from the mind of the writer as she sat toiling over her task in the solitude of Borough Farm, or in the little “powder-closet” overlooking the back gardens of Russell Square; she wrote because she “could no other,” and only rarely did she allow herself to feel, with trembling, that the Zeitgeist might indeed be with her.

The book was begun in the autumn of 1885, with every hope that it would be finished in less than a year. It was offered, when a few chapters had been written, to the Macmillans for publication, since they had published both Miss Bretherton and the English Poets, but to the sad disappointment of its author they rejected it on the ground that the subject was not likely to appeal to the British public. In this dilemma Mrs. Ward bethought herself of Mr. George Murray Smith, the publisher of Charlotte Brontë, and in some trepidation offered the book to him. Mr. Smith had greater faith than the Macmillans and accepted it at once, sealing the bargain by making an advance of £200 upon it in May, 1886. So began Mrs. Ward’s connection with “George Smith,” as she always familiarly spoke of him: a friend and counsellor indeed, to whom she owed incalculable things in the years that followed.