April 17, 1888.
I think I must write a few words in answer to your letter of yesterday, in view of your approaching article which fills me with so much interest and anxiety. If I put what I have to say badly or abruptly, please forgive me. My thoughts are so full of this terrible loss of my dear uncle Matthew Arnold, to whom I was deeply attached, that it seems difficult to turn to anything else.
And yet I feel a sort of responsibility laid upon me with regard to Mr. Green, whom you may possibly mention in your article. There are many people living who can explain his thought much better than I can. But may I say with regard to your letter of yesterday, that in turning to philosophy, that is to the labour of reason and thought, for light on the question of man’s whence and whither, Mr. Green as I conceive it, only obeyed an urgent and painful necessity. “The parting with the Christian mythology is the rending asunder of bones and marrow”—words which I have put into Grey’s mouth—were words of Mr. Green’s to me. It was the only thing of the sort I ever heard him say—he was a man who never spoke of his feelings—but it was said with a penetrating force and sincerity which I still remember keenly. A long intellectual travail had convinced him that the miraculous Christian story was untenable; but speculatively he gave it up with grief and difficulty, and practically, to his last hour, he clung to all the forms and associations of the old belief with a wonderful affection. With regard to conformity to Church usage and repression of individual opinion he and I disagreed a good deal.
If you do speak of him, will you look at his two Lay Sermons, of which I enclose my copy?—particularly the second one, which was written eight years after the first, and to my mind expresses his thought more clearly.
Some of the letters which have reached me lately about the book have been curious and interesting. A vicar of a church in the East End, who seems to have been working among the poor for forty years, says, “I could not help writing; in your book you seemed to grasp me by the hand and follow me right on through my own life experiences.” And an Owens College Professor, who appears to have thought and read much of these things, writes to a third person, à propos of Elsmere, that the book has grasped “the real force at work in driving so many to give up the Christian creed. It is not the scientific (in the loose modern sense of the word), still less the philosophical difficulties, which influence them, but it is the education of the historic sense which is disintegrating faith.”—Only the older forms of faith, as I hold, that the new may rise! But I did not mean to speak of myself.
When the famous article—entitled “Robert Elsmere and the Battle of Belief”—appeared in the May Nineteenth Century, there was nothing but courtesy between the two opponents. Mrs. Ward sent the G.O.M. a copy of the book, with a picture of Catherine’s valley bound into it, and he replied that the volumes would “form a very pleasant recollection of what I trust has been a ‘tearless battle.’” Many of the papers now reviewed both book and article together, and the Pall Mall ironically congratulated the Liberal Party on “Mr. Gladstone’s new preoccupation.” “For two and a half years,” it declared, the G.O.M. had been able to think of nothing but Home Rule and Ireland. “But Mrs. Ward has changed all that.” The excitement among the reading public was very great. It penetrated even to the streets, for one of us overheard a panting lady, hugging a copy of the Nineteenth Century, saying to her companion as she fought her way into an omnibus, “Oh, my dear, have you read Weg on Bobbie?” Naturally the sale received a fresh stimulus. Two more three-volume editions disappeared during May, and a seventh and last during June. Then there was a pause before the appearance of the Popular or 6s. edition, which came out at the end of July with an impression of 5,000. It was immediately bought up; 7,000 more were disposed of during August, and the sale went on till the end of the year at the rate of about 4,000 a month. Even during 1889 it continued steadily, until by January, 1890, 44,000 copies of the 6s. edition had been sold. But as the sale had then slackened Mr. Smith decided to try the experiment of a half-crown edition. 20,000 of this were sold by the following November, but the drop had already set in and during 1891 the total only rose to 23,000. But even so, the sale of these three editions in the United Kingdom alone had amounted to 70,500.
All through the spring and summer of 1888 letters poured in upon Mrs. Ward by the score and the hundred, both from known and unknown correspondents, so that her husband and sister-in-law had almost to build a hedge around her and to insist that she should not answer them all herself. Those which the book provoked from her old friends, however, especially those of more orthodox views than her own, were often of poignant interest. The Warden of Keble wrote her six sheets of friendly argument and remonstrance. Mr. Creighton wrote her a letter full of closely reasoned criticism of Elsmere’s position, to which she made the following reply:
March 13, 1888.
My dear Max,—
I have been deeply interested by your letter, and am very grateful to you for the fairness and candour of it. Perhaps it is an affectation to say always that one likes candour!—but I certainly like it from you, and should be aggrieved if you did not give it me.