Many difficulties were encountered in the appointment of a suitable Warden, for a combination of qualities was required which was not easy to find, especially in the limited circle of those whose views in matters of faith agreed broadly with those of the Committee. Month after month went by while Mrs. Ward and Dr. Martineau interviewed many candidates, often assisted by Canon Barnett, of Toynbee, whose interest in the new venture was as sincere as it was generous. Applications from possible residents came in fast, showing that the work would not lack support in that direction, but even in August the Warden was still to seek. At length, however, in September, the ideal choice was made in Mr. Philip Wicksteed, who was then holding the office of minister at the Unitarian chapel in Little Portland Street. He was already beginning to be widely known outside his regular work as a lecturer on Biblical subjects and on Dante, and Mrs. Ward had already sounded him once or twice in this matter of the Wardenship. But he had hitherto evaded it on the ground that his election would identify the Hall with Unitarianism. At last, however, Mrs. Ward won his acceptance at an interview she had with him at Russell Square, in which she greeted him with the words “I want to wrestle with you!” He dealt frankly with her on the subject of the religious aims of the Hall, and in a letter written to her a few days after his acceptance said:
‘You remember when first you spoke to me on this matter how I told you that I had never been clear as to the exact thing contemplated in the Hall, and had never felt that it had any programme. Under those circumstances I felt that it would be false to myself and in reality false to you to allow myself to be overcome by your splendid faith and enthusiasm and take it up without any true inspiration in pity that so noble a ‘quest’ should find no knight-errant to try it.
“My work with you has considerably cleared my vision, and has inspired me with growing hopes for the institution, but I cannot honestly say that it has given me any deep faith in its success. You know how anxious I have been throughout about our audience for lectures, and how doubtful about the existence of any large public seriously interested in Biblical studies. My fears are not allayed; though I hope the result may put them to shame.”
With Mr. Wicksteed’s acceptance of the Wardenship, the arrangements for lectures and the preparations for the reception of Residents were pushed on apace, while the Committee decided that a formal opening ceremony must be held in order to plant the flag of the new Settlement’s faith and ideals. The Portman Rooms were taken for the purpose; the venerable Dr. Martineau consented to be in the chair, and Mrs. Ward was to make the principal speech. She had never spoken in public before, and was genuinely terrified at the prospect (three years later she put into Marcella’s experience in the East End her own horror of extempore speaking); but she prepared her address with great care, and was afterwards told that her voice carried to the farthest limits of the room, packed as it was with a keenly expectant audience. Her plea was that the time had come for a reconstruction of the basis of Christian belief; that the results both of Darwinian inquiry and of historical criticism must be faced, especially in the teaching of children, but that when the “search for an exacter truth, which is the fate and mission of humanity” had been met, a possibility of faith remained which would be the future hope of the world. To the elucidation of this faith the efforts of the Hall, on its teaching and lecturing side, would be devoted. And in speaking of the “social and practical effort which is an essential part of our scheme,” she pleaded that it was “yet not its most distinctive nor its most vital part. The need of urging it on public attention is recognized in all camps. Yet, meanwhile, there are hundreds of men and women who spend themselves in these works of charity and mercy who are all the time inwardly starved, crying for something else, something more, if they could but get it. What matters to them, first and foremost—what would give fresh life to all their efforts—would be the provision of a new motive power, a new hope for the individual life in God, a new respect for man’s destiny. Let me recall you for a moment from the gospel of works to the great Pauline gospel of faith, and the inner life! It is in the bringing back of faith—not the faith which confuses legend with history, or puts authority in the place of knowledge, but the faith which springs from moral and spiritual fact, and may be day after day, and hour after hour, again verified by fact—that the great task of our generation lies.”
Thus was the new venture launched, amid a mingled chorus of admiration and criticism from that section of the world which was affected by the movement of ideas. The lecturing at University Hall was soon in full swing, and was maintained at a very high level during the years 1891 and 1892, so that when Mrs. Ward went on a speaking tour to some of the northern towns in the autumn of the latter year in order to appeal for funds for a further period of three years (an appeal in which she was completely successful), she was able to give a very remarkable account of it. Many courses on both Old and New Testament criticism had been given, by Mr. Wicksteed, by Dr. Estlin Carpenter, by M. Chavannes, of Leyden; on the Fourth Gospel by that fine scholar, Mr. Charles Hargrove; on Theism by Prof. Knight, and on the Gospel of St. Luke by Dr. Martineau himself. These latter took place on Sunday afternoons during the spring of 1891. “Sunday after Sunday,” said Mrs. Ward, “the Hall of Dr. Williams’s Library was crowded to the doors, and, I believe by many to whom the line of thought followed in the lectures was of quite fresh help and service; and it will be long indeed before many of us forget the last Sunday—the venerable form, the beautiful voice, the note of unconquerable hope as to the future of faith, and yet of unconquerable courage as to the rights of the mind! I at least shall always look back to that hour as to a moment of consecration for our young Institution, disclosing to us at once its opportunities and its responsibilities.” In the non-Biblical sphere Mrs. J. R. Green had given a series of lectures on the development of the English towns[16]; Miss Beatrice Potter (soon to become Mrs. Sidney Webb) a course on the Co-operative Movement, which became the foundation of her great book on that subject; Mr. Graham Wallas on “The English Citizen”; Mr. Stopford Brooke on “The English Poets of the Nineteenth Century”; while the Warden lectured to large audiences on Dante, and “ground away” (in his own words) at political economy, thinking aloud before his band of students and “forging forward on new lines.” It was all very stimulating, very much alive; but whether, as the months passed on, it was exactly carrying out the aims and intentions of that opening day, some sympathetic observers began to doubt.
“I was uneasy all the time,” wrote Mr. Wicksteed afterwards to J. P. T., “because though I thought I was working honestly and in a way usefully, yet I could never quite feel that the Settlement was doing the work it set out to do, or that it was quite justifying its subscription list. But I don’t believe your mother, in spite of a great measure of personal disappointment, ever had the smallest doubt or misgiving in this matter. She thoroughly believed in the significance and value of what was being done, and cared for it with a vivid faith and affection, and supported it with an inventive enthusiasm, that have always seemed to me the expression of a generosity and magnanimity of a type and quality that were quite distinctive.”
An energetic attempt was made to interest the young men employed in the big shops of Tottenham Court Road in the Hall’s activities; but the times were premature; not until the Great War had loosed the foundations of our society did the young men of Tottenham Court Road find their way into the Y.M.C.A. “The young men of Tottenham Court Road,” wrote Mr. Copeland Bowie, “gave no sign that they wished to partake of the food provided for them at University Hall.” Then, somewhat apart from the lecturing scheme of the Hall, there grew up the body of Residents, young men of divers attainments and tastes who were hard to mould into the original scheme, some of whom were even greatly concerned to show that they depended in no way for their ideas on the author of Robert Elsmere. Occasionally there were difficult moments at the Council meetings, when the Residents’ views clashed with those of the older members, but it was at those moments, and generally in her gift for bowing to the inevitable when it came, that Mrs. Ward endeared herself most to her fellow-workers by her rare great-heartedness. During their first winter’s work at the Hall the Residents had discovered, in the squalid neighbourhood to the east of Tavistock Square, a dingy building that went by the name of Marchmont Hall, which they decided to take as the scene of their regular social activities. They raised a special fund for its expenses, and under the leadership of a young solicitor, who combined much shrewdness and ability with a glowing enthusiasm for the service of his fellow-men, the late Mr. Alfred Robinson, the suspicions of the neighbourhood were overcome and a fruitful programme of boys’ clubs, men’s clubs, concerts and lectures launched by the autumn of 1891. Mrs. Ward was deeply interested in the experiment, and hoped against hope that it might lead to those opportunities for Christian teaching which still lay very near her heart. A year later she was able to give the following account of their first attempts in that direction:
“The Sunday evening lectures are preceded by half an hour’s music, and have been from the first more definitely ethical and religious in tone than those given on Thursday. But it is only quite recently we have felt that we could speak freely, without danger of misunderstanding, upon those subjects which are generally identified by the working-classes with sectarian and ecclesiastical propaganda. Now that we are known we need have no fear; and on November 12 the Warden, who had already spoken on the prophets of Israel and other kindred topics, gave an address on the life and character of Jesus. It was received with warm feeling, and more lectures of the same kind have already been arranged for. Next term we hope a class in the Gospels, already begun, may take larger proportions. Among the boys and young men of the Hall, often intelligent and well-educated as they are, there is an extraordinary amount of sheer ignorance and indifference as to the Christian story and literature, even when they have had their full share of the usual Sunday School training. To some of us there could be no more welcome task, to be undertaken at once with eagerness and with trembling, than that of making old things new to eyes and hearts still capable of that ‘admiration, hope, and love’ by which alone we truly live.”
But the movement never developed, for in truth there was no Elsmere to lead it; Mrs. Ward herself went three times to take a boy’s class on Sunday afternoons, but could not, in the midst of her other work, maintain the effort; the Warden, versatile as he was, did not regard it as his first interest, while from the body of Residents came a dumb sense of antagonism, not amounting to direct opposition, but just as effective, which in the end prevailed. The “School” of Biblical studies at University Hall continued as before, appealing to a definite class of students and educated persons of the middle-class, but the attempt to fuse it with the social work at Marchmont Hall was doomed to succeed as little as the attempt to attract to it the half-educated shopmen of Tottenham Court Road. Gradually the human interest of the experiment, the sense of romance and adventure, went over from the lecturing side to the work at Marchmont Hall, where the popular lectures and discussions, the Saturday evening concerts and the Saturday morning “play-rooms” for children were making a real mark on the life of the district. But Mrs. Ward was fully able to recognize this, and accepted in an ungrudging spirit the different direction which circumstances had given to her own cherished dreams.
“It will be seen readily enough,” wrote Mr. Wicksteed in the memorial pamphlet issued by the Passmore Edwards Settlement, “that it was on the side of the School rather than on that of the Residence that Mrs. Ward’s ideals seemed to have the best chance of fulfilling themselves. Yet in truth it was in the Residence that the germ of future development lay. The greatness of Mrs. Ward’s character was shown in her recognition—painful and unwilling sometimes, but always brave and loyal—of this fact. She could not and did not relinquish her “Elsmerean” ideals. The romance of Richard Meynell, published twenty-three years after Robert Elsmere, shows them in unabated ardour. The failure of the Residence to amalgamate with the School was the source of deep distress to her. She sometimes suggested measures for overcoming it that did not approve themselves to her colleagues, but throughout she never suspected their loyalty, and never failed in her own. It needed rare magnanimity. Patience seems too passive a word to apply to so ardent a spirit, but something that did the work of patience was very truly there. And as she came to recognize that with the available material the Settlement could not be the embodiment of her full ideal, she withdrew her vital energies from the attempt to force a passage where none was possible, she steadily refused to let blood flow through a wound that could be and should be healed, and she threw all the strength of her inventive and resourceful mind—and what is more the full stream of her affection and joy in accomplished good—into the development of such branches of her purpose as by that agency could be furthered.”