It was not their first visit, for in the spring of 1889 they had spent eight days in Rome, making their first Italian friendships and learning something of the spell of that city of old magic. “In eight days one can but scratch the surface of Rome,” she had written to her father on that occasion. “Still, I think Lord Acton was quite right when he said to us at Cannes, ‘If you have only three days, go!’ To have walked into St. Peter’s, to have driven up on to the Janiculan and seen the view of Rome, the Alban Hills, the Campagna and Soracte which you get from there, to have wandered about the Forum and Colosseum and to have climbed the Palatine and the Capitol, is something after all, even if one never saw this marvellous place again.”
Now this second time she was so tired that they passed Rome by on the outward journey and went instead to Naples, Amalfi and Ravello, where the good Signora Palumbo, landlady of the famous little inn, tended her as she lay quite fallow, browsing in books or gazing at sea and sky and sunny coast. But a visit to Pompeii could still arouse all her historical instincts:
“To sit in the Forum there,” she writes to her sister, Mrs. Leonard Huxley, “or in one of the bright gaily painted houses, or restaurants with the wine-jars still perfect in the marble counters, and to think that people were chatting and laughing in those very courts and under those very pictures while Jesus was before Pilate, or Paul was landing at Puteoli, on the same coast some twenty miles north, made an electric moment in life. It is so seldom one actually feels and touches the past. After seeing those temples with their sacrificial altars and cellæ, their priests’ sleeping-rooms and dining-rooms, I read this morning St. Paul’s directions to the Corinthians about meat offered to idols—in fact, the whole first letter—with quite different eyes.”
To the same beloved sister she was indebted for the inimitable tales of her small boy, Julian, which enliven the later pages of David Grieve; for Sandy Grieve was taken direct from this little grandson of the Professor—an “impet” indeed, in his mother’s expressive phrase. “Your stories of Julian have been killing,” wrote Mrs. Ward from Naples; “I was sorry one of them arrived too late for David. By the way, I have not yet written to Willie to say that Sandy is merely an imperfect copy of Julian. He writes ‘We both love Sandy.’ And I am sure when the book comes out that Sandy will be the making of some of the last part.”
A month after Mrs. Ward’s return to England, that is on January 22, 1892, David Grieve appeared, and was at once greeted with a chorus of praise, criticism and general talk. “Were there ever such contradictory judgments!” wrote Mrs. Ward to her publisher when the book had been out a week. “The Master of Balliol writes to me that it is ‘the best novel since George Eliot’—‘extraordinarily pathetic and interesting’—and that Louie is a sketch that Victor Hugo might have drawn. A sledgehammer article in the British Weekly to-night says ‘it is an almost absolute failure.’ Mr. Henry Grenfell and Mr. Haldane have been glued to it till they finished it. According to other people it is ‘ordinary and tedious.’ Well, one must possess one’s soul a little, I suppose, till the real verdict emerges.” The reviews were by no means all laudatory, much criticism being bestowed on the “Paris episode” of David’s entanglement with Elise Delaunay, but the general verdict certainly was that it showed a marked advance on Robert Elsmere in artistic treatment, as well as a power of character-drawing that had not been seen since Middlemarch. This feeling was summed up in Walter Pater’s sentence: “It seems to me to have all the forces of its predecessor at work in it, with perhaps a mellower kind of art—a more matured power of blending disparate literary gifts in one.” Letters poured in upon her again, both from old friends and strangers. “Max Creighton,” now Bishop of Peterborough, who was never tired of poking fun at Mrs. Ward about the “higher criticism,” found time to dash off ten closely written sheets of pseudo-solemn investigation into the authenticity of David’s life-story, beginning: “Though I am prepared to believe that David Grieve was a real personage, it is clear that many mythical elements have been incorporated into his history, and it is the function of criticism to disentangle the real man from the legendary accretions which have gathered round him.” Mrs. Ward replied in suitable vein, and confided to her friend that a few of the reviews had made her very sore. “I am very sorry to hear,” he replied, “that some criticism has been ungenerous.... But I think that we all have to learn the responsibility attached to undertaking the function of a teacher, and the inevitable antagonism which the claim arouses. It has been so always. No amount of rectitude or good intentions avail.”
But the warm admiration expressed by those for whose opinion she cared amply made up for the hostility of these reviews. As she said of it in her Recollections: “It has brought me correspondence from all parts and all classes, more intimate and striking perhaps than in the case of any other of my books.” Many pages might be filled with these letters, but at a distance of thirty years two only shall be saved from oblivion, for the sake of that mere quality of delight which pervades them both and which endeared their writers beyond other men to the company in which they moved. The first is from Professor Huxley; the second from Sir Edward Burne-Jones.
Hodeslea, Staveley Road,
Eastbourne.
February 1, 1892.
My dear Mary,—
You will think I have taken my time about thanking you for David Grieve; but a virtuous resolution to stick to a piece of work I have had on hand for a long time interfered with my finishing it before last night. The temptation was severe, and as I do not often stick to virtuous resolutions under these circumstances, I parade the fact.
I think the account of the Parisian episode of David’s life the strongest thing you have done yet. It is alive—every word of it—and without note or comment produces its ethical effect after the manner of that “gifted authoress,” Dame Nature, who never moralizes.