The view of the School Board authorities was summed up long afterwards in these sentences from the pen of Mr. Graham Wallas: “She brought to the task not only imagination and sympathy, but a steady and systematic industry, which is the most valuable of all qualities in public life. She was never disheartened, and never procrastinated.”

What was felt of her spirit by those who worked with her more intimately, who saw her week by week in contact with the children themselves, is harder to put into words. Perhaps this little vision of her, recorded by the teacher of the school, Miss Milligan, comes nearest to saving what is, after all, an intangible essence, that once had form and being and is now vanished into air:

‘But above and beyond all else Mrs. Ward was—what she was always called amongst us—‘The Fairy Godmother.’ In the early days before the school grew so big, every child knew this Fairy Godmother personally, and loved her, and we remember how on the occasion of one Christmas Party Mrs. Ward was unable to be present through illness, and the children were so sad that even the Christmas tree could hardly console them. When she had recovered and came again to see them, they gave her a delightful little tea-party, even the poorest children giving half-pence and farthings to buy a bunch of Parma violets, and a sponge-cake—having first ascertained what sort of cake she liked. It was a pretty sight to see them all clustering round her, and her kind, beautiful face whenever she was amongst the children will haunt one for years.”

CHAPTER VIII
HELBECK OF BANNISDALE—CATHOLICS AND UNITARIANS—ELEANOR AND THE VILLA BARBERINI
1896-1900

HELBECK OF BANNISDALE is probably that one among Mrs. Ward’s books on which her fame as a novelist will stand or fall. Though it sold less in England and much less in America than her previous novels at the time of its publication, it has outlasted all the others in the extent of its circulation to-day. In this the opinion of those critics for whose word she cared has been borne out, for they prophesied that it had in it, more than her other books, the element of permanence. “I know not another book that shows the classic fate so distinctly to view,” wrote George Meredith, and some years later, in a long talk with a younger friend about Mrs. Ward’s work, repeated his profound admiration for Helbeck. “The hero, if hero he be, is as fresh a creation as Ravenswood or Rochester,” said another critic, Lord Crewe, “and what a luxury it is to hang a new portrait on one’s walls in this age of old figures in patched garments! I have no idea yet how the story will end, but though the atmosphere is so much less lurid and troubled, I have something of the Wuthering Heights sense of coming disaster. I think the Brontës would have given your story the most valuable admiration of all—that of writers who have succeeded in a rather similar, though by no means the same, field.”

The theme of the book was, as all Mrs. Ward’s readers know, the eternal clash between the mediæval and the modern mind in the persons of Alan Helbeck, the Catholic squire, and Laura Fountain, the child of science and negation; while beyond and behind their tragic loves stands the “army of unalterable law” in the austere northern hills, the bog-lands of the estuary, the river in gentleness and flood. Almost, indeed, can it be said that there are but three characters in Helbeck—Alan himself, Laura, and the river, which in the end takes her tormented spirit. The idea of such a novel had presented itself to Mrs. Ward during a visit that she paid in the autumn of 1896 to her old friends, Mr. James Cropper and his daughter, in that beautiful South Westmorland country which she had known only less well than the Lake District itself ever since her childhood. There the talk turned one day on the fortunes of an old Catholic family (the Stricklands), who had owned Sizergh Castle, near Sedgwick, for more than three centuries, steadfastly enduring the persecutions of earlier days, and, now that persecutions had ceased, fighting a sad and losing battle against poverty and mortgages. “The vision of the old squire and the old house—of all the long vicissitudes of obscure suffering, and dumb clinging to the faith, of obstinate, half-conscious resistance to a modern world, that in the end had stripped them of all their gear and possessions, save only this ‘I will not’ of the soul—haunted me when the conversation was done.”[19] By the end of the long railway-journey from Kendal to London next day she had thought out her story. The deepest experiences of her own life went to the making of it, for had she not been brought up with a Catholic father, made aware from her earliest childhood of the irremediable chasm there between two lovers? The situation in Helbeck was of course wholly different, but in the working out of it Mrs. Ward had the advantage of a certain inborn familiarity with the Catholic mind, which made the characters of this book peculiarly her own.

All through the winter of 1896-7 Mrs. Ward was steeping herself in Catholic literature; then in the early spring—again by the good offices of Mr. Cropper—she became aware that Levens Hall, the wonderful old Tudor house near the mouth of the Kent, which belonged to Capt. Josceline Bagot, might be had for a few weeks or months. She determined to migrate thither as soon as possible and to write her story amid the very scenes which she had planned for it. How well do I remember the grey spring evening (it was the 6th of March) on which—after delays and confusions far beyond our small deserts—we drove up to the river front of the old house; the hurried rush through glorious dark rooms, and a half timid exploration of the garden, peopled with gaunt shapes of clipped and tortured yews. Levens was to us just such another adventure as Hampden House had been, eight years before, but this time there was no bareness, no dilapidation, nothing but the ripe product of many centuries of peaceful care. Yet Levens was famous for its crooked descent, its curse and its “grey lady”—an accessory, this latter, of sadly modern origin, as we found on inquiring into her local history. Mrs. Ward, however, wove her skilfully into her story, as she wove the fell-farm of the family of “statesmen” to whom Miss Cropper introduced her, or the mournful peat-bogs of the estuary, or the daffodils crowding up through the undergrowth in Brigsteer Wood, or covering with sheets of gold the graves round Cartmel Fell Chapel.

Yet Bannisdale itself is “a house of dream,” as Mrs. Ward herself described it[20]; neither wholly Levens nor wholly Sizergh, placed somewhere in the recesses of Levens Park, and looking south over the Kent. “And just as Bannisdale, in my eyes, is no mortal house, and if I were to draw it, it would have outlines and features all its own, so the story of the race inhabiting it, and of Helbeck its master, detached itself wholly from that of any real person or persons, past or present. Those who know Levens will recognize many a fragment here and there that has been worked into Bannisdale: and so with Sizergh. But Helbeck’s house, as it stands in the book, is his and his alone. And in the same way the details and vicissitudes of the Helbeck ancestry, and the influences that went to build up Helbeck himself, were drawn from many fields, then passed through the crucible of composition, and scarcely anything now remains of those original facts from which the book sprang.”

Many Catholic books, in which she browsed “with what thoughts,” as Carlyle would say, followed her to Levens, giving her that grip of detail in matters of belief or ritual, without which she could not have approached her subject, but which she had now learnt to absorb and re-fashion far more skilfully than in the days of Robert Elsmere. She loved to discuss these matters with her father, from whom she had no secrets, in spite of their divergencies of view; when he came to visit us at Levens—still a tall and beautiful figure, in spite of his seventy-three years—they talked of them endlessly, and when he returned to Dublin she wrote him such letters as the following:

‘One of the main impressions of this Catholic literature upon me is to make me perceive the enormous intellectual pre-eminence of Newman. Another impression—I know you will forgive me for saying quite frankly what I feel—has been to fill me with a perfect horror of asceticism, or rather of the austerities—or most of them—which are indispensable to the Catholic ideal of a saint. We must talk this over, for of course I realize that there is much to be said on the other side. But the simple and rigid living which I have seen, for various ideal purposes, in friends of my own—like T. H. Green—seems to me both religious and reasonable, while I cannot for the life of me see anything in the austerities, say of the Blessed Mary Alacoque, but hysteria and self-murder. The Divine Power occupies itself for age on age in the development of all the fine nerve-processes of the body, with their infinite potencies for good or evil. And instead of using them for good, the Catholic mystic destroys them, injures her digestion and her brain, and is then tortured by terrible diseases which she attributes to every cause but the true one—her own deliberate act—and for which her companions glorify her, instead of regarding them as what—surely—they truly are, God’s punishment. No doubt directors are more careful nowadays than they were in the seventeenth century, but her life is still published by authority, and the ideal it contains is held up to young nuns.