“Don’t imagine, dearest, that I find myself in antagonism to all this literature. The truth in many respects is quite the other way. The deep personal piety of good Catholics, and the extent to which their religion enters into their lives, are extraordinarily attractive. How much we, who are outside, have to learn from them!”
To an ex-Catholic friend, Mr. Addis, who had undertaken to look over the manuscript for her, she wrote some time later, when the book was nearly finished:
‘In my root-idea of him, Helbeck was to represent the old Catholic crossed with that more mystical and enthusiastic spirit, brought in by such converts as Ward and Faber, under Roman and Italian influence. I gather, both from books and experience, that the more fervent ideas and practices, which the old Catholics of the ’forties disliked, have, as a matter of fact, obtained a large ascendancy in the present practice of Catholics, just as Ritualism has forced the hands of the older High Churchmen. And I thought one might, in the matter of austerities, conceive a man directly influenced by the daily reading of the Lives of the Saints, and obtaining in middle life, after probation and under special circumstances, as it were, leave to follow his inclinations.
“I take note most gratefully of all your small corrections. What I am really anxious about now is the points—in addition to pure jealous misery—on which Laura’s final breach with Helbeck would turn. I think on the terror of confession—on what would seem to her the inevitable uncovering of the inner life and yielding of personality that the Catholic system involves—and on the foreignness of the whole idea of sin, with its relative, penance. But I find it extremely hard to work out!”
As the weeks of our stay at Levens passed by, while the sea-trout came up the Kent and challenged the barbarian members of the family to many a tussle in the Otter-pool, or the “turn-hole,” or the bend of the river just above the bridge, Mrs. Ward plunged ever deeper into her subject, though the difficulties under which she laboured in the sheer writing of her chapters were almost more disabling than ever. “For a week my arm has been almost useless, alas!” she wrote in May; “I have had it in a sling and bandaged up. I partly strained it in rubbing A., but I must also have caught cold in it. Anyhow it has been very painful, and I have been in quite low spirits, looking at Chapter III, which would not move! The chairs and tables here don’t suit it at all—the weather is extremely cold—and altogether I believe I am pining for Stocks!” But before we left the wonderful old house many friends had come to stay with us there, renewing their own tired spirits in its beauty and charm, and in the society of its temporary mistress. Henry James and the Henry Butchers, Katharine Lyttelton and her Colonel, Bron Herbert and Victor Lytton, fishers of sea-trout,—and, on Easter Monday, “Max Creighton” himself, now Bishop of London, much worn by the antics of Mr. Kensit and his friends, but otherwise only asking to “eat the long miles” in walks along Scout Scar, or over the “seven bens and seven fens” that lay between us and the lovely little Chapel of St. Anthony on Cartmel Fell. Such talks as they had, he and Mrs. Ward, at all times when she was not deliberately burying herself in her study to escape the temptation! The rest of us would listen fascinated, watching for that gesture of his, when he would throw back his head so that the under side of his red beard appeared to view—a gesture of triumph over his opponent, as he fondly thought, until her next remark showed him there was still much to win. Henry James was more demure in his tastes, walking beside the pony-tub when Mrs. Ward went for her afternoon drive through Levens Park, or along the Brigsteer lane, and “letting fall words of wisdom as we went” (for so it is recorded by the driver of the tub). Ah, if those words could but have been gathered up and saved from all-swallowing oblivion! Mr. James’s friendship for Mrs. Ward had already endured for ten or twelve years before this visit to Levens, but these days in the old house gave it a deeper and more intimate tone, which it never lost thenceforward. He never wholly approved of her art as a novelist—how could he, when it differed so fundamentally from his own?—but his admiration for her as a woman, his affection for her as a friend, knew very few limits indeed. And her feeling for him was to grow and deepen through another twenty years of happy friendship, ripening towards that day when, in England’s darkest time, he chose to make himself a son of England, and then, soon afterwards, followed the many lads whom he had loved “where track there is none.”
Mrs. Ward finally quitted Levens before the end of her lease, owing to a prolonged attack of influenza, which spoilt her last weeks there, but she always looked back to her stay in the “Border Castle,” as Mr. James had dubbed it, as an enchanting episode, taking her back to the fell-country and its people with an intimacy she had not known since those long-past childish days, when she would dance up the path to Sweden Bridge, the grown-ups loitering behind. For the remainder of this year (1897) she was pressing on with her book, in spite of ever-recurring waves of ill-health and of constant over-pressure with the affairs of the Settlement. By the autumn, when the new buildings were actually open, this pressure became so formidable that she was obliged to take a small house at Brighton for three months, in order to spend three days of each week there in complete seclusion. The book prospered fairly well, but the formal opening of the Settlement, which had been fixed for February 12, 1898, was very much on her mind—at least until she had succeeded in persuading Mr. Morley to make the principal speech. This, however, he consented to do with all the graciousness inspired by his old friendship for its founder; and when the ceremony was actually over Mrs. Ward retired to Stocks for a final struggle with the last chapters of Helbeck. “Except, perhaps, in the case of “Bessie Costrell,” she wrote in her Recollections, “I was never more possessed by a subject, more shut in by it from the outer world.” And in these last few weeks of the long effort she walked as in a dream, though the dream was too often broken by cruel attacks of her old illness. She fought them down, however, and emerged victorious on March 25,—more dead than alive, in the rueful opinion of her family. But the usual remedy of a flight to Italy was tried again with sovereign effect, and at Cadenabbia on Lake Como, in Florence and on Maggiore, she felt the flooding back of a sense of physical ease. The book did not appear until the month of June, when both Press and friends received it with so warm an enthusiasm as to “produce in me that curious mood, which for the artist is much nearer dread than boasting—dread that the best is over, and that one will never earn such sympathy again.” One discordant note was, however, struck by a review in the Nineteenth Century by a certain Father Clarke, violently attacking Helbeck as a caricature of Catholicism, and picking various small holes in its technicalities of Catholic practice. The article was answered in the next number of the Nineteenth Century by another Catholic, Mr. St. George Mivart, and Mrs. Ward’s fairness to Catholicism vindicated; indeed, many of the other reviews had accused her of making the ancient faith too attractive in the person of Helbeck. Mr. C. E. Maurice wrote to her to protest against Father Clarke’s attack, remarking incidentally that “if any religious body have cause of complaint against you for this book, it is the Protestant Nonconformists” and asking her in the course of his letter “what point you generally start from in deciding to write a novel; whether from the wish to work out a special thesis, or from the desire to deal with certain characters who have interested you, or from being impressed by a special story, actual or possible?” Mrs. Ward replied to him as follows:
“I think a novel with me generally springs from the idea of a situation involving two or three characters. Helbeck arose from a fragment of conversation heard in the North, and was purely human and not controversial in its origin. It is in these conflicts between old and new, as it has always seemed to me, that we moderns find our best example of compelling fate,—and the weakness of the personal life in the grip of great forces that regard it not, or seem to regard it not, is just as attractive as ever it was to the imagination—do you not think so? The forms are different, the subject is the same.”
To Mr. Mivart himself she wrote:
‘I hear with great interest from Mr. Knowles that you are going to break a lance with Father Clarke on poor Helbeck’s behalf in the forthcoming Nineteenth Century. I need not say that I shall read very diligently what you have to say. Meanwhile I am venturing to send you these few Catholic reviews, as specimens of the very different feelings that seem to have been awakened in many quarters from those expressed by Father Clarke. It amuses me to put the passages from Father Vaughan’s sermon that concern Helbeck himself side by side with Father Clarke’s onslaught upon him.