In the following year the Unitarians forgave her and asked her to deliver the “Essex Hall Lecture,” which she did with a brilliant and suggestive paper entitled “Unitarians and the Future.” Her relations with many Unitarians all through the period of University Hall were, as we have seen, of the most intimate and friendly character, and now, after the publication of Helbeck of Bannisdale, she showed her goodwill to Unitarianism once more by journeying down to Norwich to give an address in aid of the famous old Octagon Chapel there. The address was typical of many others that she gave in these years of her increasing fame; carefully and even elaborately prepared beforehand—for she would never trust herself to speak extempore—it lived for long in the memory of her hearers as a model of its kind, while the outspoken opinions it expressed gave rise to a good deal of controversy in the religious Press. The demands on her time for speeches and addresses in aid of every possible good cause were by this time incessant. She refused nineteen out of twenty, but the twentieth was usually so persuasively put that she succumbed, and then she would live in an agony of apprehension and of accumulated overwork, until the effort was safely over. One of her most finished literary performances was the address she gave in Glasgow in February, 1897, on “the Peasant in Literature”; while her paper on the Transfiguration, entitled “Gospel Interpretation—a Fragment,” given at the Leicester Unitarian Conference in 1900, remains to this day, with some of her audience, as a new and startling revelation of the critical methods which had, for her, thrown so vivid a light on the dark places of the Gospel story. All these carefully-prepared essays—for such, indeed, they were—added enormously to the burden of work which Mrs. Ward already carried, but she loved her audiences and loved to feel that she had pleased and interested, or even shocked them a little. “I want to poke them up,” she would say sometimes, with that flash of mischief or “trotzigkeit” (the word is untranslatable), that endeared her so much to those who knew her well; and poke them up she surely did whenever the subject of her address was a religious one.
But the pace at which she lived during this year (1898), when the work of the Settlement was expanding in every direction, and the preparations for the Invalid Children’s School were going on throughout the winter, led her to feel that in order to write her next book she must have a complete change of scene and, if possible, a far more complete seclusion than that of Stocks, with its accessibility to posts and telegrams. The great subject of Catholicism still held her fascinated, but she was tempted to explore it this second time rather from the artistic than the religious point of view. She had been reading much of Châteaubriand and Mme de Beaumont during the winter, and had felt her imagination kindled by the relationship between the two; why should she not migrate to Rome and there, in the ancient scene, weave anew the old tale of the conquest of “outworn, buried age” by the forces of youth? So while the preparations for the Cripples’ School were hastening forward, in February, 1899, negotiations were also going on with the owners of the vast old Villa Barberini, at Castel Gandolfo, in the Alban Hills, for the taking of its first floor, and various friends in Rome were helping us with advice as to how to make it habitable. It was just such an adventure as Mrs. Ward loved with her whole heart, and when we finally arrived at the little station overlooking the Alban Lake, on March 23, packed ourselves and our luggage into three vetture and drove up to the somewhat forbidding entrance of the Villa, we felt that here, indeed, was a new kingdom—a place to dream of, not to tell!
Never, indeed, will those who took part in it forget the sensations of that arrival—the floods of welcome poured upon us by the delightful little butler, Alessandro, and his stately sister Vittoria, who had been engaged to minister to our wants, our own faltering Italian, and the procession across the gloomy entrance-hall and up the uncarpeted stone staircase, to the rooms of our floor above. A dozen rooms clustering round two huge central saloni, all with tiled floors, exiguous strips of carpet, and wonderfully ugly wall-papers, formed our appartamento; but at each end, east and west, were glorious balconies, the one overlooking the Alban Lake and Monte Cavo, the other the vast sweep of the Campagna, stretching from our falling olive-gardens to the sea. Long we hung over those balconies, forgetting our unpacking, and when at last we left our book-boxes behind and wandered out into the mile-long garden, clothing the side of the hill on the Campagna side, it was only to suffer fresh thrills of wonder and delight. For there, beyond the ilex avenue, that led like a cool green tunnel to the further mysteries, ran a great wall of opus reticulatum, banking up the hill on that side and crowned by overhanging olives, which had formed part of the villa built on this ridge by the Emperor Domitian, just eighteen hundred years before. And there, to the right, on another substructure of Domitian’s, ran the balustraded terrace laid out by the rascally Barberini Pope, Urban VIII (or more probably by one of his still more rascally nephews), from which you beheld, rolling away to the sea, fold after fold of sad Campagna, and far away to the north, between two stone pines, the white dome of St. Peter’s. Mrs. Ward thus described the scene, four days after our arrival, in a letter to her son:
“VILLA BARBERINI,”
March 27, 1899.
‘To-day, you never saw anything so enchanting in the world, as this house and its outlook. At our feet, looking west, lies the rose and green Campagna, melting into the sea on the horizon line, and as it approaches the hills, climbing towards us through all imaginable beauty of spreading olive-groves, and soaring pinewoods—brown pinkish earth, just upturned by the white ploughing oxen,—here and there on the spurs of the hills, great ruined strongholds of the Savelli and Orsini, or fragments of Roman tombs: close below the house a green sloping olive garden, white with daisies under the grey mist of the olives—while if you lean out of window and crane your neck a little, far to the north beyond the descending stone pines, the æthereal sun-steeped plain takes here a consistence in something, which is Rome.
‘We have just come in from wandering along the sunny hill-side towards Albano, past ruins of the Domitian Villa, overgrown with ilex and creepers, through long shady ilex-avenues, and then out into the warmth of the olive-yards, where the cyclamen are coming out and the grass is full of white and blue and pink anemones. Such a deep draught of beauty—of bien-être physical and mental—one has not had for years. But only to-day! Two days ago we woke up to find a world in snow, or rather all the hills white, the Alban Lake lying like steel in its snowy ring, and the silvæ laborantes under the weight. And oh! the cold of these vast bare rooms at night! We spent the day in Rome, where, of course, there was no snow and much shelter, but when we came home, we sat and shivered at dinner, and presently we all dragged the table up to the fire in hope of cheating the draughts a little. Then the north wind howled round us all night, and our spirits were low. But to-day the transformation scene is complete!... We have put in baths and stoves, and carpets and spring mattresses, bought some linen and electro-plate, hired some armchairs—and here we are, not luxurious certainly, but with a fair amount of English comfort about us—quite enough, I fear, to make the Italians stare, who think we must be mad, anyway, to come here in March, and still madder to spend any money on an apartment that we take for three months! The cook, a white-capped, white-jacketed gentleman whom I have only seen once, sends us up excellent meals—except that on one occasion he so far forgot himself as to offer us for dinner, first, pâté de foie gras, and then “movietti,” which, being explained, are small birds, probably siskins. Father and I were too hungry to desist, the poor little things being anyway fried and past praying for, but J. sat by, starving and lofty. And we were punished by finding nothing to eat! So for many reasons, ideal and other, the cook will have to be told to keep his hands off movietti.”
Here, then, we established ourselves, and here, either in the little salotto that we furnished for her, or walking up and down that marvellous terrace, Mrs. Ward thought out her tale of Eleanor, infusing into it strains old and new—Papal, Italian, English, American—but, above all, steeping the whole scene in her own love for the Italy of to-day, as well as for the old, the immemorial Italy.
Those were the times—how far away they seem now, and how small the troubles!—when things were not going happily for the new-made Italian Kingdom, when the country still smarted under the misery and failure of the Abyssinian campaign, and when English visitors were wont to express themselves with insular frankness on the shortcomings of the New Italy, whose squalid activities so impudently disturbed, in their eyes, the shades of the Old. The glamour of the Risorgimento had somehow departed, in the forty years that followed Cavour’s death, so that the Englishman travelling for his pleasure in the former territories of the Pope, was ready enough to criticize the defects of the new Government, while forgetting that if they had remained under the Pope, he would have found therein no Government, in the modern sense, at all. Many elderly people still remained who could remember Rome before Venti Settembre, when the Cardinals drove in state down the Corso, and Pio Nono could be seen taking his part in the processions of Corpus Domini or San Giovanni. Sentimentalists wept at the vandalisms of the Savoyards, who had built a new city, all in squares and rectangles, on the heights of the Esquiline, away from the sights and smells of Old Rome, had put up a huge “Palace of Finance” to record their yearly deficits, and were now cleaning up the Colosseum and the Forum, so that no æsthetic tourist would ever wish to set foot in them again.
Mrs. Ward heard plenty of this sort of talk from English friends, who came out to see us at the Villa, but she, by the simple process of falling in love, headlong, with Italy and the Italians, avoided these pitfalls and was enabled to see with a far truer eye than they the essential soundness of Italian life, whether in town or country—the new ever jostling the old, rudely sometimes, but with the rudeness of life and growth, and the old still influencing and encompassing all things.
“Nothing could be worse than the state of things here between Liberals and Clericals,” she wrote to her son, “yet people seem to rub along and will, I believe, go on rubbing along in much the same way for many a long year. We read the Tribuna and the Civiltà Cattolica, which on opposite sides breathe fire and flame. But life goes on and insensibly certain links grow up, even between the two extremes. For instance, there is a certain priest in Rome, rector of San Lorenzo in Lucina, who has started charitable work rather on the English pattern—no indiscriminate alms, careful inquiry, provision of work, exercise, recreation, country holidays, etc., in fine ‘Settlement’ style. And his workers include people of all beliefs or none—Jews even. But as he is perfectly correct in doctrine and observance, and does not meddle with any disputed points, he is let alone, and the experiment produces a quiet but very real effect. Yesterday our parroco, Padre Ruelli, came to see us here, an enchanting little man, with something of the old maid and the child and the poet all combined. He recited to us Leopardi, and explained some poems in Roman dialect, with an ease, a vivacity, a perfect simplicity, that charmed us all. Then he remembered his function, and before he left gave us a discourse on charity, containing a quotation from the Gospels, largely invented by himself, and so departed.”