“We had,” she wrote, “a very interesting talk about the War and Dreyfus. ‘Oh! I am all with the English,’ he said—‘they could not let that state of things in the Transvaal continue—the struggle was inevitable. But then I have lived in England. I love England, and English people, and can look at matters calmly. As to the treatment of English people in Paris, remember, Madame, that we are just now a restless and discontented people. We are a disappointed people—we have lost our great position in the world, and we don’t see how to get it back. That makes us rude and bitter. And then our griefs against England go back to the Crimea. The English officers then made themselves disliked—and in the great war of 1870, you were not sympathetic—we thought you might have done something for us, and you did nothing. Then you were much too violent about the Affaire. The first trial was abominable, but by the second trial we stand, we the modérés who think ourselves honest fellows. But you made no difference. The Press of both countries has done great harm. All that explains the present state of things. It is not the Boers—that is mainly a pretext, an opportunity.”
It is perhaps a curious fact that while German learning and German methods of historical criticism had compelled Mrs. Ward’s admiration from her earliest years, no crop of personal friendships with Germans had sprung from these sowings, as in the case of her French studies and her Italian sojournings. Dear, homely German governesses were almost the only children of the Fatherland with whom she had personal contact, her relations with certain Biblical scholars and with the translators and publishers of her books being confined to pen and ink. But there was one German scholar with whom she had at any rate a lengthy correspondence—Dr. Adolf Jülicher, of Marburg, whose monumental work on the New Testament she presented one day, in a moment of enthusiasm, to her younger daughter (aged seventeen), suggesting that she should translate it into English. The daughter dutifully obeyed, devoting the best part of the next three years to the task—only to find, when the work was all but finished, that the German professor had in the meantime brought out a new edition of his book, running to some 100 pages of additional matter. Dismay reigned at Stocks, but there was no help for it: the additional 100 pages had to be tackled. In the end Mrs. Ward herself seized on the proofs and went all through them, pen in hand; little indeed was left of the daughter’s unlucky sentences by the time the process was complete. In vain we would point out to her that this was the “Lower Criticism” and therefore unworthy of her serious attention; she would merely make a face at us and plunge with ardour—perhaps after a heavy day of writing—into the delightful task of defacing poor Mr. Reginald Smith’s clean page-proofs. For these were the days when Mr. Reginald had practically taken over the business of Smith & Elder’s from his father-in-law, George Smith, and one of the diversions that he allowed himself was to print Mrs. Ward’s daughter’s translation free of all profit to the firm. The profits, indeed, if any, were to go in full to the translator, but naturally the expenses of proof-correction stood on the debit side of the account. Hence the anxiety of the person who had once been seventeen whenever Mrs. Ward had had a particularly energetic day with the proofs of Jülicher!
Eleanor had had a triumphal progress in the monthly numbers of Harper’s Magazine throughout this year (1900), and appeared at length in book-form on November 1. Mrs. Ward’s pleasure in its reception was much enhanced by the warm appreciation given to Mr. Albert Sterner’s illustrations—clever and charming drawings, which had wonderfully caught the spirit of her characters and of the Italian scene, for Mr. Sterner had spent two or three weeks with us at the Villa Barberini. He and Mrs. Ward were fast friends, and it was always a matter of real delight to her whenever he could be secured to illustrate one of her subsequent novels. This was to be the case with William Ashe, Fenwick’s Career and The Case of Richard Meynell. The publication of Eleanor coincided, however, with news of Mr. Arnold’s serious illness in Dublin, so that the chorus of delight in her “Italian novel” reached Mrs. Ward’s ears muffled by the presence of death.
Thomas Arnold died on November 12, 1900, tended to the last by his surviving children, and by the devoted second wife (Miss Josephine Benison), whom he had married in 1889. Mrs. Ward’s affection for him had never wavered throughout these many years, as the letters which she wrote him about all her doings, once or even twice in every week, attest to this day; his mystical, child-like spirit attracted her invincibly. Three days after his death she wrote to Bishop Creighton, over whom the same summons was already hovering:
November 15, 1900.
My dear Bishop,—
Many, many thanks. It was very dear of you to write to me, especially at this time of illness, and I prize much all that you say. My father’s was a rare and hidden nature. Among his papers that have now come to me I have come across the most touching and remarkable things—things that are a revelation even to his children. The service yesterday in Newman’s beautiful little University Church, the early mass, the bright morning light on the procession of friends and clergy through the cypress-lined paths of Glasnevin, the last ‘requiescat in pace,’ answered by the Amen of the little crowd—all made a fitting close to his gentle and laborious life. He did not suffer much, I am thankful to say, and he knew that we were all round him and smiled upon us to the last.
And he on his side regarded her with an adoring affection that sometimes found touching expression in his letters, as when, a few months after the publication of David Grieve, he broke out in these words:
“My own dearest Polly (let me call you for once what I often called you when a child), God made you what you are, and those who love you will be content to leave you to Him. He gave you that wide-flashing, swiftly-combining wit, ‘glancing from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven’; He gave you also the power of turning your thoughts, with deft and felicitous hand, into forms of beauty. No one can divine what new problems will occupy you in time to come, nor how you will solve them; but one may feel sure that with you, as Emerson says, ‘the future will be worthy of the past.’”
Yet there was hardly a public question, especially in his later years, on which Mrs. Ward and her father did not differ profoundly; for Tom Arnold hated “Imperialism” and the modern world, especially such manifestations of it as the Omdurman campaign and the South African War. Mrs. Ward, on the other hand, watched the former with all the pride and dread that comes from a personal stake in the adventure; for was not Colonel Neville Lyttelton in command of a brigade, and had he not left his wife and children under our care at Stocks Cottage? She had found a task for Mrs. Lyttelton’s quick mind, to while away the too-long hours of that summer, in a translation into English of the “Pensées” of Joubert; their consultations over the fine shades of his meaning, while the bees hummed in the lime-tree on the lawn, became the light and relaxation of her days, while, later on, the Introduction she contributed to the book helped its appearance with the public. And when Colonel Lyttelton came home, a happy soldier, and pegged out the Omdurman campaign for us on the drawing-room floor with matches, how was it possible not to rejoice with him in the overthrow of so dark a tyranny as the Khalifa’s?