But the South African War was a matter of far more mingled feelings, though on the whole Mrs. Ward was persuaded that we were right as against President Kruger and his methods, and upheld this view in many a letter to her father:
“I am not without sympathy for the Boers,” she wrote to him in November, 1899, “and I often try to realize their case and how the invasive unwelcome English power looks to them. But it seems to me that history—which for me is God—makes very stern decisions between nations. The Boers have had their chance of an ascendancy which must have been theirs if they had known how to work for it and deserve it; they have missed it, and the chance now passes to England. If she is not worthy of it, it won’t remain with her—that one may be sure. But I must say that the loyalty of the other colonies—especially of French-speaking Canada; the pacification and good government of India, the noble development of Egypt, are to me so many signs that at present we are fit to rule, and are meant to rule. But we shall rule only so long as we execute righteous judgment and so long as it is for the good of the world that we should rule.”
She would have liked to see peace made after Lord Roberts’ early victories, and was for a time in favour of such terms as would not have involved annexation. But when this hope failed she settled down to endure the thing, and in 1901 devoted much time and labour to the improvement of the Boer women’s and children’s lot in the concentration camps. She joined the committee of the Victoria League formed for this purpose. And, as inevitably happens in all such controversies, the passion felt by the other side contributed to the hardening of her own opinion, so that the end of the war found her more staunch an Imperialist, more definite a Conservative, than she would have admitted herself to be before it.
It was during the war-shadowed winter of 1900-1901 that Mrs. Ward suffered a series of heavy personal losses in the death of many of her oldest friends, beginning with Mr. James Cropper, of Ellergreen, her quasi-uncle,[21] with whom she had been on the most affectionate terms ever since her childhood. This occurred a bare month before her father’s death; then, two months later (January 14, 1901), came the blow that the whole country felt as a catastrophe, the death of Bishop Creighton, and, early in April, a loss that came home very sadly to Mrs. Ward, that of her well-beloved publisher and friend, George Smith. “I never had a truer friend or a wiser counsellor,” she wrote of him, and indeed he combined these qualities with so shrewd a humour and so unvarying a kindness that Mrs. Ward might well count herself fortunate to have enjoyed fourteen years of familiar intercourse with him.
“His position as a publisher was very remarkable,” she wrote to her son. “He was the friend of his authors, their counsellor, banker and domestic providence often—as Murray was to Byron. But nobody would ever have dared to take the liberties with him that Byron did with Murray.”
When he was gone, Mrs. Ward was fortunate enough to find in his successor, Reginald Smith, an equally just and generous adviser, on whose friendship she leant more and more until death took him too, in the tragic winter of 1916.
The remarkable success of Eleanor in the United States (where the character of Lucy Foster won all hearts) led to inquiries being made from certain theatrical quarters there as to whether Mrs. Ward would not undertake to dramatize it. The suggestion attracted her at once, for though she had never written anything for the stage she had, all her life, been a keenly interested critic of plays and actors and a devoted adherent of French methods as against the heavy English stage conventions. But when she seriously confronted the problem she felt herself too ignorant of stagecraft to undertake the task unaided, and therefore called in to her counsels that delightful writer of light comedy, Julian Sturgis, whom she persuaded to collaborate with her. Could she have foreseen the play’s delays, the insolence of box offices and the manifold despairs that awaited her in this new path, probably even her high courage would have turned aside, but the co-operation it brought her with so rare a spirit as Julian Sturgis was at any rate a very living compensation. In the spring of 1901 Mr. Sturgis came out to stay with us in a villa we had taken (on the spur of the moment) on the outskirts of Rapallo (not then celebrated as the scene of international “pacts”), and together he and his hostess plunged with ardour into the business of making their puppets move. The work was extraordinarily hard, while the skies above our crimson villa behaved as though it were Westmorland and the Mediterranean thundered on the sea-wall of our garden; but Mrs. Ward enjoyed the stimulus and novelty of it immensely and always declared that she owed much even for her novelist’s art to that week of “grind” with Mr. Sturgis. Nor was it quite all grind, for one day, when the sun at last shone, we took our guest and his tall Eton boy up the long pilgrimage-way to the Madonna di Montallegro, overtaking a party of laden peasant-women as we went to whom Mr. Sturgis offered some passing kindness. His advances were met by a torrent of words in some uncouth dialect which none of us could understand, but he chose to appropriate them to himself as a prayer offered to “Santo Giulio,” and “Santo Giulio” he remained to Mrs. Ward and all of us for the too-short remnant of his life.[22] The play stood up and lived by the time his visit was ended; but this was only the beginning of endless heartaches and disappointments. At first there were hopes of the Duse, then of Mrs. Pat; then Mr. Benson was to produce it with a clever and charming amateur actress of our acquaintance in the role of Eleanor; then at length a real promise was secured from a well-known actor-manager, and all was fixed for May, 1902. But the promise was not an agreement, and was therefore mortal; when it died Mr. Sturgis’s only comment was: “My dear Mrs. Ward, I am not a bit surprised. My deep distrust of the theatrical world, wherein pretending gets into the blood, makes me sceptical of any promises which are not stamped, signed and witnessed by a legion of angels.”
Already, however, Miss Marion Terry, Miss Robins and Miss Lilian Braithwaite had promised in no spirit of “pretending” to play the three principal parts, so that with things so well advanced on that side Mrs. Ward determined to go forward. Since the managers were timid she would take a theatre and bear the risk herself. Finally all was settled with the Court Theatre, and the delightful agony of the rehearsals began (October, 1902). Miss Terry sprained a tendon in her leg, but gallantly limped through her part, while the constant changes called for in the words, the cuts and compressions, made a bewildering variety of versions that left the lay onlooker gasping. Mrs. Ward, however, was equal to all occasions—even to a last-minute change in the actor who played Manisty[23]—until not one of the cast but was moved to astonishment and admiration, not only by her versatility, but by her long-suffering. Add to this her endless consideration for themselves—for their comfort, their feelings or their clothes—and it is easy to understand the feelings of real affection which grew up between author and actors as the play went on. Yet all was of no avail, or, at least, it failed to conquer the great heart of the British public. The cast was admirable, the reviews were kind—though Mr. Walkley in The Times perhaps gave the key to the situation when he ended his article with the words, “But then, who could play Manisty?” Yet, somehow, the audience (after the first day) failed to fill the seats. Eleanor ran for only fifteen matinées, October 30-November 15, and though much was said of a revival, she only once again saw the footlights—in a couple of special matinées given in aid of the Passmore Edwards Settlement. And yet—what fun it had been! Though the financial loss made her rueful, Mrs. Ward always looked back to those six weeks at the Court Theatre as a breathless but happy episode, during which she had looked deep into the technique of a new art and brought from it, not success indeed, but much valuable experience which she might bring to bear upon her future work. Certainly the two novels of these years, Lady Rose’s Daughter and the Marriage of William Ashe, gained much in sureness of touch, terseness and finish from Mrs. Ward’s dramatic studies; Lady Rose was in fact acclaimed by the critics as the book in which, at last, the writer showed “the predominance of the artistic over the ethical instinct, the subordination of the didactic to the artistic impulse.”
She never dramatized it, but a dramatized version of William Ashe, at which Mrs. Ward toiled extremely hard, in collaboration with Miss Margaret Mayo, during 1905, was accepted by an American “stock company” and acquired a considerable reputation in the States. In London, however, where it was performed by a semi-American cast in 1908, it fell very flat, Mrs. Ward being fortunately spared the sight of it owing to the fact that she herself was across the Atlantic at the time. The actress who played Kitty, wishing to leave the author in no doubt as to the cause of its failure, cabled to her after the first night, “Press unfriendly to play—my performance highly praised!” Even so, however, the Manager decided to withdraw it after a three weeks’ run, and no play of Mrs. Ward’s was ever afterwards performed in England.
Among the most absorbed spectators of the first performance of Eleanor, watching it from an arm-chair brought for his ease into the author’s box, was the pathetic figure of Mrs. Ward’s eldest brother, William Arnold. His health had broken down some years before, while he was still assistant editor of the Manchester Guardian, and he had come to live, with his wife, in a small house in Chelsea, where it was Mrs. Ward’s delight to find him, on his better days, and to discuss all things in heaven and earth with him. No comradeship could ever have been closer than was theirs, though intercourse with him would always end in a strangling heartache for his state of health, for noble gifts submerged by bodily pain, despite as gallant a fight as was ever waged by suffering man. Mrs. Ward was for ever watching over him and helping him; sending him abroad in search of sun and warmth; having him to stay with her at Stocks, in London, or at some villa in Italy; encouraging him to do what work he could. But most they loved their talks together. Their tastes would usually agree on literary matters, and differ on politics, but no matter what the subject, his flashes of mischief and malice would light up the most ordinary topic, and no one loved better to draw him out, and to set him railing or praising, than his sister. How they would talk, sometimes, about the details of her craft, about Jane Austen, or Trollope, or George Meredith! For this latter they both had a feeling akin to adoration, based on a knowledge not only of his novels but of his poems (then not a common accomplishment); and I remember W. T. A. once saying to me that he thought the jolliest line in English poetry was