Gentle beasties through pushed a cold long nose.
Mrs. Ward’s feeling for the old giant of Box Hill led her on all occasions to champion his right to be regarded as the greatest living master of English—as may be seen from the following spirited letter (January 19, 1902) addressed to the secretary of the Society of Authors, when that body had, in her view, made the wrong decision in recommending Herbert Spencer instead of Meredith for the Nobel Prize.
“However eminent Mr. Spencer may be” (she wrote), “and however important his contribution to English thought, there must be a great many of us who will feel, when it is a question of interrogating English opinion as to the most distinguished name among us in pure literature, there can be only one answer—George Meredith. It is no reply to say that the Swedish Academy will probably know something of Mr. Herbert Spencer, and may know little or nothing about Mr. Meredith. That is their affair, not ours. The meaning and purpose of this prize has been illustrated by the selection of M. Sully Prud’homme. Its recipient should be surely, first and foremost, a man of letters, and, if possible, a representative of what the Germans call ‘Dichtung,’ whether in prose or verse.
‘If Mr. Meredith had written nothing but the love-scenes in Richard Feverel; The Egoist; and certain passages of description in Vittoria and Beauchamp’s Career, he would still stand at the head of English ‘Dichtung.’ There is no critic now who can be ranged with him in position, and no poet. As a man of letters he is easily first; to compare Mr. Spencer’s power of clear statement with the play of imaginative genius in Meredith would be absurd—in the literary field. And this is or should be a literary award.
“I trust that in writing thus I shall not be misunderstood. I am not venturing to dispute Mr. Spencer’s great position in the history of English thought—I have neither the wish nor the capacity for anything of the kind. But to be the philosopher of evolution is one thing; to be our first man of letters is another. I would submit that English opinion is asked to point out our most distinguished man of letters, and that if we cannot unanimously say ‘George Meredith!’ we are not worthy that Genius should come among us at all.”
But only two years after this outburst (which I feel sure she showed him) her comradeship with “Will” ended for ever, and his sufferings ceased. He died on May 29, 1904.[24]
About the same time as she lost her beloved brother, Mrs. Ward acquired a new member of the family in the person of her son-in-law, George Macaulay Trevelyan, son of Sir George Otto Trevelyan. He and her younger daughter became engaged at the Villa Bonaventura, Cadenabbia—which Mrs. Ward had taken from Mr. Alfred Trench—in May, 1903—and ten months later they were married at Oxford. Mrs. Ward soon became much devoted to her son-in-law, whose ardent faiths and non-faiths challenged and stimulated her, bringing her into touch with movements of thought that ran parallel to, but had not yet mingled with, her own belief in a more reasonable Christianity. The walls of her room at Stocks would re-echo, during his visits, with the most fundamental discussions! Mr. Chamberlain, too, was a disturbing element in those days, with his Tariff Reform campaign, for what was Mrs. Ward to do when her son took one side and her son-in-law the other—and when, moreover, her own well-trained mind was perfectly capable of understanding the arguments of each? But whatever the subject of these discussions, whether politics or religion, they only served to increase the affection between the two, which grew and deepened with every turn of fortune that the years might bring.
It is perhaps interesting to speculate what might have been the development of Mrs. Ward’s powers if her intellect had never been captured by the dramatic spell, and if other sides of that “wide-flashing” mind had been allowed to work themselves out unchecked. For in the lull that followed the completion of Eleanor she had conceived the writing of a “Life of Christ” based on such a re-interpretation of the Gospel story as she believed had been made possible by the research of the last half-century. She brooded much over this theme and even discussed it with her publishers. But whether it was that her continued ill-health made her shrink from the heavy toil involved by such a task—the re-reading and collating of all her Germans, the study of an infinite amount of fresh material, and probably a journey to Palestine—or whether the practical side of Christianity had by now absorbed too large a share of her time and her powers, the project never came to fruition, though it never ceased to attract her.
And indeed, Mrs. Ward’s practical adventures in well-doing during these years would have been enough to fill the lives of any three ordinary individuals, without any such diversions as the writing of novels or the hammering out of plays. The affairs of the Settlement were always on her shoulders, not only as regards the financial burden of its maintenance, but in all the personal questions that inevitably arose in such a busy hive of humanity. If the nurse of the Invalid School had words with the porter, the case was sure to come up to her for judgment, while any misdemeanour among the young people themselves who frequented the building would cause her the most anxious searchings of heart. But “it does not do to start things and then let them drift,” as she wrote in these days to one of us, and she continued to cherish the Settlement, to support the Warden (Mr. Tatton) in his difficulties and to beg for money, with an extraordinary vitality as well as an extraordinary patience. Yet in spite of all, the Settlement was far more of joy to her than of burden, and on its children’s side it never ceased to be pure joy from the beginning. For was it not always possible to devise new ways of making the children happy, as well as to continue the old? The principal way in which Mrs. Ward’s work extended itself at this time was in the opening of the “Vacation School,” designed to bring in from the streets in large numbers the children left stranded during the August holiday,—and if anyone will take the trouble to wander through the back streets during that happy season, and to note what he sees, there will be little doubt in his mind that such a school must be a real deliverance. Mrs. Ward had taken the idea from an account by Mr. Henry Curtis in Harper’s Magazine (early in 1902) of the first schools of the kind started in New York, and her mind had at once grasped the possibilities of such a scheme. There stood the Settlement with its fine shady garden in the rear, empty and dumb through the holidays: surely it would be a sin not to use it!
She collected a special fund from a few old friends of the Settlement, appointed an admirable director in the person of Mr. E. G. Holland, an assistant master at the Highgate Secondary School, enlisted the help of all the schools around to send us such children only as had no chance of a country holiday, and then issued invitations to some 750, divided into two batches, morning and afternoon. The result was an orderly and delighted crowd which, owing to Miss Churcher’s and Mr. Holland’s faultless organization, moved from class to class and from garden to building without the smallest hitch, played and dug in the “waste ground” beyond the garden, specially thrown open to the school by the Duke of Bedford, and when rain came marched into the building and filled its basement rooms and the pleasant library and class-rooms without any confusion or squabbling. The occupations were much the same as those already in use for the “Recreation School,” and never failed to attract and then to keep the children; while the spirit of good fellowship that the atmosphere of the school engendered had a marked effect on their manners as the four weeks of the school passed away. Here is Mrs. Ward’s own account of the contrast presented by the children as they were in the Vacation School and as they could not help being in a mean street only half a mile away:[25]