...φἱη ἑν πατρἱδι γαἱη
and the fells which stand around the little church in the Langdale valley looked down upon another grave.
It was long before Mrs. Ward could surmount this grief. That summer (1911) she was busied with the organization of her Playgrounds for the thousands upon thousands of London children who had no Stocks to play in.
“Sometimes,” she wrote, “when I think of the masses of London children I have been going through I seem to imagine him beside me, his eager little hand in mine, looking at the dockers’ children, ragged, half-starved, disfigured, with his grave sweet eyes, eyes so full already of humanity and pity. Is it so that his spirit lives with us—the beloved one—part for ever of all that is best in us, all that is nearest to God, in whom, I must believe, he lives.”
During these years between her visit to America and the outbreak of War, Mrs. Ward produced no less than six novels, including the two on America and Canada which we have already mentioned. She also issued, in the autumn of 1911, with Mr. Reginald Smith’s help and guidance, the “Westmorland Edition” of her earlier books (from Miss Bretherton to Canadian Born), contributing to them a series of critical and autobiographical Prefaces which, as the Oxford Chronicle said, “to a great extent disarm criticism because in them Mrs. Ward appears as her own best critic.” Time and again, in these Introductions, we find her seizing upon the weak point in her characters or her constructions: how Robert Elsmere “lacks irony and detachment,” how David Grieve is “didactic in some parts and amateurish in others,” how in Sir George Tressady Marcella “hovers incorporate and only very rarely finds her feet.” This candour made the new edition all the more acceptable to her old admirers, and set the critics arguing once more on their old theme, as to whether Mrs. Ward possessed or not a sense of humour. If it may be permitted to one so near to her to venture an opinion on this point, it is that Mrs. Ward, like all those who possess the ardent temperament, the will to move the world, worked first and foremost by the methods of direct attack rather than by the subtler shafts of humour; but no one could live beside her, especially in these years of her maturity, without falling under the spell of something which, if not humour, was at least a vivid gift of “irony and detachment,” asserting itself constantly at the expense of herself and her doings and finding its way, surely, into so many of her later books. Her minor characters are usually instinct with it; they form the chorus, or the “volley of silvery laughter” for ever threatening her too ardent heroes from the Meredithian “spirit up aloft,” and show that she herself is by no means totally carried away by the ardours she creates. My own feeling is that this gift of “irony and detachment” grew stronger with the years, perhaps as the original motive force grew weaker, and though she maintained to the end her unconquerable fighting spirit, as shown in her struggle against the Suffrage and her keen interest in politics, these things were crossed more frequently by humorous returns upon herself which made her all the more delightful to those who knew her well. And in the little things of life, no one was ever more easy to move to helpless laughter over her own foibles. When she had bought no less than five hats for her daughter on a motor-drive from Stocks to London—“on spec, darling, at horrid little cheap shops in the Edgware Road”—or when at Cadenabbia, she had actually sallied forth unattended in order to buy a pair of the peasants’ string shoes, and had gone through a series of harrowing adventures, no one who heard her tell the tale could doubt that she was richly endowed with the power of laughing at herself. In her writings she was, perhaps, a little sensitive about the point.
“Am I so devoid of humour?” she wrote to Mr. Reginald Smith, in September, 1911. “I was looking at David Grieve again the other day—surely there is a good deal that is humorous there. And if I may be egotistical and repeat them, I heard such pleasing things about David from Lord Arran in Dublin the other day. He knows it absolutely by heart, and he says that when he was campaigning in South Africa two battered copies of David were read to pieces by him and his brother-officers, and every night they discussed it round the camp fires.”
The inference being, no doubt, that a set of hard-bitten British officers would hardly have wasted their scanty leisure on a book that totally lacked the indispensable national ingredient.
The last novel with a definitely religious tendency to which Mrs. Ward set her hand was her well-known sequel to Robert Elsmere, the “Case” of the Modernist clergyman, Richard Meynell. It was by far the most considerable work of her later years and represented the fruit of her ripest meditations on the evolution of religious thought and practice in the twenty years that had elapsed since Robert’s day. Ever since the Loisy case she had been deeply possessed by the literature of Modernism, seeing in it the force which would, she believed, in the end regenerate the churches.
“What interests and touches me most, in religion, at the present moment,” she wrote to Mrs. Creighton, in September, 1907, “is Liberal Catholicism. It has a bolder freedom than anything in the Anglican Church, and a more philosophic and poetic outlook. It seems to me at any rate to combine the mystical and scientific powers in a wonderful degree. If I only could believe that it would last, and had a future!”