From André Chevrillon
‘On est heureux d’y retrouver ce qui nous a paru si longtemps une des principales caractéristiques de la littérature anglaise: ce sentiment de la beauté morale, cette émotion devant la qualité de la conduite qui prennent par leur intensité même une valeur esthétique. C’est la tradition de vos écrivains les plus anglais, celle des Browning, des Tennyson, des George Eliot. Elle fait la portée et l’originalité des œuvres de cette époque victorienne, contre laquelle on a l’air, malheureusement, d’être en réaction en Angleterre aujourd’hui—réaction que je ne crois pas durable—qui cessera dès que le recule sera suffisant pour que la force et la grandeur de cette littérature apparaisse.
“Le problème religieux que vous posez là est vital, et la solution que vous y prévoyez dans votre pays, cette possibilité d’un christianisme évolué, adapté, qui conserverait les formes anciennes avec leur puissance si efficace de prestige, tout en attribuant de plus en plus aux vieilles formules, aux vieux rites une valeur de symbole—cette solution est celle que l’on peut espérer du protestantisme, lequel est relativement peu cristalisé et peut encore évoluer. Même dans l’anglicanisme la part de l’interprétation personnelle a toujours été assez grande. J’ai peur que l’avenir de la religion soit plus douteux dans ceux des pays catholiques où la culture est avancée. Nous sommes là comme des vivants liés à des cadavres, ou comme des grandes personnes que l’on astreindrait au régime de la nursery. Les mêmes formules, les mêmes articles de foi, le même catéchisme, les mêmes interprétations, doivent servir à la fois à des peuple de mentalité encore primitive et semi-païenne et à des sociétés aussi intellectuelles et civilisées que la nôtre. Nous n’avons le choix qu’entre le culte des reliques, la foi aux eaux miraculeuses, et l’agnosticisme pur, ou du moins, une religiosité amorphe, sans système ni discipline.”
The writing of Richard Meynell left Mrs. Ward very tired, and all the next year (1912) she “puddled along” as Mrs. Dell would have put it, accomplishing her tasks with all her old devotion, but suffering from sleeplessness and knowing that the novel of that year, The Mating of Lydia, was not really up to standard. Mr. Ward, too, fell ill, and remained in precarious health for the next four years, which gravely added to his wife’s anxieties. The burdens of life pressed upon her, while the maintenance of her Play Centres seemed sometimes an almost impossible addition. Italy was still the best restorative for all these ills. Every spring she fled across the Alps, enjoying a week or two of holiday and then settling, with her daughter, in some Villa where she might work undisturbed. In 1909 she went for the last time to the Villa Bonaventura at Cadenabbia, the place which was to her, I think, the high-water mark of earthly bliss. This time her stay was marked by one long-remembered day—a flying visit paid her from Milan by Contessa Maria Pasolini, the friend for whom, amongst all her Italian aquaintance, Mrs Ward felt the strongest devotion. She could watch her, or listen to her talk, for hours with unfailing delight; for she seemed to embody in herself both the wisdom and the charm, the age and the youth, of Italy. It was a friendship worthy of two noble spirits. Never again was Mrs. Ward able to rise to the Villa Bonaventura, but she explored other parts of Italy with almost equal delight, settling at the Villa Pazzi, outside Florence, in April, 1910, at a bare but fascinating Villa in the Lucchese hills in the next year, and in a fragment of a palace on the Grand Canal in 1912. It was during this stay in Venice that Mr. Reginald Smith obtained for her, from Mr. Pen Browning, permission to camp and work in the empty Rezzonico Palace, a privilege which she greatly valued and which gave her many romantic hours. While savouring thus the delights of Venice she was enabled, too, to witness the formal inauguration of the new-built Campanile, watching the splendid ceremony from a seat in the Piazzetta.
“Venice has been delirious to-day,” she wrote to Reginald Smith on St. Mark’s Day, April 25, “and the inauguration of the Campanile was really a most moving sight. ‘Il Campanile è morto—viva il Campanile!’ The letting loose of the pigeons—the first sound of the glorious bells after these ten years of silence—the thousands of children’s voices—the extraordinary beauty of the setting—the splendour of the day—it was all perfect, and one feels that Italy may well be proud.”
Her great relaxation during all these sojourns, but especially during a stay of six weeks at Rydal Mount during the autumn of 1911, was to play with brushes and paint, for she had skill enough in the problems of colour and line to throw off all other cares in their pursuit, while her inevitable imperfections only spurred her to fresh efforts. Dorothy would call it her “public-house,” for she could not keep away from it and would exhaust herself, sometimes, in the pursuit of the ideal, but the results were full of charm and are much treasured by their few possessors.
In 1913, as though to confound her critics, Mrs. Ward produced the book which contained, perhaps, the most brilliant character-drawing that she had ever attempted—The Coryston Family. She was pleased with its success, which was indeed needed to reassure her, for at this time occurred some serious losses, not of her making, which had to be faced, and, if possible, repaired. She was already sixty-two and her health, as we know, was more than precarious, but she set herself to work perhaps harder than ever. “Courage!” she wrote in July 1913, “and perhaps this time next year, if we are all well, the clouds will have rolled away.”
When that time came, when the Archduke Francis Ferdinand had been murdered at Serajevo and we in England, no less than the Serbian peasant and the French piou-piou, found ourselves face to face with a horror never known before, the crisis found Mrs. Ward at a low ebb of health and spirits. Attacks of giddiness led the doctors to pronounce that she was suffering from “heart fatigue.” Mr. Ward’s illness had increased rather than diminished; Stocks was abandoned for a time (though to a charming tenant and a sister novelist, Mrs. Wharton), and the three had migrated to a small and unattractive house in Fifeshire, where Mrs. Ward applied herself once more to writing. There the blow fell. Her first reaction to it was one of mere revolt, a cry of blind human misery. “What madness is it that drives men to such horrors?—not for great causes, but for dark diplomatic and military motives only understood by the ruling class, and for which hundreds of thousands will be sent to their death like sheep to the slaughter! Germany, Russia and Austria seem to me all equally criminal.” Then, as the news came rolling in, from the “dark motives” there seemed to detach itself one clear, stabbing thought. France! France invaded, perhaps overwhelmed!
“To me she is still the France of Taine, and Renan, and Pasteur, of an immortal literature, and a history that, blood-stained as it is, makes a page that humanity could ill spare. No, I am with her, heart and soul, and to see her wiped out by Germany would put out for me one of the world’s great lights.”