Meanwhile the portrait prospered, and was at length presented to its subject when she lay recovering from the birth of her second babe—a boy whom they named Arnold—in November, 1876. “Humphry and I are full of delight over the picture,” writes Mary to Mrs. Johnson, “and of wonder at the amount of true and delicate work you have put into it. It will be a possession not only for us but for our children—see how easily the new style comes!” These were prophetic words, for it is indeed the portrait of her that still gives most pleasure to the beholder, though in later years she was painted or drawn by many skilful hands.
Her two babies, Dorothy and Arnold, naturally absorbed a great deal of her time and thoughts in these years, although it was possible in those spacious days to live comfortably and to keep as many little nursery-maids as one required on £800 or £900 a year, which was about the income that husband and wife jointly earned. Her natural talent for “doctoring” showed itself very early in the skill with which she fed her babies or cured them of their ills when they were sick. Nor was she content with her domestic success, but in days before “Infant Welfare” had ever been thought of she wrote a leaflet entitled “Plain Facts on Infant Feeding” and circulated it in the slums of Oxford. We will not, however, rescue it from oblivion, lest it should be found to contain heretical matter! But there was still time for other pursuits, and since both she and her husband did their writing mainly at night, from nine to twelve, Mary began to show her practical powers in other directions, and to take a leading part in the movement for the higher education of women which was then absorbing some of the best minds of Oxford. As early as the winter of 1873-4 a committee was formed among this group of friends, with Mrs. Ward and Mrs. Creighton (followed, on the latter’s departure, by Mrs. T. H. Green) as joint secretaries, for organizing regular “Lectures for Women”—not in any connection with the University, for this was as yet impossible, but in order to satisfy the growing demand among the women residents of Oxford for more serious instruction in history, or modern languages, or Latin. The first series of lectures was held in the early spring of 1874, in the Clarendon Buildings, with Mr. A. H. Johnson as lecturer; it was an immediate success, and the large sum of 5s. which each member of the Committee had put down as a guarantee could be triumphantly refunded. Further courses were arranged in each succeeding winter, till in 1877 the same committee expanded into an “Association for the Education of Women” (again with Mrs. Ward as secretary[9]), which undertook still more important work. The idea of the founding of Women’s Colleges was already in the air, for Girton and Newnham had led the way at Cambridge, and all through 1878 plans were being discussed to this end. In the next year a special committee was formed for the raising of funds towards the foundation of a “Hall of Residence”; Mrs. Ward and Mrs. Augustus Vernon Harcourt were joint secretaries, but since the latter soon fell ill the whole burden of correspondence fell upon Mary’s shoulders. “There seems no end to the things I have to do just now,” she writes to her father in June, 1879. “All the secretary’s work for Somerville Hall falls on me now as my colleague, Mrs. Harcourt, is laid up, and yesterday and the day before I have had the house full of girls being examined for scholarship at the Hall, and have had to copy out examination papers and look after them generally. Our Lady Principal, Miss Shaw-Lefevre, is here and she came to dinner to-night to talk business about furnishing, etc. I think we are getting on. Did you see in The Times that the Clothworkers’ Company have given us 100 guineas?”
And thus the work went on, week after week, all through the year 1879. I have before me a common-looking engagement-diary in which it is all recorded, from the month of March to late in the month of October: all the committee-meetings, all the letters written to newspapers, to prospective students or to possible heads; the decision to purchase the lease of “Walton House,” “to be assigned to the President (Dr. Percival) on August 1”; the builder’s estimate for alterations (“£540 for raising the roof and making twelve bedrooms”), the letters about drainage, or cretonne, or armchairs and fenders, no less than the resolution passed at Balliol on October 24 to “form a Company for the management of the Hall under the Limited Liability Act of 1862, with a nominal capital of £25,000.” But by that time the Hall was already opened and the long labour crowned; and a fortnight afterwards, on November 6, her youngest child was born. It may be hoped that after this Mrs. Ward took a brief holiday from the cares of Somerville.
Mrs. Ward remained a member of the original Council of Somerville Hall long after her departure from Oxford, and during her last two years there continued to be largely responsible, as one of the most active members of the Association for the Education of Women, for the organization of the teaching. All the lectures were arranged by the Association—in consultation, of course, with the Principal—for it was not until 1884 that women students were admitted to the smallest of the University examinations, or to lectures at a few of the Colleges.
Thus had Mrs. Ward learnt her first lesson and won her first laurels in the carrying out of a big piece of public work. It was an experience that was to stand her in good stead in after years. But at this time her ambitions were still largely historical, weaving themselves in dreams and plans for the writing of that big book on the origins of modern Spain of which she afterwards sketched the counterpart in Elsmere’s projected book on the origins of modern France. Very likely she would have settled down to write it before the opening of Somerville, but as early as October, 1877, she had received a very flattering offer from Dean Wace, the general editor of the Dictionary of Christian Biography, to take a large share in writing the lives of the early Spanish ecclesiastics for that monumental work. It was an offer that she could not refuse, and she always spoke with gratitude of the years of hard and exacting work that followed, although once or twice she almost broke down under the strain of it. “Sheer, hard, brain-stretching work,” she calls it in her Recollections, and if anyone will look up her articles on Joannes Biclarensis, or Idatius, or the Histories of Isidore of Seville, they will see how triply justified she was in using the term. “You have gone over the ground so thoroughly that there is no gleaning left,” wrote Mr. C. W. Boase, in those days one of the best-known of Oxford history tutors, while Dean Wace himself, in the many letters he wrote to her, showed by his kindness and consideration how much he valued her contributions. Oxford began to think that she was definitely committed to an historical career, when to its astonishment she came out as the author of a children’s story. “Milly and Olly” was the record of her own “Holiday among the Mountains” with her children in the summer of 1879, but the very simplicity of the tale has endeared it to many generations of children and child-lovers, while the stories it contains of Beowulf and the Spanish Queen give it a note of romance that differentiates it from other nursery tales. She wrote it almost as a relaxation in the summer of 1880; in the midst of her historical work it showed that the story-telling instinct was already stirring within her.
And indeed the Oxford historical school was to be disappointed in her after all, for her labours on the early Spaniards were in reality to lead her into far other fields. Her interest in the problems of Christianity had only gathered strength with the years, and were now greatly stimulated by these researches into the early history of the Spanish Church. She began to feel the enormous importance to the believer of the historical testimony on which the whole fabric rested, while her keen historical imagination enabled her to grasp the mentality of those distant ages which produced for us the literature of the New Testament. A feeling of revolt against the arrogance of the orthodox party, as it was represented in Oxford by Christchurch and Dr. Pusey, grew and increased in her mind, while at the same time she became more and more attracted by the romance and mystery of Christianity when stripped of the coating of legend which pious hands had given it. As early as 1871 she had written to Mr. Ward (à propos of a somewhat fatuous sermon to which she had been listening): “How will you make Christianity into a motive?—that is the puzzle. Traditional and conventional Christianity is worked out—certainly as far as the great artisan and intelligent working-class in England is concerned, and all those who are young and touched, ever so vaguely and uncertainly, with the thought-atmosphere, thought-currents of the day. Is there a substitute which shall still be Christianity? Yes surely, but it is not to be arrived at by mere arbitrary remoulding and petulant upsetting as Mr. Voysey seems to think.” And two years later she writes to her father: “Just now it seems to me that one cannot make one’s belief too simple or hold what one does believe too strongly. Of dogmatic Christianity I can make nothing. Nothing is clear except the personal character of Christ and that view of Him as the founder and lawgiver of a new society which struck me years ago in Ecce Homo. And the more I read and think over the New Testament the more impossible it seems to me to accept what is ordinarily called the scheme of Christianity.”
But these reflections need never have led her in the direction of writing Robert Elsmere if it had not been for a personal incident. On Sunday, March 6, 1881, she attended the first Bampton Lecture of the Rev. John Wordsworth, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury. It was on “the present unsettlement in religion,” and the speaker castigated the holders of unorthodox views as being very definitely guilty of sin. Something in the tone of the sermon set Mary’s heart on fire within her. She walked home in a tumult of feeling. That this man with his confident phrases should dare thus to arraign the leaders of the Liberal host—men of such noble lives as T. H. Green, thinkers like Jowett and Matt Arnold! She sat down and wrote, within a very few days, a reply to Dr. Wordsworth entitled “Unbelief and Sin: a Protest addressed to those who attended the Bampton Lecture of Sunday, March 6.” A little pamphlet cast in the form of a dialogue between two Oxford men, it was put up for sale in Slatter & Rose’s window and attracted considerable attention. But before it had been selling for many hours a certain ecclesiastic took the bookseller aside and pointed out that the pamphlet bore no printer’s name, which made the sale illegal. He politely threatened proceedings, and the bookseller in alarm withdrew it from circulation and sent the unsold copies up to Bradmore Road with an apology, but a firm intimation that no further copies could be sold. Mary laughed and submitted, and sent her anonymous offspring round to various friends, among them the redoubtable Rector of Lincoln. He replied to her as follows:—
‘No, I did not guess your secret. It was whispered to me in the street, and I fancy was no secret within the first week of publication.
‘I admire your courage in attacking one of their strong places. The doctrine of disbelief in Church principles being due to a propensity to secret sins is one of the oldest tenets of the Anglican party. It is also a fundamental principle of popular Catholicism. I have heard it from the catholic pulpit so often that it must have among them the character of a commonplace.
‘There is, as you admit, a certain basis of fact for it—just as ‘Patriotism’ is often enough the trade of the egoist. ‘Licence they mean when they cry liberty.’