‘More interesting even than your argument against the psychological dogma, was your constructive hint as to the ‘Church of the future.’ I wish I could follow you there! But that is an ‘argumentum non unius horæ.’
‘Believe me, dear Mrs. Ward, to be
“Yr. attached friend,
“MARK PATTISON.”
It was indeed an argument, not of a single hour, but of many long years. But the spark had been set to a complex train of thought which was now to work itself out through toil and stress towards its appointed end.
CHAPTER III
EARLY YEARS IN LONDON—THE WRITING OF ROBERT ELSMERE
1881-1888
IT was in the early summer of 1880 that Mr. Ward was first approached by Mr. Chenery, the editor, with a suggestion that he should join the staff of The Times. The proposal was in many ways an attractive one, in spite of the love of both husband and wife for Oxford, for Mr. Ward was becoming known to a wider world than that of Oxford by his English Poets, which had appeared in this year, nor was he a novice in journalism. His wife, too, had many links with London through her visits to the Forsters and her journalistic work. The experiment began in a tentative way in the winter of 1880-81, she remaining in Oxford with the children, and he being “tried” for leader-writing while staying in Bloomsbury lodgings. Within a very few months it proved itself a success, and, after some pleasant interviews with Mr. John Walter, he was retained on the permanent staff of the paper. They began seriously to plan their removal and to look for a house, and found one at length in that comfortable Bloomsbury region, which was then innocent of big hotels and offices, and where the houses in Russell Square had not yet suffered embellishment in the form of pink terra-cotta facings to their windows. They found that the oldest house in the Square, No. 61, was to let, and in spite of the dirt of years with which it was encrusted, perceived its possibilities at once, and came to an agreement with its owner. A charming old house, built in 1745, its prettiest feature was a small square entrance-hall, with eighteenth-century stucco-work on the walls, from which a wide staircase ascended to the drawing-room, giving an impression of space rare in a bourgeois London house. At the back was a good-sized strip of garden shaded by tall old plane-trees and running down to meet the gardens of Queen Square, for No. 61 stood on the east side of the square and adjoined the first house of Southampton Row. Little powder-closets jutted out at the back, one of which Mrs. Ward used as her writing-room, and upstairs the bedroom floors seemed to expand as you ascended, reaching only to a third story, but giving us rooms enough even so for ourselves, our maids, and a German governess, besides the various relations who were constantly coming to stay. Wholly pleasant are the memories connected with that benign old house, to us children as well as to our elders, save only that to the youngest of us there were always two lurking horrors, one on the second floor landing, where a dark alcove gave harbourage to a little old man in Scotch kilts, who might, if your legs were not swift enough, come after you as you toiled up the last flight, and one—still more disquieting—on the top landing itself, where the taps dripped in a dreadful little boxroom, and if the taps dripped you knew that the water-bogy, who lives in taps, might at any moment escape and overwhelm you. Since no self-respecting child ever imparts its terrors to its elders, these nightmares went unknown until one night, when all the maids were downstairs at supper, the child in question could not make up its mind to cross the landing, past the dark mouth of that box-room, from the room where it undressed to the room where it slept, and was found an hour later, fast asleep in a chair, with towels pinned over every inch of its small body lest the bogy should come out and catch hold. After this crisis I think the terrors declined, and now, alas! taps and box-room and dark alcove have all disappeared together, with the pleasant rooms downstairs and the gravelled garden where one made so many persevering expeditions with the salt-cellar, after the tails of London’s sparrows—all swept away and vanished, and the air that they enclosed parcelled out once more into the rectangles of the Imperial Hotel! Peace be to the ghost of that poor house, for it gave happiness in its latter days for nine long years to the human folk who inhabited it, and it watched the unfolding of a human heart and mind which were to have no mean influence upon the generation that encompassed them.
The house at Oxford was disposed of to the Henry Nettleships, at Michaelmas, 1881, and in the following November the family moved in to Russell Square. It was not without searchings of heart, I think, that Mr. and Mrs. Ward embarked upon the larger venture, where all depended on their retaining health and strength for their work; but they fondly hoped that with the larger regular income from The Times the burden on both pairs of shoulders would be lessened.
“All will be well with us yet,” wrote Mrs. Ward to her husband three months before their move, “and if God is good to us there are coming years of work indeed, but of less burden and strain. All depends on you and me, and though I know the very thought depresses us sometimes, it ought not to, for we have many good gifts within and without, and a fair field, if not the fairest possible field to use them in. It seems to me that all I want to be happy is to keep my own heart and conscience clear, and to feel my way open into the presence of God and the unseen. And surely to seek is to find.”
Years of less burden and strain! She had, indeed, forgotten the spirit within, which was to drive her on to ever new and greater efforts in the more stimulating atmosphere of London. Though her work for the Dictionary of Christian Biography was almost over, she had by this time made the acquaintance of Mr. Morley, then editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, and was doing much reviewing of French and Spanish books for him, while she continued to write weekly articles for the Church Guardian and the Oxford Chronicle. Nor were the authorities of The Times long in finding out that she too could write, and by the autumn of 1882 many foreign books reached her for review from Printing House Square. She complains in her letters that she cannot get through them quickly enough. “Three or four volumes of these books a week is about all I can do, and that seems to go no way.” The inevitable expenses of London life did in fact weigh upon her heavily within a year of their migration, and the sense of “burden and strain” was never long absent. But she could not have lived otherwise. It was her fundamental instinct to work herself to the bone and then to share her good times with others less fortunate, and since this process made away with her earnings she would work herself to the bone again. In this atmosphere of unremitting toil interruptions were of course discouraged, but when they occurred in spite of all defences she never showed the irritation which so frequently accompanies overwork. And in the many interruptions caused by the childish illnesses of her small family her tenderness and devotion were beyond all words. How she dosed us with aconite and belladonna, watching over us and compelling us to throw off our fevers and colds! Nor was anything allowed to interfere with the befriending of all members of the family who wished to come to Russell Square. Her brother Willie, who had by this time been appointed to the staff of the Manchester Guardian, was a frequent visitor, renewing with each appearance his literary camaraderie with her and delighting in the friends whom she would ask to meet him. Matthew Arnold, too, was sometimes to be caught for an evening—great occasions, those, for Mrs. Ward’s relations with him were already of the most affectionate. He influenced her profoundly in literary and critical matters, for she imbibed from him both her respect for German thoroughness and her passion for French perfection. These, indeed, were the years when she saw most of “Uncle Matt,” for Pains’ Hill Cottage, at Cobham, was not too far away for a Sunday visit, so that she and Mr. Ward would sometimes fly down there for an afternoon of talk. Usually, however, she would return full of blasphemies about his precious dogs, who had diverted their master’s attention all through the walk and prevented the flow of his wit and wisdom. Therefore she preferred to get him safely to herself at Russell Square!
Her two younger sisters, Julia and Ethel, were constantly in the house, the elder of whom married in 1885 Mr. Leonard Huxley, and so brought about a happy connection with the Professor and his wife, which gave Mrs. Ward much joy for many years. Nor were her neighbours neglected. When Christmas came round there was always a wonderful Weihnachtsbaum, dressed with loving care by the good German governess, and by any uncles and aunts who were within reach, and attended not only by all possible relations and friends (including especially and always Mr. and Mrs. J. R. Thursfield and their children), but also by the choirboys of St. John’s Church and by many of their relations too. But behind all this eager hospitality lay a far deeper longing. Her mother had, early in 1881, undergone a second operation for cancer, and though this gave her a year’s immunity from pain the malady returned. In March, 1882, she wrote to her daughter with stoical courage that she foresaw what was in store for her—“a hard ending to a hard life.” Though she was devotedly nursed by her youngest daughter, Ethel, her suffering overshadowed the next six years of Mary’s life like a cloud, but it became also Mrs. Ward’s keenest joy to be able to help her and to ease her path. Once when she herself had been ill and suffering, she wrote her a few lines which reveal her own inmost thoughts on the relation between pain and faith: