April 15, 1888.
Dear Mr. Gladstone,—
Thank you very much for the volume of Gleanings with its gracious inscription. I have read the article you point out to me with the greatest interest, and shall do the same with the others. Does not the difference between us on the question of sin come very much to this—that to you the great fact in the world and in the history of man, is sin—to me, progress? I remember Amiel somewhere speaks of the distinction as marking off two classes of thought, two orders of temperament. In myself I see a perpetual struggle, in the world also, but through it all I feel the “Power that makes for righteousness.” In the life of conscience, in the play of physical and moral law, I see the ordained means by which sin is gradually scourged and weakened both in the individual and in the human society. And as to that sense of irreparableness, that awful burden of evil both on the self and outside it, for which all religions have sought an anodyne in the ceremonies of propitiation and sacrifice, I think the modern who believes in God and cherishes the dear memory of a human Christ will learn humbly, as Amiel says, even “to accept himself,” and life, as they are, at God’s hands. Constant and recurrent experience teaches him that the baser self can only be killed by constant and recurrent effort towards good; the action of the higher self is governed by an even stronger and more prevailing law of self-preservation than that of the lower; evil finds its appointed punishment and deterrent in pain and restlessness; and as the old certainty of the Christian heaven fades it will become clear to him that his only hope of an immortality worth having lies in the developing and maturing of that diviner part in him which can conceive and share the divine life—of the soul. And for the rest, he will trust in the indulgence and pity of the power which brought forth this strangely mingled world.
So much for the minds capable of such ideas. For the masses, in the future, it seems to me that charitable and social organization will be all-important. If the simpler Christian ideas can clothe themselves in such organization—and I believe they can and are even now beginning to do it—their effect on the democracy may be incalculable. If not, then God will fulfil Himself in other ways. But “dream” as it may be, it seems to many of us, a dream worth trying to realize in a world which contains your seven millions of persons in France, who will have nothing to say to religious beliefs, or the 200,000 persons in South London alone, amongst whom, according to the Record, Christianity has practically no existence.
And the letter ends with a plea that the faith which animated T. H. Green might fitly be described by the words of the Psalm, “my soul is athirst for God, for the living God.”
To this Mr. Gladstone replied immediately:
St. James’s Street.
April 16, 1888.
MY DEAR MRS. WARD,—
I do not at all doubt that your conception of Robert Elsmere includes much of what is expressed in the opening verses of Psalm 42. I am more than doubtful whether he could impart it to Elgood St., and I wholly disbelieve that Elgood St. could hand it on from generation to generation. You have much courage, but I doubt whether even you are brave enough to think that, fourteen centuries after its foundation, Elgood St. could have written the Imitation of Christ.
And my meaning about Mr. Green was to hint at what seems to me the unutterable strangeness of his passionately beseeching philosophy to open to him the communion for which he thirsted, when he had a better source nearer hand.
It is like a farmer under the agricultural difficulty who has to migrate from England and plants himself in the middle of the Sahara.
But I must abstain from stimulating you. At Oxford I sought to avoid pricking you and rather laid myself open—because I thought it not fair to ask you for statements which might give me points for reply.
Mr. Gladstone evidently believed he had been as mild as milk—he knew not the terror of his own “drawn brows!”
Mrs. Ward to Mr. Gladstone.
April 17, 1888.
I think I must write a few words in answer to your letter of yesterday, in view of your approaching article which fills me with so much interest and anxiety. If I put what I have to say badly or abruptly, please forgive me. My thoughts are so full of this terrible loss of my dear uncle Matthew Arnold, to whom I was deeply attached, that it seems difficult to turn to anything else.
And yet I feel a sort of responsibility laid upon me with regard to Mr. Green, whom you may possibly mention in your article. There are many people living who can explain his thought much better than I can. But may I say with regard to your letter of yesterday, that in turning to philosophy, that is to the labour of reason and thought, for light on the question of man’s whence and whither, Mr. Green as I conceive it, only obeyed an urgent and painful necessity. “The parting with the Christian mythology is the rending asunder of bones and marrow”—words which I have put into Grey’s mouth—were words of Mr. Green’s to me. It was the only thing of the sort I ever heard him say—he was a man who never spoke of his feelings—but it was said with a penetrating force and sincerity which I still remember keenly. A long intellectual travail had convinced him that the miraculous Christian story was untenable; but speculatively he gave it up with grief and difficulty, and practically, to his last hour, he clung to all the forms and associations of the old belief with a wonderful affection. With regard to conformity to Church usage and repression of individual opinion he and I disagreed a good deal.
If you do speak of him, will you look at his two Lay Sermons, of which I enclose my copy?—particularly the second one, which was written eight years after the first, and to my mind expresses his thought more clearly.
Some of the letters which have reached me lately about the book have been curious and interesting. A vicar of a church in the East End, who seems to have been working among the poor for forty years, says, “I could not help writing; in your book you seemed to grasp me by the hand and follow me right on through my own life experiences.” And an Owens College Professor, who appears to have thought and read much of these things, writes to a third person, à propos of Elsmere, that the book has grasped “the real force at work in driving so many to give up the Christian creed. It is not the scientific (in the loose modern sense of the word), still less the philosophical difficulties, which influence them, but it is the education of the historic sense which is disintegrating faith.”—Only the older forms of faith, as I hold, that the new may rise! But I did not mean to speak of myself.
When the famous article—entitled “Robert Elsmere and the Battle of Belief”—appeared in the May Nineteenth Century, there was nothing but courtesy between the two opponents. Mrs. Ward sent the G.O.M. a copy of the book, with a picture of Catherine’s valley bound into it, and he replied that the volumes would “form a very pleasant recollection of what I trust has been a ‘tearless battle.’” Many of the papers now reviewed both book and article together, and the Pall Mall ironically congratulated the Liberal Party on “Mr. Gladstone’s new preoccupation.” “For two and a half years,” it declared, the G.O.M. had been able to think of nothing but Home Rule and Ireland. “But Mrs. Ward has changed all that.” The excitement among the reading public was very great. It penetrated even to the streets, for one of us overheard a panting lady, hugging a copy of the Nineteenth Century, saying to her companion as she fought her way into an omnibus, “Oh, my dear, have you read Weg on Bobbie?” Naturally the sale received a fresh stimulus. Two more three-volume editions disappeared during May, and a seventh and last during June. Then there was a pause before the appearance of the Popular or 6s. edition, which came out at the end of July with an impression of 5,000. It was immediately bought up; 7,000 more were disposed of during August, and the sale went on till the end of the year at the rate of about 4,000 a month. Even during 1889 it continued steadily, until by January, 1890, 44,000 copies of the 6s. edition had been sold. But as the sale had then slackened Mr. Smith decided to try the experiment of a half-crown edition. 20,000 of this were sold by the following November, but the drop had already set in and during 1891 the total only rose to 23,000. But even so, the sale of these three editions in the United Kingdom alone had amounted to 70,500.
All through the spring and summer of 1888 letters poured in upon Mrs. Ward by the score and the hundred, both from known and unknown correspondents, so that her husband and sister-in-law had almost to build a hedge around her and to insist that she should not answer them all herself. Those which the book provoked from her old friends, however, especially those of more orthodox views than her own, were often of poignant interest. The Warden of Keble wrote her six sheets of friendly argument and remonstrance. Mr. Creighton wrote her a letter full of closely reasoned criticism of Elsmere’s position, to which she made the following reply:
March 13, 1888.
My dear Max,—
I have been deeply interested by your letter, and am very grateful to you for the fairness and candour of it. Perhaps it is an affectation to say always that one likes candour!—but I certainly like it from you, and should be aggrieved if you did not give it me.
I think you only evade the whole issue raised by the book when you say that Elsmere was never a Christian. Of course in the case of every one who goes through such a change, it is easy to say this; it is extremely difficult to prove it; and all probability is against its being true in every case. What do you really fall back upon when you say that if Elsmere had been a Christian he could not have been influenced as he was? Surely on the “inward witness.” But the “inward witness,” or as you call it “the supernatural life,” belongs to every religion that exists. The Andaman islander even believes himself filled by his God, the devout Buddhist and Mahommedan certainly believe themselves under divine and supernatural direction, and have been inspired by the belief to heroic efforts and sufferings. What is, in essence and fundamentally, to distinguish your “inner witness” from theirs? And if the critical observer maintains that this “supernatural life” is in all cases really an intense life of the imagination, differently peopled and conditioned, what answer have you?
None, unless you appeal to the facts and fruits of Christianity. The Church has always done so. Only the Quaker or the Quietist can stand mainly on the “inward witness.”
The fruits we are not concerned with. But it is as to the facts that Elsmere and, as I conceive, our whole modern time is really troubled. An acute Scotch economist was talking to Humphry the other day about the religious change in the Scotch lowlands. “It is so pathetic,” he said: “when I was young religion was the main interest, the passionate occupation of the whole people. Now when I go back there, as I constantly do, I find everything changed. The old keenness is gone, the people’s minds are turning to other things; there is a restless consciousness, coming they know not whence, but invading every stratum of life, that the evidence is not enough.” There, on another scale, is Elsmere’s experience writ large. Why is he to be called “very ill-trained,” and his impressions “accidental” because he undergoes it?... What convinced me finally and irrevocably was two years of close and constant occupation with the materials of history in those centuries which lie near to the birth of Christianity, and were the critical centuries of its development. I then saw that to adopt the witness of those centuries to matters of fact, without translating it at every step into the historical language of our own day—a language which the long education of time has brought closer to the realities of things—would be to end by knowing nothing, actually and truly, about their life. And if one is so to translate Augustine and Jerome, nay even Suetonius and Tacitus, when they talk to you of raisings from the dead, and making blind men to see, why not St. Paul and the Synoptics?
I don’t think you have ever felt this pressure, though within the limits of your own work I notice that you are always so translating the language of the past. But those who have, cannot escape it by any appeal to the “inward witness.” They too, or many of them, still cling to a religious life of the imagination, nay perhaps they live for it, but it must be one where the expansive energies of life and reason cannot be always disturbing and tormenting, which is less vulnerable and offers less prey to the plunderer than that which depends on the orthodox Christian story.
Another old friend, Mrs. Edward Conybeare, wrote to contend that the “mere life and death of the carpenter’s son of Nazareth could never have proved the vast historical influence for good which you allow it to be,” had that life ended in
Mrs. Ward replied to her as follows:—
May 16, 1888.
My dear Frances,
It was very interesting to me to get your letter about Robert Elsmere. I wish we could have a good talk about it. Writing is very difficult to me, for the letters about it are overwhelming, and I am always as you know more or less hampered by writer’s cramp.
I am thinking of “A Conversation” for one of the summer numbers of the Nineteenth Century, in which some of the questions which are only suggested in the book may be carried a good deal further. For the more I think and read the more plain the great lines of that distant past become to me, the more clearly I see God at work there, through the forms of thought, the beliefs, the capacities of the first three centuries, as I see Him at work now, through the forms of thought, the beliefs and capacities of our own. Christianity was the result of many converging lines of thought and development. The time was ripe for a moral revolution, and a great personality, and the great personality came. That a life of importance and far-reaching influence could have been lived within the sphere of religion at that moment, or for centuries afterwards, without undergoing a process of miraculous amplification, would, I think, have been impossible. The generations before and the generations after supply illustration after illustration of it. That Jesus, our dear Master, partly shared this tendency of his time and was partly bewildered and repelled by it, is very plain to me.
As to the belief in the Resurrection, I have many things to say about it, and shall hope to say them in public when I have pondered them long enough. But I long to say them not negatively, for purposes of attack, but positively, for purposes of reconstruction. It is about the new forms of faith and the new grounds of combined action that I really care intensely. I want to challenge those who live in doubt and indecision from year’s end to year’s end, to think out the matter, and for their children’s sake to count up what remains to them, and to join frankly for purposes of life and conduct with those who are their spiritual fellows. It is the levity or the cowardice that will not think, or the indolence and self-indulgence that is only too glad to throw off restraints, which we have to fear. But in truth for religion, or for the future, I have no fear at all. God is his own vindication in human life.
But apart from the religious argument, the characters in Robert Elsmere aroused the greatest possible interest, especially perhaps that of Catherine.
“As an observer of the human ant-hill, quite impartial by this time,” wrote Prof. Huxley, “I think your picture of one of the deeper aspects of our troubled times admirable. You are very hard on the philosophers: I do not know whether Langham or the Squire is the more unpleasant—but I have a great deal of sympathy with the latter, so I hope he is not the worse.
“If I may say so, I think the picture of Catherine is the gem of the book. She reminds me of her namesake of Siena—and would as little have failed in any duty, however gruesome. You remember Sodoma’s picture?”
The appreciation of her French friends was always very dear to Mrs. Ward, and amongst them too the book was eagerly read by a small circle, though, as Scherer warned her, the subject could never become a popular one in France. But both he and M. Taine were greatly excited by it, while M. André Michel of the Louvre, to whom she had entrusted the copy which she desired to present to M. Taine, wrote her a delightful account of his embassy:
PARIS.
ce 31 janvier, 1889.
CHERE MADAME,—
Votre lettre m’a été une bien agréable surprise et une bien intéressante lecture. Je l’ai immédiatement communiquée à M. Taine, en lui remettant l’exemplaire que vous lui destiniez de Robert Elsmere et je vous avoue qu’en me rendant chez lui à cet effet, je me rengorgeais un peu, très-fier de servir d’intermédiaire entre l’auteur de Robert Elsmere et celui de la Littérature Anglaise. L’âne portant des reliques chez son évêque ne marchait pas plus solennellement!
M. Taine a été très-touché de cet hommage venant de vous, et je pense qu’il vous en a déjà remercié lui-même. J’aurais voulu que vous eussiez pu entendre—incognito—avec quelle vivacité de sympathie et d’admiration il parlait de votre livre. Pendant plusieurs jours, il n’a pas été question d’autre chose chez lui.
The cumulative effect of all these letters, both approving and disapproving; of the preachings on Robert’s opinions that began with Mr. Haweis in May, and continued at intervals throughout the summer; of the general atmosphere of celebrity that began to surround her, was extremely upsetting to so sensitive a nature as Mrs. Ward’s, and much of it was and remained distasteful to her. But fame had its lighter sides. There were the inevitable sonnets, beginning
or
there were inquiries as to the address of the “New Brotherhood of Christ,” “so that next time we are in London we may attend some of its meetings,” and there was a gentleman who demanded to know “the opus no. of the Andante and Scherzo of Beethoven mentioned on p. 239, and of Hans Sachs’s Immortal Song quoted on p. 177. I am in want of a little fresh music for one of my daughters and shall esteem your kind reply.” And finally there was the following letter, which must be transcribed in full:
DEAR MADAM,—
Trusting to your Clemency, in seeking your advice, knowing my sphere in life, to be so far below your’s. My Mother, who is a Cook-Housekeeper, but very fond of Literature, Poetry (“unfortunately”), in her younger days brought out a small volume, upon her own account, a copy of which Her Majesty graciously accepted. Tennyson considered it most “meritorious,” Caryle most “creditable.” But what I am asking your advice upon is her “Autography,” her Cook’s Career, which has been a checquered one. She feels quite sure, that if it were brought out by an abler hand, it would be widely sought and read, at least by two classes “my Ladies” and Cooks. The matter would be truth, names and places strictously ficticious. With much admiration and respect,
I am, Madam,
Yours Obediently,
A. A.
History does not record what reply Mrs. Ward made to this interesting proposal, but no doubt she took it all as part of the great and amusing game that Fate was playing with her. As to that game—“I have still constant letters and reviews,” she wrote to her father on July 17, “and have been more lionized this last month than ever.—But a little lionizing goes a long way! One’s sense of humour protests, not to speak of anything more serious, and I shall be very glad to get to Borough next week. As to my work, it is all in uncertainty. For the present Miss Sellers is coming to me in the country, and I shall work hard at Latin and Greek, especially the Greek of the New Testament.”
And to her old friend, Mrs. Johnson, she wrote: “Being lionized, dear Bertha, is the foolishest business on earth; I have just had five weeks of it, and if I don’t use it up in a novel some day it’s a pity. The book has been strangely, wonderfully successful and has made me many new friends. But I love my old ones so much best!” This latter sentiment is expressed again in a letter to Mr. Ward: “Strange how tenacious are one’s first friendships! No other friends can ever be to me quite like Charlotte or Louise or Bertha or Clara.[13] They know all there is to know, bad and good—and with them one is always at ease.”
That autumn they went off on a round of visits, staying first at Merevale with Mrs. Dugdale, whose husband had been killed three years before in his own mine near by—a story of simple heroism which moved Mrs. Ward profoundly, so that years afterwards she used it in her own tale of George Tressady. Then to Sir Robert and Lady Cunliffe, with whom they went over to see the “old wizard” of Hawarden, and spent a wonderful hour in his company.
To her old friend, J. R. Thursfield (a staunch Home Ruler), she wrote the following account of it:
September 14, 1888.
“Where do you think we spent the afternoon of the day before yesterday? You would have been so much worthier of it than we! The Cunliffes took us over to tea at Hawarden and the G.O.M. was delightful. First of all he showed us the old Norman keep, skipping up the steps in a way to make a Tory positively ill to see, talking of every subject under the sun—Sir Edward Watkin and their new line of railway, border castles, executions in the sixteenth century, Villari’s Savonarola, Damiens and his tortures—‘all for sticking half-an-inch of penknife into that beast Louis XV!’—modern poetry, Tupper, Lewis Morris, Lord Houghton and Heaven knows what besides, and all with a charm, a courtesy, an élan, an eagle glance of eye that sent regretful shivers down one’s Unionist backbone. He showed us all his library—his literary table, and his political table, and his new toy, the strong fire-proof room he has just built to hold his 60,000 letters, the papers which will some day be handed over to his biographer. His vigour both of mind and body was astonishing—he may well talk, as he did, of ‘the foolish dogmatism which refuses to believe in centenarians.’”
À propos of this last remark, Mrs. Ward filled in the tale on her return by telling us how he turned upon her with flashing eye and demanded: “Did it ever occur to you, Mrs. Ward, that Lord Palmerston was Prime Minister at 81?” He himself was to surpass that record by returning to power at 82.
From the Cunliffes’ they also made an expedition to the Peak country, which Mrs. Ward wished to explore for purposes of her next book (David Grieve), now already taking shape in her mind—and then travelled up to Scotland to stay at a great house to whose mistress, Lady Wemyss, she was devoted. From one who was afterwards to be known as the portrayer of English country-house life the following impressions may be of interest:
To Mrs. A. H. Johnson
Fox Ghyll, Ambleside,
October 21, 1888.
...Yes, we had many visits and on the whole very pleasant ones. In Derbyshire I saw a farm and a moorland which I shall try to make the British public see some day. Then on we went to the Lyulph Stanleys’, saw them, and Castle Howard and Rivaulx, and journeyed on by the coast to Redcar and the Hugh Bells. There we found Alice Green, and had a merry time. Afterwards came a week at Gosford, whereof the pleasure was mixed. Lady Wemyss I love more than ever, but the party in the house was large and very smart, and with the best will in the world on both sides it is difficult for plain literary folk who don’t belong to it to get much entertainment out of a circle where everybody is cousin of everybody else, and on Christian name terms, and where the women at any rate, though pleasant enough, are taken up with “places,” jewels and Society with a big S. I don’t mean to be unfair. Most of them are good and kindly, and have often unsuspected “interests,” but naturally the paraphernalia of their position plays a large part in their lives, and makes a sort of hedge round them through which it is hard to get at the genuine human being.
Perhaps our most delightful visit was a Saturday to Monday with Mr. Balfour, at Whittinghame. There life is lived, intellectually, on the widest and freest of all possible planes, and the master of it all is one to whom nature has given a peculiar charm and magnetism, in addition to all that he has made for himself by toil and trouble.
...I am a little disturbed by the announcement of a Quarterly article on R.E. It must be hostile—perhaps an attack in the old Quarterly fashion: well, if so I shall be in good company! But I don’t want to have to answer—I want to be free to think new thoughts and imagine fresh things.
When the Quarterly article appeared a few days later she found it courteous enough in tone, but its attitude of complacent superiority towards the whole critical process, which it described as “a phase of thought long ago lived through and practically dead,” stung her to action and made her feel that some reply—to this and Gladstone together—was now unavoidable. She owed it to her own position—not as a scholar, for she never claimed that title, but as an interpreter of scholars and their work to the modern public. But “If I do reply,” she wrote to her husband, “I shall make it as substantive and constructive as possible. All the attacking, destructive part is so distasteful to me. I can only go through with it as a necessary element in a whole which is not negative but positive.” But she could not be induced even by Mr. Knowles’s persuasions to make it a regular “reply” to Mr. Gladstone, whose name is not once mentioned throughout the article[14]; she threw her argument instead into dialogue form, so keeping the artistic ground which she had used in the novel, and replying to the Quarterly or to the G.O.M. rather by allusion than by direct argument. The article was very widely read and certainly carried her cause a stage further; it was felt that here was something that had come to stay, that must be reckoned with, and her skilful use of the admissions made in the Church Congress that year as to the date and authorship of certain books of the Old Testament filled her readers with a vague feeling that perhaps after all these things must be faced for the New Testament also.
Meanwhile in America the hubbub produced by Robert Elsmere had far exceeded anything that occurred on this side of the Atlantic. Those were the days before International Copyright, when any American publisher was free to issue the works of British authors without their consent and without payment, and when if an “authorized edition” was issued by some reputable firm which had paid the author for his rights, it could be undersold the next day by some adventurous “pirate.” Messrs. Macmillan had bought the American rights of Robert Elsmere for a small sum and had issued it at $1.50 in April, but as soon as it began to excite attention, and especially after the appearance of Gladstone’s article, the pirate firms rushed in and raged furiously with each other and with Macmillan’s to get the book out at the lowest possible price. One firm—Messrs. Lowell & Co.—which had sold tens of thousands of copies, magnanimously sent the author a cheque for £100, but this was the only payment which Mrs. Ward ever received for Robert Elsmere from an American publisher. Some of the incidents of the internecine war between the pirates themselves for control of the Robert Elsmere market are still worth recording. They were summed up in a well-informed article in the Manchester Guardian in March, 1889, entitled The “Book-Rats” of the United States:
‘In America the publisher’s lot is not a happy one. If he is honest, he pays his author, and upon the first assurance of success sees nine-tenths of his lawful profits swept away by the incursions of pirates. If he is dishonest, he does not pay his author, but in hot haste reprints in cheap and nasty material, with one object alone—to undersell the legitimate publisher. A host more follow suit with new reprints in still cheaper and nastier material, till, under the pretence of giving cheap literature to the million, the culminating point is reached in the man who sells at a quarter of cost price to drive his rivals out of the field. This is what happened the other day in Boston over the sale of Robert Elsmere, a book which has there achieved an unparalleled success, and abundantly illustrates the inequality of the present system of no copyright. In England between thirty and forty thousand copies have already been sold in the nine months since it was published, and the book is selling steadily at the rate of some 700 a week. In America the sale is estimated at 200,000 copies, of which 150,000 are in pirated editions. One honest pirate purges his conscience by the magnificent gift of £100, which is likely to be the first and last instalment of that ‘handsome competence which the American reading public,’ says a Rhode Island newspaper, ‘owes to Mrs. Ward.’ A hundred pounds, representing just one shilling and fourpence per hundred copies upon all the pirated editions! And the author must be thankful for such mercies; rights she has none over her own creation, which pervades the States from end to end, and is not only a library in itself, but has called into existence so much polemical literature that a leading New York paper gives solemn warning to contributors that for the future sermons on Robert Elsmere will only be published at the ordinary advertisement rates. A Buffalo advertisement cries, ‘Who has yet touched Robert Elsmere at ten cents?’ only to be taken down by Jordan Marsh and Co., the ‘Whiteleys’ of Boston, who offered the book at four cents. Twopence for a book which extends over 400 pages in close-printed octavo! The stroke told, almost too successfully for its contrivers. It is said that next day the shop doors were besieged by a crowd like the surging throng at the entrance to the Lyceum pit on a first night. A queue extended across the street. For three days the enterprising pirate had the field to himself; then he raised his price again; he had lost some ten cents on every copy, but he had crushed his rivals.”
The achievement of one still more enterprising firm, however, escaped the notice of this correspondent. The Balsam Fir Soap Co., being anxious to launch their new soap upon the market, made the following announcement:
TO THE PUBLIC
We beg to announce that we have purchased an edition of the Hyde Park Company’s Robert Elsmere, and also their edition of Robert Elsmere and the Battle of Belief—a criticism by the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P.
These two books will be presented to each purchaser of a single cake of Balsam Fir Soap.
Respectfully,
The Maine Balsam Fir Co.
Thus was poor Robert, with his doubts and dreams, his labours and his faith, given away with a cake of soap!
But this was not all, nor even the worst. When the boom was still at its height, in the spring of 1889, Mrs. Ward was horrified to hear that a full-blown dramatized version of the book, by William Gillette, had actually been produced in Boston, with a “comedy element,” as the newspaper report described it, “involving an English exquisite and a horsey husband,” thrown in, the Squire and Grey eliminated, and Langham “endowed with such nobility of character as ultimately to marry Rose.” She at once cabled her protest with some energy and succeeded in getting the further performance of the play stopped; but hardly was this episode ended than another followed on its heels.
“A writer in the New York Tribune,” wrote the Glasgow Herald in April, 1889, “exposes a most barefaced trick of trading upon Mrs. Humphry Ward’s name. A continuation, he says, of Robert Elsmere has already been begun by an American publisher, and advance sheets, containing thrilling instalments of the romantic adventures of Robert Elsmere’s Daughter, are being scattered broadcast over the length and breadth of the United States. The industrious agents of the publisher of this sheet have been busily engaged in inserting sample chapters of this new novel under the doors of houses all over New York. This, however, is not the worst feature of the trick. From the title of the story the impression sought to be conveyed is that Mrs. Humphry Ward, the authoress of Robert Elsmere, is responsible, too, for Robert Elsmere’s Daughter, the headings of the story being arranged in this specious shape: ‘Robert Elsmere’s Daughter—a companion story to Robert Elsmere—by Mrs. Humphry Ward.’”
It was no wonder that the scandal of these events was used by the promoters of the International Copyright Bill then before Congress as one of their most powerful arguments; for there were many honourable publishing firms in America which abhorred these proceedings and were only anxious to regularize their relations with British authors. Mr. George Haven Putnam, head of the firm of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, and the International Copyright Committee which he formed, had already been working in this direction for some years; but the opposition was strenuous, and it was only in March, 1891, that the Copyright Bill which was to have so great an effect on Mrs. Ward’s fortunes actually became law in the United States. Even before that, however, very flattering offers were made to her by American publishers—especially by Mr. S. S. McClure, founder of the then youthful McClure’s Magazine—for the right of publishing the “authorized version” of her next book. Mr. McClure tried to beguile her into writing him a “novelette,” or a “romance of Bible times,” but Mrs. Ward was not to be moved. She had already begun work upon her next book (David Grieve), and all she said in writing to her sister (Mrs. Huxley) was: “This American, Mr. McClure, is a wonderful man. He has offered me £1,000 for the serial rights of a story as long as Milly and Olly! Naturally I am not going to do it, but it is amusing.” To her father she wrote in more serious mood about the American boom:
“It is a great moral strain, this extraordinary success. I feel often as though it were a struggle to preserve one’s full individuality, and one’s sense of truth and proportion in the teeth of it. There is no help but to look away from oneself and everything that pertains to self, to the Eternal and Divine things, to live penetrated with the feebleness and poverty of self and the greatness of God.”
Yet naturally she enjoyed the many letters from Americans of all ranks and classes which reached her during the autumn and winter of 1888. The veteran Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote to her in his most charming vein, speaking of the book as a “medicated novel, which will do much to improve the secretions and clear the obstructed channels of the decrepit theological system.” W. R. Thayer, afterwards the biographer of Cavour, wrote:
“The extraordinary popularity of Robert Elsmere is a most significant symptom of the spiritual conditions of this country. No book since Uncle Tom’s Cabin has had so sudden and wide a diffusion among all classes of readers; and I believe that no other book of equal seriousness ever had so quick a hearing. I have seen it in the hands of nursery-maids, and of shop-girls behind the counter; of frivolous young women, who read every novel that is talked about; of business men, professors, students, and even schoolboys. The newspapers and periodicals are still discussing it, and, perhaps the best sign of all, it has been preached against by the foremost clergymen of all denominations.”
And a sturdy rationalist, Mr. W. D. Childs, thus recorded his protest:
‘I regret the popularity of Robert Elsmere in this country. Our western people are like sheep in such matters. They will not see that the book was written for a people with a State Church on its hands, that a gross exaggeration of the importance of religion was necessary. It will revive interest in theology and retard the progress of rationalism.
“Am I not right in this? You surely cannot think it good for individuals or for societies to take religion seriously, when there is so much economic disorder in the world, when the mass of physical and mental suffering is so obviously reducible only by material means.”
It was very delightful, of course, to be making a little money from the book, after so many years of strenuous work, and though the sum she had earned was still a modest one (about £3,200 by January, 1889), it enabled her and her husband to make plans for the future and to embark on the purchase of some land for building in the still unspoilt country to the east of Haslemere. Here, on Grayswood Hill, overlooking the vast tangle of the Weald as far as Chanctonbury Ring and the South Downs, a red-brick house of moderate size, cunningly designed by Mr. Robson, gradually arose during 1889 and the first part of 1890; but while it was still building a fortunate accident placed in our way the chance of living for three months in a far different habitation—John Hampden’s wonderful old house near Great Missenden, which was then in a state of interregnum, and might be rented for a small sum.
“It will be quite an adventure,” wrote Mrs. Ward to her publisher in July, 1889, “for in spite of the beauty and romance of the place there is hardly enough furniture of a ramshackle kind in it to enable us to camp for three months in tolerable comfort! But by dint of sending down a truck load of baths, carpets and saucepans from home we shall get on, and our expenses will be less than if we took a villa at Westgate.”
And to Mrs. Johnson, of Oxford, who was coming with her whole family to stay there, Mrs. Ward wrote three days after her arrival:
‘The furniture of the house is decrepit, scanty and decayed, but it has breeding and refinement, and is a thousand times preferable to any luxurious modern stuff. I am perfectly happy here, and bless the lucky chance which drew our attention to the advertisement. I will not spoil the old house and gardens and park for you by describing them—but they are a dream, and the out-at-elbowness of everything is an additional charm.”
So for three months we stayed at Hampden, revelling in its beauty and its spaciousness, learning to know the Chiltern country with its chalk-downs and beech-woods, entertaining many visitors, including the much-loved Professor Huxley, and watching anxiously for the ghost that walked in the passage outside the tapestry-room on moonlight nights. It never walked for us, though Mrs. Ward sat up many times to woo it, but there were plenty of ghosts of another sort in a house that had sheltered Queen Elizabeth on one of her “progresses,” that still possessed the chair in which John Hampden had sat when they came to arrest him for ship-money, and that had guarded his body at the last, when his Greencoats bore it thither from Thame to lie in the great hall for one more night before its burial in the little church across the garden. At first there were no lamps, and we groped about with stumps of candles after dark, but gradually all the more glaring deficiencies were remedied and Mrs. Ward settled down to a happy three months of work on her new novel, David Grieve. But as she wrote of her two wild children on the Derbyshire moors, or of young David and his books in Manchester, the very different scene around her formed itself in her mind into a new setting, from which arose in course of time Marcella.
Meanwhile it was not Hampden’s ghost but Elsmere’s that still haunted her, in the sense that the “New Brotherhood” with which the novel ended would not die with it, but struggled dumbly in the author’s mind for expression in some living form. Some time before she had been deeply impressed by a visit she had paid to Toynbee Hall with “Max Creighton,” as she wrote to her father, when she found that “in the library there R.E. had been read to pieces, and in a workmen’s club which had just been started several ideas had been taken from the “New Brotherhood.” The experience had remained with her; she had brooded and dreamt over it, and now when she returned to London in the autumn of 1889 she began for the first time to try to work out the idea in consultation with certain chosen friends. “Lord Carlisle came and had a long talk with M. about a proposed Unitarian Toynbee somewhere in South London”—so wrote the little sister-in-law (herself an orthodox Christian) in her journal on November 11, 1889. And a little later: “Mr. Stopford Brooke came and had a long talk with her about a ‘New Brotherhood’ they hope to start with Lord Carlisle and a few others to help.”
Was it to be a new religion, or a re-vivifying of the old? The impulse to build up, to re-create, was hot within her; could she not appeal to her generation to help her in following out this impulse towards some practical goal? Was there not room for another Toynbee, inspired still more definitely than the first with the ideals of a simpler Christianity? The dæmon drove; surely the very success of her book showed that this was the need of the new age in which she lived. She plunged into the task, and only time and Fate were to reveal that the “new religion” was doomed to take no outward form, but to work itself out in ways undreamt of as yet by the author of Robert Elsmere.
THE conversations with Stopford Brooke and Lord Carlisle mentioned in the last chapter contained the germ of all that public work which was to claim henceforth so large a share of Mrs. Ward’s life. Up to this point she had hardly taken any part in London committees; indeed, those spacious days were still comparatively free from them, and it is remembered that when the first meeting of the group with whom she was discussing her new scheme took place at Russell Square,[15] one irreverent child in the schoolroom next door said to its fellow, “What’s a committee?” “Oh,” said the elder, in the manner of one who imparts information, “it’s when the grown-ups get together, and first they think, and then they talk, and then they think again.” At the moment no sound was audible through the wall. “They must be thinking now,” said the instructor carelessly, leaving his junior to the solemn belief, held for many years, that a committee was a sort of prayer-meeting.
That first group, who discussed and finally approved Mrs. Ward’s draft circular announcing the foundation of a “Hall for Residents” in London, consisted of the following men and women besides herself: Dr. Martineau, Dr. James Drummond, of Manchester College, Oxford, Mr. Stopford Brooke, Lord Carlisle, Rev. W. Copeland Bowie, Dr. Estlin Carpenter, Mr. Frederick Nettlefold, the Dowager Countess Russell, Miss Frances Power Cobbe, and lastly, Dr. Blake Odgers, Q.C., who acted as Hon. Treasurer. Mr. Copeland Bowie, who helped Mrs. Ward for several months as a “kind of assistant secretary,” has recorded his impressions of those crowded days in an article which he wrote for the Inquirer on April 3, 1920:
“We met in the dining-room at Russell Square. Mrs. Ward was the moving and executive force; the rest of us were simply admiring and sympathetic spectators of her enterprise and zeal. It is delightful to recall her abounding activity and enthusiasm. Difficulties were overcome, criticisms were answered, work was carried on with extraordinary devotion and skill. Several meetings were devoted to the consideration of how to proceed, for the pathway was beset by many difficulties. At last, early in March, 1890, a scheme for the establishment of a Settlement at University Hall, Gordon Square, in a part of the old building belonging to Dr. Williams’s Trustees, was agreed upon. The religious note is very prominent. University Hall would encourage ‘an improved popular teaching of the Bible and the history of religion, in order to show the adaptability of the faith of the past to the needs of the present.’”
The aims of the new movement were, in fact, set forth in the original circular in these words:
‘It has been determined to establish a Hall for residents in London, somewhat on the lines of Toynbee Hall, with the following objects in view:
‘1. To provide a fresh rallying point and enlarged means of common religious action for all those to whom Christianity, whether by inheritance or process of thought, has become a system of practical conduct, based on faith in God, and on the inspiring memory of a great teacher, rather than a system of dogma based on a unique revelation. Such persons especially, who, while holding this point of view, have not yet been gathered into any existing religious organization, are often greatly in want of those helps towards the religious life, whether in thought or action, which are so readily afforded by the orthodox bodies to their own members. The first aim of the new Hall will be a religious aim.
MRS. WARD IN 1889 (Bassano, photo.)
MRS. WARD IN 1889 (Bassano, photo.)
‘2. The Hall will endeavour to promote an improved popular teaching of the Bible and of the history of religion. To this end continuous teaching will be attempted under its roof on such subjects as Old and New Testament criticism, the history of Christianity, and that of non-Christian religions. A special effort will be made to establish Sunday teaching both at the Hall and, by the help of the Hall residents, in other parts of London, for children of all classes. The children of well-to-do parents are often worse off in this matter of careful religious teaching than those of their poorer neighbours. There can be little doubt that many persons are deeply dissatisfied with the whole state of popular religious teaching in England. Either it is purely dogmatic, taking no account of the developments of modern thought and criticism, or it is colourless and perfunctory, the result of a compromise which satisfies and inspires nobody. Yet that a simpler Christianity can be frankly and effectively taught, so as both to touch the heart and direct the will, is the conviction and familiar experience of many persons in England, America, France and Holland. But the new teaching wants organizing, deepening and extending. It should be the aim of the proposed Hall to work towards such an end.”
It was natural that such ideals as these should appeal in a peculiar way to the Unitarian community, and we find in fact that the first subscription list, which guaranteed an income of about £700 to University Hall for three years, contains a preponderance of Unitarian names. Lord Carlisle and Mr. Stopford Brooke were in favour of calling it frankly a Unitarian Settlement. “There is a life and spirit about the things which are done by Dissenters,” wrote Lord Carlisle, “which I believe can never be got out of people who have a lingering feeling for the Church of England.” But the majority on the Committee, including Mrs. Ward and Dr. Martineau, thought that this would be setting unnecessary limits to the movement, which they rather intended to be a leaven permeating the lump both of orthodoxy and of indifferentism. It was therefore agreed not to use the word in the preliminary circular, though all the world could see from the names on the Committee that the tone of the new Settlement would be largely that of the younger and freer Unitarianism which had founded Manchester College, Oxford. It was one of Mrs. Ward’s most characteristic achievements that while she herself never sympathized with Unitarianism as an organization, she was yet able to work closely with Unitarians in this her first great enterprise, sharing with them their enthusiasm for the Christian message and their austere devotion to truth, while herself cherishing that “lingering feeling for the Church of England” which forbade her to identify herself with any outside body while there was still hope of influencing and widening the national Church. Yet for all practical purposes the breach between the “new religion,” as its critics contemptuously dubbed it, and the Establishment was complete enough, and the foundation of University Hall only confirmed the orthodox in their disapproval of Mrs. Ward and all her works.
Besides its definitely religious aim, the new Settlement was to have a well-marked social side as well. This is set forth in another paragraph of the circular: