November 15, 1900.
My dear Bishop,—
Many, many thanks. It was very dear of you to write to me, especially at this time of illness, and I prize much all that you say. My father’s was a rare and hidden nature. Among his papers that have now come to me I have come across the most touching and remarkable things—things that are a revelation even to his children. The service yesterday in Newman’s beautiful little University Church, the early mass, the bright morning light on the procession of friends and clergy through the cypress-lined paths of Glasnevin, the last ‘requiescat in pace,’ answered by the Amen of the little crowd—all made a fitting close to his gentle and laborious life. He did not suffer much, I am thankful to say, and he knew that we were all round him and smiled upon us to the last.
And he on his side regarded her with an adoring affection that sometimes found touching expression in his letters, as when, a few months after the publication of David Grieve, he broke out in these words:
“My own dearest Polly (let me call you for once what I often called you when a child), God made you what you are, and those who love you will be content to leave you to Him. He gave you that wide-flashing, swiftly-combining wit, ‘glancing from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven’; He gave you also the power of turning your thoughts, with deft and felicitous hand, into forms of beauty. No one can divine what new problems will occupy you in time to come, nor how you will solve them; but one may feel sure that with you, as Emerson says, ‘the future will be worthy of the past.’”
Yet there was hardly a public question, especially in his later years, on which Mrs. Ward and her father did not differ profoundly; for Tom Arnold hated “Imperialism” and the modern world, especially such manifestations of it as the Omdurman campaign and the South African War. Mrs. Ward, on the other hand, watched the former with all the pride and dread that comes from a personal stake in the adventure; for was not Colonel Neville Lyttelton in command of a brigade, and had he not left his wife and children under our care at Stocks Cottage? She had found a task for Mrs. Lyttelton’s quick mind, to while away the too-long hours of that summer, in a translation into English of the “Pensées” of Joubert; their consultations over the fine shades of his meaning, while the bees hummed in the lime-tree on the lawn, became the light and relaxation of her days, while, later on, the Introduction she contributed to the book helped its appearance with the public. And when Colonel Lyttelton came home, a happy soldier, and pegged out the Omdurman campaign for us on the drawing-room floor with matches, how was it possible not to rejoice with him in the overthrow of so dark a tyranny as the Khalifa’s?
But the South African War was a matter of far more mingled feelings, though on the whole Mrs. Ward was persuaded that we were right as against President Kruger and his methods, and upheld this view in many a letter to her father:
“I am not without sympathy for the Boers,” she wrote to him in November, 1899, “and I often try to realize their case and how the invasive unwelcome English power looks to them. But it seems to me that history—which for me is God—makes very stern decisions between nations. The Boers have had their chance of an ascendancy which must have been theirs if they had known how to work for it and deserve it; they have missed it, and the chance now passes to England. If she is not worthy of it, it won’t remain with her—that one may be sure. But I must say that the loyalty of the other colonies—especially of French-speaking Canada; the pacification and good government of India, the noble development of Egypt, are to me so many signs that at present we are fit to rule, and are meant to rule. But we shall rule only so long as we execute righteous judgment and so long as it is for the good of the world that we should rule.”
She would have liked to see peace made after Lord Roberts’ early victories, and was for a time in favour of such terms as would not have involved annexation. But when this hope failed she settled down to endure the thing, and in 1901 devoted much time and labour to the improvement of the Boer women’s and children’s lot in the concentration camps. She joined the committee of the Victoria League formed for this purpose. And, as inevitably happens in all such controversies, the passion felt by the other side contributed to the hardening of her own opinion, so that the end of the war found her more staunch an Imperialist, more definite a Conservative, than she would have admitted herself to be before it.
It was during the war-shadowed winter of 1900-1901 that Mrs. Ward suffered a series of heavy personal losses in the death of many of her oldest friends, beginning with Mr. James Cropper, of Ellergreen, her quasi-uncle,[21] with whom she had been on the most affectionate terms ever since her childhood. This occurred a bare month before her father’s death; then, two months later (January 14, 1901), came the blow that the whole country felt as a catastrophe, the death of Bishop Creighton, and, early in April, a loss that came home very sadly to Mrs. Ward, that of her well-beloved publisher and friend, George Smith. “I never had a truer friend or a wiser counsellor,” she wrote of him, and indeed he combined these qualities with so shrewd a humour and so unvarying a kindness that Mrs. Ward might well count herself fortunate to have enjoyed fourteen years of familiar intercourse with him.
“His position as a publisher was very remarkable,” she wrote to her son. “He was the friend of his authors, their counsellor, banker and domestic providence often—as Murray was to Byron. But nobody would ever have dared to take the liberties with him that Byron did with Murray.”
When he was gone, Mrs. Ward was fortunate enough to find in his successor, Reginald Smith, an equally just and generous adviser, on whose friendship she leant more and more until death took him too, in the tragic winter of 1916.
The remarkable success of Eleanor in the United States (where the character of Lucy Foster won all hearts) led to inquiries being made from certain theatrical quarters there as to whether Mrs. Ward would not undertake to dramatize it. The suggestion attracted her at once, for though she had never written anything for the stage she had, all her life, been a keenly interested critic of plays and actors and a devoted adherent of French methods as against the heavy English stage conventions. But when she seriously confronted the problem she felt herself too ignorant of stagecraft to undertake the task unaided, and therefore called in to her counsels that delightful writer of light comedy, Julian Sturgis, whom she persuaded to collaborate with her. Could she have foreseen the play’s delays, the insolence of box offices and the manifold despairs that awaited her in this new path, probably even her high courage would have turned aside, but the co-operation it brought her with so rare a spirit as Julian Sturgis was at any rate a very living compensation. In the spring of 1901 Mr. Sturgis came out to stay with us in a villa we had taken (on the spur of the moment) on the outskirts of Rapallo (not then celebrated as the scene of international “pacts”), and together he and his hostess plunged with ardour into the business of making their puppets move. The work was extraordinarily hard, while the skies above our crimson villa behaved as though it were Westmorland and the Mediterranean thundered on the sea-wall of our garden; but Mrs. Ward enjoyed the stimulus and novelty of it immensely and always declared that she owed much even for her novelist’s art to that week of “grind” with Mr. Sturgis. Nor was it quite all grind, for one day, when the sun at last shone, we took our guest and his tall Eton boy up the long pilgrimage-way to the Madonna di Montallegro, overtaking a party of laden peasant-women as we went to whom Mr. Sturgis offered some passing kindness. His advances were met by a torrent of words in some uncouth dialect which none of us could understand, but he chose to appropriate them to himself as a prayer offered to “Santo Giulio,” and “Santo Giulio” he remained to Mrs. Ward and all of us for the too-short remnant of his life.[22] The play stood up and lived by the time his visit was ended; but this was only the beginning of endless heartaches and disappointments. At first there were hopes of the Duse, then of Mrs. Pat; then Mr. Benson was to produce it with a clever and charming amateur actress of our acquaintance in the role of Eleanor; then at length a real promise was secured from a well-known actor-manager, and all was fixed for May, 1902. But the promise was not an agreement, and was therefore mortal; when it died Mr. Sturgis’s only comment was: “My dear Mrs. Ward, I am not a bit surprised. My deep distrust of the theatrical world, wherein pretending gets into the blood, makes me sceptical of any promises which are not stamped, signed and witnessed by a legion of angels.”
Already, however, Miss Marion Terry, Miss Robins and Miss Lilian Braithwaite had promised in no spirit of “pretending” to play the three principal parts, so that with things so well advanced on that side Mrs. Ward determined to go forward. Since the managers were timid she would take a theatre and bear the risk herself. Finally all was settled with the Court Theatre, and the delightful agony of the rehearsals began (October, 1902). Miss Terry sprained a tendon in her leg, but gallantly limped through her part, while the constant changes called for in the words, the cuts and compressions, made a bewildering variety of versions that left the lay onlooker gasping. Mrs. Ward, however, was equal to all occasions—even to a last-minute change in the actor who played Manisty[23]—until not one of the cast but was moved to astonishment and admiration, not only by her versatility, but by her long-suffering. Add to this her endless consideration for themselves—for their comfort, their feelings or their clothes—and it is easy to understand the feelings of real affection which grew up between author and actors as the play went on. Yet all was of no avail, or, at least, it failed to conquer the great heart of the British public. The cast was admirable, the reviews were kind—though Mr. Walkley in The Times perhaps gave the key to the situation when he ended his article with the words, “But then, who could play Manisty?” Yet, somehow, the audience (after the first day) failed to fill the seats. Eleanor ran for only fifteen matinées, October 30-November 15, and though much was said of a revival, she only once again saw the footlights—in a couple of special matinées given in aid of the Passmore Edwards Settlement. And yet—what fun it had been! Though the financial loss made her rueful, Mrs. Ward always looked back to those six weeks at the Court Theatre as a breathless but happy episode, during which she had looked deep into the technique of a new art and brought from it, not success indeed, but much valuable experience which she might bring to bear upon her future work. Certainly the two novels of these years, Lady Rose’s Daughter and the Marriage of William Ashe, gained much in sureness of touch, terseness and finish from Mrs. Ward’s dramatic studies; Lady Rose was in fact acclaimed by the critics as the book in which, at last, the writer showed “the predominance of the artistic over the ethical instinct, the subordination of the didactic to the artistic impulse.”
She never dramatized it, but a dramatized version of William Ashe, at which Mrs. Ward toiled extremely hard, in collaboration with Miss Margaret Mayo, during 1905, was accepted by an American “stock company” and acquired a considerable reputation in the States. In London, however, where it was performed by a semi-American cast in 1908, it fell very flat, Mrs. Ward being fortunately spared the sight of it owing to the fact that she herself was across the Atlantic at the time. The actress who played Kitty, wishing to leave the author in no doubt as to the cause of its failure, cabled to her after the first night, “Press unfriendly to play—my performance highly praised!” Even so, however, the Manager decided to withdraw it after a three weeks’ run, and no play of Mrs. Ward’s was ever afterwards performed in England.
Among the most absorbed spectators of the first performance of Eleanor, watching it from an arm-chair brought for his ease into the author’s box, was the pathetic figure of Mrs. Ward’s eldest brother, William Arnold. His health had broken down some years before, while he was still assistant editor of the Manchester Guardian, and he had come to live, with his wife, in a small house in Chelsea, where it was Mrs. Ward’s delight to find him, on his better days, and to discuss all things in heaven and earth with him. No comradeship could ever have been closer than was theirs, though intercourse with him would always end in a strangling heartache for his state of health, for noble gifts submerged by bodily pain, despite as gallant a fight as was ever waged by suffering man. Mrs. Ward was for ever watching over him and helping him; sending him abroad in search of sun and warmth; having him to stay with her at Stocks, in London, or at some villa in Italy; encouraging him to do what work he could. But most they loved their talks together. Their tastes would usually agree on literary matters, and differ on politics, but no matter what the subject, his flashes of mischief and malice would light up the most ordinary topic, and no one loved better to draw him out, and to set him railing or praising, than his sister. How they would talk, sometimes, about the details of her craft, about Jane Austen, or Trollope, or George Meredith! For this latter they both had a feeling akin to adoration, based on a knowledge not only of his novels but of his poems (then not a common accomplishment); and I remember W. T. A. once saying to me that he thought the jolliest line in English poetry was
Mrs. Ward’s feeling for the old giant of Box Hill led her on all occasions to champion his right to be regarded as the greatest living master of English—as may be seen from the following spirited letter (January 19, 1902) addressed to the secretary of the Society of Authors, when that body had, in her view, made the wrong decision in recommending Herbert Spencer instead of Meredith for the Nobel Prize.
“However eminent Mr. Spencer may be” (she wrote), “and however important his contribution to English thought, there must be a great many of us who will feel, when it is a question of interrogating English opinion as to the most distinguished name among us in pure literature, there can be only one answer—George Meredith. It is no reply to say that the Swedish Academy will probably know something of Mr. Herbert Spencer, and may know little or nothing about Mr. Meredith. That is their affair, not ours. The meaning and purpose of this prize has been illustrated by the selection of M. Sully Prud’homme. Its recipient should be surely, first and foremost, a man of letters, and, if possible, a representative of what the Germans call ‘Dichtung,’ whether in prose or verse.
‘If Mr. Meredith had written nothing but the love-scenes in Richard Feverel; The Egoist; and certain passages of description in Vittoria and Beauchamp’s Career, he would still stand at the head of English ‘Dichtung.’ There is no critic now who can be ranged with him in position, and no poet. As a man of letters he is easily first; to compare Mr. Spencer’s power of clear statement with the play of imaginative genius in Meredith would be absurd—in the literary field. And this is or should be a literary award.
“I trust that in writing thus I shall not be misunderstood. I am not venturing to dispute Mr. Spencer’s great position in the history of English thought—I have neither the wish nor the capacity for anything of the kind. But to be the philosopher of evolution is one thing; to be our first man of letters is another. I would submit that English opinion is asked to point out our most distinguished man of letters, and that if we cannot unanimously say ‘George Meredith!’ we are not worthy that Genius should come among us at all.”
But only two years after this outburst (which I feel sure she showed him) her comradeship with “Will” ended for ever, and his sufferings ceased. He died on May 29, 1904.[24]
About the same time as she lost her beloved brother, Mrs. Ward acquired a new member of the family in the person of her son-in-law, George Macaulay Trevelyan, son of Sir George Otto Trevelyan. He and her younger daughter became engaged at the Villa Bonaventura, Cadenabbia—which Mrs. Ward had taken from Mr. Alfred Trench—in May, 1903—and ten months later they were married at Oxford. Mrs. Ward soon became much devoted to her son-in-law, whose ardent faiths and non-faiths challenged and stimulated her, bringing her into touch with movements of thought that ran parallel to, but had not yet mingled with, her own belief in a more reasonable Christianity. The walls of her room at Stocks would re-echo, during his visits, with the most fundamental discussions! Mr. Chamberlain, too, was a disturbing element in those days, with his Tariff Reform campaign, for what was Mrs. Ward to do when her son took one side and her son-in-law the other—and when, moreover, her own well-trained mind was perfectly capable of understanding the arguments of each? But whatever the subject of these discussions, whether politics or religion, they only served to increase the affection between the two, which grew and deepened with every turn of fortune that the years might bring.
It is perhaps interesting to speculate what might have been the development of Mrs. Ward’s powers if her intellect had never been captured by the dramatic spell, and if other sides of that “wide-flashing” mind had been allowed to work themselves out unchecked. For in the lull that followed the completion of Eleanor she had conceived the writing of a “Life of Christ” based on such a re-interpretation of the Gospel story as she believed had been made possible by the research of the last half-century. She brooded much over this theme and even discussed it with her publishers. But whether it was that her continued ill-health made her shrink from the heavy toil involved by such a task—the re-reading and collating of all her Germans, the study of an infinite amount of fresh material, and probably a journey to Palestine—or whether the practical side of Christianity had by now absorbed too large a share of her time and her powers, the project never came to fruition, though it never ceased to attract her.
And indeed, Mrs. Ward’s practical adventures in well-doing during these years would have been enough to fill the lives of any three ordinary individuals, without any such diversions as the writing of novels or the hammering out of plays. The affairs of the Settlement were always on her shoulders, not only as regards the financial burden of its maintenance, but in all the personal questions that inevitably arose in such a busy hive of humanity. If the nurse of the Invalid School had words with the porter, the case was sure to come up to her for judgment, while any misdemeanour among the young people themselves who frequented the building would cause her the most anxious searchings of heart. But “it does not do to start things and then let them drift,” as she wrote in these days to one of us, and she continued to cherish the Settlement, to support the Warden (Mr. Tatton) in his difficulties and to beg for money, with an extraordinary vitality as well as an extraordinary patience. Yet in spite of all, the Settlement was far more of joy to her than of burden, and on its children’s side it never ceased to be pure joy from the beginning. For was it not always possible to devise new ways of making the children happy, as well as to continue the old? The principal way in which Mrs. Ward’s work extended itself at this time was in the opening of the “Vacation School,” designed to bring in from the streets in large numbers the children left stranded during the August holiday,—and if anyone will take the trouble to wander through the back streets during that happy season, and to note what he sees, there will be little doubt in his mind that such a school must be a real deliverance. Mrs. Ward had taken the idea from an account by Mr. Henry Curtis in Harper’s Magazine (early in 1902) of the first schools of the kind started in New York, and her mind had at once grasped the possibilities of such a scheme. There stood the Settlement with its fine shady garden in the rear, empty and dumb through the holidays: surely it would be a sin not to use it!
She collected a special fund from a few old friends of the Settlement, appointed an admirable director in the person of Mr. E. G. Holland, an assistant master at the Highgate Secondary School, enlisted the help of all the schools around to send us such children only as had no chance of a country holiday, and then issued invitations to some 750, divided into two batches, morning and afternoon. The result was an orderly and delighted crowd which, owing to Miss Churcher’s and Mr. Holland’s faultless organization, moved from class to class and from garden to building without the smallest hitch, played and dug in the “waste ground” beyond the garden, specially thrown open to the school by the Duke of Bedford, and when rain came marched into the building and filled its basement rooms and the pleasant library and class-rooms without any confusion or squabbling. The occupations were much the same as those already in use for the “Recreation School,” and never failed to attract and then to keep the children; while the spirit of good fellowship that the atmosphere of the school engendered had a marked effect on their manners as the four weeks of the school passed away. Here is Mrs. Ward’s own account of the contrast presented by the children as they were in the Vacation School and as they could not help being in a mean street only half a mile away:[25]
‘Last week a lady interested in the school was passing through one of the slum streets to the west of Tottenham Court Road. Much good work has been done there by many agencies. But in August most of the workers are away. Dirty, ragged, fighting or querulous children covered the pavement, or seemed to be bursting out of the grimy houses. The street was filthy, the clothes of the children to match. There was no occupation; the little souls were given up to ‘the weight of chance desires’; and whatever happiness there was must have been of rather a perilous sort. The same spectator passed on, and half a mile eastward entered the settlement building in Tavistock Place. Here were nearly 300 children (the children of the Evening Session), divided between house and garden, many of them from quarters quite as poor as those she had just traversed. But all was order, friendliness and enjoyment. Every child was clean and neat, though the clothes might be poor; if a boy brushed past the visitor, it would be with a pleasant ‘Excuse me, Miss’; in the manual training-room boys looked up from the benches with glee to show the models they had made; the drawing-room of the settlement was full of little ones busy with the unfamiliar delights of brush or pencil; in the library boys were sitting hunched up over Masterman Ready, or the ever-adored Robinson Crusoe; girls were deep in Anderson’s Fairy Tales or The Cuckoo Clock, the little ones were reading Mr. Stead’s Books for the Bairns or looking at pictures; outside in the garden under the trees clay modelling and kindergarten games were going on, while the sand-pit was crowded with children enjoying themselves heartily without either shouting or fighting. Meanwhile in the big hall parents were thronging in to see the musical drill, the dancing or the acting, or to listen to the singing; the fathers as proud as the mothers that Willie was ‘in the Shakespeare,’ or Nellie ‘in the Gavotte.’ The visitor had only to watch to see that the teachers were obeyed at a word, at a glance, and that the children loved to obey. Everywhere was discipline, good temper, pleasure. And next day the school broke up with the joining of 600 voices in the old hymn ‘O God, our help in ages past.’ Surely no contrast could be more complete.”
And in conclusion Mrs. Ward made her characteristic appeal:
“Shall we not enter seriously on the movement and call on our public authorities to take it up? Who can doubt the need of it, even when all allowance is made for country holidays of all sorts? Extend and develop country holidays as you will, London in the summer vacation month will never be without its hundreds of thousands of children for whom these Vacation Schools, properly managed, would be almost a boon of fairyland.”
The Vacation School had indeed been watched with much interest by the London School Board, which had also co-operated by the lending of furniture and “stock,” but the transference of its powers to the London County Council made a bad atmosphere, just at this time, for the adoption of new experiments, and the new “London Education Authority” which arose in 1903 was only too glad to leave the carrying-on of the Settlement Vacation School to Mrs. Ward. Every year it seemed to increase in popularity. Mr. Holland remained director for thirteen consecutive Augusts (1902-1914); the numbers of the school rose to 1,000 per day in later years, when an additional building became available, and Mrs. Ward could have no greater pleasure, when the pressure of her literary work permitted, than to come up from Stocks for a day to watch her holiday children. But in spite of the universally recognized success of her experiment, this and the “Holiday School” organized by the Browning Settlement from 1904 onwards remained practically the only efforts of the kind carried on in London, until at length, in 1910, the L.C.C. followed suit by opening six Vacation Schools in different parts of the metropolis, housed in the ordinary school buildings and playgrounds. They were an enormous boon to the children of those districts, but the Council did not persist in its good deeds, for after two years these Holiday Schools were allowed to drop, and have never, unfortunately, been revived. Indeed, in June, 1921, a resolution was passed, prohibiting any expenditure on Holiday Schools or Organized Playgrounds. So does the London child pay its share of the War Debt.
But the Vacation School at the Settlement has never lapsed, since the first day that Mrs. Ward opened it in August, 1902, although in these times of forced economy the numbers are less than of old. But there, under the great plane-trees in the garden, the trestle-tables are still set up and the children still congregate, bearing their laughing testimony to the memory of one who knew their little hearts, and who, seeing them shepherdless in the hot streets, could not rest until they were gathered in.
BOTH Lady Rose’s Daughter and The Marriage of William Ashe, which appeared in 1903 and 1905 respectively, are novels of London life, reflecting in their minor characters, their talk and the incidents that accompany the tale, that intimate aquaintance with the world of London which Mrs. Ward had acquired during the many years that she had spent in observing it, in working with it, and in sharing some of the rarer forms of the rewards which it has to give. The central theme in each case is a broadly human one, but the setting and the savour are those of London—that all-devouring London which she loved so well, but from which, after a few weeks of its turmoil, she was always so thankful to escape. It was now twenty years and more since she and Mr. Ward had come to live in the pretty old house in Russell Square where they had first gathered their friends around them, and where her Thursdays had first become an institution; but time had not dimmed her zest for friendship and for talk, so that the Thursdays and the frequent dinner-parties continued at Grosvenor Place through all the years that followed. She would never have claimed that they amounted to a salon, for, in spite of Lady Rose’s Daughter, her belief was that a salon, properly so-called, was not in the English tradition, and could hardly survive outside Paris; yet I think that if one had taken the opinion of those who frequented them they would have said that Mrs. Ward’s afternoons or evenings made a remarkable English equivalent. She herself did not disguise the fact that she regarded good talk as an art, and enjoyed nothing more than the play of mind on mind and the quick thrust and parry that occasionally sweeps across a dinner-table; but she had no illusions as to the natural inaptitude of the English for the art, and would often quote the exasperated remark of her great friend in Rome, Contessa Maria Pasolini, after an evening spent in entertaining English visitors: “You English, you need so much winding up! Now, if I were merely to tear up a piece of paper and throw it down among my French friends, they would talk about it delightfully all the evening!” Hence her injunctions to her children, when they began to take wing and go forth to “social junketings” of their own, not to be stuck-up or blasé, and above all “not to sit like a stuck pig when you get there!” To exert one’s wits to make a party go was part of one’s social duty, just as much as handing the tea-cake or opening the door, and she herself, in spite of a natural absence of small talk which made her formidable sometimes to new acquaintances, would faithfully follow her own precepts. But with her the effort was second nature, for it sprang from her inborn desire to place herself in sympathetic relations with her neighbour, to draw out the best in him, to set him going. And so the talk that was heard at Grosvenor Place, whether at her small luncheon-parties, her Thursdays, or her dinners, always took from her first and foremost the quality of reality; people talked—or made her talk—of the things they knew or cared about, and since her range was so wide, and there was always, as an old friend expressed it, “so much tinder about” among her guests, the result was a certain vividness and vitality that left their mark, and have been long remembered. And, as one of those who knew her best said once on a public occasion,[26] she had the secret of making you feel, as you left her house, that you were a much finer fellow than you thought when you went in; she made you believe in yourself, for she had, by some subtle magic—or perhaps by the simplest of all—brought out gifts or powers in you which you hardly knew that you possessed.
As to the persons who came and went in that pretty room, looking out on the garden of Buckingham Palace, how is it possible to number or name them, or to recall the flavour of their long-vanished conversation? Many have, like their hostess, passed into the unknown: figures like Leslie Stephen, who wrote to her often, especially after his wife’s death, and came at intervals to Grosvenor Place for a long tête-à-tête, sitting on the sofa beside Mrs. Ward, his ear-trumpet between them; or like the much-loved Burne-Jones, who came at an earlier stage and too soon ceased to come, for he died in 1898, leaving her only a little bundle of letters which she affectionately treasured; or again, like Lady Wemyss, the deep-voiced, queerly-dressed grande dame, whom Mrs. Ward loved for her heart’s sake, and of whom she has recorded a suggestion, perhaps, in the Lady Winterbourne of Marcella; and ah! how many more, of whom it would be unprofitable for the after-born to write. Mrs. Ward has left in her novels the mirror of the world in which she lived and moved, and in her Recollections a more intimate picture of her friends. To try to add to these records would be but to tempt the Gods.
But at what a cost in fatigue of body and mind even her entertaining was carried on, those who passed their days with Mrs. Ward may at least tell. It was always the same story. She put so much of herself into whatever she was doing that the effort produced exhaustion. And so, after her Thursdays, or perhaps after some gathering of Settlement workers to whom she had been talking individually, she would collapse upon the sofa, white and speechless, only fit to be “stroked” and left to gather her forces again as best she might. There was one Thursday in the month when, after her own “At Home,” she was obliged to attend the Settlement Council meeting at eight o’clock. This meant that there was no time for recuperation between the two, but only for a hurried meal, filled with hasty consultations as to the evening’s notes, letters and telephonings that must be done during her absence; then she would go off, and some time towards eleven would return, worn out and crumpled, though perhaps with the light of battle still in her eye over some point well raised or some victory won. At the Settlement she would have given no hint of any disability, and would have been the life and soul of the meeting. Perhaps only her friend the Warden knew what a struggle against physical pain and weakness her presence there had implied. We used to chaff her sometimes about the physical ailments of her heroines, who, according to our robust ideas, were too fond of turning white or of letting their lips tremble, but this trick of her novels expressed only too deep an experience of her own, since never, in all the years that she was writing, did she know what it was to have a day of ordinary physical strength. On many and many of her guests she made the illusion of being a strong woman, but could they have seen her when the talk and the excitement were over, they would have known that it was only her spirit that had carried her through. The body was always dragged after, a more or less protesting slave.
Her way of life at Grosvenor Place was naturally one which involved a good deal of expenditure. Sometimes she would have searchings of heart over this, or even momentary spasms of economy, but it sprang in reality from two fundamental causes—one her delight in beautiful things, inherited even in her starved childhood from her mother, and shared to the full in later years with her husband; the other this constant ill-health, which made her incapable of “roughing it,” and rendered a certain amount of luxury indispensable if she was to get through her daily task. Good pictures and the right kind of furniture gave her a definite joy for their own sakes, while the arrangement of the chairs and tables in the manner best calculated to encourage talk was always a fascinating problem. Clothes, too, were not to be despised, and though she liked to sit and work in some old rag that had seen better days, it amused her also to go and plan some beautiful thing with her dressmaker, Mrs. Kerr, and it amused her to wear the “creation” when it was finished. Her faithful maid, Lizzie, who had been with us since the early days of Russell Square, and who was often more nurse than maid to her, cut and altered and renovated in her little workroom upstairs, while every now and then Mrs. Ward would issue forth and make a raid upon the shops, coming home either triumphant to face the criticism of her family, or very low because she knew she had been beguiled into buying something which she now positively hated. She was extremely particular, too, about her daughters’ clothes, nor could she make up her mind, when they came out, to give them a dress allowance, being far too much interested herself in the problem of how they looked; but even when she was fully responsible for some luckless garment of theirs she would often break out, on its first appearance, with the fatal words, “Go upstairs, take that off, and let me never see it again until it’s completely re-made!”—usually uttered amid helpless giggles, for this had become, by long use, a stock phrase in our family.
Strangers coming from afar with some claim upon her kindness found always a ready welcome at her house. In addition to her French and Italian friends, who would find their way to her door as soon as they arrived in London, she had many warm friendships with Americans, beginning with her much-loved cousin, Frederick W. Whitridge, who had married Matthew Arnold’s daughter Lucy, and had got Mr. Ward to build a comely house for her within half a mile of Stocks. “Cousin Fred,” with his charming blue eyes and white moustache and beard, had been a truly Olympian figure to us children even in the days of Russell Square, for had he not deposited on our plates at breakfast, one golden morning, a sovereign each for the two elders and half a sovereign for the youngest? And as the years passed on, and he became the intimate friend of Roosevelt and a recognized leader of the New York Bar, the friendship between him and Mrs. Ward grew ever deeper, so that his shrewd wisdom and inimitable humour, as well as his habit of spoiling the people he was fond of, came to be looked for each summer as one of the true pleasures of the year. His son was one of the first Americans to join the British Army in 1914, but he himself, like Henry James, was not to see the day for which both he and Roosevelt had toiled so hard. He died in December, 1916, four months before America “came in.” Mr. Lowell, the American Ambassador during the ’eighties, had been a frequent visitor at Russell Square, while his successors, Hay, Bayard and Choate, were all on friendly terms with Mrs. Ward. Comrades in her own trade whom it always pleased her to see were Mr. Gilder, editor of the Century Magazine, welcome whether he came as publisher or friend; Mr. Godkin, of the Evening Post, the most intellectual among American journalists; Mr. S. S. McClure, who had first tracked down Mrs. Ward at Borough Farm, and remained ever afterwards on cordial, not to say familiar, terms with her; Charles Dudley Warner, Mrs. Wharton, the William James’s, and many more. But the most intimate of all were certain women: that inseparable and delightful pair, Mrs. Fields and Miss Sarah Orne Jewett (the writer of New England stories), who twice found their way to Stocks, and many times to Grosvenor Place, and lastly that other Bostonian, Miss Sara Norton, whose friendship for Dorothy made her almost as another daughter during her visits to Stocks, to Levens, or to the Villa Bonaventura.
But it was not by any means only for the “distinguished,” whether from home or abroad, that Grosvenor Place laid itself out. One of its principal functions was that of making the head-quarters in London for all the younger members of Mrs. Ward’s own family, as well as for the grandchildren who began about this time to find their way to her knee. For to all such young people she was mother, fairy godmother and friend rolled into one. Settlement workers and Associates, teachers and many “dim” people of various professions would find her as accessible as her strenuous hours of labour would allow. All she asked of those who came to her house was that they should have something real to contribute—and if possible that they should contribute it without egotism. Certainly she did not suffer bores gladly; an ordinary bore was bad enough, but an egotistic bore would produce a peculiar kind of nervous irritation in her which we who watched could always detect, however manfully she strove to conceal it. Nor could she ever bring herself to observe the strict rules of London etiquette, so that to “go calling” was an unknown occupation in her calendar, and in spite of two daughters and a secretary her social lapses and forgetfulnesses sometimes plunged her in black despair. When she had hopelessly missed Mrs. So-and-So’s party, to which she had fully meant to go, she would sorrowfully declare that the motto of the Ward family ought to be: “Never went and never wrote.”
It is needless to point out how exhausting this London life became to one who pressed so much into it as Mrs. Ward. For although she could rarely write her books in London, being far too distracted by the demands of the hungry world upon her time, it was mainly at Grosvenor Place that she hammered out her schemes for the welfare of London’s children, talking them over with members of the School Board or the County Council, driving about to some of the poorest districts to see with her own eyes the conditions under which they lived, and planning out the details in mornings of hard work with Miss Churcher. The development of the Cripples’ Schools, both in London and the Provinces, was very much on her shoulders at this time, for she felt the imperative need for extending them to other parts of the country, and undertook many arduous missionary journeys on their behalf during the few years that followed their establishment in London. There, as the schools grew and spread under the fostering care of the L.C.C., it was the auxiliary services of after-care, feeding and training that claimed the principal share of her attention. But she had a very efficient committee to assist her in these matters, under the chairmanship of Miss Maude Lawrence, so that gradually her responsibility for the London cripples grew less heavy, and she was able to turn to other schemes that now began to simmer in her mind for the welfare of the whole as well as the halt among London’s children.
For the remarkable success of the Children’s Recreation School at the Settlement, which by the year 1904 had attendances of some 1,700 children a week (all, of course, wholly voluntary), led Mrs. Ward to feel that some effort might be made to carry the civilizing effect of such centres of play into the remoter and still more squalid regions of the East and South. Already the Children’s Happy Evenings’ Association held weekly or fortnightly “Evenings” in some eighty or ninety schools, giving much pleasure to the children wherever they went, but Mrs. Ward’s plan was for something on a more intensive scale than this, something that might exert a continuous influence over the lives of large numbers of children in any given district, as the occupations and delights of the “Passmore” did over the children of St. Pancras. She founded a small committee, in October, 1904, to go into the matter and to lay proposals before the Education Committee of the London County Council: proposals to the effect that the “Play Centres Committee” should be allowed the free use of certain schools after school hours on five evenings a week, from 5.30 to 7.30, and also on Saturday mornings, for the purpose of providing games, physical exercises and handwork occupations for the children of that district. The Council readily gave its consent, and Mrs. Ward applied herself to the task of raising sufficient funds for the maintenance of eight “Evening Play Centres” in certain school buildings, to be carried on for a year as an experiment. She obtained promises amounting to nearly £800, largely from the same friends as had watched her work at the Settlement, and with this she felt that she could go forward. After careful inquiry, four schools in the East End were selected, with one in Somers Town and two in Lambeth and Walworth respectively, while Canon Barnett offered Toynbee Hall itself as the scene of an eighth Centre. Mrs. Ward devoted special pains to the selection of the eight Superintendents who were to have charge of these Play Centres, for she rightly felt that on their wisdom and skill in handling the large numbers of children who would pass through their hands would largely depend the success of the adventure. Gymnastic instructors, handwork teachers and many voluntary helpers were also secured and assigned to the various Centres, so that the staff in each case consisted of a cadre of paid and professional workers, assisted by as many volunteers as possible. Mrs. Ward’s long experience at the Settlement had convinced her that this nucleus of paid workers was essential to the smooth and continuous working of any such scheme, since although the best volunteers were invaluable in supplying an element of initiative and originality in the working out of new ideas, still there was also an element of irregularity in their attendance which detracted much from their usefulness! And in proportion as the Centres succeeded in their object of attracting the children from the streets, so much the more disastrous would it be if large numbers of them were left shepherdless on foggy evenings because Miss So-and-So had a bad cold. Mrs. Ward was much criticized in certain quarters for bringing the “professional element” into her Play Centres, but she knew better than her critics how far the voluntary element might safely be trusted, and how far it must be supplemented by the professional. She was playing all the time for a big thing, with possibilities of expansion not only in London but in the great industrial towns as well, besides which she always hotly resented the suggestion that the paid worker must be inferior in quality to the volunteer. On the contrary, it interested her immensely to see how the professional teachers, both men and women, would often reveal new and unsuspected qualities in the freer atmosphere of the Play Centre, while the greater intimacy that they acquired with their children was—as they often acknowledged—of the greatest value to them in their day-school work.
The first eight Play Centres opened their doors to the children on the first Monday in February, 1905, and it may be imagined with what anxiety and delight Mrs. Ward watched their development during these first weeks. The children had been secured in the first instance by invitations distributed through the Head Teachers to those who, in their opinion, stood most in need of shelter and occupation after school hours, i.e. principally to those whose parents were both out at work till 7 or 8 o’clock; but after the ice was broken, Alf would bring ‘Arry and Edie would bring Maud, till the utmost capacity of the classes was reached, and Mrs. Ward’s heart was both gladdened and saddened by the tale that her staff had as many children as they could possibly cope with, and that many had of necessity been turned away. By the end of the year the weekly attendance at the eight Centres amounted to nearly 6,000, and a year later, with ten Centres instead of eight, they had risen to over 10,000. This meant that Mrs. Ward had struck upon a real need of the wandering, loafing child-population of our greatest city—a need that will in fact be perennial so long as the housing of the miles upon miles of bricks and mortar that we call the working-class districts remains what it is. “It all grows steadily beyond my hopes,” wrote Mrs. Ward to Mrs. Creighton in October, 1906, “and I believe that in three or four years we shall see it developing into an ordinary part of education, in the true sense. There is no difficulty about money—the difficulty is to find the time and nerve-strength to carry it on, even with such help as Bessie Churcher’s.”
But the burden of raising the increasing sums required was, in truth, very great, so that Mrs. Ward, with her belief in the future of the movement, was already at work to get the Play Centre principle recognized and embodied in an Act of Parliament. The opportunity arose on Mr. Birrell’s ill-fated Bill of 1906, but although Mrs. Ward’s clause, enabling any Local Education Authority “to provide for children attending a public elementary school, Vacation Schools, Play Centres, or means of recreation during their holidays or at such other times as the Local Education Authority may prescribe,” was accepted by the Government, and passed the House of Lords in December, 1906, the Bill itself was dropped soon afterwards, having been wrecked on the usual rocks of sectarian passion. Fortunately, however, Mr. McKenna, who succeeded Mr. Birrell at the Board of Education, was able to carry a smaller measure, known as the Education (Administrative Provisions) Act, in the summer of the next year (1907). This Act duly contained the Play Centres clause, as well as the provisions for the medical inspection and treatment of school-children which have since borne such beneficent fruit. Already in the previous summer, when the clause was first before the House of Commons, Mr. Sydney Buxton had said at the opening of the Settlement Vacation School that he felt sure it would go down to history as the “Mary Ward Clause.”
But this victory had not been won except at the cost of considerable friction with the only other body that attempted to cater in any systematic fashion for the needs of London’s children in the evening hours—I mean the Children’s Happy Evenings’ Association. The Association, which embodied the “voluntary principle” in its purest form, could not tolerate the idea that the Public Education Authority might in the future come to encroach upon a field which they regarded as their own—even though their “Evenings” were avowedly held only once a week, sometimes only once a fortnight, and could not touch more than the barest fringe of the child population of each district. They disliked the professional worker, and they abhorred the bare idea that public money might eventually be spent upon the recreation of the children—ignoring the experience of America, where the public authority was doing more each year for the playtime of its children, and forgetting, perhaps, that at the “preparatory schools” to which their own little boys were sent, almost more time and thought were spent upon their games than upon their “education” proper. And so they sent a deputation to Mr. Birrell to oppose Mrs. Ward’s clause, and their workers attacked Mrs. Ward and her precious Play Centres in other ways and on other occasions as well; but they found that she was a shrewd fighter, for even though during the summer of 1906 she was laid low by that most disabling complaint, a terrible attack of eczema, she compelled herself to write from her bed a trenchant letter to The Times in defence of the professional worker, and also a very conciliatory letter to her friend Lady Jersey, the President of the Happy Evenings’ Association.