Read Ebook: The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward by Trevelyan Janet Penrose

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CHILDHOOD

Mary Arnold's Parentage--The Sorells--Thomas Arnold the Younger--Marriage in Tasmania with Julia Sorell--Conversion to Roman Catholicism--Return to England--The Arnold Family--Mary Arnold's Childhood--Schools--Her Father's Re-conversion--Removal to Oxford 1-16

LIFE AT OXFORD, 1867-1881

CHILDREN AND ADULTS AT THE PASSMORE EDWARDS SETTLEMENT--THE FOUNDATION OF THE INVALID CHILDREN'S SCHOOL, 1897-1899

Beginnings of the Work for Children--The Recreation School--The Work for Adults--Finance--Mrs. Ward's interest in Crippled Children--Plans for Organizing a School--She obtains the help of the London School Board--Opening of the Settlement School--The Children's Dinners--Extension of the Work--Mrs. Ward's Inquiry and Report--Further Schools opened by the School Board--After-care--Mrs. Ward and the Children 123-142

MRS. WARD AS CRITIC AND PLAYWRIGHT--FRENCH AND ITALIAN FRIENDS--THE SETTLEMENT VACATION SCHOOL, 1899-1904

LONDON LIFE--THE BEGINNINGS AND GROWTH OF THE CHILDREN'S PLAY CENTRES, 1904-1917

THE VISIT TO THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA, 1908

MRS. WARD AND THE SUFFRAGE QUESTION

THE WAR, 1914-1917--MRS. WARD'S FIRST TWO JOURNEYS TO FRANCE

LAST YEARS: 1917-1920

TO FACE PAGE

Borough Farm. From a water-colour painting by Mrs. Humphry Ward 45

Mrs. Ward in 1889. From a photograph by Bassano 82

Mrs. Ward in 1898. From a photograph by Miss Ethel M. Arnold 149

Mrs. Ward and Henry James at Stocks. From a photograph by Miss Dorothy Ward 252

Mrs. Ward beside the Lake of Lucerne. From a photograph by Miss Dorothy Ward 262

CHILDHOOD

Is the study of heredity a science or a pure romance? For the unlearned at least I like to think it is the latter, since no law that the Professors ever formulated can explain the caprices of each little human soul, bobbing up like a coracle over life's horizon and bringing with it things gathered at random from an infinitely remote and varying ancestry. It is, I believe, generally known that the subject of this biography was a granddaughter of Arnold of Rugby, and therewith her intellectual ability and the force of her character are thought to be sufficiently explained. But what of her mother, the beautiful Julia Sorell, of whom her sad husband said at her death that she had "the nature of a queen," ever thwarted and rebuffed by circumstance? What of the strain of Spanish Protestant blood that ran in the veins of the Sorells: for although they were refugees from France after the Edict of Nantes, it is most probable that they came of Spanish origin? What of the strain brought in by the wild and forcible Kemps of Mount Vernon in Tasmania? A daughter of Anthony Fenn Kemp married William Sorell and so became the mother of Julia and the grandmother of Mary Arnold; but the principal fact that is known of her is that she deserted her three daughters after bringing them to England for their education, went off with an army officer and was hardly heard of more. An ungovernable temper seems to have marked most of this family, and the recollections of her childhood were so terrible to Julia Sorell that she wrote in after years to her husband, "Few families have been blessed with such a home training as yours, and certainly very few in our rank of life have been cursed with such as mine." Yet although Julia inherited much of this violence and passion, to her own constant misery, she had also "the nature of a queen," and transmitted it in no small degree to her daughter Mary.

The Sorells were descended from Colonel William Sorell, one of the early Governors of Tasmania, who had been appointed to the post in 1816. Nine years before, on his appointment as Adjutant-General at the Cape of Good Hope, this Colonel Sorell had left behind him in England a woman to whom he was legally married and by whom he had had several children, but whom he never saw again after leaving these shores. He occupied himself, indeed, with another lady, while the unfortunate wife at home struggled to maintain his children on the very inadequate allowance which he had granted her. Twice the allowance lapsed, with calamitous results for the wife and children, and it was only on the active intervention of Lord Bathurst, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, that the payment of her quarterly instalments was resumed in 1818. Meanwhile, her eldest son William, a steady, hard-working lad, had been trying to support the family from his own earnings of 12s. a week, and when he grew to man's estate he applied to Lord Bathurst for permission to join his father in Van Diemen's Land, hoping that so he might help to reconcile his parents. Lord Bathurst gave him his passage out, but had in fact already decided to recall Governor Sorell, so that when young Sorell arrived at Hobart Town early in 1824 he found his father only awaiting the arrival of his successor , before quitting the Colony for good. William, however, decided to remain there, accepted the position of Registrar of Deeds from Colonel Arthur, and made his permanent home in the island. He married the head-strong Miss Kemp, and in his sad after-life suffered a reversal of the parts played by his own father and mother. Long after his wife had deserted him he lived on in Hobart Town, much respected and beloved, and remembered by his granddaughter as a "gentle, affectionate, upright being, a gentleman of an old, punctilious school, content with a small sphere and much loved within it."

His daughter Julia grew up as the favourite and pet of Hobart Town society, much admired by the subalterns of the solitary battalion of British troops that maintained our prestige among the convicts and the "blacks" of that remote settlement. But for her Fate held other things in store. Early in 1850 there appeared at Hobart Town a young man of twenty-six, tall and romantic-looking, who bore a name well known even in the southern seas--the name of Thomas Arnold. He was the second son of Dr. Arnold of Rugby. He had left the Old World for the Newest three years before on a genuine quest for the ideal life; had tried farming in New Zealand, but in vain, and had then, after some adventures in schoolmastering, come to Tasmania at the invitation of the Governor, Sir William Denison, to organize the public education of the Colony. Fortune seemed to smile upon the young Inspector of Schools, who as a first-classman and an Arnold found a kind and ready welcome from those who reigned in Tasmania, and when he met Julia Sorell a few weeks after he landed and fell in love with her at first sight, no obstacles were placed in his way. They were married on June 12, 1850--a love-match if ever there was one, but a match that was too soon to be subjected to that most fiery test of all, a religious struggle of the deepest and most formidable kind.

Thus, at the age of five, this little spirit, passionate, self-willed and tender-hearted, came within the direct orbit of the Arnold family. During most of the four years that followed their arrival she was either staying with her grandmother, the Doctor's widow, at Fox How, or else living as a boarder at Miss Clough's little school at Eller How, near Ambleside, and spending her Saturdays at Fox How. Her father meanwhile took work under Newman in Dublin and earned a precarious subsistence for his wife and family by teaching at the Catholic University there. They were times of hardship and privation for Julia, who never ceased to be in love with Tom and never ceased to curse the day of his conversion; and as the babies increased and the income did not she was fain to allow her eldest daughter to live more and more with the kind grandmother, who asked no better than to have the child about the house. And, indeed, to have this particular child about the house was not always a light undertaking! She was wonderfully quick, clever and affectionate, but her tempers sometimes shook her to pieces in storms of passion, and the devoted "Aunt Fan," the Doctor's youngest daughter, who lived with her mother at Fox How, was often sorely puzzled how to deal with her. Still, by a judicious mixture of severity and tenderness she won the child's affection, so that Mary was wont to say, looking slyly at her aunt, "I like Aunt Fan--she's the master of me!"

The Arnold atmosphere made indeed a very remarkable influence for any impressionable child of Mary's age to live in; it supplied a deep-rooted sense of calm and balance, an unalterable family affection and a sad disapproval of tempers and excesses of all kinds which, as time went on, had a marked effect on the Tasmanian child. From a Sorell by birth and temperament, as I believe she was, she gradually became an Arnold by environment. If she inherited from her mother those wilder springs of energy and courage which impelled her, like some daemon within, to be up and doing in life's race, it was from the Arnolds that she learnt the art of living, the art of harnessing the daemon. They certainly made a memorable group, the nine sons and daughters of Arnold of Rugby: all of whom, except Fan, the youngest daughter, were scattered from the nest by the time that "little Polly" came to Fox How, but all of whom maintained for each other and for their mother the tenderest affection, so that life at the Westmorland home was continually crossed and re-crossed by their visits and their letters. In looking through these faded letters the reader of to-day is struck by their seriousness and simplicity of tone, by the intense family affection they display and by the very real relation in which the writers stood towards the "indwelling presence of God." Hardly a member of the family can be mentioned without the prefix "dear" or "dearest," nor can anyone who is acquainted with the Arnold temperament doubt that this was genuine. Birthdays are made the occasion for rather solemn words of love or exhortation, and if any sorrow strikes the family one may expect without fail to find a complete reliance on the accustomed sources of consolation. Yet they are not prigs, these brothers and sisters; their roots strike deep down to the bed-rock of life, and though they are all in fairly prosperous circumstances, they can be generous and open-handed to those who are less so. Tom was, I think, the special darling of the family, and his lapse to Catholicism a terrible trial to them, but none the less did they labour for Tom's children in all simplicity of heart.

"Mary had a very decided character of her own, as well as a pretty vivid imagination, for the odd things she used to say, merely on the spur of the moment, would quite stagger me sometimes. Once when we were going along the passage upstairs leading to the schoolroom, she stopped at one of the gratings where the hot air came up from the furnace, with holes in the pattern about the size of a shilling, and told me that she knew a little boy whose head was so small that he could put it through one of those holes: and after we had gone to bed she would tell me the oddest stories in a whisper, because it was against the rules to talk. I think now that her fancy used to run riot with her, and, of course, she had to give vent to it in any way that suggested itself. But I implicitly believed whatever she chose to tell me, so that you see we both enjoyed ourselves. Her energy and high spirits were something wonderful; out of doors she was never still, but always running or jumping or playing, and she invariably tired me out at this sort of thing. Still, nothing came amiss to her in the way of amusement; anything that entered her head would answer the purpose, and she was never at a loss. I recollect she had a lovely doll, which her aunt, Mrs. Forster, had given her, all made of wax. Once she was annoyed with this doll for some reason or other and broke it up into little bits. We put the bits into little saucepans, and melted them over one of the gratings I told you of. Sometimes Willy Dolly would let the fire go down, and then the gratings were cold, and at other times he would have a roaring fire, and then they would be so hot that you couldn't touch them. So we melted the wax and moulded it into dolls' puddings, and that was the last of her wax doll!

"One day we were over at Fox How, which was a pretty house, with a wide lawn and garden. One side of it was covered with a handsome Virginia creeper, which was thought a great deal of, and, of course, was not intended to be meddled with. Suddenly it occurred to Mary that it would be first-rate fun to pick 'all those red leaves,' and I obediently went and helped her. We cleared a great bare space all along the wall as high as we could reach, but from what Miss Arnold said when she came out and discovered what was done, I gathered that she was not so pleased with our work as we were ourselves."

But there were some compensations even in these unlovely surroundings. The nice old German governess, Fr?ulein Gerecke, was always kind to her, and tried in little unobtrusive ways to ease the lot which Mary found so hard to bear. Once she made for her, surreptitiously, a white muslin frock with blue ribbons and laid it on her bed in time for some little function of the school for which Mary had received no "party frock" from home. A gush of hot tears was the response, tears partly of gratitude, partly of soreness at the need for it; but the muslin frock was worn nevertheless, and entered from that moment into the substance of the day-dreams and stories that she was for ever telling herself. Any child who has a faculty for it will understand how great a consolation were these self-told stories, in which she rioted especially on days of senna-tea and gruel. Tales of the Princess of Wales and how she, Mary, herself succeeded in stopping her runaway horses, with the divinity's pale agitation and gratitude, filled the long hours, and the muslin frock usually came into the story when Mary made her trembling appearance "by command" at the palace afterwards. Gradually, too, these tales came to weave themselves round more accessible mortals, for Mary's heart and affections were waking up and she did not escape, any more than the modern schoolgirl, her share of "adorations." At twelve years old she fell headlong in love with the Vicar of Shiffnal and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Cunliffe; going to church--especially in the evenings, when the Vicar preached--became a romance; seeing Mrs. Cunliffe pass by in her pony-carriage lent a radiance to the day. The Vicar's wife, a gentle Evangelical, felt genuinely drawn towards the untamed little being and did her best to guide the wayward footsteps, while Mary on her side wrote poems to her idol, keeping them fortunately locked within her desk, and let her fancy run from ecstasy to ecstasy in the dreams that she wove around her. What "dauntless child" among us does not know these splendours, and the transforming effect that they have upon the prickly hide of youth? Little Mary Arnold was destined to leave her mark upon the world, partly by power of brain, but more by sheer power of love, and the first human beings to unlock the unguessed stores of it within her were these two kindly Evangelicals.

Still, the demon was not quite exorcised, and "Aunt Fan" still found Mary something of a handful when she stayed at Fox How, though now in a different way.

Whether it was that after two or three years of the Birmingham Oratory, Tom Arnold's political radicalism began to make him uneasy at the proceedings of Pio Nono--for 1864 was the year of the Encyclical--or whether it was more particularly the Mortara case, as he says in his autobiography, at any rate his feeling towards the Catholic Church had grown distinctly cool by the end of that year, and he was meditating leaving the Oratory. Gradually the rumour spread among his friends that Tom Arnold was turning against Rome, and in June, 1865, a paragraph to this effect appeared in the papers. Little Mary, now a girl of fourteen, heard the news while she was at Miss May's, and wrote in ecstasy to her mother:

"My precious Mother, I have indeed seen the paragraphs about Papa. The L's showed them me on Saturday. You can imagine the excitement I was in on Saturday night, not knowing whether it was true or not. Your letter confirmed it this morning and Miss May, seeing I suppose that I looked rather faint, sent me on a pretended errand for her notebook to escape the breakfast-table. My darling Mother, how thankful you must be! One feels as if one could do nothing but thank Him."

Her father's change opened indeed a new and happier chapter in their lives, for it opened the road to Oxford. He had been seriously facing the possibility of a second emigration, this time to Queensland, and had been making inquiries about official work there, but his own inclinations--and, of course, Julia's too--were in favour of trying to make a living at Oxford by the taking of pupils. His old friends there encouraged him, and by the autumn of 1865 they were established in a house in St. Giles's and the venture had begun. Mary wrote in delight that winter to her dear Mrs. Cunliffe:

"Do you know that we are now living at Oxford? My father takes pupils and has a history lectureship. We are happier there than we have ever been before, I think. My father revels in the libraries, and so do I when I am at home."

As the eldest of eight children she led a very strenuous life at home, helping to teach the little ones and ever striving to avoid a clash between her mother's temper and her own. The entries in the diary are often sadly self-accusing: "These last three days I have not served Christ at all. It has been nothing but self from beginning to end. Prayer seems a task and it seems as if God would not receive me."

LIFE AT OXFORD

Two other remarkable figures who dominated the Oxford world of that day, though from opposite camps, were the silver-tongued Dr. Liddon, "Select Preacher" at the University Church, and Mark Pattison, Rector of Lincoln, whom his contemporaries looked on with awe as one of the most learned scholars in Europe in matters of pure erudition, but in religion a sad sceptic, though twenty years before, they knew, he had been a brand only barely plucked from Newman's burning. Both were to have their influence upon Mary Arnold, the former superficial, the latter deep and lasting, and it is curious to find a letter from her father, written in 1865, before he had definitely left the Catholic communion, in which he describes hearing both men preach on the same day in the University Church.

In the course of this work on the early Spaniards she developed an extraordinary attachment to the Bodleian, with all the most secret corners of which she soon became familiar, under the benevolent guidance of the Librarian, Mr. Coxe. The charm of the noble building, with its mellow lights and shades, its silences, its deep spaces of book-lined walls, sank into her very soul and gave her that background of the love of books and reading which became perhaps--next to her love of nature--the strongest solace of her after-life. At the age of twenty she wrote a little essay, called "A Morning in the Bodleian," which reflects all the joy--nay, the pride--of her own long days of work among the calf-bound volumes.

"As you slip into the chair set ready for you," she writes, "a deep repose steals over you--the repose, not of indolence but of possession; the product of time, work and patient thought only. Literature has no guerdon for 'bread-students,' to quote the expressive German phrase; let not the young man reading for his pass, the London copyist or the British Museum illuminator, hope to enter within the enchanted ring of her benignest influences; only to the silent ardour, the thirst, the disinterestedness of the true learner, is she prodigal of all good gifts. To him she beckons, in him she confides, till she has produced in him that wonderful many-sidedness, that universal human sympathy which stamps the true literary man, and which is more religious than any form of creed."

A touch about the German students to be found there has its note of prophecy: "In a small inner room are the Hebrew manuscripts; a German is working there, another in shirt-sleeves is here--strange people of innumerable tentacles, stretching all ways, from Genesis to the latest form of the needle-gun." And in the last page we come upon her most intimate reflections, the thoughts pressed together from her many months of comradeship with those silent tomes, which show, better than any letters, the quality of a mind but just emerging--as the years are reckoned--from its teens:--

"Who can pass out of such a building without a feeling of profound melancholy? The thought is almost too obvious to be dwelt upon; but it is overpowering and inevitable. These shelves of mighty folios, these cases of laboured manuscripts, these illuminated volumes of which each may represent a life--the first, dominant impression which they make cannot fail to be like that which a burial-ground leaves--a Hamlet-like sense of 'the pity of it.' Which is the sadder image, the dust of Alexander stopping a bung-hole, or the brain and life-blood of a hundred monks cumbering the shelves of the Bodleian? Not the former, for Alexander's dust matters little where his work is considered, but these monks' work is in their books; to their books they sacrificed their lives, and gave themselves up as an offering to posterity. And posterity, overburdened by its own concerns, passes them by without a look or a word! Here and there, of course, is a volume which has made a mark upon the world; but the mass are silent for ever, and zeal, industry, talent, for once that they have had permanent results, have a thousand times been sealed by failure. And yet men go on writing, writing; and books are born under the shadow of the great libraries just as children are born within sight of the tombs. It seems as though Nature's law were universal as well as rigid in its sphere--wide wastes of sand shut in the green oasis, many a seed falls among thorns or by the wayside, many a bud must be sacrificed before there comes the perfect flower, many a little life must exhaust itself in a useless book before the great book is made which is to remain a force for ever. And so we might as profitably murmur at the withered buds, at the seed that takes no root, at the stretch of desert, as at the unread folios. They are waste, it is true; but it is the waste that is thrown off by Humanity in its ceaseless process towards the fulfilment of its law."

No doubt her life was not all books during these four years, though books gave it its tone and background; she took her part in the gaieties of Oxford, in Eights Week and Commem. and in river parties to the Nuneham woods, and it is to be feared that her stout resistance to the "seductiveness of Oxford, its moonlight charms and Romeo and Juliet character" was not of long duration. In one select Oxford pastime, the game of croquet, she attained to real pre-eminence, becoming, after her marriage, one of the moving spirits of the Oxford Croquet Club. But her shyness made social events no special joy to her, and she was far happier sitting at the feet of "Mark Pat" or helping "Mrs. Pat" with her etching in the sitting-room upstairs than in making conversation with the youth of Oxford.

Mary's efforts at writing fiction, which had been many from her school-days onwards, were far less successful at this stage than her more serious essays; but she persisted in the attempt, for the pressure on the family budget was always so great that she longed to make herself independent of it by earning something with her pen. She sent one story, at the age of eighteen, to Messrs. Smith & Elder, her future publishers, but when it was politely declined by them she showed her philosophy in the following note--

DEAR SIRS,--

I beg to thank you for your courteous letter. "Ailie" is a juvenile production and I am not sorry you decline to publish it. Had it appeared in print I should probably have been ashamed of it by and by.

I remain, Yours obediently, MARY ARNOLD.

Sometimes the Forsters would invite her to stay with them in London, and so it occurred that at the age of eighteen she was actually there, in the Ladies' Gallery of the House of Commons, when her uncle brought in his famous Education Bill. In after life she was always glad to recall that day, and when in the fullness of time her own path led her among the stunted lives of London's children she liked to think that she was in a sense continuing her uncle's work.

They were engaged for ten months, and then, on April 6, 1872, Dean Stanley married them and they settled, a little later, in a house in Bradmore Road , where they lived and worked for the next nine years.

Strenuous and delightful years! In looking back over them her old friends recall with amazement her intense vitality and energy, in spite of many lapses of health; how she was always at work, writing articles or reviewing books to eke out the family income, and how she seemed besides to bear on her shoulders the cares of two families, her own and her husband's. She was the eldest and he the third of a long string of brothers and sisters, the younger of whom were still quite children and much in need of shepherding. The house in Bradmore Road was always a second home to them. Her own parents lived close by and she was much in and out of their house, sharing in their anxieties and struggles and helping whenever it was possible to help. For she was linked to her father by a deep and instinctive devotion, much strengthened by these years of companionship at Oxford, and to her mother by a more aching sense of pity and longing. Tom Arnold was growing restless again in the mid-'seventies, and when he went with his younger children to church at St. Philip's they would nudge each other to hear him muttering under his breath the Latin prayers of long ago--little thinking, poor babes, how their very bread and butter might hang upon these mutterings! But in 1876 there came a day when his election to the Professorship of Early English was almost a foregone conclusion; as the author of the standard edition of Wycliffe's English Works he was by far the strongest candidate in the field, and Julia looked forward eagerly to a time of deliverance from their perpetual money troubles. For some months, however, he had secretly made up his mind that he must re-enter the Roman fold, and now that once more his worldly promotion depended on his remaining outside it he decided that this was the moment to make his re-conversion public. He announced it on the very eve of the election, with the result that the majority of the electors decided against him. Poor Mary heard the news early next morning and ran round in great distress to her true friends, the T. H. Greens, pouring it out to them with uncontrollable tears. And, indeed, it was the death-knell of the Arnolds' prosperity at Oxford. Pupils came no longer to be taught by a professing Catholic, and Julia was reduced to taking "boarders" in a smaller house in Church Walk, while Tom earned what he could by incessant writing and eventually took work again at the Catholic University in Dublin. And then a still more terrible blow fell upon Julia; she was discovered to have cancer, and an operation in the autumn of 1877 left her a maimed and suffering invalid. All this could not fail to leave a profound mark on the anxious and tender heart of her daughter, in whom the capacity for human affection seemed to grow and treble with the years; it made a dark background to her Oxford life, otherwise so full to overflowing with the happiness of friends and home.

Her music was a constant joy to her friends, and Mrs. Johnson makes frequent mention of her playing of Bach and of her wonderful reading. It was a possession that remained with her, to a certain extent, all her life, in spite of writer's cramp and of a total inability to find time to "keep it up." But even twenty and thirty years later than this date, her playing of Beethoven or Brahms--on the rare occasions when she would allow herself such indulgence--would astonish the few friends who heard it.

Meanwhile the portrait prospered, and was at length presented to its subject when she lay recovering from the birth of her second babe--a boy whom they named Arnold--in November, 1876. "Humphry and I are full of delight over the picture," writes Mary to Mrs. Johnson, "and of wonder at the amount of true and delicate work you have put into it. It will be a possession not only for us but for our children--see how easily the new style comes!" These were prophetic words, for it is indeed the portrait of her that still gives most pleasure to the beholder, though in later years she was painted or drawn by many skilful hands.

And thus the work went on, week after week, all through the year 1879. I have before me a common-looking engagement-diary in which it is all recorded, from the month of March to late in the month of October: all the committee-meetings, all the letters written to newspapers, to prospective students or to possible heads; the decision to purchase the lease of "Walton House," "to be assigned to the President on August 1"; the builder's estimate for alterations , the letters about drainage, or cretonne, or armchairs and fenders, no less than the resolution passed at Balliol on October 24 to "form a Company for the management of the Hall under the Limited Liability Act of 1862, with a nominal capital of ?25,000." But by that time the Hall was already opened and the long labour crowned; and a fortnight afterwards, on November 6, her youngest child was born. It may be hoped that after this Mrs. Ward took a brief holiday from the cares of Somerville.

Mrs. Ward remained a member of the original Council of Somerville Hall long after her departure from Oxford, and during her last two years there continued to be largely responsible, as one of the most active members of the Association for the Education of Women, for the organization of the teaching. All the lectures were arranged by the Association--in consultation, of course, with the Principal--for it was not until 1884 that women students were admitted to the smallest of the University examinations, or to lectures at a few of the Colleges.

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