The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward Part 21

"The book will be a very prized memento, not only of a gifted writer who did so much to bring home to the ignorant the whole significance of our effort in the war; but also of a great Englishwoman, and of the happy breaks in our work marked by her visits to the First Army in France.

"What strikes me most in your mother's book is her marvellous insight into the way of thinking of the soldiers--I mean those who knew most of what was really happening--who were actually engaged in the great struggle. One would say the book was written by one who had played a prominent part in the War in France, and with knowledge of the thoughts of the high directing staffs. This is no compliment; it can only come from the trained expression of a very deep sympathy, and complete understanding of the thoughts and views which were expressed to her by those high in command.

"I can well understand what a strain such intense concentration of thought must have meant, when combined with the fatigues of travel over great distances on the French roads, and the regrets and delays in publication. But the completed book and its predecessors are a very precious legacy, especially to those of us who saw the whole long struggle in France."

Mrs. Ward's health improved to a certain extent during the summer of this year (1919), so that she was able to enjoy on Peace Day (July 19) the great procession of Victory, watching it from the enclosure outside Buckingham Palace. "Foch saluting was a sight not to be forgotten," she wrote. "A paladin on horseback, saluting with a certain melancholy dignity--a figure of romance." But she was mainly at Stocks during all this summer, basking in the golden weather of that year, delighting in a few Sunday gatherings of friends and in the weekly visits of her grandchildren, who were now domiciled at Berkhamsted, five miles away, and whom nothing could keep away, on Sundays, from Stocks, with its tennis-court, its strawberries--and "Gunny"!

..."I shall always think of her particularly," wrote Mrs. Robert Crawshay afterwards, "sitting in her garden that last beautiful summer at Stocks, with her wonderful expression of wisdom and the kindness that prevented anyone feeling rebuked by her being on a much higher level than themselves--her interest so generously given, her pain never mentioned, her eyes lighting up with love as the children came across the lawn, an atmosphere of beauty and peace all around her."

Much talk was heard on the lawn, as the summer pa.s.sed on, about the peace terms and the prospects of any recovery in Europe, and it is recorded that although Mrs. Ward approved on the whole of the terms she thought it the height of unwisdom to have allowed the Germans no voice in discussing them before the signature. In Russia her heart was pa.s.sionately with the various rebels who arose to dispute the tyranny of the Soviets, and as each hope faded she felt the horrors of that tragic land more acutely. But most of all did she feel the tragedy of the children of Austria and Central Europe, so that one of her last speeches was devoted to pleading, at Berkhamsted, the cause of the Save the Children Fund.[40] It was noticed that day how white and frail was her look, but all the more for that did her appeal find its way to the hearts of her audience. The children of Germany must be fed as well as the rest, she said; "we have no war with children," and she recalled the lovely lines of Blake which describe the angels moving through the night:

"If they see any weeping That should have been sleeping They pour sleep on their head And sit down by their bed."

"There are hundreds of thousands of children at this moment who on these beautiful October nights 'are weeping that should have been sleeping'--It is for this country, it is for you and me, to play the part of angels of succour to these poor little ones wherever they may be, to feed and clothe and cherish them in the name of our common humanity and our common faith."

In the meantime the unrelenting pressure of war taxation on her own income had made it imperative, at last, to give up the house in Grosvenor Place which had been her London home for nearly thirty years.

Mrs. Ward slept there for the last time on August 29, 1919, and wrote of her parting from it the next day to J. P. T.

"The poor old house begins to look dismantled. I had many thoughts about it that last night there--of the people who had dined and talked in it--Henry James, and Burne-Jones, Stopford Brooke, Martineau, Watts, Tadema, Lowell, Roosevelt, Page, Northbrook, Goschen and so many more--of one's own good times, and follies and mistakes--everything pa.s.sing at last into the words, 'He knoweth whereof we are made, He remembereth that we are but dust.'"

Then, in September, Mrs. Ward went for the last time to the Lake District, motoring there via Stratford-on-Avon in her "little car"--a cheap post-war purchase which spent most of its time in the repairing shop, but which, for this occasion, put forth a supreme effort and actually brought Mrs. Ward safely home through the midst of the railway strike. She made her headquarters at Grasmere, for which she had developed a special affection during two recent summers when she had taken "Kelbarrow" and had watched from its lawn every pa.s.sing mood of the little lake. She visited Fox How and "Aunt Fan" almost every day; she renewed her friends.h.i.+p with Canon and Mrs. Rawnsley and her life-long intimacy with Gordon Wordsworth. And, on the Langdale side of the fell, she visited a little grave to which her heart always yearned afresh.

Mrs. Ward was deeply interested, during these last months of her life, in the attempts made by the Liberal element in the Church to modify or r.e.t.a.r.d the "Enabling Bill," or as it is now known, the Church a.s.sembly Act. All her fighting spirit was aroused by the claim made by the Bill to lay down tests and distinctions between member and member of the National Church, especially by the imposition of the test of Holy Communion on all candidates for the new Church bodies. She feared, in the words of the Bishop of Carlisle (who saw eye to eye with her in this matter) "that the declaration required as a condition of members.h.i.+p of the Church of England will go a long way towards de-nationalising the Church and reducing it to the status of a sect." She organised, early in December, a letter to _The Times_ which was signed by all the most prominent names in Liberal Churchmans.h.i.+p, protesting against the scanty opportunities for debate which, owing to a ruling of the Speaker's, the measure was to have in the House of Commons. But, when it became law _quand meme_, she turned her thoughts and her remaining energies to a constructive movement which might rally the scattered Liberal forces of the Church and a.s.sert for them the right, after due notice given of their opinions, to partic.i.p.ate without dishonesty in the rite of Holy Communion. In a leaflet issued from Stocks to various private sympathisers in January 1920, Mrs. Ward pointed out that the difficulty which had confronted the Church sixty years before with regard to the Thirty-nine Articles had now pa.s.sed on to the Creeds, and that to many who were convinced believers in the G.o.d within us, the following of Christ and the practical realisation of the Kingdom, the Nicene Creed was yet, "to quote a recent phrase, 'no more than the majority opinion of a Committee held 1,600 years ago.'" She therefore appealed for the formation of a "Faith and Freedom a.s.sociation," the members of which might claim to take their part in the new Councils and a.s.semblies while openly stating their dissent from, or their right to re-interpret the Creeds; only so could the Church continue to include that Modernist element which was essential to its healthy development.

Mrs. Ward received a good deal of sympathy and encouragement from those to whom she sent her leaflet, and dreamt, in her indomitable way, of summoning a meeting later on if the response were sufficient. But she knew in her heart that her own strength would no longer suffice to lead such a crusade, and she appealed with a certain wistfulness to the young "to pour into it their life, their courage and their love." It troubled her that no young person or group arose to take the burden from her shoulders. But in truth she was still the youngest in heart of all her generation, or the next, and if it were not that the poor body was outworn she might yet have exerted the influence she longed for on the religious life of her country.

But it was too late. Mrs. Ward's health definitely gave way about Christmas-time, 1919, the breakdown taking the form of a violent attack of neuritis in the shoulders and arms. Although she would not yet acknowledge it, but tried to continue the old round of work, increasing weakness made it plain to her, at length, that she must not, for the present at least, go crusading. But how she hoped and strove for better times! Her devoted doctor-brother, Frank Arnold, to whom she turned again and again with pathetic trust, knowing his ingenuity in the devising of remedies, tended her with a skill born of a life-long knowledge of her; but the malady was too deep-seated. At the end of January she moved to London in order to try a certain course of treatment, taking up her abode in a little house in Connaught Square which her husband and Dorothy had found for her. She liked the little place, especially on the days when flowers from Stocks arrived to make a bower of it, and there, in the midst of a fruitless round of "treatments" which did nothing but sap her remaining strength, she pa.s.sed the last weeks of her life. Old friends came once more to visit her; her son and her daughters took turns in reading to her the poets that she loved; Miss Churcher brought for her delight the latest stories from the Play Centres. She still went downstairs and even, sometimes, out of doors, but those who came to the house to sit with her left it, usually, with aching hearts. Then, on March 11, another blow fell. Mr.

Ward became dangerously ill, and an immediate operation was found to be necessary. The doctors carried him off to a nursing home not far away and performed it, successfully, that night, while Mrs. Ward sat below in the waiting-room in an agony of anxiety. The next day, and the next, she was still able to go to him, the porters carrying her upstairs to his room, but on Sunday, March 14, signs of bronchitis showed themselves, together with a grave condition of the heart. The doctors would not hear, after this, of her leaving the house.

So for ten days she lay in the little London bedroom, looking out over London trees, her heart pining for the day--the spring day which would surely come--when she and he would return to Stocks together and their ills would be forgotten. "Ah," she wrote to him in his nursing home on March 18, "it is too trying this imprisonment--but it ought only to be a few days more!"

And indeed, her release was nearer than she knew. Did she not know it?

In mortal illness there are secrets of the inner consciousness which those who tend, however lovingly, can never wholly penetrate, but as her mind advanced ever nearer to the verge, one felt that it was swept, ever and anon, by far-off gusts of poetry, finding expression in words and fragments long possessed and intimately loved. Such were the "Last Lines" of Emily Bronte, of which, two days before the end, she repeated the great second verse to Dorothy, saying with the old pa.s.sionate gesture of the hands, "_That's_ what I am thinking of!"

O G.o.d within my breast, Almighty, ever-present Deity!

Life--that in me has rest, As I--undying Life--have power in thee!

Then, early on the morning of the 24th, there came an hour of crisis, when life fought with death for victory; but, before the end, "she opened her dear eyes wide, her dear brown eyes, like the eyes of a young woman, and looked out into the unknown with a most wonderful look on her face. I think that at that moment her soul crossed the bar." So wrote Dorothy, the only witness of that look; she will carry the memory of it in her heart to the end.

We buried her in the quiet churchyard at Aldbury, within sight of the long sweep of hill and the beechwoods that she had loved so well. Her old friend the Rector, Canon Wood, laid her to rest, while another friend for whom she had had a deep regard, Dean Inge, spoke of her in simple and moving words, naming her before us all as "perhaps the greatest Englishwoman of our time."

There were not wanting, indeed, signs that many in England so regarded her. It was as though she had lived through the period, some ten years before, when the public had tired somewhat of her books and younger writers had to a large extent supplanted her, until, towards the end, she found herself taken to the heart of her countrymen in a manner that had hardly been her lot in the years of her greatest literary fame. They loved her not only for all that she had done, but for what she was, divining in her, besides her intellectual gifts, besides even the tenderness and sympathy of her character, that indomitable courage that carried her through to the end, over difficulties and obstacles at which they only dimly guessed. They loved her for wearing herself out, at sixty-seven, in visits to the battle-fields of France, that she might bear her witness to her country's deeds; they loved her for all the joy that she had given to little children. Two months before her death the Lord Chancellor, making himself the mouthpiece of this feeling, had asked her to act as one of the first seven women magistrates of England, and later still, when she was already nearing the end, the University of Edinburgh invited her to receive the Honorary Degree of LL.D. These acts of recognition gave her a pa.s.sing pleasure, and when she herself was beyond the reach of pleasure, or of pain, it stirred the hearts of those who went with her, for the last time, to the little village graveyard to see awaiting her, at the drive gate, a file of stalwart police, claiming their right to escort the coffin of a Justice of the Peace.

Many indeed were the tributes paid to her memory, whether in the letters received after her death or in the words uttered by Lord Milner and other old friends at the unveiling of her medallion in the Hall of the Pa.s.smore Edwards Settlement[41] (July 1922). Of these one only shall be quoted here, from a letter written to Mr. Ward by her dear and intimate friend of so many years' standing, Andre Chevrillon:

..."I had no friend in England whom I loved and respected more, none to whom I owed so much. I have often thought that if I love your country as I do--and indeed I have sometimes been accused of being bia.s.sed in my views of England--it was partly due to the personal grat.i.tude which I always felt for the kindness of her greeting and hospitality when I came to England as a young man. The same generous welcome was extended to other young Frenchmen who have since written on England, and there is no doubt that it has helped to create long before the War a bond between our two countries.

"We all felt the spell of her n.o.ble and generous spirit. She struck one as the most perfect example of the English lady of the old admirable governing cla.s.s, with her ever-active and efficient public spirit--of the highest English moral and intellectual culture. Though I had come to England several times before I met her--some thirty years ago--I had not yet formed a true idea of what that culture would be--though I had read of it in my uncle Taine's _Notes on England_. It was a revelation, though I must say I have never met one since with quite so complete a mental equipment, and that showed quite to the same degree those wonderful and, to others, beneficent qualities of radiant vitality, spirit and generosity. (It seems that these words must recur again and again when one speaks of her). She was one of those of whom a nation may well be proud.

"I remember our impression when her first great book came to us in Paris. Here was the true successor of George Eliot; she continued the great English tradition of insight into the spiritual world.

The events in her novels were those of the soul--how remote from those which can be adapted from other writers' novels for the cinema!--The main forces that drove the characters like Fate were Ideas. She could _dramatise_ ideas. I do not know of any novelist that gives one to the same degree the feeling that Ideas are living forces, more enduring than men, and in a sense more real than men--forces that move through them, taking hold of them and driving them like an unseen, higher Power."

On her tombstone we inscribed the lines of Clough, which she herself had written on the last page of _Robert Elsmere_:

Others, I doubt not, if not we, The issue of our toils shall see, And, they forgotten and unknown, Young children gather as their own The harvest that the dead had sown.