‘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 errandfor 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.”
‘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 errandfor 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.”
“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.”
A fragment of diary written in the Christmas holidays of 1865-6 reveals how much she enjoyed being taken for a grown-up young lady by Oxford friends. “Went to St. Mary Magdalen’s in the morning and heard a droll sermon on Convictional Sin. Met Sir Benjamin [Brodie] coming home. Miss Arnold at home supposed to be seventeen, and Mary Arnold at school known to be fourteen are two very different things.” She is absorbed inEssays in Criticism, but can still criticize the critic. “Read Uncle Matt’s Essay on Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment. Compares the religious feeling of Pompeii and Theocritus with the religious feeling of St. Francis and the German Reformation. Contrasts the religion of sorrow as he is pleased to call Christianity with the religion of sense, giving to the former for the sake of propriety a slight pre-eminence over the latter.” She does not like the famousPrefaceat all. “ThePrefaceis rich and has the fault which the author professes to avoid, that of being amusing. As for the seductiveness of Oxford, its moonlight charms and Romeo and Juliet character, I think Uncle Matt is slightly inclined to ride the high horse whenever he approaches the subject.”
As the eldest of eight children she led a very strenuous life at home, helping to teach the little ones and ever strivingto 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.”
But after another year and a half at Miss May’s school these difficulties vanished, and by the time that she came to live at home altogether, in the summer of 1867, the rough edges had smoothed themselves away in marvellous fashion. She was sixteen, and the world was before her—the world of Oxford, which in spite of her criticisms of thePrefacewas indeedherworld. Her father seemed content with his teaching work, and was planning the building of a larger house. She set to work to be happy, and so indeed did her mother—happy in a great reprieve, and in the reviving hopes of prosperity. But now and then Julia would stop suddenly in her household tasks, hearing ominous sounds from Tom’s study. Was it the chanting of a Latin prayer? She put the fear behind her and passed on.
WHEN Tom Arnold settled with his family at Oxford, in 1865, the old University was still labouring under the repercussions, the thrills and counter-thrills, of the famous Movement set on foot in 1833 by Keble’s sermon onNational Apostasy. Keble, indeed, was withdrawn from the scene, but Newman’s conversion to Rome (1845) had made so prodigious a stir that even twenty years later the religious world of England still took its colour from that event. In the words of Mark Pattison, “whereas other reactions accomplished themselves by imperceptible degrees, in 1845 the darkness was dissipated and the light was let in in an instant, as by the opening of the shutters in the chamber of a sick man who has slept till mid-day.” So at least the crisis appeared to the Liberal world; the mask had been torn from the Tractarians and their Romanizing tendencies stood revealed to all beholders. In the opposite camp the consternation was proportionate, but the formidable figure of Pusey rallied the doubters and brought them back in good order to theVia Mediaof the Anglican communion; while the tender poetry of Keble and the far-famed eloquence of Liddon fortified and adorned the High Church cause. But the sudden ending of the Tractarian controversy opened the way for another movement, slower and less sensational than that of Newman, yet destined to have an even deeper effect upon the religious life of England. The freedom of the human mind began to be insisted upon, not only in the realm of science, or where science clashed with the Book of Genesis, but in the whole field of the Interpretation of Scripture. Slowly the results of fifty years of patient studyof the Bible by German scholars and historians began to penetrate here, and even Oxford, stronghold and citadel of the Laudian establishment, felt the stir of a new interest, a new challenge to accepted forms. A Liberal school of theologians arose, led by Jowett, Mark Pattison and other writers inEssays and Reviews(1860), for whom the old letter of “inspiration” no longer existed, though they stoutly maintained their orthodoxy as members and ministers of the Church of England. The Church, they said, must broaden her base so as to make room for the results of science and of historical criticism, or else she would be left high and dry while the forces of democracy passed on their way without her. Jowett, in his famous essay “On the Interpretation of Scripture,” boldly summed up his argument in the precept, “Interpret the Scripture like any other book.” “The first step is to know the meaning, and this can only be done in the same careful and impartial way that we ascertain the meaning of Sophocles or Plato.” “Educated persons are beginning to ask, not what Scripture may be made to mean, but what it does mean.”
The hubbub raised by these and similar expressions continued during the three years of proceedings before the Court of Arches, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and finally Convocation, against two of the contributors toEssays and Reviews, and had hardly died away when the Arnolds came to take up their life in Oxford. And side by side with the theoretical discussion went the insistent demand of the reforming party, both at Oxford and in Parliament, for the abolition of the disabilities that still weighed so heavily against Dissenters. For, although the “Oxford University Act” of 1854 had admitted them to matriculation and the B.A. degree, neither Fellowships nor the M.A. were yet open to any save subscribers to the Thirty-nine Articles. All through the ’sixties the battle raged, with an annual attempt in Parliament to break down the defence of the guardians of tradition, and not till 1871 was the “citadel taken.”[5]Jowett and Arthur Stanley stood forth among the Liberal champions at Oxford—the latter reckoning himself always as carrying on the tradition of Arnold of Rugby, whose pamphlet urging the inclusion of Dissenters in the National Church had made so great asensation in 1833. It was hardly possible, therefore, for a little Arnold of Mary’s temperament and traditions to escape the atmosphere that surrounded her so closely, though we need not imagine that at the age of sixteen she did more than imbibe it passively. But there were certain things that were not passive in her memory—visions of Dr. Newman in the streets of Edgbaston, passing gravely by upon his business—business which the child so passionately resented because she understood it to be responsible in some vague way for all the hardships and misfortunes of her family. We may safely assume that if she was ever taken into Oriel College and saw the many rows of portraits looking down at her there, in Common-room and Hall, she would feel an instinctive rallying to the standard of her grandfather rather than to that of his mighty opponent.
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.
“Pattison’s sermon was certainly a most remarkable one,” he writes; “I could have sat another half-hour under him with pleasure. But he has much more of the philosopher than the divine about him, and the discourse had the effect of an able article in theNationalorEdinburgh Review, read to a cultivated audience in the academical theatre, much more than of a sermon. In fact, the name either of Jesus Christ or of one of the Apostles was not once mentioned throughout. The subject was, the higher education; and the felicity of the language accorded well with the clearness and beauty of the thoughts. He condemned the Catholic system, and also the Positivist system, and in speaking of the former he said, ‘I cannot do betterthan describe it in the words of one whose voice was once wont to sound within these walls with thrilling power, but now, alas! can never more be heard by us, who in his Treatise on University Education—‘ and then he proceeded to quote at some length from Dr. Newman. It was an extremely powerful sermon, but scandalized, I think, the High Church and orthodox party. ‘Do you often now,’ I asked Edwin Palmer with a smile, meeting him outside after it was over, ‘have University sermons in that style?’ ‘Oh dear no,’ he said, ‘scarcely ever, except indeed from Pattison himself’; this with some acidity of tone. I dined early; then thought I, in for a penny, in for a pound, I’ll go and hear the other University sermon. I was punctual, but there was not a seat to be had, the ladies mustered in overwhelming force. It was strange, but sermon and preacher were now everything most opposite to those of the morning. Liddon is a dark, black-haired little man—short, straight, stubby hair—and with that shiny, glistening appearance about his sallow complexion which one so often sees in Dissenting ministers, and which the devotees no doubt consider a mark of election. Liddon’s whole sermon was an impassioned strain of apologetic argument for the truth of the Resurrection, and of the church doctrine generally. It was very clever certainly, but rather too long, it extended to about an hour and twenty minutes. The tone was earnest and devout; yet there were several sarcastic, one might almost say irritable, flings at the liberal and rationalizing party; and it was evident that he was thinking of the Oxford congregation when he spoke pointedly of the ‘educated sceptics who at that time composed, or at any rate controlled, the Sanhedrin.’ These two,” he continues, “were certainly sermons of more than ordinary interest—each worthily representing a great stream of thought and tendency, influential for good or evil at the present moment upon millions of human beings.”
“Pattison’s sermon was certainly a most remarkable one,” he writes; “I could have sat another half-hour under him with pleasure. But he has much more of the philosopher than the divine about him, and the discourse had the effect of an able article in theNationalorEdinburgh Review, read to a cultivated audience in the academical theatre, much more than of a sermon. In fact, the name either of Jesus Christ or of one of the Apostles was not once mentioned throughout. The subject was, the higher education; and the felicity of the language accorded well with the clearness and beauty of the thoughts. He condemned the Catholic system, and also the Positivist system, and in speaking of the former he said, ‘I cannot do betterthan describe it in the words of one whose voice was once wont to sound within these walls with thrilling power, but now, alas! can never more be heard by us, who in his Treatise on University Education—‘ and then he proceeded to quote at some length from Dr. Newman. It was an extremely powerful sermon, but scandalized, I think, the High Church and orthodox party. ‘Do you often now,’ I asked Edwin Palmer with a smile, meeting him outside after it was over, ‘have University sermons in that style?’ ‘Oh dear no,’ he said, ‘scarcely ever, except indeed from Pattison himself’; this with some acidity of tone. I dined early; then thought I, in for a penny, in for a pound, I’ll go and hear the other University sermon. I was punctual, but there was not a seat to be had, the ladies mustered in overwhelming force. It was strange, but sermon and preacher were now everything most opposite to those of the morning. Liddon is a dark, black-haired little man—short, straight, stubby hair—and with that shiny, glistening appearance about his sallow complexion which one so often sees in Dissenting ministers, and which the devotees no doubt consider a mark of election. Liddon’s whole sermon was an impassioned strain of apologetic argument for the truth of the Resurrection, and of the church doctrine generally. It was very clever certainly, but rather too long, it extended to about an hour and twenty minutes. The tone was earnest and devout; yet there were several sarcastic, one might almost say irritable, flings at the liberal and rationalizing party; and it was evident that he was thinking of the Oxford congregation when he spoke pointedly of the ‘educated sceptics who at that time composed, or at any rate controlled, the Sanhedrin.’ These two,” he continues, “were certainly sermons of more than ordinary interest—each worthily representing a great stream of thought and tendency, influential for good or evil at the present moment upon millions of human beings.”
It was under such influences as these that Mary Arnold passed the four impressionable years of her girlhood, from sixteen to twenty, that elapsed between her leaving school and her engagement to Mr. Humphry Ward, of Brasenose. She plunged with zest into the Oxford life, making friends, helping her father at the Bodleian in his researches intoearly English literature and studying music to very good purpose under James Taylor, the future organist of New College. But she had no further regular education, and was free to roam and devour at will in that city of books, guided only by the advice of a few friends and by her own innate literary instincts. The Mark Pattisons early befriended her, frequently asking her to supper with them on Sunday evenings—suppers at which she sat, shy and silent, in a high woollen dress, with her black, wavy hair brushed very smoothly back, listening to every word of the eager talk around her and drinking in, no doubt, the Rector’s caustic remarks about Oxford scholarship. These were the years of battle between the champions of research and the champions of the Balliol ideal of turning out good men for the public service, and in her ardent admiration for the Rector Mary Arnold threw herself whole-heartedly into the former camp. “Get to the bottom of something,” he used to say to her; “choose a subject and knoweverythingabout it!” And so she plunged into early Spanish literature and history, working at it in the Bodleian with the fervour that comes from knowing that your subject is your very own, or at least that it has only been traversed before by dear, musty German scholars. There was hard practice here in the reading of German and Latin, let alone the Spanish poems and chronicles themselves, but after a couple of years of it there was little she did not know about thePoema del Cid, or the Visigothic invasion, or the reign ofAlfonso el Sabio. Her friend, J. R. Green, the historian, was so much impressed with her work that he recommended her when she was only twenty to Edward Freeman as the best person he could suggest for writing a volume on Spain in an historical series that the latter was editing. Mr. Freeman duly invited her, but by that time she was already deep in the preparations for her marriage and was obliged to decline the offer. She maintained her allegiance to the subject, however, through all the years that followed, until, as will be seen hereafter, Dean Wace made her the momentous proposition that she should undertake the lives of the early Spanish kings and ecclesiastics for theDictionary of Christian Biography. And there, in the four volumes of theDictionary, her articles stand to this day, a monument to an early enthusiasm lightly kindled by a word from agreat man, but pursued with all the patience and intensity of the true historian.
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,”[6]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.”
“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, thequality 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.”
“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, andit 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.
One charming glimpse of her, however, at a social function remains to us in the letters of M. Taine. The great Frenchman had come over in the very spring of theCommune(1871) to give a course of lectures at Oxford; he met her one evening at the Master of Balliol’s, being introduced to her by Jowett himself. “‘A very clever girl,’ said Professor Jowett, as he was taking me towards her. She is about twenty, very nice-looking and dressed with taste (rather a rare thing here: I saw one lady imprisoned in a most curious sort of pink silk sheath). Miss Arnold was born out in Australia, where she was brought up till the age of five. She knows French, German and Italian, and during this last year has been studying old Spanish of the time of the Cid; also Latin, in order to be able to understand the mediæval chronicles. All her mornings she spends at the Bodleian Library—a most intellectual lady, but yet a simple, charming girl. By exercise of great tact, I finally led her on to telling me of an article—her first—that she was writing forMacmillan’s Magazineupon the oldest romances. In extenuation of it she said, ‘Everybody writes or lectures here, and one must follow the fashion. Besides, it passes the time, and the library is so fine and so convenient.’ Not in the least pedantic!”[7]
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—
Laleham, Oxford.October 1, 1869.DEARSIRS,—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,MARYARNOLD.
Laleham, Oxford.October 1, 1869.
DEARSIRS,—
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,MARYARNOLD.
But at length no less a veteran than Miss Charlotte Yonge, who was then editing a blameless magazine named theChurchman’s Companion, accepted a tale from her called “A Westmorland Story,” and Mary’s joy and pride were unbounded. But the tale shows no glimpse, I think, of her future power, and is as far removed from “A Morning in the Bodleian” as water is from wine.
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.
In the winter of 1870-71 she first met Mr. T. Humphry Ward, Fellow and Tutor of Brasenose College, between whom and herself an instant attraction became manifest. Mr. Ward was the son of the Rev. Henry Ward, Vicar of St. Barnabas, King Square, E.C., while his mother was Jane Sandwith, sister of the well-known Army surgeon at the siege of Kars, Humphry Sandwith, and herself a woman of remarkable charm and beauty of character. By an odd chance, J. R. Green, the historian, had been curate to Mr. Henry Ward in London for two years, had made himself the devoted friend of all his numerous children and has left in his published Letters a striking tribute to the greatqualities of Mrs. Ward.[8]But she died at the age of forty-two, and Mary Arnold never knew her. The course of true love ran smoothly through the spring of 1871, and on June 16, five days after Mary’s twentieth birthday, they became engaged. Never was happiness more golden, and when the pair of lovers went to stay at Fox How and the young man was introduced to all the well-beloved places—Sweden Bridge and Loughrigg, Rydal Water and the stepping-stones—she was quite puzzled, as she wrote to him afterwards, by the change that had come over the mountains, by the “new relations between Westmorland and me!” It was simply, as she said, that the mountains had become the frame, instead of being, as hitherto, the picture.
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 (then No. 5, now 17), 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 Latinprayers 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.
In herRecollectionsshe has given us once and for all a picture of the Oxford of her day which in its brilliance and charm is not to be matched by any later comer. All that can be attempted here is to fill in to some extent the only gap that she has left in it—the portrait of herself. How did she move among that small but gifted community, where Walter Pater revolutionized the taste of Oxford with his Morris papers and blue china, shocked the Oxford world with his paganizing tendencies and would, besides, keep his sisters laughing the whole evening, when they werequite alone, with his spontaneous fun; where Mandell Creighton was leading and stimulating the teaching of history, with J. R. Green to help him as Examiner in the Modern History Schools; where T. H. Green was inspiring the younger generation with his own robust idealism and the doctrine of the “duty of work,” and the more venerable figures of Jowett and Mark Pattison, Ruskin and Matthew Arnold, Stubbs and Freeman dominated the intellectual scene? The impression that she made upon this circle of friends seems first of all to have been one of extraordinary energy and power of work, of great personal charm veiled by a crust of shyness, of intellectual powers for which they had the respect of equals and co-workers, and of a warm and generous sympathy which was yet free from “gush.” One of her closest friends in these early years, Mrs. Arthur Johnson, has allowed me to use certain extracts from her journal, in which the figure of “Mary Ward” stands out with the clearness of absolute simplicity. Mrs. Johnson, besides having the public spirit which has since made her the President of the Oxford Home Students’ Society, was also a charming artist, and in 1876 painted Mary’s portrait in water-colour, using the opportunities which the sittings gave her to explore her friend’s mind to the uttermost:
“July 22. Began her portrait. I was so excited that my head ached all day afterwards. She talked of deep, most interesting subjects, and attention to the arguments and drawing too was too much for one’s head! I was surprised at the full extent of her vague religion. Jowett is her great admiration and Matt Arnold her guide for some things. She is great on the rising Dutch and French and German school of religious thought, very free criticism of the Bible, entire denial of miracle, our Lord only a great teacher. I felt as if I had been beaten about, as I always do after the excitement of such talks. And yet it is all a striving after righteousness, sincerity, truth.” Or, again: “Mary W. came to tea. My visitor was charmed with her and truly she is a sweet, charming person, full of gentleness and sympathy, with all her talent and intelligence too. She had dined at the Pattisons’ last night and had felt appalled at the learning of Mrs. P. and Miss ——,‘ more in their little fingers than I in my whole body!’ But I felt that no one would wish to change her for either of them.”
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.
Her two babies, Dorothy and Arnold, naturally absorbed a great deal of her time and thoughts in these years, although it was possible in those spacious days to live comfortably and to keep as many little nursery-maids as one required on £800 or £900 a year, which was about the income that husband and wife jointly earned. Her natural talent for “doctoring” showed itself very early in the skill with which she fed her babies or cured them of their ills when they were sick. Nor was she content with her domestic success, but in days before “Infant Welfare” had ever been thought of she wrote a leaflet entitled “Plain Facts on Infant Feeding” and circulated it in the slums of Oxford. We will not, however, rescue it from oblivion, lest it should be found to contain heretical matter! But there was still time for other pursuits, and since both she and her husband did their writing mainly at night, from nine to twelve, Mary began to show her practical powers in other directions, and to take a leading part in the movement for the higher education of women which was then absorbing some of the best minds of Oxford. As early as the winter of 1873-4 a committee was formed among this group of friends, with Mrs. Ward and Mrs. Creighton (followed, on the latter’s departure, byMrs. T. H. Green) as joint secretaries, for organizing regular “Lectures for Women”—not in any connection with the University, for this was as yet impossible, but in order to satisfy the growing demand among the women residents of Oxford for more serious instruction in history, or modern languages, or Latin. The first series of lectures was held in the early spring of 1874, in the Clarendon Buildings, with Mr. A. H. Johnson as lecturer; it was an immediate success, and the large sum of 5s.which each member of the Committee had put down as a guarantee could be triumphantly refunded. Further courses were arranged in each succeeding winter, till in 1877 the same committee expanded into an “Association for the Education of Women” (again with Mrs. Ward as secretary[9]), which undertook still more important work. The idea of the founding of Women’s Colleges was already in the air, for Girton and Newnham had led the way at Cambridge, and all through 1878 plans were being discussed to this end. In the next year a special committee was formed for the raising of funds towards the foundation of a “Hall of Residence”; Mrs. Ward and Mrs. Augustus Vernon Harcourt were joint secretaries, but since the latter soon fell ill the whole burden of correspondence fell upon Mary’s shoulders. “There seems no end to the things I have to do just now,” she writes to her father in June, 1879. “All the secretary’s work for Somerville Hall falls on me now as my colleague, Mrs. Harcourt, is laid up, and yesterday and the day before I have had the house full of girls being examined for scholarship at the Hall, and have had to copy out examination papers and look after them generally. Our Lady Principal, Miss Shaw-Lefevre, is here and she came to dinner to-night to talk business about furnishing, etc. I think we are getting on. Did you see inThe Timesthat the Clothworkers’ Company have given us 100 guineas?”
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 (Dr. Percival) on August 1”; the builder’s estimate for alterations (“£540 for raising the roof and making twelve bedrooms”), 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.
Thus had Mrs. Ward learnt her first lesson and won her first laurels in the carrying out of a big piece of public work. It was an experience that was to stand her in good stead in after years. But at this time her ambitions were still largely historical, weaving themselves in dreams and plans for the writing of that big book on the origins of modern Spain of which she afterwards sketched the counterpart in Elsmere’s projected book on the origins of modern France. Very likely she would have settled down to write it before the opening of Somerville, but as early as October, 1877, she had received a very flattering offer from Dean Wace, the general editor of theDictionary of Christian Biography, to take a large share in writing the lives of the early Spanish ecclesiastics for that monumental work. It was an offer that she could not refuse, and she always spoke with gratitude of the years of hard and exacting work that followed, although once or twice she almost broke down under the strain of it. “Sheer, hard, brain-stretching work,” she calls it in herRecollections, and if anyone willlook up her articles on Joannes Biclarensis, or Idatius, or the Histories of Isidore of Seville, they will see how triply justified she was in using the term. “You have gone over the ground so thoroughly that there is no gleaning left,” wrote Mr. C. W. Boase, in those days one of the best-known of Oxford history tutors, while Dean Wace himself, in the many letters he wrote to her, showed by his kindness and consideration how much he valued her contributions. Oxford began to think that she was definitely committed to an historical career, when to its astonishment she came out as the author of a children’s story. “Milly and Olly” was the record of her own “Holiday among the Mountains” with her children in the summer of 1879, but the very simplicity of the tale has endeared it to many generations of children and child-lovers, while the stories it contains of Beowulf and the Spanish Queen give it a note of romance that differentiates it from other nursery tales. She wrote it almost as a relaxation in the summer of 1880; in the midst of her historical work it showed that the story-telling instinct was already stirring within her.
And indeed the Oxford historical school was to be disappointed in her after all, for her labours on the early Spaniards were in reality to lead her into far other fields. Her interest in the problems of Christianity had only gathered strength with the years, and were now greatly stimulated by these researches into the early history of the Spanish Church. She began to feel the enormous importance to the believer of thehistorical testimonyon which the whole fabric rested, while her keen historical imagination enabled her to grasp the mentality of those distant ages which produced for us the literature of the New Testament. A feeling of revolt against the arrogance of the orthodox party, as it was represented in Oxford by Christchurch and Dr. Pusey, grew and increased in her mind, while at the same time she became more and more attracted by the romance and mystery of Christianity when stripped of the coating of legend which pious hands had given it. As early as 1871 she had written to Mr. Ward (à propos of a somewhat fatuous sermon to which she had been listening): “How will you make Christianity into amotive?—that is the puzzle. Traditional and conventional Christianity is worked out—certainly as far as the great artisan and intelligent working-classin England is concerned, and all those who are young and touched, ever so vaguely and uncertainly, with the thought-atmosphere, thought-currents of the day. Is there a substitute which shall still be Christianity? Yes surely, but it is not to be arrived at by mere arbitrary remoulding and petulant upsetting as Mr. Voysey seems to think.” And two years later she writes to her father: “Just now it seems to me that one cannot make one’s belief too simple or hold what one does believe too strongly. Of dogmatic Christianity I can make nothing. Nothing is clear except the personal character of Christ and that view of Him as the founder and lawgiver of a new society which struck me years ago inEcce Homo. And the more I read and think over the New Testament the more impossible it seems to me to accept what is ordinarily called the scheme of Christianity.”
But these reflections need never have led her in the direction of writingRobert Elsmereif it had not been for a personal incident. On Sunday, March 6, 1881, she attended the first Bampton Lecture of the Rev. John Wordsworth, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury. It was on “the present unsettlement in religion,” and the speaker castigated the holders of unorthodox views as being very definitely guilty of sin. Something in the tone of the sermon set Mary’s heart on fire within her. She walked home in a tumult of feeling. That this man with his confident phrases should dare thus to arraign the leaders of the Liberal host—men of such noble lives as T. H. Green, thinkers like Jowett and Matt Arnold! She sat down and wrote, within a very few days, a reply to Dr. Wordsworth entitled “Unbelief and Sin: a Protest addressed to those who attended the Bampton Lecture of Sunday, March 6.” A little pamphlet cast in the form of a dialogue between two Oxford men, it was put up for sale in Slatter & Rose’s window and attracted considerable attention. But before it had been selling for many hours a certain ecclesiastic took the bookseller aside and pointed out that the pamphlet bore no printer’s name, which made the sale illegal. He politely threatened proceedings, and the bookseller in alarm withdrew it from circulation and sent the unsold copies up to Bradmore Road with an apology, but a firm intimation that no further copies could be sold. Mary laughed and submitted, and sent her anonymous offspring round to various friends,among them the redoubtable Rector of Lincoln. He replied to her as follows:—
‘No, I did not guess your secret. It was whispered to me in the street, and I fancy was no secret within the first week of publication.‘I admire your courage in attacking one of their strong places. The doctrine of disbelief in Church principles being due to a propensity to secret sins is one of the oldest tenets of the Anglican party. It is also a fundamental principle of popular Catholicism. I have heard it from the catholic pulpit so often that it must have among them the character of a commonplace.‘There is, as you admit, a certain basis of fact for it—just as ‘Patriotism’ is often enough the trade of the egoist. ‘Licence they mean when they cry liberty.’‘More interesting even than your argument against the psychological dogma, was your constructive hint as to the ‘Church of the future.’ I wish I could follow you there! But that is an ‘argumentum non unius horæ.’‘Believe me, dear Mrs. Ward, to be“Yr. attached friend,“MARKPATTISON.”
‘No, I did not guess your secret. It was whispered to me in the street, and I fancy was no secret within the first week of publication.
‘I admire your courage in attacking one of their strong places. The doctrine of disbelief in Church principles being due to a propensity to secret sins is one of the oldest tenets of the Anglican party. It is also a fundamental principle of popular Catholicism. I have heard it from the catholic pulpit so often that it must have among them the character of a commonplace.
‘There is, as you admit, a certain basis of fact for it—just as ‘Patriotism’ is often enough the trade of the egoist. ‘Licence they mean when they cry liberty.’
‘More interesting even than your argument against the psychological dogma, was your constructive hint as to the ‘Church of the future.’ I wish I could follow you there! But that is an ‘argumentum non unius horæ.’
‘Believe me, dear Mrs. Ward, to be
“Yr. attached friend,“MARKPATTISON.”
It was indeed an argument, not of a single hour, but of many long years. But the spark had been set to a complex train of thought which was now to work itself out through toil and stress towards its appointed end.
IT was in the early summer of 1880 that Mr. Ward was first approached by Mr. Chenery, the editor, with a suggestion that he should join the staff ofThe Times. The proposal was in many ways an attractive one, in spite of the love of both husband and wife for Oxford, for Mr. Ward was becoming known to a wider world than that of Oxford by hisEnglish Poets, which had appeared in this year, nor was he a novice in journalism. His wife, too, had many links with London through her visits to the Forsters and her journalistic work. The experiment began in a tentative way in the winter of 1880-81, she remaining in Oxford with the children, and he being “tried” for leader-writing while staying in Bloomsbury lodgings. Within a very few months it proved itself a success, and, after some pleasant interviews with Mr. John Walter, he was retained on the permanent staff of the paper. They began seriously to plan their removal and to look for a house, and found one at length in that comfortable Bloomsbury region, which was then innocent of big hotels and offices, and where the houses in Russell Square had not yet suffered embellishment in the form of pink terra-cotta facings to their windows. They found that the oldest house in the Square, No. 61, was to let, and in spite of the dirt of years with which it was encrusted, perceived its possibilities at once, and came to an agreement with its owner. A charming old house, built in 1745, its prettiest feature was a small square entrance-hall, with eighteenth-century stucco-work on the walls, from which a wide staircase ascended to the drawing-room, giving an impression of spacerare in abourgeoisLondon house. At the back was a good-sized strip of garden shaded by tall old plane-trees and running down to meet the gardens of Queen Square, for No. 61 stood on the east side of the square and adjoined the first house of Southampton Row. Little powder-closets jutted out at the back, one of which Mrs. Ward used as her writing-room, and upstairs the bedroom floors seemed to expand as you ascended, reaching only to a third story, but giving us rooms enough even so for ourselves, our maids, and a German governess, besides the various relations who were constantly coming to stay. Wholly pleasant are the memories connected with that benign old house, to us children as well as to our elders, save only that to the youngest of us there were always two lurking horrors, one on the second floor landing, where a dark alcove gave harbourage to a little old man in Scotch kilts, who might, if your legs were not swift enough, come after you as you toiled up the last flight, and one—still more disquieting—on the top landing itself, where the taps dripped in a dreadful little boxroom, and if the taps dripped you knew that the water-bogy,who lives in taps, might at any moment escape and overwhelm you. Since no self-respecting child ever imparts its terrors to its elders, these nightmares went unknown until one night, when all the maids were downstairs at supper, the child in question could not make up its mind to cross the landing, past the dark mouth of that box-room, from the room where it undressed to the room where it slept, and was found an hour later, fast asleep in a chair, with towels pinned over every inch of its small body lest the bogy should come out and catch hold. After this crisis I think the terrors declined, and now, alas! taps and box-room and dark alcove have all disappeared together, with the pleasant rooms downstairs and the gravelled garden where one made so many persevering expeditions with the salt-cellar, after the tails of London’s sparrows—all swept away and vanished, and the air that they enclosed parcelled out once more into the rectangles of the Imperial Hotel! Peace be to the ghost of that poor house, for it gave happiness in its latter days for nine long years to the human folk who inhabited it, and it watched the unfolding of a human heart and mind which were to have no mean influence upon the generation that encompassed them.
The house at Oxford was disposed of to the Henry Nettleships, at Michaelmas, 1881, and in the following November the family moved in to Russell Square. It was not without searchings of heart, I think, that Mr. and Mrs. Ward embarked upon the larger venture, where all depended on their retaining health and strength for their work; but they fondly hoped that with the larger regular income fromThe Timesthe burden on both pairs of shoulders would be lessened.