Art. 10.-MRS HUMPHRY WARD: A SKETCH FROM MEMORY.

A GREAT literary figure, a great personal force has passed away from our midst. The earlier Victorian era produced not a few remarkable women, but either their gifts flowed naturally in a single channel or they were hampered by a harem tradition which decreed that in public affairs women must walk veiled. Florence Nightingale made reforms in the British Army—a very difficult thing to do. She invented and founded the modern hospital. But-the brief period of the 'Lady of the lamp' over-she was obliged to effect all this in the uncomfortable posture of the old-fashioned Punch-andJudy man. She gripped her puppets somewhat firmly. They seldom kicked, they frequently expired. The fault was in the system, not in her. Can any one imagine what the late Lord Kitchener would have been like if he had never been able to hold any public and responsible position, but had been condemned to carry out his every scheme by dint of managing, cajoling, getting influence over, 'catching the eye' of, a man in office? No; it cannot be imagined.

It may be asked, where is the point of contact between the early Victorian reformer and the late Victorian writer? All women, but especially all women social workers, owe much to Florence Nightingale. She blazed a path through a tangled forest of convention and prejudice, which others have trodden into a road. The Pioneer had, and needed to have, incomparable drivingpower. Mrs Humphry Ward had no such heavy task to perform, but in her manner and measure she also possessed great driving-power, and a power of acquiring influence with men of importance, which counted for much in the realisation of her beneficent schemes. Yet the two women were of different breeds. Mrs Ward was primarily a woman of the pen, and the first source of her influence lay in her ink-pot. Miss Nightingale owed much to the accident of her birth. She was born a member of an aristocracy, of the governing class. Mrs Ward also was born a member of an aristocracy, but a quite different and much smaller one, consisting of a few families-are not their names written in the Book of

Galton?-at the head of which stand those of Coleridge and Arnold.

It seemed at first as though the family tradition were severed, for her father, Thomas Arnold the younger, vanished early from the English scene-went to the Antipodes, actually and metaphorically, for over there he became a member of the Roman Church. He returned to England-his eldest child, Mary, being then five years old-not to the England of Arnold but to the England of Newman. The family settled in Birmingham, but the child's Protestant mother did not allow her to come in contact with the Oratory. Long afterwards, on the occasion of that touching visit of Newman to Trinity College, Oxford, when she, as a young married woman, was presented to him, he showed that the clever darkeyed child he had not been allowed to know had not escaped his notice. But at the age of seven she was sent to a boarding school, evidently the usual one of the period, where amazingly nothing was taught. The heads of such schools-arrived there by natural selection -were often clever, superior women, but the teachers were yet oftener elementarily educated persons of the tradesman class, who made it a large part of their duty to teach their pupils to 'behave like ladies.' A most laborious branch of learning, as taught by them, to which I stubbornly refused myself. My resistance, however, was passive; Mary Arnold's seems to have been active. I remember her telling me many years ago, how in a paroxysm of anger-doubtless just-she had run up to the top of a flight of stairs with a large plate full of bread-and-butter and flung slice after slice smack in the face of the governess standing at the foot, finally hurling the plate after, let us hope with less deadly aim. At sixteen she left school for home and her real education began. Her father had now left the Roman Church and settled in Oxford. It might be said that, had he not done so, had the sensitive, as yet intellectually undeveloped girl, come under the charm of Newman, the whole course of her career would have been different. I think not. Hers was not a mind to crave for, or even at all admit, authority in religious matters. Affection and admiration might have drawn her into the fold, but she would not have remained there.

At Oxford the name of Arnold opened to her all doors. Stanley she already knew; Jowett and Mark Pattison were soon interested in her. And it is on the grey Oxford background that I see her first-pale, slight, black-haired, nineteen. I had but just made acquaintance with the magic city itself-alas! how marred and mutilated in the half-century which has passed over it since then! It was still to me so much the Oxford of my father's fond recollections that I remember half expecting to see young gentlemen in rich waistcoats doing the High' for the delight of passengers on London coaches. Indeed in that year, 1871, although the coaches were no more and Oxford was on the brink of a tremendous transformation, in appearance and constitution it was as yet but trivially altered from the Oxford of the 'forties. We were just taking possession of the old Master's Lodgings at University College, a house which had been acquainted with Dr Johnson and with Shelley, and where the Highland lady so much enjoyed staying with her relative, Dr Griffith, who adorned the dining-room with a 'gothic' vaulting.

In this dim room, with its three casements opening on the High, I perceive down a long vista of years, yet clearly, Tom Arnold' and his daughter, seated at the end of the table. The Arnolds' were already a kind of legend to us. My father had been devotedly attached to Dr Arnold-the real Arnold, not the clever gargoyle recently presented to the public under that label-and was in early life an intimate friend of 'Matt's.' His visits to Fox How remained delightful memories, shared with his children. Tom' was a familiar figure in these reminiscences; and we had heard of his wonderful daughter, who was deep in the study of Spanish at the Bodleian. He had hurried to welcome his old friend to Oxford. He was a tall, straggly man with a gentle, intellectual face, showing, in despite of strongly marked features, the weakness, whether of judgement or of character, which had made his life and that of his family so hard. Mary resembled her uncle 'Matt' more than her father. In later life, when her head acquired a certain massiveness, it showed some family likeness to that of the great Doctor, whom her gifted and attractive brother Willie strongly resembled. It was certainly

'black Tom' whom she had to thank for the abundance and the glossy black of the plaits that were coiled close to her shapely head, if not for the creamy white of her complexion. Tall-for the period-slender, and graceful, with white and charming hands, Mary Arnold, if not a regular beauty, was admittedly a handsome girl.

It was at the beginning of the aesthetic movement, when Ruskin, living at Abingdon, but teaching in Oxford, was the prophet of the place. He had decreed that yellow was the test colour. No one who did not love yellow in preference to all other colours, could hope to be saved-æsthetically speaking. There was accordingly great rapture over yellow. Some years later he, surely inconsiderately, declared purple to be the true test. It was too late. The whole cultured world was already seething with yellow. But in 1871, to wear yellow-a colour for some reason banned by early Victorian taste -was to wave a flag. It was a flag which became Mary Arnold well. That she often wore it-with black-may, however, have been not unconnected with the circumstance that black and yellow were the colours of Brasenose, for in 1872 she married Humphry Ward, a brilliant young Fellow of that College and part author of a charming little book of local fame-the Oxford Spectator.' It was a love-match of the simple Victorian kind, yet, had the gifted girl foreseen her future, she could hardly have made a marriage more conducive to its success. Even in Oxford, where many young dons were generously enthusiastic in the cause of the education and emancipation of women, she would have found very few so able and willing to help her in the development of her manifold powers, and still fewer so unselfishly anxious that she should have that freedom and leisure to exercise them seldom enjoyed by women in the past.

This was among the first of those marriages of Fellows which were directly and indirectly to transform Oxford, socially for the better, architecturally for the unspeakably worse. 'The Parks' had but begun to exist. It is a fixed habit-like that of making jokes about mothers-in-law-to sneer at academic society. It would have been difficult to find elsewhere brilliant and remarkable personalities so thick on the ground as they were in Oxford during the 'seventies and early

'eighties. To enumerate them all would take too long. Enough that in 1872 there were living within a square hundred yards a group of close friends, consisting of the Humphry Wards, the Mandell Creightons, and Walter Pater and his sisters. The Max Müllers were their near neighbours, at whose house interesting guests, English and foreign, abounded. In the Colleges were to be found Andrew Lang, Mark Pattison, and occasionally his wife, the future Lady Dilke. Last but not least, Jowett, the great little Master of Balliol, then at the end of his career as an heresiarch-become indeed a kind of licensed heretic-and already launched on that of host, friend, and counsellor of the Mighty; also of their wives, whether in politics, letters, or Society. Presently, in a dark-panelled old house under the shadow of New College tower, sparkled the incomparable wit of Rhoda Broughton.

During all the years that I was acquainted with it, academic society lived the much-talked-of Simple Life simply, without talking about it. There reigned in it what is called a republican equality, although I have never observed anything of the kind in a Republic. Settlers within its borders were welcomed or not, according to their personal qualities or lack of them. Not merely intellectual distinction, but any kind of interestingness, accomplishment, or charm was the 'Open, Sesame.' It is not too much to say that neither money nor birth counted. The ostentation of either excited a cheerful ridicule. Most people were poor, but their poverty was not sordid. The taste for old furniture and china was still the passion of the few, not the fashion of the many; and the small houses held beautiful things. This was particularly true of the Humphry Wards' house in Bradmore Road, where Mr Ward was already exercising, on a small scale, his afterwards well-known gift as a connoisseur. Its aesthetically green-blue walls and black woodwork made a becoming background to its graceful young mistress; more flattering in truth to humanity in general than the austere walls of the modern drawingroom, 'tout blanc-blanc comme une salle de bain,' as a French woman described it.

Here, besides 'keeping' the pretty, hospitable house and mothering her three children, she was still studying