The two infuriated ladies were attached to my father, and had known him
for many years as a clergyman and a rural dean of unblemished character.
He wrote to them himself to assure them that they had made a mistake,
that I was not the author of the obnoxious work.
But the only effect his letter had on their minds was a pained uprootal
of their respect and long affection for him. And they both died some
years later, and (presumably) went up to heaven, convinced of my guilt,
in spite of the unscrupulous parental ruridiaconal effort to whitewash
me.
Long afterwards I mentioned this incident to Mrs. Clifford, but it did
not cause her surprise. She had had her own experiences. She told me
that when "Aunt Anne" appeared, she had many letters from persons with
whom she was unacquainted, reproaching her for having portrayed their
aunt.
The reverse of the medal ought perhaps to be mentioned. So primitive was
the circle in which my youth was passed that an adverse review, if seen
by one of the community, was at once put down to a disaffected and
totally uneducated person in our village.
A witty but unfavourable criticism in _Punch_ of my first story was
always believed by two ladies in the parish to have been penned by one
of the village tradesmen. It was in vain I assured them that the person
in question could not by any possibility be on the staff of _Punch_.
They only shook their heads, and repeated mysteriously that they "had
reasons for _knowing_ he had written it."
When we moved to London, I hoped I might fare better. But evidently I
had been born under an unlucky star. The "Aunt Anne" incident proved to
be only the first playful ripple which heralded the incoming of the
Breakers of the boundless deep.
After the publication of "Red Pottage" a storm burst respecting one of
the characters--Mr. Gresley--which even now I have not forgotten. The
personal note was struck once more with vigour, but this time by the
clerical arm. I was denounced by name from a London pulpit. A Church
newspaper which shall be nameless suggested that my portrait of Mr.
Gresley was merely a piece of spite on my part, as I had probably been
jilted by a clergyman. I will not pretend that the turmoil gave me
unmixed pain. If it had, I should have been without literary vanity. But
when a witty bishop wrote to me that he had enjoined on his clergy the
study of Mr. Gresley as a Lenten penance, it was not possible for me to
remain permanently depressed.
The character was the outcome of long, close observation of large
numbers of clergymen, but not of one particular parson. Why, then, was
it so exactly like individual clergymen that I received excited or
enthusiastic letters from the parishioners of I dare not say how many
parishes, affirming that their vicar (whom I had never beheld), and he
alone, could have been the prototype of Mr. Gresley? I was frequently
implored to go down and "see for myself." Their most adorable platitudes
were chronicled and sent up to me, till I wrung my hands because it was
too late to insert them in "Red Pottage."[1] For they all fitted Mr.
Gresley like a glove, and I should certainly have used them if it had
been possible. For, as has been well said, "There is no copyright in
platitudes." They are part of our goodly heritage. And though people
like Mr. Gresley and my academic prig Wentworth have in one sense made a
particular field of platitude their own, by exercising themselves
continually upon it, nevertheless we cannot allow them to warn us off as
trespassers, or permit them to annex or enclose common land, the
property and birthright of the race.
Young men fresh from public schools also informed me that Mr. Gresley
was the facsimile of their tutor, and of no one else. I was at that time
unacquainted with any schoolmasters, being cut off from social
advantages. But that fact did me no good. The dispassionate statement of
it had no more effect on my young friends than my father's denial had on
my elderly relations.
I am ashamed to say that once again, as in the case of "Aunt Anne," I
endeavoured to exculpate myself in order to pacify two old maiden
ladies. Why is it always the acutely unmarried who are made miserable by
my books? Is it because--odious thought, avaunt!--married persons do not
open them? These two ladies did not, indeed, think that I had been
"paying out" some particular clergyman, as suggested in their favourite
paper, _The Guardian_,[2] but they were shocked by the profanity of the
book. Soon afterwards the Bishop of Stepney (now Bishop of London)
preached on "Red Pottage" in St. Paul's. I sent them a newspaper which
reprinted the sermon _verbatim_, with a note saying that I trusted this
expression of opinion on the part of their idolised preacher might
mitigate their condemnation of the book.
But when have my attempts at making an effect ever come off? My firework
never lights up properly like that of others! It only splutters and goes
out. I received in due course a dignified answer that they had both been
deeply distressed by my information, as it would prevent them ever going
to hear the Bishop of Stepney again.
My own experience, especially as to "Red Pottage" and "Prisoners,"
struck me as so direful, I seemed so peculiarly outside the protection
of Providence, like the celebrated plot of ground on which "no rain nor
no dew never fell," that I consulted several other brother and sister
novelists as to how they had fared in this delicate matter. It is not
for me to reveal the interesting skeletons concealed in cupboards not my
own, but I have almost invariably returned from these interviews
cheered, chuckling, and consoled by the comfortable realisation that
others had writhed on a hotter gridiron than I.
Georges Sand, when she was accused of lampooning a certain _abbe_, said
that to draw one character of that kind one must know a thousand. She
has, I think, put her finger on the truth which is not easy to find--at
least, I never found it until I read those words of hers.
It is necessary to know a very large number of persons of a certain
kind before one can evolve a type. Each he or she contributes a twig,
and the author weaves them into a nest. I have no doubt that I must have
taken such a twig from nearly every clergyman I met who had a _soupcon_
of Mr. Gresley in him.
But if an author takes one tiny trait, one saying, one sentiment, direct
from a person, there is always the danger that the contributor will
recognise the theft, and, if of a self-regarding temperament, will
instantly conclude that the _whole_ character is drawn from himself.
There is, for instance, no more universal trait, of what has been
unkindly called "the old-maid temperament" in either sex, than the
assertion that it is always busy. But when such a trait is noted in a
book, how many sensitive readers assume that it is a cruel personality.
If people could but perceive that what they think to be character in
themselves is often only sex, or sexlessness; if they could but believe
in the universality of what they hold to be their individuality! And yet
how easily they believe in it when it is pleasant to do so, when they
write books about themselves, and thousands of grateful readers bombard
the gifted authoress with letters to tell her that they also have "felt
just like that," and have "been helped" by her exquisite sentiments,
which are the exact replicas of their own!
The worst of it is that with the academic or clerical prig, when the
mind has long been permitted to run in a deep, platitudinous groove from
which it is at last powerless to escape, the resemblance to a prig in
fiction is sometimes more than fanciful. It is real. For there is no
doubt that prigs have a horrid family likeness to each other, whether in
books or in real life. I have sometimes felt as the puzzled mother of
some long-lost Tichborne might feel. Each claimant to the estates in
turn seems to acquire a look of the original because he _is_ a claimant.
Has not this one my lost Willy's eyes? But no! that one has Willy's
hands. True, but the last-comer snuffles exactly as my lost Willy
snuffled. How many men have begun suddenly and indubitably in my eyes to
resemble one of the adored prigs of my novels, merely because they
insisted on the likeness themselves.
The most obnoxious accident which has yet befallen me, the most wanton
blow below the belt which Fate has ever dealt me, is buried beneath the
snows of twenty years. But even now I cannot recall it without a
shudder. And if a carping critic ventures to point out that blows below
the belt are not often buried beneath snow, then all I can say is that
when I have made my meaning clear, I see no reason for a servile
conformity to academic rules of composition.
I was writing "Diana Tempest." One of the characters, a very worldly
religious young female prig, was much in my mind. I know many such. I
may as well mention here that I do not bless the hour on which I first
saw the light. I have not found life an ardent feast of tumultuous joy.
But I do realise that it has been embellished by the acquaintance of a
larger number of delightful prigs than falls to the lot of most. I have
much to be thankful for. Having got hold of the character of this lady,
I piloted her through courtship and marriage. I gleefully invented _all_
her sayings on these momentous occasions, and described the wedding and
the abhorrent bridegroom with great minuteness. In short, I gloated over
it.
The book was finished, sold, finally corrected, and in the press when
one of the young women who had unconsciously contributed a trait to the
character became affianced. She immediately began throwing off with
great dignity, as if by clock-work, all the best things which I had
evolved out of my own brain and had put into the mouth of my female
prig. At first I was delighted with my own cleverness, but gradually I
became more and more uneasy, and when I attended the wedding my heart
failed me altogether. In "Diana Tempest" I had described the rich,
elderly, stout, and gouty bridegroom whom the lady had captured. There
he was before my panic-stricken eyes! The wedding was exactly as I had
already described it. It took place in London, just as I had said. The
remembrance that the book had passed beyond my own control, the
irrevocability of certain ghastly sentences, came over me in a flash,
together with the certainty that, however earnestly I might deny, swear,
take solemn oaths on family Bibles, nothing, nothing, not even a voice
from heaven, much less that of a rural dean still on earth, could make
my innocence credible.
I may add that no voice from heaven sounded, and that I never made any
attempt at self-exculpation, or invited my father to sacrifice himself a
second time.
As I heard "The Voice that breathed o'er Eden" and saw the bride of
twenty-five advance up the aisle to meet the bridegroom of forty-five
awaiting her deeply flushed, in a distorted white waistcoat--I had
mercilessly alluded to his white waistcoat as an error of judgment--I
gave myself up for lost; _and I was lost_.
But all this time, while I have been giving a free rein to my
autobiographic instincts, the question still remains unanswered, Why is
human nature so prone to think it has been travestied that it becomes
impervious to reason on the subject the moment the idea has entered the
mind? Once lodged, I have never known such an idea dislodged, however
fantastic. Why is it that if, like Mrs. Clifford, one has the good
fortune to evolve a type, no one can believe it is not an individual?
Why does not the outraged friend console himself with the remembrance
that if he is one of many others who are feeling equally harrowed, he
cannot really be the object of a malignant spite, carefully disguised
till then under the apparel of a cheerful friendship?
I think an answer--a partial answer--to the latter question may be found
in the fact that balm was never yet poured on a wounded spirit by the
assurance that there are thousands of others exactly like itself. We can
all endure to be lampooned. (I have even known a man who was deeply
disappointed when he was forced to believe that he had not been
victimised.) But to be told we are one of a herd! This flesh and blood
cannot tolerate. It is unthinkable; a living death. That we who "look
before and after," and "whose sincerest laughter with some pain is
fraught"; that _we_, lonely, superb, pining for what is not,
misunderstood by our nearest and dearest, who don't know, and never
_can_ know