Transcribed from the 1886 Cassell & Co. edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
NATURE AND ART
BY
MRS. INCHBALD.
CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED:
_LONDON_, _PARIS_, _NEW YORK & MELBOURNE_.
1886.
INTRODUCTION
Elizabeth Simpson was born on the 15th of October, 1753, one of the eight
children of a poor farmer, at Standingfield, near Bury St. Edmunds. Five
of the children were girls, who were all gifted with personal beauty. The
family was Roman Catholic. The mother had a delight in visits to the
Bury Theatre, and took, when she could, her children to the play. One of
her sons became an actor, and her daughter Elizabeth offered herself at
eighteen--her father then being dead--for engagement as an actress at the
Norwich Theatre. She had an impediment of speech, and she was not
engaged; but in the following year, leaving behind an affectionate letter
to her mother, she stole away from Standingfield, and made a bold plunge
into the unknown world of London, where she had friends, upon whose help
she relied. Her friends happened to be in Wales, and she had some
troubles to go through before she found a home in the house of a sister,
who had married a poor tailor. About two months after she had left
Standingfield she married, in London, Mr. Inchbald, an actor, who had
paid his addresses to her when she was at home, and who was also a Roman
Catholic. On the evening of the wedding day the bride, who had not yet
succeeded in obtaining an engagement, went to the play, and saw the
bridegroom play the part of Mr. Oakley in the "Jealous Wife." Mr.
Inchbald was thirty-seven years old, and had sons by a former marriage.
In September, 1772, Mrs. Inchbald tried her fortune on the stage by
playing Cordelia to her husband's Lear. Beauty alone could not assure
success. The impediment in speech made it impossible for Mrs. Inchbald
to succeed greatly as an actress. She was unable to realise her own
conceptions. At times she and her husband prospered so little that on
one day their dinner was of turnips, pulled and eaten in a field, and
sometimes there was no dinner at all. But better days presently
followed; first acquaintance of Mrs. Inchbald with Mrs. Siddons grew to a
strong friendship, and this extended to the other members of the Kemble
family.
After seven years of happy but childless marriage, Mrs. Inchbald was left
a widow at the age of twenty-six. In after years, when devoting herself
to the baby of one of her landladies, she wrote to a friend,--"I shall
never again have patience with a mother who complains of anything but the
loss of her children; so no complaints when you see me again. Remember,
you have had two children, and I never had one." After her husband's
death, Mrs. Inchbald's beauty surrounded her with admirers, some of them
rich, but she did not marry again. To one of those who offered marriage,
she replied that her temper was so uncertain that nothing but blind
affection in a husband could bear with it. Yet she was patiently living
and fighting the world on a weekly salary of about thirty shillings, out
of which she helped her poorer sisters. When acting at Edinburgh she
spent on herself only eight shillings a week in board and lodging. It
was after her husband's death that Mrs. Inchbald finished a little novel,
called "A Simple Story," but it was not until twelve years afterwards
that she could get it published. She came to London again, and wrote
farces, which she could not get accepted; but she obtained an increase of
salary to three pounds a week by unwillingly consenting not only to act
in plays, but also to walk in pantomime. At last, in July, 1784, her
first farce, "The Mogul Tale," was acted. It brought her a hundred
guineas. Three years later her success as a writer had risen so far that
she obtained nine hundred pounds by a little piece called "Such Things
Are." She still lived sparingly, invested savings, and was liberal only
to the poor, and chiefly to her sisters and the poor members of her
family. She finished a sketch of her life in 1786, for which a
publisher, without seeing it, offered a thousand pounds. But there was
more satirical comment in it than she liked, and she resolved to do at
once what she would wish done at the point of death. She destroyed the
record.
In 1791 Mrs. Inchbald published her "Simple Story." Her other tale,
"Nature and Art," followed in 1794, when Mrs. Inchbald's age was forty-
one. She had retired from the stage five years before, with an income of
fifty-eight pounds a year, all she called her own out of the independence
secured by her savings. She lived in cheap lodgings, and had sometimes
to wait altogether on herself; at one lodging "fetching up her own water
three pair of stairs, and dropping a few tears into the heedless stream,
as any other wounded deer might do." Later in life, she wrote to a
friend from a room in which she cooked, and ate, and also her saucepans
were cleaned:--"Thank God, I can say No. I say No to all the vanities of
the world, and perhaps soon shall have to say that I allow my poor infirm
sister a hundred a year. I have raised my allowance to eighty; but in
the rapid stride of her wants, and my obligation as a Christian to make
no selfish refusal to the poor, a few months, I foresee, must make the
sum a hundred." In 1816, when that sister died, and Mrs. Inchbald buried
the last of her immediate home relations--though she had still nephews to
find money for--she said it had been a consolation to her when sometimes
she cried with cold to think that her sister, who was less able to bear
privation, had her fire lighted for her before she rose, and her food
brought to her ready cooked.
Even at fifty Mrs. Inchbald's beauty of face inspired admiration. The
beauty of the inner life increased with years. Lively and quick of
temper, impulsive, sensitive, she took into her heart all that was best
in the sentiments associated with the teaching of Rousseau and the dreams
of the French Revolution. Mrs. Inchbald spoke her mind most fully in
this little story, which is told with a dramatic sense of construction
that swiftly carries on the action to its close. She was no weak
sentimentalist, who hung out her feelings to view as an idle form of self-
indulgence. Most unselfishly she wrought her own life to the pattern in
her mind; even the little faults she could not conquer, she well knew.
Mrs. Inchbald died at the age of sixty-eight, on the 1st of August, 1821,
a devout Roman Catholic, her thoughts in her last years looking
habitually through all disguises of convention up to Nature's God.
H. M.
CHAPTER I.
At a time when the nobility of Britain were said, by the poet laureate,
to be the admirers and protectors of the arts, and were acknowledged by
the whole nation to be the patrons of music--William and Henry, youths
under twenty years of age, brothers, and the sons of a country shopkeeper
who had lately died insolvent, set out on foot for London, in the hope of
procuring by their industry a scanty subsistence.
As they walked out of their native town, each with a small bundle at his
back, each observed the other drop several tears: but, upon the sudden
meeting of their eyes, they both smiled with a degree of disdain at the
weakness in which they had been caught.
"I am sure," said William (the elder), "I don't know what makes me cry."
"Nor I neither," said Henry; "for though we may never see this town
again, yet we leave nothing behind us to give us reason to lament."
"No," replied William, "nor anybody who cares what becomes of us."
"But I was thinking," said Henry, now weeping bitterly, "that, if my poor
father were alive, _he_ would care what was to become of us: he would not
have suffered us to begin this long journey without a few more shillings
in our pockets."
At the end of this sentence, William, who had with some effort suppressed
his tears while his brother spoke, now uttered, with a voice almost
inarticulate,--"Don't say any more; don't talk any more about it. My
father used to tell us, that when he was gone we must take care of
ourselves: and so we must. I only wish," continued he, giving way to his
grief, "that I had never done anything to offend him while he was
living."
"That is what I wish too," cried Henry. "If I had always been dutiful to
him while he was alive, I would not shed one tear for him now that he is
gone--but I would thank Heaven that he has escaped from his creditors."
In conversation such as this, wherein their sorrow for their deceased
parent seemed less for his death than because he had not been so happy
when living as they ought to have made him; and wherein their own outcast
fortune was less the subject of their grief, than the reflection what
their father would have endured could he have beheld them in their
present situation;--in conversation such as this, they pursued their
journey till they arrived at that metropolis, which has received for
centuries past, from the provincial towns, the bold adventurer of every
denomination; has stamped his character with experience and example; and,
while it has bestowed on some coronets and mitres--on some the lasting
fame of genius--to others has dealt beggary, infamy, and untimely death.