Mrs. Highmore’s errand this morning was odd enough to deserve
commemoration: she came to ask me to write a notice of her great
forthcoming work. Her great works have come forth so frequently without
my assistance that I was sufficiently entitled on this occasion to
open my eyes; but what really made me stare was the ground on which her
request reposed, and what leads me to record the incident is the train
of memory lighted by that explanation. Poor Ray Limbert, while we
talked, seemed to sit there between us: she reminded me that my
acquaintance with him had begun, eighteen years ago, with her having
come in precisely as she came in this morning to bespeak my charity for
him. If she didn’t know then how little my charity was worth she is at
least enlightened about it to-day, and this is just the circumstance
that makes the drollery of her visit. As I hold up the torch to the
dusky years--by which I mean as I cipher up with a pen that stumbles
and stops the figured column of my reminiscences--I see that Limbert’s
public hour, or at least my small apprehension of it, is rounded by
those two occasions. It was _finis_, with a little moralising flourish,
that Mrs. Highmore seemed to trace to-day at the bottom of the page.
“One of the most voluminous writers of the time,” she has often repeated
this sign; but never, I daresay, in spite of her professional command
of appropriate emotion, with an equal sense of that mystery and that
sadness of things which to people of imagination generally hover over
the close of human histories. This romance at any rate is bracketed by
her early and her late appeal; and when its melancholy protrusions had
caught the declining light again from my half-hour’s talk with her I
took a private vow to recover while that light still lingers something
of the delicate flush, to pick out with a brief patience the perplexing
lesson.
It was wonderful to observe how for herself Mrs. Highmore had already
done so: she wouldn’t have hesitated to announce to me what was the
matter with Ralph Limbert, or at all events to give me a glimpse of the
high admonition she had read in his career. There could have been no
better proof of the vividness of this parable, which we were really in
our pleasant sympathy quite at one about, than that Mrs. Highmore, of
all hardened sinners, should have been converted. This indeed was not
news to me: she impressed upon me that for the last ten years she had
wanted to do something artistic, something as to which she was prepared
not to care a rap whether or no it should sell. She brought home to me
further that it had been mainly seeing what her brother-in-law did and
how he did it that had wedded her to this perversity. As _he_ didn’t
sell, dear soul, and as several persons, of whom I was one, thought
highly of that, the fancy had taken her--taken her even quite early
in her prolific course--of reaching, if only once, the same heroic
eminence. She yearned to be, like Limbert, but of course only once, an
exquisite failure. There was something a failure was, a failure in the
market, that a success somehow wasn’t. A success was as prosaic as a
good dinner: there was nothing more to be said about it than that you
had had it. Who but vulgar people, in such a case, made gloating remarks
about the courses? It was often by such vulgar people that a success was
attested. It made if you came to look at it nothing but money; that
is it made so much that any other result showed small in comparison. A
failure now could make--oh, with the aid of immense talent of course,
for there were failures and failures--such a reputation! She did me
the honour--she had often done it--to intimate that what she meant by
reputation was seeing _me_ toss a flower. If it took a failure to catch
a failure I was by my own admission well qualified to place the laurel.
It was because she had made so much money and Mr. Highmore had taken
such care of it that she could treat herself to an hour of pure glory.
She perfectly remembered that as often as I had heard her heave that
sigh I had been prompt with my declaration that a book sold might easily
be as glorious as a book unsold. Of course she knew this, but she knew
also that it was the age of trash triumphant and that she had never
heard me speak of anything that had “done well” exactly as she had
sometimes heard me speak of something that hadn’t--with just two or
three words of respect which, when I used them, seemed to convey more
than they commonly stood for, seemed to hush up the discussion a little,
as if for the very beauty of the secret.
I may declare in regard to these allusions that, whatever I then thought
of myself as a holder of the scales I had never scrupled to laugh out
at the humour of Mrs. Highmore’s pursuit of quality at any price. It had
never rescued her even for a day from the hard doom of popularity, and
though I never gave her my word for it there was no reason at all why
it should. The public _would_ have her, as her husband used roguishly
to remark; not indeed that, making her bargains, standing up to her
publishers and even, in his higher flights, to her reviewers, he ever
had a glimpse of her attempted conspiracy against her genius, or rather
as I may say against mine. It was not that when she tried to be what
she called subtle (for wasn’t Limbert subtle, and wasn’t I?) her fond
consumers, bless them, didn’t suspect the trick nor show what they
thought of it: they straightway rose on the contrary to the morsel she
had hoped to hold too high, and, making but a big, cheerful bite of it,
wagged their great collective tail artlessly for more. It was not
given to her not to please, nor granted even to her best refinements to
affright. I have always respected the mystery of those humiliations, but
I was fully aware this morning that they were practically the reason
why she had come to me. Therefore when she said with the flush of a
bold joke in her kind, coarse face “What I feel is, you know, that _you_
could settle me if you only would.” I knew quite well what she meant. She
meant that of old it had always appeared to be the fine blade, as some
one had hyperbolically called it, of my particular opinion that snapped
the silken thread by which Limbert’s chance in the market was wont to
hang. She meant that my favour was compromising, that my praise indeed
was fatal. I had made myself a little specialty of seeing nothing in
certain celebrities, of seeing overmuch in an occasional nobody, and of
judging from a point of view that, say what I would for it (and I had a
monstrous deal to say) remained perverse and obscure. Mine was in short
the love that killed, for my subtlety, unlike Mrs. Highmore’s, produced
no tremor of the public tail. She had not forgotten how, toward the
end, when his case was worst, Limbert would absolutely come to me with
a funny, shy pathos in his eyes and say: “My dear fellow, I think I’ve
done it this time, if you’ll only keep quiet.” If my keeping quiet in
those days was to help him to appear to have hit the usual taste, for
the want of which he was starving, so now my breaking out was to help
Mrs. Highmore to appear to have hit the unusual.
The moral of all this was that I had frightened the public too much for
our late friend, but that as she was not starving this was exactly
what her grosser reputation required. And then, she good-naturedly and
delicately intimated, there would always be, if further reasons were
wanting, the price of my clever little article. I think she gave that
hint with a flattering impression--spoiled child of the booksellers as
she is--that the price of my clever little articles is high. Whatever it
is, at any rate, she had evidently reflected that poor Limbert’s
anxiety for his own profit used to involve my sacrificing mine. Any
inconvenience that my obliging her might entail would not in fine be
pecuniary. Her appeal, her motive, her fantastic thirst for quality and
her ingenious theory of my influence struck me all as excellent comedy,
and when I consented contingently to oblige her she left me the sheets
of her new novel. I could plead no inconvenience and have been looking
them over; but I am frankly appalled at what she expects of me. What
is she thinking of, poor dear, and what has put it into her head that
“quality” has descended upon her? Why does she suppose that she has been
“artistic”? She hasn’t been anything whatever, I surmise, that she has
not inveterately been. What does she imagine she has left out? What
does she conceive she has put in? She has neither left out nor put
in anything. I shall have to write her an embarrassed note. The book
doesn’t exist, and there’s nothing in life to say about it. How can
there be anything but the same old faithful rush for it?
I
This rush had already begun when, early in the seventies, in the
interest of her prospective brother-in-law, she approached me on the
singular ground of the unencouraged sentiment I had entertained for her
sister. Pretty pink Maud had cast me out, but I appear to have passed in
the flurried little circle for a magnanimous youth. Pretty pink Maud,
so lovely then, before her troubles, that dusky Jane was gratefully
conscious of all she made up for, Maud Stannace, very literary too,
very languishing and extremely bullied by her mother, had yielded,
invidiously as it might have struck me, to Ray Limbert’s suit, which
Mrs. Stannace was not the woman to stomach. Mrs. Stannace was seldom the
woman to do anything: she had been shocked at the way her children, with
the grubby taint of their father’s blood (he had published pale Remains
or flat Conversations of _his_ father) breathed the alien air of
authorship. If not the daughter, nor even the niece, she was, if I am
not mistaken, the second cousin of a hundred earls and a great stickler
for relationship, so that she had other views for her brilliant child,
especially after her quiet one (such had been her original discreet
forecast of the producer of eighty volumes) became the second wife of an
ex-army-surgeon, already the father of four children. Mrs. Stannace had
too manifestly dreamed it would be given to pretty pink Maud to detach
some one of the hundred, who wouldn’t be missed, from the cluster. It
was because she cared only for cousins that I unlearnt the way to
her house, which she had once reminded me was one of the few paths of
gentility I could hope to tread. Ralph Limbert, who belonged to nobody
and had done nothing--nothing even at Cambridge--had only the uncanny
spell he had cast upon her younger daughter to recommend him; but if her
younger daughter had a spark of filial feeling she wouldn’t commit the
indecency of deserting for his sake a deeply dependent and intensely
aggravated mother.
These things I learned from Jane Highmore, who, as if her books had been
babies (they remained her only ones) had waited till after marriage
to show what she could do and now bade fair to surround her satisfied
spouse (he took for some mysterious reason, a part of the credit) with a
little family, in sets of triplets, which properly handled would be the
support of his declining years. The young couple, neither of whom had
a penny, were now virtually engaged: the thing was subject to Ralph’s
putting his hand on some regular employment. People more enamoured
couldn’t be conceived, and Mrs. Highmore, honest woman, who had moreover
a professional sense for a love-story, was eager to take them under her
wing. What was wanted was a decent opening for Limbert, which it had
occurred to her I might assist her to find, though indeed I had not yet
found any such matter for myself. But it was well known that I was too
particular, whereas poor Ralph, with the easy manners of genius, was
ready to accept almost anything to which a salary, even a small one, was
attached. If he could only for instance get a place on a newspaper the
rest of his maintenance would come freely enough. It was true that his
two novels, one of which she had brought to leave with me, had passed
unperceived and that to her, Mrs. Highmore personally, they didn’t
irresistibly appeal; but she could all the same assure me that I should
have only to spend ten minutes with him (and our encounter must speedily
take place) to receive an impression of latent power.
Our encounter took place soon after I had read the volumes Mrs. Highmore
had left with me, in which I recognised an intention of a sort that
I had then pretty well given up the hope of meeting. I daresay that
without knowing it I had been looking out rather hungrily for an altar
of sacrifice: however that may be I submitted when I came across Ralph
Limbert to one of the rarest emotions of my literary life, the sense
of an activity in which I could critically rest. The rest was deep and
salutary, and it has not been disturbed to this hour. It has been
a long, large surrender, the luxury of dropped discriminations. He
couldn’t trouble me, whatever he did, for I practically enjoyed him as
much when he was worse as when he was better. It was a case, I suppose,
of natural prearrangement, in which, I hasten to add, I keep excellent
company. We are a numerous band, partakers of the same repose, who sit
together in the shade of the tree, by the plash of the fountain, with
the glare of the desert around us and no great vice that I know of but
the habit perhaps of estimating people a little too much by what they
think of a certain style. If it had been laid upon these few pages,
none the less, to be the history of an enthusiasm, I should not have
undertaken them: they are concerned with Ralph Limbert in relations to
which I was a stranger or in which I participated only by sympathy. I
used to talk about his work, but I seldom talk now: the brotherhood of
the faith have become, like the Trappists, a silent order. If to the
day of his death, after mortal disenchantments, the impression he first
produced always evoked the word “ingenuous,” those to whom his face was
familiar can easily imagine what it must have been when it still had the
light of youth. I had never seen a man of genius look so passive, a man
of experience so off his guard. At the period I made his acquaintance
this freshness was all un-brushed. His foot had begun to stumble, but he
was full of big intentions and of sweet Maud Stannace. Black-haired and
pale, deceptively languid, he had the eyes of a clever child and the
voice of a bronze bell. He saw more even than I had done in the girl
he was engaged to; as time went on I became conscious that we had both,
properly enough, seen rather more than there was. Our odd situation,
that of the three of us, became perfectly possible from the moment I
observed that he had more patience with her than I should have had. I
was happy at not having to supply this quantity, and she, on her side,
found pleasure in being able to be impertinent to me without incurring
the reproach of a bad wife.
Limbert’s novels appeared to have brought him no money: they had only
brought him, so far as I could then make out, tributes that took up his
time. These indeed brought him from several quarters some other things,
and on my part at the end of three months _The Blackport Beacon_. I
don’t to-day remember how I obtained for him the London correspondence
of the great northern organ, unless it was through somebody’s having
obtained it for myself. I seem to recall that I got rid of it in
Limbert’s interest, persuaded the editor that he was much the better
man. The better man was naturally the man who had pledged himself
to support a charming wife. We were neither of us good, as the event
proved, but he had a finer sort of badness. _The Blackport
Beacon_ had two London correspondents--one a supposed haunter of
political circles, the other a votary of questions sketchily classified
as literary. They were both expected to be lively, and what was held out
to each was that it was honourably open to him to be livelier than the
other. I recollect the political correspondent of that period and how
the problem offered to Ray Limbert was to try to be livelier than Pat
Moyle. He had not yet seemed to me so candid as when he undertook this
exploit, which brought matters to a head with Mrs. Stannace, inasmuch
as her opposition to the marriage now logically fell to the ground. It’s
all tears and laughter as I look back upon that admirable time, in which
nothing was so romantic as our intense vision of the real. No
fool’s paradise ever rustled such a cradle-song. It was anything but
Bohemia--it was the very temple of Mrs. Grundy. We knew we were too
critical, and that made us sublimely indulgent; we believed we did our
duty or wanted to, and that made us free to dream. But we dreamed over
the multiplication-table; we were nothing if not practical. Oh, the long
smokes and sudden ideas, the knowing hints and banished scruples! The
great thing was for Limbert to bring out his next book, which was just
what his delightful engagement with the _Beacon_ would give him
leisure and liberty to do. The kind of work, all human and elastic
and suggestive, was capital experience: in picking up things for
his bi-weekly letter he would pick up life as well, he would pick
up literature. The new publications, the new pictures, the new
people--there would be nothing too novel for us and nobody too
sacred. We introduced everything and everybody into Mrs. Stannace’s
drawing-room, of which I again became a familiar.
Mrs. Stannace, it was true, thought herself in strange company; she
didn’t particularly mind the new books, though some of them seemed
queer enough, but to the new people she had decided objections. It was
notorious however that poor Lady Robeck secretly wrote for one of the
papers, and the thing had certainly, in its glance at the doings of the
great world, a side that might be made attractive. But we were going to
make every side attractive, and we had everything to say about the sort
of thing a paper like the _Beacon_ would want. To give it what it would
want and to give it nothing else was not doubtless an inspiring, but it
was a perfectly respectable task, especially for a man with an appealing
bride and a contentious mother-in-law. I thought Lambert’s first letters
as charming as the type allowed, though I won’t deny that in spite of my
sense of the importance of concessions I was just a trifle disconcerted
at the way he had caught the tone. The tone was of course to be caught,
but need it have been caught so in the act? The creature was even
cleverer, as Maud Stannace said, than she had ventured to hope. Verily
it was a good thing to have a dose of the wisdom of the serpent. If it
had to be journalism--well, it _was_ journalism. If he had to be “chatty
“--well, he _was_ chatty. Now and then he made a hit that--it was stupid
of me--brought the blood to my face. I hated him to be so personal; but
still, if it would make his fortune--! It wouldn’t of course directly,
but the book would, practically and in the sense to which our pure ideas
of fortune were confined; and these things were all for the book.
The daily balm meanwhile was in what one knew of the book--there were
exquisite things to know; in the quiet monthly cheques from Blackport
and in the deeper rose of Maud’s little preparations, which were as
dainty, on their tiny scale, as if she had been a humming-bird building
a nest. When at the end of three months her betrothed had fairly settled
down to his correspondence--in which Mrs. Highmore was the only person,
so far as we could discover, disappointed, even she moreover being in
this particular tortuous and possibly jealous; when the situation
had assumed such a comfortable shape it was quite time to prepare.
I published at that moment my first volume, mere faded ink to-day, a
little collection of literary impressions, odds and ends of criticism
contributed to a journal less remunerative but also less chatty than the
_Beacon_, small ironies and ecstasies, great phrases and mistakes;
and the very week it came out poor Limbert devoted half of one of his
letters to it, with the happy sense this time of gratifying both himself
and me as well as the Blackport breakfast-tables. I remember his saying
it wasn’t literature, the stuff, superficial stuff, he had to write
about me; but what did that matter if it came back, as we knew, to
the making for literature in the roundabout way? I sold the thing, I
remember, for ten pounds, and with the money I bought in Vigo Street
a quaint piece of old silver for Maud Stannace, which I carried to her
with my own hand as a wedding-gift. In her mother’s small drawing-room,
a faded bower of photography fenced in and bedimmed by folding screens
out of which sallow persons of fashion with dashing signatures looked at
you from retouched eyes and little windows of plush, I was left to
wait long enough to feel in the air of the house a hushed vibration of
disaster. When our young lady came in she was very pale and her eyes too
had been retouched.
“Something horrid has happened,” I immediately said; and having really
all along but half believed in her mother’s meagre permission I risked
with an unguarded groan the introduction of Mrs. Stannace’s name.
“Yes, she has made a dreadful scene; she insists on our putting it off
again. We’re very unhappy: poor Ray has been turned off.” Her tears
began to flow again.