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GREVILLE FANE
GREVILLE FANE HENRY JAMES I came away early for the express purpose of driving to ask about
her. The journey took time for she lived in the north-west
district in the neighbourhood of Primrose Hill. My apprehension
that I should be too late was justified in a fuller sense than I had
attached to it--I had only feared that the house would be shut up.
There were lights in the windows and the temperate tinkle of my bell
brought a servant immediately to the door but poor Mrs. Stormer had
passed into a state in which the resonance of no earthly knocker was
to be feared. A lady in the hall hovering behind the servant came
forward when she heard my voice. I recognised Lady Luard but she
had mistaken me for the doctor.
"Excuse my appearing at such an hour" I said; "it was the first
possible moment after I heard."
"It's all over" Lady Luard replied. "Dearest mamma!"
She stood there under the lamp with her eyes on me; she was very
tall very stiff very cold and always looked as if these things
and some others beside in her dress her manner and even her name
were an implication that she was very admirable. I had never been
able to follow the argument but that is a detail. I expressed
briefly and frankly what I felt while the little mottled maidservant
flattened herself against the wall of the narrow passage and tried to
look detached without looking indifferent. It was not a moment to
make a visit and I was on the point of retreating when Lady Luard
arrested me with a queer casual drawling "Would you--a--would you
perhaps be WRITING something?" I felt for the instant like an
interviewer which I was not. But I pleaded guilty to this
intention on which she rejoined: "I'm so very glad--but I think my
brother would like to see you." I detested her brother but it
wasn't an occasion to act this out; so I suffered myself to be
inducted to my surprise into a small back room which I immediately
recognised as the scene during the later years of Mrs. Stormer's
imperturbable industry. Her table was there the battered and
blotted accessory to innumerable literary lapses with its contracted
space for the arms (she wrote only from the elbow down) and the
confusion of scrappy scribbled sheets which had already become
literary remains. Leolin was also there smoking a cigarette before
the fire and looking impudent even in his grief sincere as it well
might have been.
To meet him to greet him I had to make a sharp effort; for the air
that he wore to me as he stood before me was quite that of his
mother's murderer. She lay silent for ever upstairs--as dead as an
unsuccessful book and his swaggering erectness was a kind of symbol
of his having killed her. I wondered if he had already with his
sister been calculating what they could get for the poor papers on
the table; but I had not long to wait to learn for in reply to the
scanty words of sympathy I addressed him he puffed out: "It's
miserable miserable yes; but she has left three books complete."
His words had the oddest effect; they converted the cramped little
room into a seat of trade and made the "book" wonderfully feasible.
He would certainly get all that could be got for the three. Lady
Luard explained to me that her husband had been with them but had had
to go down to the House. To her brother she explained that I was
going to write something and to me again she made it clear that she
hoped I would "do mamma justice." She added that she didn't think
this had ever been done. She said to her brother: "Don't you think
there are some things he ought thoroughly to understand?" and on his
instantly exclaiming "Oh thoroughly--thoroughly!" she went on
rather austerely: "I mean about mamma's birth."
"Yes and her connections" Leolin added.
I professed every willingness and for five minutes I listened but
it would be too much to say that I understood. I don't even now but
it is not important. My vision was of other matters than those they
put before me and while they desired there should be no mistake
about their ancestors I became more and more lucid about themselves.
I got away as soon as possible and walked home through the great
dusky empty London--the best of all conditions for thought. By the
time I reached my door my little article was practically composed--
ready to be transferred on the morrow from the polished plate of
fancy. I believe it attracted some notice was thought "graceful"
and was said to be by some one else. I had to be pointed without
being lively and it took some tact. But what I said was much less
interesting than what I thought--especially during the half-hour I
spent in my armchair by the fire smoking the cigar I always light
before going to bed. I went to sleep there I believe; but I
continued to moralise about Greville Fane. I am reluctant to lose
that retrospect altogether and this is a dim little memory of it a
document not to "serve." The dear woman had written a hundred
stories but none so curious as her own.
When first I knew her she had published half-a-dozen fictions and I
believe I had also perpetrated a novel. She was more than a dozen
years older than I but she was a person who always acknowledged her
relativity. It was not so very long ago but in London amid the big
waves of the present even a near horizon gets hidden. I met her at
some dinner and took her down rather flattered at offering my arm to
a celebrity. She didn't look like one with her matronly mild
inanimate face but I supposed her greatness would come out in her
conversation. I gave it all the opportunities I could but I was not
disappointed when I found her only a dull kind woman. This was why
I liked her--she rested me so from literature. To myself literature
was an irritation a torment; but Greville Fane slumbered in the
intellectual part of it like a Creole in a hammock. She was not a
woman of genius but her faculty was so special so much a gift out
of hand that I have often wondered why she fell below that
distinction. This was doubtless because the transaction in her
case had remained incomplete; genius always pays for the gift feels
the debt and she was placidly unconscious of obligation. She could
invent stories by the yard but she couldn't write a page of English.
She went down to her grave without suspecting that though she had
contributed volumes to the diversion of her contemporaries she had
not contributed a sentence to the language. This had not prevented
bushels of criticism from being heaped upon her head; she was worth a
couple of columns any day to the weekly papers in which it was shown
that her pictures of life were dreadful but her style really
charming. She asked me to come and see her and I went. She lived
then in Montpellier Square; which helped me to see how dissociated
her imagination was from her character.
An industrious widow devoted to her daily stint to meeting the
butcher and baker and making a home for her son and daughter from
the moment she took her pen in her hand she became a creature of
passion. She thought the English novel deplorably wanting in that
element and the task she had cut out for herself was to supply the
deficiency. Passion in high life was the general formula of this
work for her imagination was at home only in the most exalted
circles. She adored in truth the aristocracy and they constituted
for her the romance of the world or what is more to the point the
prime material of fiction. Their beauty and luxury their loves and
revenges their temptations and surrenders their immoralities and
diamonds were as familiar to her as the blots on her writing-table.
She was not a belated producer of the old fashionable novel she had
a cleverness and a modernness of her own she had freshened up the
fly-blown tinsel. She turned off plots by the hundred and--so far as
her flying quill could convey her--was perpetually going abroad. Her
types her illustrations her tone were nothing if not cosmopolitan.
She recognised nothing less provincial than European society and her
fine folk knew each other and made love to each other from Doncaster
to Bucharest. She had an idea that she resembled Balzac and her
favourite historical characters were Lucien de Rubempre and the
Vidame de Pamiers. I must add that when I once asked her who the
latter personage was she was unable to tell me. She was very brave
and healthy and cheerful very abundant and innocent and wicked. She
was clever and vulgar and snobbish and never so intensely British as
when she was particularly foreign.
This combination of qualities had brought her early success and I
remember having heard with wonder and envy of what she "got" in
those days for a novel. The revelation gave me a pang: it was such
a proof that practising a totally different style I should never
make my fortune. And yet when as I knew her better she told me her
real tariff and I saw how rumour had quadrupled it I liked her
enough to be sorry. After a while I discovered too that if she got
less it was not that _I_ was to get any more. My failure never had
what Mrs. Stormer would have called the banality of being relative--
it was always admirably absolute. She lived at ease however in those
days--ease is exactly the word though she produced three novels a
year. She scorned me when I spoke of difficulty--it was the only
thing that made her angry. If I hinted that a work of art required a
tremendous licking into shape she thought it a pretension and a pose.
She never recognised the "torment of form"; the furthest she went was
to introduce into one of her books (in satire her hand was heavy) a
young poet who was always talking about it. I couldn't quite
understand her irritation on this score for she had nothing at stake
in the matter. She had a shrewd perception that form in prose at
least never recommended any one to the public we were condemned to
address and therefore she lost nothing (putting her private
humiliation aside) by not having any. She made no pretence of
producing works of art but had comfortable tea-drinking hours in
which she freely confessed herself a common pastrycook dealing in
such tarts and puddings as would bring customers to the shop. She
put in plenty of sugar and of cochineal or whatever it is that gives
these articles a rich and attractive colour. She had a serene
superiority to observation and opportunity which constituted an
inexpugnable strength and would enable her to go on indefinitely. It
is only real success that wanes it is only solid things that melt.
Greville Fane's ignorance of life was a resource still more unfailing
than the most approved receipt. On her saying once that the day
would come when she should have written herself out I answered: "Ah
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