Greville Fane

Henry James

Greville Fane

GREVILLE FANE

Coming in to dress for dinner, I found a telegram: “Mrs. Stormer dying; can you give us half a column for to-morrow evening?  Let her off easy, but not too easy.”  I was late; I was in a hurry; I had very little time to think, but at a venture I dispatched a reply: “Will do what I can.”  It was not till I had dressed and was rolling away to dinner that, in the hansom, I bethought myself of the difficulty of the condition attached.  The difficulty was not of course in letting her off easy but in qualifying that indulgence.  “I simply won’t qualify it,” I said to myself.  I didn’t admire her, but I liked her, and I had known her so long that I almost felt heartless in sitting down at such an hour to a feast of indifference.  I must have seemed abstracted, for the early years of my acquaintance with her came back to me.  I spoke of her to the lady I had taken down, but the lady I had taken down had never heard of Greville Fane.  I tried my other neighbour, who pronounced her books “too vile.”  I had never thought them very good, but I should let her off easier than that.

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 Rubempré 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, you look into fairyland, and the fairies love you, and they never change.  Fairyland is always there; it always was from the beginning of time, and it always will be to the end.  They’ve given you the key and you can always open the door.  With me it’s different; I try, in my clumsy way, to be in some direct relation to life.”  “Oh, bother your direct relation to life!” she used to reply, for she was always annoyed by the phrase—which would not in the least prevent her from using it when she wished to try for style.  With no more prejudices than an old sausage-mill, she would give forth again with patient punctuality any poor verbal scrap that had been dropped into her.  I cheered her with saying that the dark day, at the end, would be for the like of me; inasmuch as, going in our small way by experience and observation, we depended not on a revelation, but on a little tiresome process.  Observation depended on opportunity, and where should we be when opportunity failed?

One day she told me that as the novelist’s life was so delightful and during the good years at least such a comfortable support (she had these staggering optimisms) she meant to train up her boy to follow it.  She took the ingenious view that it was a profession like another and that therefore everything was to be gained by beginning young and serving an apprenticeship.  Moreover the education would be less expensive than any other special course, inasmuch as she could administer it herself.  She didn’t profess to keep a school, but she could at least teach her own child.  It was not that she was so very clever, but (she confessed to me as if she were afraid I would laugh at her) that he was.  I didn’t laugh at her for that, for I thought the boy sharp—I had seen him at sundry times.  He was well grown and good-looking and unabashed, and both he and his sister made me wonder about their defunct papa, concerning whom the little I knew was that he had been a clergyman.  I explained them to myself by suppositions and imputations possibly unjust to the departed; so little were they—superficially at least—the children of their mother.  There used to be, on an easel in her drawing-room, an enlarged photograph of her husband, done by some horrible posthumous “process” and draped, as to its florid frame, with a silken scarf, which testified to the candour of Greville Fane’s bad taste.  It made him look like an unsuccessful tragedian; but it was not a thing to trust.  He may have been a successful comedian.  Of the two children the girl was the elder, and struck me in all her younger years as singularly colourless.  She was only very long, like an undecipherable letter.  It was not till Mrs. Stormer came back from a protracted residence abroad that Ethel (which was this young lady’s name) began to produce the effect, which was afterwards remarkable in her, of a certain kind of high resolution.  She made one apprehend that she meant to do something for herself.  She was long-necked and near-sighted and striking, and I thought I had never seen sweet seventeen in a form so hard and high and dry.  She was cold and affected and ambitious, and she carried an eyeglass with a long handle, which she put up whenever she wanted not to see.  She had come out, as the phrase is, immensely; and yet I felt as if she were surrounded with a spiked iron railing.  What she meant to do for herself was to marry, and it was the only thing, I think, that she meant to do for any one else; yet who would be inspired to clamber over that bristling barrier?  What flower of tenderness or of intimacy would such an adventurer conceive as his reward?

This was for Sir Baldwin Luard to say; but he naturally never confided to me the secret.  He was a joyless, jokeless young man, with the air of having other secrets as well, and a determination to get on politically that was indicated by his never having been known to commit himself—as regards any proposition whatever—beyond an exclamatory “Oh!”  His wife and he must have conversed mainly in prim ejaculations, but they understood sufficiently that they were kindred spirits.  I remember being angry with Greville Fane when she announced these nuptials to me as magnificent; I remember asking her what splendour there was in the union of the daughter of a woman of genius with an irredeemable mediocrity.  “Oh! he’s awfully clever,” she said; but she blushed for the maternal fib.  What she meant was that though Sir Baldwin’s estates were not vast (he had a dreary house in South Kensington and a still drearier “Hall” somewhere in Essex, which was let), the connection was a “smarter” one than a child of hers could have aspired to form.  In spite of the social bravery of her novels she took a very humble and dingy view of herself, so that of all her productions “my daughter Lady Luard” was quite the one she was proudest of.  That personage thought her mother very vulgar and was distressed and perplexed by the occasional license of her pen, but had a complicated attitude in regard to this indirect connection with literature.  So far as it was lucrative her ladyship approved of it, and could compound with the inferiority of the pursuit by doing practical justice to some of its advantages.  I had reason to know (my reason was simply that poor Mrs. Stormer told me) that she suffered the inky fingers to press an occasional bank-note into her palm.  On the other hand she deplored the “peculiar style” to which Greville Fane had devoted herself, and wondered where an author who had the convenience of so lady-like a daughter could have picked up such views about the best society.  “She might know better, with Leolin and me,” Lady Luard had been known to remark; but it appeared that some of Greville Fane’s superstitions were incurable.  She didn’t live in Lady Luard’s society, and the best was not good enough for her—she must make it still better.

I could see that this necessity grew upon her during the years she spent abroad, when I had glimpses of her in the shifting sojourns that lay in the path of my annual ramble.  She betook herself from Germany to Switzerland and from Switzerland to Italy; she favoured cheap places and set up her desk in the smaller capitals.  I took a look at her whenever I could, and I always asked how Leolin was getting on.  She gave me beautiful accounts of him, and whenever it was possible the boy was produced for my edification.  I had entered from the first into the joke of his career—I pretended to regard him as a consecrated child.  It had been a joke for Mrs. Stormer at first, but the boy himself had been shrewd enough to make the matter serious.  If his mother accepted the principle that the intending novelist cannot begin too early to see life, Leolin was not interested in hanging back from the application of it.  He was eager to qualify himself, and took to cigarettes at ten, on the highest literary grounds.  His poor mother gazed at him with extravagant envy and, like Desdemona, wished heaven had made her such a man.  She explained to me more than once that in her profession she had found her sex a dreadful drawback.  She loved the story of Madame George Sand’s early rebellion against this hindrance, and believed that if she had worn trousers she could have written as well as that lady.  Leolin had for the career at least the qualification of trousers, and as he grew older he recognised its importance by laying in an immense assortment.  He grew up in gorgeous apparel, which was his way of interpreting his mother’s system.  Whenever I met her I found her still under the impression that she was carrying this system out and that Leolin’s training was bearing fruit.  She was giving him experience, she was giving him impressions, she was putting a gagnepain into his hand.  It was another name for spoiling him with the best conscience in the world.  The queerest pictures come back to me of this period of the good lady’s life and of the extraordinarily virtuous, muddled, bewildering tenor of it.  She had an idea that she was seeing foreign manners as well as her petticoats would allow; but, in reality she was not seeing anything, least of all fortunately how much she was laughed at.  She drove her whimsical pen at Dresden and at Florence, and produced in all places and at all times the same romantic and ridiculous fictions.  She carried about her box of properties and fished out promptly the familiar, tarnished old puppets.  She believed in them when others couldn’t, and as they were like nothing that was to be seen under the sun it was impossible to prove by comparison that they were wrong.  You can’t compare birds and fishes; you could only feel that, as Greville Fane’s characters had the fine plumage of the former species, human beings must be of the latter.

It would have been droll if it had not been so exemplary to see her tracing the loves of the duchesses beside the innocent cribs of her children.  The immoral and the maternal lived together in her diligent days on the most comfortable terms, and she stopped curling the mustaches of her Guardsmen to pat the heads of her babes.  She was haunted by solemn spinsters who came to tea from continental pensions, and by unsophisticated Americans who told her she was just loved in their country.  “I had rather be just paid there,” she usually replied; for this tribute of transatlantic opinion was the only thing that galled her.  The Americans went away thinking her coarse; though as the author of so many beautiful love-stories she was disappointing to most of these pilgrims, who had not expected to find a shy, stout, ruddy lady in a cap like a crumbled pyramid.  She wrote about the affections and the impossibility of controlling them, but she talked of the price of pension and the convenience of an English chemist.  She devoted much thought and many thousands of francs to the education of her daughter, who spent three years at a very superior school at Dresden, receiving wonderful instruction in sciences, arts and tongues, and who, taking a different line from Leolin, was to be brought up wholly as a femme du monde.  The girl was musical and philological; she made a specialty of languages and learned enough about them to be inspired with a great contempt for her mother’s artless accents.  Greville Fane’s French and Italian were droll; the imitative faculty had been denied her, and she had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.  She knew it, but she didn’t care; correctness was the virtue in the world that, like her heroes and heroines, she valued least.  Ethel, who had perceived in her pages some remarkable lapses, undertook at one time to revise her proofs; but I remember her telling me a year after the girl had left school that this function had been very briefly exercised.  “She can’t read me,” said Mrs. Stormer; “I offend her taste.  She tells me that at Dresden—at school—I was never allowed.”  The good lady seemed surprised at this, having the best conscience in the world about her lucubrations.  She had never meant to fly in the face of anything, and considered that she grovelled before the Rhadamanthus of the English literary tribunal, the celebrated and awful Young Person.  I assured her, as a joke, that she was frightfully indecent (she hadn’t in fact that reality any more than any other) my purpose being solely to prevent her from guessing that her daughter had dropped her not because she was immoral but because she was vulgar.  I used to figure her children closeted together and asking each other while they exchanged a gaze of dismay: “Why should she be so—and so fearfully so—when she has the advantage of our society?  Shouldn’t we have taught her better?”  Then I imagined their recognising with a blush and a shrug that she was unteachable, irreformable.  Indeed she was, poor lady; but it is never fair to read by the light of taste things that were not written by it.  Greville Fane had, in the topsy-turvy, a serene good faith that ought to have been safe from allusion, like a stutter or a faux pas.

She didn’t make her son ashamed of the profession to which he was destined, however; she only made him ashamed of the way she herself exercised it.  But he bore his humiliation much better than his sister, for he was ready to take for granted that he should one day restore the balance.  He was a canny and far-seeing youth, with appetites and aspirations, and he had not a scruple in his composition.  His mother’s theory of the happy knack he could pick up deprived him of the wholesome discipline required to prevent young idlers from becoming cads.  He had, abroad, a casual tutor and a snatch or two of a Swiss school, but no consecutive study, no prospect of a university or a degree.  It may be imagined with what zeal, as the years went on, he entered into the pleasantry of there being no manual so important to him as the massive book of life.  It was an expensive volume to peruse, but Mrs. Stormer was willing to lay out a sum in what she would have called her premiers frais.  Ethel disapproved—she thought this education far too unconventional for an English gentleman.  Her voice was for Eton and Oxford, or for any public school (she would have resigned herself) with the army to follow.  But Leolin never was afraid of his sister, and they visibly disliked, though they sometimes agreed to assist, each other.  They could combine to work the oracle—to keep their mother at her desk.