When first I knew her she had published half-a-dozen fictions, and Ibelieve 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 Iremember 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.