A Simple Story | Page 5

was happy, respected, free.
Mrs. Inchbald's plays are so bad that it is difficult to believe that they
brought her a fortune. But no doubt it was their faults that made them
popular--their sentimentalities, their melodramatic absurdities, their
strangely false and high-pitched moral tone. They are written in a
jargon which resembles, if it resembles anything, an execrable prose
translation from very flat French verse. "Ah, Manuel!" exclaims one of
her heroines, "I am now amply punished by the Marquis for all my
cruelty to Duke Cordunna--he to whom my father in my infancy
betrothed me, and to whom I willingly pledged my faith, hoping to wed;
till Romono, the Marquis of Romono, came from the field of glory, and
with superior claims of person as of fame, seized on my heart by force,
and perforce made me feel I had never loved till then." Which is the
more surprising--that actors could be found to utter such speeches, or
that audiences could be collected to applaud them? Perhaps, for us, the
most memorable fact about Mrs. Inchbald's dramatic work is that one
of her adaptations (from the German of Kotzebue) was no other than
that Lovers' Vows which, as every one knows, was rehearsed so
brilliantly at Ecclesford, the seat of the Right Hon. Lord Ravenshaw, in
Cornwall, and which, after all, was not performed at Sir Thomas
Bertram's. But that is an interest sub specie aeternitatis; and, from the

temporal point of view, Mrs. Inchbald's plays must be regarded merely
as means--means towards her own enfranchisement, and that condition
of things which made possible A Simple Story. That novel had been
sketched as early as 1777; but it was not completely written until 1790,
and not published until the following year. A second edition was
printed immediately, and several more followed; the present reprint is
taken from the fourth, published in 1799--but with the addition of the
characteristic preface, which, after the second edition, was dropped.
The four small volumes of these early editions, with their large type,
their ample spacing, their charming flavour of antiquity, delicacy, and
rest--may be met with often enough in secluded corners of secondhand
bookshops, or on some neglected shelf in the library of a country house.
For their own generation, they represented a distinguished title to fame.
Mrs. Inchbald--to use the expression of her biographer--"was
ascertained to be one of the greatest ornaments of her sex." She was
painted by Lawrence, she was eulogized by Miss Edgeworth, she was
complimented by Madame de Stael herself. She had, indeed, won for
herself a position which can hardly be paralleled among the women of
the eighteenth century--a position of independence and honour, based
upon talent, and upon talent alone. In 1796 she published Nature and
Art, and ten years later appeared her last work--a series of biographical
and critical notices prefixed to a large collection of acting plays. During
the greater part of the intervening period she lived in lodgings in
Leicester Square--or "Leicester Fields" as the place was still often
called--in a house opposite that of Sir Joshua Reynolds. The oeconomy
which she had learnt in her early days she continued to practise;
dressing with extraordinary plainness, and often going without a fire in
winter; so that she was able, through her self-sacrifice, to keep from
want a large band of poor relatives and friends. The society she mixed
with was various, but, for the most part, obscure. There were occasional
visits from the now triumphant Mrs. Siddons; there were incessant
propositions--but alas! they were equivocal--from Sir Charles Bunbury;
for the rest, she passed her life among actor-managers and humble
playwrights and unremembered medical men. One of her friends was
William Godwin, who described her to Mrs. Shelley as a "piquante
mixture between a lady and a milkmaid", and who, it is said, suggested
part of the plot of A Simple Story. But she quarreled with him when he

married Mary Wollstonecraft, after whose death she wrote to him
thus--"With the most sincere sympathy in all you have suffered--with
the most perfect forgiveness of all you have said to me, there must
nevertheless be an end to our acquaintance for ever. I respect your
prejudices, but I also respect my own." Far more intimate were her
relations with Dr. Gisborne--a mysterious figure, with whom, in some
tragic manner that we can only just discern, was enacted her final
romance. His name--often in company with that of another physician,
Dr. Warren, for whom, too, she had a passionate affection--occurs
frequently among her papers; and her diary for December 17, 1794, has
this entry:--"Dr. Gisborne drank tea here, and staid very late: he talked
seriously of marrying--but not me." Many years later, one September,
she amused herself by making out a list of all the Septembers since her