Fenwicks Career | Page 2

new meaning. For in Eugénie de Pastourelles,
who is Phoebe's unconscious rival, I tried to embody, not the sensuous
intoxicating power of an Emma Hamilton, but those more exquisite and
spiritual influences which many women have exercised over some of
the strongest and most virile of men. Fenwick indeed possesses the
painter's susceptibility to beauty. Beauty comes to him and beguiles
him, but it is a beauty akin to that of Michel Angelo's 'Muse and
dominant Lady, spirit-wed'--which yet, for all its purity, is not, as
Fenwick's case shows, without its tragic effects in the world.
On looking through my notes, I find that this was not my first idea. The
distracting intervening woman was to have been of a commoner type,
intellectual indeed rather than sensuous, but yet of the predatory type
and class, which delights in the capture of man. When I began to write
the first scene in which Eugénie was to appear, she was still nebulous
and uncertain. Then she did appear--suddenly!--as though the mists
parted. It was not the woman I had been expecting and preparing for.
But I saw her quite distinctly; she imposed herself; and thenceforward I
had nothing to do but to draw her.
The drawing of Eugénie made perhaps my chief pleasure in the story,
combined with that of the two landscapes--the two sharply contrasted
landscapes--Westmoreland and Versailles, which form its main
background. I find in a note-book that it was begun 'early in May, 1905,
at Robin Ghyll. Finished (at Stocks) on Tuesday night or rather

Wednesday morning, 1 A.M., Dec. 6, 1905. Deo Gratias!' And an
earlier note, written in Westmoreland itself, records some of the
impressions amid which the first chapters were written. I give it just as
I find it:
'The exquisiteness of the spring. The strong-limbed sycamores with
their broad expanding leaves. The leaping streams, and the small
waterfalls, white and foaming--the cherry blossom, the white farms, the
dark yews which are the northern cypresses--and the tall upstanding firs
and hollies, vigorously black against the delicate bareness of the fells,
like some passionate self-assertive life....
'The "old" statesman B----. His talk of the gentle democratic poet who
used to live in the cottage before us. "He wad never täak wi the betther
class o' foak--but he'd coom mony a time, an hae a crack wi my missus
an me."
'The swearing ploughman that I watched this morning--driving his
plough through old pastures and swearing at the horse--"Dang ye!
Darned old hoss! Pull up, will ye--pull up, dang ye!"
'Elterwater, and the soft grouping of the hills. The blue lake, the woods
in tints of pale green and pinkish brown, nestling into the fells, the
copses white with wind flowers. Everywhere, softness and austerity
side by side--the "cheerful silence of the fells," the high exhilarating air,
dark tortured crags and ghylls--then a soft and laughing scene, gentle
woods, blue water, lovely outlines, and flower-carpeted fields.
'The exquisite colour of Westmoreland in May! The red of the autumn
still on the hills,--while the bluebells are rushing over the copses.'
The little cottage of Robin Ghyll, where the first chapters were written,
stands, sheltered by its sycamore, high on the fell-side, above the road
that leads to the foot of the Langdale Pikes. But--in the dream-days
when the Fenwicks lived there!--it was the old cottage, as it was up to
ten or fifteen years ago;--a deep-walled, low-ceiled labourer's cottage
of the sixteenth century, and before any of the refinements and
extensions of to-day were added.

The book was continued at Stocks, during a quiet summer. Then with
late September came fatigue and discouragement. It was imperative to
find some stimulus, some complete change of scene both for the tale
and its writer. Was it much browsing in Saint-Simon that suggested to
me Versailles? I cannot remember. At any rate by the beginning of
October we were settled in an apartment on the edge of the park and a
stone's throw from the palace. Some weeks of quickened energy and
more rapid work followed--and the pleasures of that chill golden
autumn are reflected in the later chapters of the book. Each sunny day
was more magnificent than the last. Yet there was no warmth in the
magnificence. The wind was strangely bitter; it was winter before the
time. And the cold splendour of the weather heightened the spell of the
great, dead, regal place; so that the figures and pageants of a vanished
world seemed to be still latent in the sharp bright air--a filmy multitude.
This brilliance of an incomparable décor followed me back to
Hertfordshire, and remained with me through winter days. But when
the last pages came, in December, I turned back in spirit to the softer,
kinder beauty amid which the little story had taken its rise, and