Greville Fane | Page 5

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