Nature and Art | Page 4

farmer, at Standingfield, near Bury St.

Edmunds. Five of the children were girls, who were all gifted with
personal beauty. The family was Roman Catholic. The mother had a
delight in visits to the Bury Theatre, and took, when she could, her
children to the play. One of her sons became an actor, and her daughter
Elizabeth offered herself at eighteen--her father then being dead--for
engagement as an actress at the Norwich Theatre. She had an
impediment of speech, and she was not engaged; but in the following
year, leaving behind an affectionate letter to her mother, she stole away
from Standingfield, and made a bold plunge into the unknown world of
London, where she had friends, upon whose help she relied. Her friends
happened to be in Wales, and she had some troubles to go through
before she found a home in the house of a sister, who had married a
poor tailor. About two months after she had left Standingfield she
married, in London, Mr. Inchbald, an actor, who had paid his addresses
to her when she was at home, and who was also a Roman Catholic. On
the evening of the wedding day the bride, who had not yet succeeded in
obtaining an engagement, went to the play, and saw the bridegroom
play the part of Mr. Oakley in the "Jealous Wife." Mr. Inchbald was
thirty-seven years old, and had sons by a former marriage. In
September, 1772, Mrs. Inchbald tried her fortune on the stage by
playing Cordelia to her husband's Lear. Beauty alone could not assure
success. The impediment in speech made it impossible for Mrs.
Inchbald to succeed greatly as an actress. She was unable to realise her
own conceptions. At times she and her husband prospered so little that
on one day their dinner was of turnips, pulled and eaten in a field, and
sometimes there was no dinner at all. But better days presently
followed; first acquaintance of Mrs. Inchbald with Mrs. Siddons grew
to a strong friendship, and this extended to the other members of the
Kemble family.
After seven years of happy but childless marriage, Mrs. Inchbald was
left a widow at the age of twenty-six. In after years, when devoting
herself to the baby of one of her landladies, she wrote to a friend,--"I
shall never again have patience with a mother who complains of
anything but the loss of her children; so no complaints when you see
me again. Remember, you have had two children, and I never had one."
After her husband's death, Mrs. Inchbald's beauty surrounded her with
admirers, some of them rich, but she did not marry again. To one of

those who offered marriage, she replied that her temper was so
uncertain that nothing but blind affection in a husband could bear with
it. Yet she was patiently living and fighting the world on a weekly
salary of about thirty shillings, out of which she helped her poorer
sisters. When acting at Edinburgh she spent on herself only eight
shillings a week in board and lodging. It was after her husband's death
that Mrs. Inchbald finished a little novel, called "A Simple Story," but
it was not until twelve years afterwards that she could get it published.
She came to London again, and wrote farces, which she could not get
accepted; but she obtained an increase of salary to three pounds a week
by unwillingly consenting not only to act in plays, but also to walk in
pantomime. At last, in July, 1784, her first farce, "The Mogul Tale,"
was acted. It brought her a hundred guineas. Three years later her
success as a writer had risen so far that she obtained nine hundred
pounds by a little piece called "Such Things Are." She still lived
sparingly, invested savings, and was liberal only to the poor, and
chiefly to her sisters and the poor members of her family. She finished
a sketch of her life in 1786, for which a publisher, without seeing it,
offered a thousand pounds. But there was more satirical comment in it
than she liked, and she resolved to do at once what she would wish
done at the point of death. She destroyed the record.
In 1791 Mrs. Inchbald published her "Simple Story." Her other tale,
"Nature and Art," followed in 1794, when Mrs. Inchbald's age was
forty-one. She had retired from the stage five years before, with an
income of fifty-eight pounds a year, all she called her own out of the
independence secured by her savings. She lived in cheap lodgings, and
had sometimes to wait altogether on herself; at one lodging "fetching
up her own water three pair of stairs, and dropping a few tears into the
heedless stream, as any other wounded deer might do." Later in