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A SIMPLE STORY
BY
MRS. INCHBALD
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
G. L. STRACHEY
LONDONHENRY FROWDE1908
OXFORD: HORACE HARTPRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
PREFACE
VOLUME II-CHAPTER I 5I-CHAPTER II 8I-CHAPTER III 13I-CHAPTER IV 14I-CHAPTER V 17I-CHAPTER VI 22I-CHAPTER VII 25I-CHAPTER VIII 31I-CHAPTER IX 34I-CHAPTER X 38I-CHAPTER XI 42I-CHAPTER XII 47I-CHAPTER XIII 53I-CHAPTER XIV 57I-CHAPTER XV 63I-CHAPTER XVI 69I-CHAPTER XVII 78
VOLUME IIII-CHAPTER I 85II-CHAPTER II 90II-CHAPTER III 94II-CHAPTER IV 102II-CHAPTER V 112II-CHAPTER VI 117II-CHAPTER VII 121II-CHAPTER VIII 131II-CHAPTER IX 138II-CHAPTER X 146II-CHAPTER XI 153II-CHAPTER XII 164
VOLUME IIIIII-CHAPTER I 173III-CHAPTER II 177III-CHAPTER III 179III-CHAPTER IV 187III-CHAPTER V 188III-CHAPTER VI 194III-CHAPTER VII 201III-CHAPTER VIII 204III-CHAPTER IX 205III-CHAPTER X 214III-CHAPTER XI 218III-CHAPTER XII 227III-CHAPTER XIII 233III-CHAPTER XIV 244
VOLUME IVIV-CHAPTER I 247IV-CHAPTER II 250IV-CHAPTER III 255IV-CHAPTER IV 261IV-CHAPTER V 266IV-CHAPTER VI 270IV-CHAPTER VII 277IV-CHAPTER VIII 283IV-CHAPTER IX 285IV-CHAPTER X 288IV-CHAPTER XI 291IV-CHAPTER XII 293
INTRODUCTION
_A Simple Story_ is one of those books which, for some reason or other,have failed to come down to us, as they deserved, along the current oftime, but have drifted into a literary backwater where only theprofessional critic or the curious discoverer can find them out. "Theiniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy;" and nowhere moreblindly than in the republic of letters. If we were to inquire how ithas happened that the true value of Mrs. Inchbald's achievement haspassed out of general recognition, perhaps the answer to our questionwould be found to lie in the extreme difficulty with which the mass ofreaders detect and appreciate mere quality in literature. Their judgmentis swayed by a hundred side-considerations which have nothing to do withart, but happen easily to impress the imagination, or to fit in with thefashion of the hour. The reputation of Mrs. Inchbald's contemporary,Fanny Burney, is a case in point. Every one has heard of Fanny Burney'snovels, and _Evelina_ is still widely read. Yet it is impossible todoubt that, so far as quality alone is concerned, _Evelina_ deserves tobe ranked considerably below _A Simple Story._ But its writer was thefamiliar friend of the greatest spirits of her age; she was the authorof one of the best of diaries; and her work was immediately andimmensely popular. Thus it has happened that the name of Fanny Burneyhas maintained its place upon the roll of English novelists, while thatof Mrs. Inchbald is forgotten.
But the obscurity of Mrs. Inchbald's career has not, of course, been theonly reason for the neglect of her work. The merits of _A Simple Story_are of a kind peculiarly calculated to escape the notice of ageneration of readers brought up on the fiction of the nineteenthcentury. That fiction, infinitely various as it is, possesses at leastone characteristic common to the whole of it--a breadth of outlook uponlife, which can be paralleled by no other body of literature in theworld save that of the Elizabethans. But the comprehensiveness of viewshared by Dickens and Tolstoy, by Balzac and George Eliot, finds noplace in Mrs. Inchbald's work. Compared with _A Simple Story_ even thenarrow canvases of Jane Austen seem spacious pictures of diversifiedlife. Mrs. Inchbald's novel is not concerned with the world at large, orwith any section of society, hardly even with the family; its subject isa group of two or three individuals whose interaction forms the wholebusiness of the book. There is no local colour in it, no complexity ofdetail nor violence of contrast; the atmosphere is vague and neutral,the action passes among ill-defined sitting-rooms, and the most poignantscene in the story takes place upon a staircase which has never beendescribed. Thus the reader of modern novels is inevitably struck, in _ASimple Story_, by a sense of emptiness and thinness, which may wellblind him to high intrinsic merits. The spirit of the eighteenth centuryis certainly present in the book, but it is the eighteenth century ofFrance rather than of England. Mrs. Inchbald no doubt owed much toRichardson; her view of life is the indoor sentimental view of the greatauthor of _Clarissa_; but her treatment of it has very little in commonwith his method of microscopic analysis and vast accumulation. If shebelongs to any school, it is among the followers of the French classicaltradition that she must be placed. _A Simple Story_ is, in its smallway, a descendant of the Tragedies of Racine; and Miss Milner may claimrelationship with Madame de Cleves.
Besides her narrowness of vision, Mrs. Inchbald possesses anotherquality, no less characteristic of her French predecessors, and no lessrare among the novelists of England. She is essentially a stylist--awriter whose whole conception of her art is dominated by stylisticintention. Her style, it is true, is on the whole poor; it is oftenheavy and pompous, sometimes clumsy and indistinct; compared with thestyle of such a master as Thackeray it sinks at once intoinsignificance. But the interest of her style does not lie in itsintrinsic merit so much as in the use to which she puts it. Thackeray'sstyle is mere ornament, existing independently of what he has to say;Mrs. Inchbald's is part and parcel of her matter. The result is thatwhen, in moments of inspiration, she rises to the height of heropportunity, when, mastering her material, she invests her expressionwith the whole intensity of her feeling and her thought, then sheachieves effects of the rarest beauty--effects of a kind for which onemay search through Thackeray in vain. The most triumphant of thesepassages is the scene on the staircase of Elmwood House--a passage whichwould be spoilt by quotation and which no one who has ever read it couldforget. But the same quality is to be found throughout her work. "Oh,Miss Woodley!" exclaims Miss Milner, forced at last to confess to herfriend what she feels towards Dorriforth, "I love him with all thepassion of a mistress, and with all the tenderness of a wife." No younglady, even in the eighteenth century, ever gave utterance to such asentence as that. It is the sentence, not of a speaker, but of a writer;and yet, for that very reason, it is delightful, and comes to us chargedwith a curious sense of emotion, which is none the less real for itselaboration. In _Nature and Art_, Mrs. Inchbald's second novel, theclimax of the story is told in a series of short paragraphs, which, forbitterness and concentration of style, are almost reminiscent ofStendhal:
The jury consulted for a few minutes. The verdict was "Guilty".
She heard it with composure.
But when William placed the fatal velvet on his head and rose to pronounce sentence, she started with a kind of convulsive motion, retreated a step or two back, and, lifting up her hands with a scream, exclaimed--
"Oh, not from _you!_"
The piercing shriek which accompanied these words prevented their being heard by part of the audience; and those who heard them thought little of their meaning, more than that they expressed her fear of dying.
Serene and dignified, as if no such exclamation had been uttered, William delivered the fatal speech, ending with "Dead, dead, dead".
She fainted as he closed the period, and was carried back to prison in a swoon; while he adjourned the court to go to dinner.
Here, no doubt, there is a touch of melod
rama; but it is the melodramaof a rhetorician, and, in that fine "She heard it with composure",genius has brushed aside the forced and the obvious, to express, withsupreme directness, the anguish of a soul.
For, in spite of Mrs. Inchbald's artificialities, in spite of her lackof that kind of realistic description which seems to modern readers thevery blood and breath of a good story, she has the power of doing what,after all, only a very few indeed of her fellow craftsmen have ever beenable to do--she can bring into her pages the living pressure of a humanpassion, she can invest, if not with realism, with something greaterthan realism--with the sense of reality itself--the pains, the triumphs,and the agitations of the human heart. "The heart," to use theold-fashioned phrase--there is Mrs. Inchbald's empire, there is thesphere of her glory and her command. Outside of it, her powers are weakand fluctuating. She has no firm grasp of the masculine elements incharacter: she wishes to draw a rough man, Sandford, and she draws arude one; she tries her hand at a hero, Rushbrook, and she turns out aprig. Her humour is not faulty, but it is exceedingly slight. What animmortal figure the dim Mrs. Horton would have become in the hands ofJane Austen! In _Nature and Art_, her attempts at social satire aresuperficial and overstrained. But weaknesses of this kind--and it wouldbe easy to prolong the list--are what every reader of the following pageswill notice without difficulty, and what no wise one will regard. "Il nefaut point juger des hommes par ce qu'ils ignorent, mais par ce qu'ilssavent;" and Mrs. Inchbald's knowledge was as profound as it waslimited. Her Miss Milner is an original and brilliant creation, compactof charm and life. She is a flirt, and a flirt not only adorable, butworthy of adoration. Did Mrs. Inchbald take the suggestion of a heroinewith imperfections from the little masterpiece which, on more sides thanone, closely touches her's--Manon Lescaut? Perhaps; and yet, if this wasso, the borrowing was of the slightest, for it is only in the fact thatshe _is_ imperfect that Miss Milner bears to Manon any resemblance atall. In every other respect, the English heroine is the precise contraryof the French one: she is a creature of fiery will, of high bearing, ofnoble disposition; and her shortcomings are born, not of weakness, butof excess of strength. Mrs. Inchbald has taken this character, she hasthrown it under the influence of a violent and absorbing passion, and,upon that theme, she has written her delicate, sympathetic, andartificial book.
As one reads it, one cannot but feel that it is, if not directly andcircumstantially, at least in essence, autobiographical. One findsoneself speculating over the author, wondering what was her history, andhow much of it was Miss Milner's. Unfortunately the greater part of whatwe should most like to know of Mrs. Inchbald's life has vanished beyondrecovery. She wrote her Memoirs, and she burnt them; and who can tellwhether even there we should have found a self-revelation? Confessionsare sometimes curiously discreet, and, in the case of Mrs. Inchbald, wemay be sure that it is only what was indiscreet that would really beworth the hearing. Yet her life is not devoid of interest. A briefsketch of it may be welcome to her readers.
Elizabeth Inchbald was born on the 15th of October, 1753, atStandingfield, near Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk;[1] one of the numerousoffspring of John and Mary Simpson. The Simpsons, who were RomanCatholics, held a moderate farm in Standingfield, and ranked among thegentry of the neighbourhood. In Elizabeth's eighth year, her fatherdied; but the family continued at the farm, the elder daughters marryingand settling in London, while Elizabeth grew up into a beautiful andcharming girl. One misfortune, however, interfered with her happiness--adefect of utterance which during her early years rendered her speech soindistinct as to be unintelligible to strangers. She devoted herself toreading and to dreams of the great world. At thirteen, she declared shewould rather die than live longer without seeing the world; she longedto go to London; she longed to go upon the stage. When, in 1770, one ofher brothers became an actor at Norwich, she wrote secretly to hismanager, Mr. Griffith, begging for an engagement. Mr. Griffith wasencouraging, and, though no definite steps were taken, she wassufficiently charmed with him to write out his name at length in herdiary, with the inscription "Each dear letter of thy name is harmony."Was Mr. Griffith the hero of the company as well as its manager? That,at any rate, was clearly Miss Simpson's opinion; but she soon had otherdistractions. In the following year she paid a visit to her marriedsisters in London, where she met another actor, Mr. Inchbald, who seemsimmediately to have fallen in love with her, and to have proposed. Sheremained cool. "In spite of your eloquent pen," she wrote to him, with atouch of that sharp and almost bitter sense that was always hers,"matrimony still appears to me with less charms than terrors: the blissarising from it, I doubt not, is superior to any other--but best not tobe ventured for (in my opinion), till some little time have proved theemptiness of all other; which it seldom fails to do." Nevertheless, thecorrespondence continued, and, early in 1772, some entries in her diarygive a glimpse of her state of mind:--
_Jan. 22._ Saw Mr. Griffith's picture.
_Jan. 28._ Stole it.
_Jan. 29._ Rather disappointed at not receiving a letter from Mr. Inchbald.
A few months later she did the great deed of her life: she steppedsecretly into the Norwich coach, and went to London. The days thatfollowed were full of hazard and adventure, but the details of them areuncertain. She was a girl of eighteen, absolutely alone, andastonishingly attractive--"tall," we are told, "slender, straight, of thepurest complexion, and most beautiful features; her hair of a goldenauburn, her eyes full at once of spirit and sweetness;" and it was onlyto be expected that, in such circumstances, romance and daring wouldsoon give place to discomfort and alarm. She attempted in vain to obtaina theatrical engagement; she found herself, more than once, obliged toshift her lodging; and at last, after ten days of trepidation, she wasreduced to apply for help to her married sisters. This put an end to herdifficulties, but, in spite of her efforts to avoid notice, her beautyhad already attracted attention, and she had received a letter from astranger, with whom she immediately entered into correspondence. She hadall the boldness of innocence, and, in addition, a force of characterwhich brought her safely through the risks she ran. While she was stillin her solitary lodging, a theatrical manager, named Dodd, attempted touse his position as a cover for seduction. She had several interviewswith him alone, and the story goes that, in the last, she snatched up abasin of hot water and dashed it in his face. But she was not to gounprotected for long; for within two months of her arrival in London shehad married Mr. Inchbald.
The next twelve years of Mrs. Inchbald's life were passed amid the roughand tumble of the eighteenth-century stage. Her husband was thirty-sevenwhen she married him, a Roman Catholic like herself, and an actor whodepended for his living upon ill-paid and uncertain provincialengagements. Mrs. Inchbald conquered her infirmity of speech and threwherself into her husband's profession. She accompanied him to Bristol,to Scotland, to Liverpool, to Birmingham, appearing in a great varietyof roles, but never with any very conspicuous success. The record ofthese journeys throws an interesting light upon the conditions of theprovincial companies of those days. Mrs. Inchbald and her companionswould set out to walk from one Scotch town to another; they would thinkthemselves lucky if they could climb on to a passing cart, to arrive atlast, drenched with rain perhaps, at some wretched hostelry. But thiskind of barbarism did not stand in the way of an almost childish gaiety.In Yorkshire, we find the Inchbalds, the Siddonses, and Kemble retiringto the moors, in the intervals of business, to play blindman's buff orpuss in the corner. Such were the pastimes of Mrs. Siddons before thedays of her fame. No doubt this kind of lightheartedness was the bestantidote to the experience of being "saluted with volleys of potatoesand broken bottles", as the Siddonses were by the citizens of Liverpool,for having ventured to appear on their stage without having ever playedbefore the King. On this occasion, the audience, according to a letterfrom Kemble to Mrs. Inchbald, "extinguished all the lights round thehouse; then jumped upon the stage; brushed every lamp out with theirhats; took back their money; left
the theatre, and determined themselvesto repeat this till they have another company." These adventures werediversified by a journey to Paris, undertaken in the hope that Mr.Inchbald, who found himself without engagements, might pick up alivelihood as a painter of miniatures. The scheme came to nothing, andthe Inchbalds eventually went to Hull, where they returned to their oldprofession. Here, in 1779, suddenly and somewhat mysteriously, Mr.Inchbald died. To his widow the week that followed was one of "grief,horror, and almost despair"; but soon, with her old pertinacity, she wasback at her work, settling at last in London, and becoming a member ofthe Covent Garden company. Here, for the next five years, she earned forherself a meagre living, until, quite unexpectedly, deliverance came. Inher moments of leisure she had been trying her hand upon dramaticcomposition; she had written some farces, and, in 1784, one of them, _AMogul Tale_, was accepted, acted, and obtained a great success. This wasthe turning-point of her career. She followed up her farce with a seriesof plays, either original or adapted, which, almost without exception,were well received, so that she was soon able to retire from the stagewith a comfortable competence. She had succeeded in life; she was happy,respected, free.
Mrs. Inchbald's plays are so bad that it is difficult to believe thatthey brought her a fortune. But no doubt it was their faults that madethem popular--their sentimentalities, their melodramatic absurdities,their strangely false and high-pitched moral tone. They are written ina jargon which resembles, if it resembles anything, an execrable prosetranslation from very flat French verse. "Ah, Manuel!" exclaims one ofher heroines, "I am now amply punished by the Marquis for all my crueltyto Duke Cordunna--he to whom my father in my infancy betrothed me, and towhom I willingly pledged my faith, hoping to wed; till Romono, theMarquis of Romono, came from the field of glory, and with superiorclaims of person as of fame, seized on my heart by force, and perforcemade me feel I had never loved till then." Which is the moresurprising--that actors could be found to utter such speeches, or thataudiences could be collected to applaud them? Perhaps, for us, the mostmemorable fact about Mrs. Inchbald's dramatic work is that one of heradaptations (from the German of Kotzebue) was no other than that_Lovers' Vows_ which, as every one knows, was rehearsed so brilliantlyat Ecclesford, the seat of the Right Hon. Lord Ravenshaw, in Cornwall,and which, after all, was _not_ performed at Sir Thomas Bertram's. Butthat is an interest _sub specie aeternitatis_; and, from the temporalpoint of view, Mrs. Inchbald's plays must be regarded merely asmeans--means towards her own enfranchisement, and that condition ofthings which made possible _A Simple Story._ That novel had beensketched as early as 1777; but it was not completely written until 1790,and not published until the following year. A second edition was printedimmediately, and several more followed; the present reprint is takenfrom the fourth, published in 1799--but with the addition of thecharacteristic 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, andrest--may be met with often enough in secluded corners of secondhandbookshops, or on some neglected shelf in the library of a countryhouse. For their own generation, they represented a distinguished titleto fame. Mrs. Inchbald--to use the expression of her biographer--"wasascertained to be one of the greatest ornaments of her sex." She waspainted by Lawrence, she was eulogized by Miss Edgeworth, she wascomplimented by Madame de Stael herself. She had, indeed, won forherself a position which can hardly be paralleled among the women of theeighteenth century--a position of independence and honour, based upontalent, and upon talent alone. In 1796 she published _Nature and Art_,and ten years later appeared her last work--a series of biographical andcritical notices prefixed to a large collection of acting plays. Duringthe greater part of the intervening period she lived in lodgings inLeicester Square--or "Leicester Fields" as the place was still oftencalled--in a house opposite that of Sir Joshua Reynolds. The oeconomywhich she had learnt in her early days she continued to practise;dressing with extraordinary plainness, and often going without a fire inwinter; so that she was able, through her self-sacrifice, to keep fromwant a large band of poor relatives and friends. The society she mixedwith was various, but, for the most part, obscure. There were occasionalvisits from the now triumphant Mrs. Siddons; there were incessantpropositions--but alas! they were equivocal--from Sir Charles Bunbury;for the rest, she passed her life among actor-managers and humbleplaywrights and unremembered medical men. One of her friends was WilliamGodwin, who described her to Mrs. Shelley as a "piquante mixture betweena lady and a milkmaid", and who, it is said, suggested part of the plotof _A Simple Story._ But she quarreled with him when he married MaryWollstonecraft, after whose death she wrote to him thus--"With the mostsincere sympathy in all you have suffered--with the most perfectforgiveness of all you have said to me, there must nevertheless be anend to our acquaintance _for ever._ I respect your prejudices, but Ialso respect my own." Far more intimate were her relations with Dr.Gisborne--a mysterious figure, with whom, in some tragic manner that wecan only just discern, was enacted her final romance. His name--often incompany with that of another physician, Dr. Warren, for whom, too, shehad a passionate affection--occurs frequently among her papers; and herdiary for December 17, 1794, has this entry:--"Dr. Gisborne drank teahere, and staid very late: he talked seriously of marrying--but not_me_." Many years later, one September, she amused herself by making outa list of all the Septembers since her marriage, with brief notes as toher state of mind during each. The list has fortunately survived, andsome of the later entries are as follows:--
1791. London; after my novel, Simple Story ... very happy.
1792. London; in Leicester Square ... cheerful, content, and sometimes rather happy....
1794. Extremely happy, but for poor Debby's death.
1795. My brother George's death, and an intimate acquaintance with Dr. Gisborne--not happy....
1797. After an alteration in my teeth, and the death of Dr. Warren--yet far from unhappy.
1798. Happy, but for suspicion amounting almost to certainty of a rapid appearance of age in my face....
1802. After feeling wholly indifferent about Dr. Gisborne--very happy but for ill health, ill looks, &c.
1803. After quitting Leicester Square probably for ever--after caring scarce at all or thinking of Dr. Gisborne ... very happy....
1806.... After the death of Dr. Gisborne, too, often very unhappy, yet mostly cheerful, and on my return to London nearly happy.
The record, with all its quaintness, produces a curious impression ofstoicism--of a certain grim acceptance of the facts of life. It wouldhave been a pleasure, certainly, but an alarming pleasure, to have knownMrs. Inchbald.
In the early years of the century, she gradually withdrew from London,establishing herself in suburban boarding-houses, often among sisters ofcharity, and devoting her days to the practice of her religion. In herearly and middle life she had been an indifferent Catholic: "Sunday.Rose late, dressed, and read in the Bible about David, &c."--this is oneof the very few references in her diary to anything approaching areligious observance during many years. But, in her old age, her viewschanged; her devotions increased with her retirement; and her retirementwas at last complete. She died, in an obscure Kensington boarding-house,on August 1, 1821. She was buried in Kensington churchyard. But, if herghost lingers anywhere, it is not in Kensington: it is in the heart ofthe London that she had always loved. Yet, even there, how much nowwould she find to recognize? Mrs. Inchbald's world has passed away fromus for ever; and, as we walk there to-day amid the press of the living,it is hard to believe that she too was familiar with Leicester Square.
G. L. STRACHEY.
[1] The following account is based upon the _Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald,including her familiar correspondence with the most distinguishedpersons of her time_, edited by James Boaden, Esq.--a discursive, vague,and not unamusing book.
A
SIMPLE STORY,
IN FOUR VOLUMES,
BY
MRS. INCHBALD.
VOL. I.
_THE FOURTH EDITION._
LONDON:
Printed for G. G. and J. ROBINSON,PATERNOSTER ROW.
1799.