Fenwick's Career Part 1

Fenwick's Career.

by Mrs. Humphry Ward.

A PREFATORY WORD

The story told in the present book owes something to the past, in its picturing of the present, as its predecessors have done; though in much less degree. The artist, as I hold, may gather from any field, so long as he sacredly respects what other artists have already made their own by the trans.m.u.ting processes of the mind. To draw on the conceptions or the phrases that have once pa.s.sed through the warm minting of another's brain, is, for us moderns, at any rate, the literary crime of crimes. But to the teller of stories, all that is recorded of the real life of men, as well as all that his own eyes can see, is offered for the enrichment of his tale. This is a clear and simple principle; yet it has been often denied. To insist upon it is, in my belief, to uphold the true flag of Imagination, and to defend the wide borders of Romance.

In addition to this word of notice, which my readers will perhaps accept from me once for all, this small preface must also contain a word of thanks to my friend Mr. Sterner, whose beautiful art has contributed to this story, as to several of its forerunners. I have to thank him, indeed, not only as an artist, but as a critic. In the interpreting of Fenwick, he has given me valuable aid; has corrected mistakes, and illumined his own painter's craft for me, as none but a painter can. But his poetic intelligence as an artist is what makes him so rare a colleague. In the first lovely drawing of the husband and wife sitting by the Westmoreland stream, Phoebe's face and look will be felt, I think, by any sympathetic reader, as a light on the course of the story; reappearing, now in storm, as in the picture of her despair, before the portrait of her supposed rival; and now in tremulous afterglow, as in the scene with which the drawings close. To be so understood and so bodied forth is great good-fortune; and I beg to be allowed this word of grat.i.tude.

The lines quoted on page 166 are taken, as any lover of modern poetry will recognise, from the 'Elegy on the Death of a Lady,' by Mr. Robert Bridges, first printed in 1873.

MARY A. WARD.

INTRODUCTION

Fenwick's career was in the first instance suggested by some incidents in the life of the painter George Romney. Romney, as is well known, married a Kendal girl in his early youth, and left her behind him in the North, while he went to seek training and fortune in London. There he fell under other influences, and finally under the fascinations of Lady Hamilton, and it was not till years later that he returned to Westmoreland and his deserted wife to die.

The story attracted me because it was a Westmoreland story, and implied, in part at least, that setting of fell and stream, wherein, whether in the flesh or in the spirit, I am always a willing wanderer.

But in the end it really gave me nothing but a bare situation into which I had breathed a wholly new meaning. For in Eugenie 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 cla.s.s, which delights in the capture of man. When I began to write the first scene in which Eugenie 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 Eugenie 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 pa.s.sionate self-a.s.sertive life....

'The "old" statesman B----. His talk of the gentle democratic poet who used to live in the cottage before us. "He wad never taak wi the betther cla.s.s 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 mult.i.tude.

This brilliance of an incomparable _decor_ 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 I placed the sad second spring of the two marred lives under the dear shelter of the fells.

MARY A. WARD.

PART I

WESTMORELAND

'Who can contemplate Fame through clouds unfold The star which rises o'er her steep, nor climb?'

CHAPTER I

Really, mother, I can't sit any more. I'm that stiff!--and as cold as anything.'

So said Miss Bella Morrison, as she rose from her seat with an affected yawn and stretch. In speaking she looked at her mother, and not at the painter to whom she had been sitting for nearly two hours.

The young man in question stood embarra.s.sed and silent, his palette on his thumb, brush and mahlstick suspended. His eyes were cast down: a flush had risen in his cheek. Miss Bella's manner was not sweet; she wished evidently to slight somebody, and the painter could not flatter himself that the somebody was Mrs. Morrison, the only other person in the room beside the artist and his subject. The mother looked up slightly, and without pausing in her knitting--'It's no wonder you're cold,' she said, sharply, 'when you wear such ridiculous dresses in this weather.'

It was now the daughter's turn to flush; she coloured and pouted. The artist, John Fenwick, returned discreetly to his canvas, and occupied himself with a fold of drapery.

'I put it on, because I thought Mr. Fenwick wanted something pretty to paint. And as he clearly don't see anything in _me_!'--she looked over her shoulder at the picture, with a shrug of mock humility concealing a very evident annoyance--'I thought anyway he might like my best frock.'

'I'm sorry you're not satisfied, Miss Morrison,' said the artist, stepping back from his canvas and somewhat defiantly regarding the picture upon it. Then he turned and looked at the girl--a coa.r.s.ely pretty young woman, very airily clothed in a white muslin dress, of which the transparency displayed her neck and arms with a freedom not at all in keeping with the nipping air of Westmoreland in springtime--going up to his easel again after the look to put in another touch.

As to his expression of regret, Miss Morrison tossed her head.

'It doesn't matter to me!' she declared. 'It was father's fad, and so I sat. He promised me, if I didn't like it, he'd put it in his own den, where _my_ friends couldn't see it. So I really don't care a straw!'

'Bella! don't be rude!' said her mother, severely. She rose and came to look at the picture.

Bella's colour took a still sharper accent; her chest rose and fell; she fidgeted an angry foot.

'I told Mr. Fenwick hundreds of times,' she protested, 'that he was making my upper lip miles too long--and that I _hadn't_ got a nasty staring look like that--nor a mouth like that--nor--nor anything.

It's--it's too bad!'

The girl turned away, and Fenwick, glancing at her in dismay, saw that she was on the point of indignant tears.

Mrs. Morrison put on her spectacles. She was a small, grey-haired woman with a face, wrinkled and drawn, from which all smiles seemed to have long departed. Even in repose, her expression suggested hidden anxieties--fears grown habitual and watchful; and when she moved or spoke, it was with a cold caution or distrust, as though in all directions she was afraid of what she might touch, of possibilities she might set loose.

She looked at the picture, and then at her daughter.

'It's not flattered,' she said, slowly. 'But I can't say it isn't like you, Bella.'

'Oh, I knew _you'd_ say something like that, mother!' said the daughter, scornfully. She stooped and threw a shawl round her shoulders; gathered up some working materials and a book with which she had been toying during the sitting; and then straightened herself with an air at once tragic and absurd.

'Well, good-bye, Mr. Fenwick.' She turned to the painter. 'I'd rather not sit again, please.'

'I shouldn't think of asking you, Miss Morrison,' murmured the young man, moving aside to let her pa.s.s.

'Hullo, hullo! what's all this?' said a cheery voice at the door.