by Ann Thwaite
Frances had thought Lord Houghton “a charming, modest and lovable young giant”. He was created Earl of Crewe in 1895 and endeared himself to Frances by taking “special pride in claiming Sara Crewe as a relation”. “Henry James visited him at Dublin Castle last season,” Frances told Vivian. James had apparently not told her, as he had told his brother William, that he had found the visit “unmitigated hell . . . a very chill and second-rate house party”. James might have had the same opinion about the party at Fryston Hall but Frances was ecstatic. Crewe was not only “the most beautiful Earl in England”, there was something touching about him. His wife had died after only seven years of marriage, leaving him with three small daughters. Moreover he was a poet. She wrote from Fryston while “Mrs T. P. O’Connor and Bret Harte are walking and the great T. P. is doubtless at work upon a thundering leader.” Mark Twain had long ago decided that Bret Harte was “a liar, a thief, a swindler, a sot, a sponge, a coward”. At Fryston his ill temper had to be calmed with lemon tea, but he did not upset Frances. She enjoyed everything: Lady Celia, one of the twins, tearing up the avenue on her horse “like a little witch”, the Romneys and the Reynoldses, the rare books—a Spenser which had belonged to Charles I, a book containing some manuscript poems of Rochester’s. Her hostess was Florence Henniker, Lord Crewe’s sister and Thomas Hardy’s “rare, fair woman”. At dinner, Lord Crewe was entertaining rather than touching, quoting Dr Johnson and Carlyle as well as duchesses. He recalled a verse he once heard Tennyson quote as the finest poem of its kind:
Mrs Boem wrote a poem
In praise of Tynemouth air;
Mr Boem read the poem
And built a cottage there.
Edith Sichel was also at Fryston that week. Her “great fat book” Catherine de Medici and the French Reformation was later to be one of the first books Virginia Woolf reviewed for the Times Literary Supplement. Her description of Frances, written with no thought of publication, is of special value, for it is one of the very few objective descriptions we have of her. Most of the time we have to deduce everything from letters to her and from her and from newspaper reports which aimed at entertaining their readers rather than conveying an exact impression: Edith Sichel does not seem to have read Max Beerbohm’s “Defence of Cosmetics” in the first number of the Yellow Book, but she certainly had no axes to grind. This is what she wrote:
I have spent most of my day in trying to fathom Mrs Hodgson Burnett. I think she is very interesting, and I have grown to like her through her vulgarities of manner, her dyed hair, rouge, blacking and endless stories of Liberty hangings and hotels. I can mention them comfortably, because she has not got a vulgar soul and I am sure her heart is large. At first, it was impossible to fit her on to any of her books except Little Lord Fauntleroy, but now I understand how she wrote her beautiful stories. She has the power of intense suffering and intense admiration, both conferring distinction of soul.
Vulgarity of manner and distinction of soul: it is a strange mixture. With her manner, was Frances trying to shock the bourgeoisie? Certainly she shared with many writers of the nineties a determination to escape from outworn conventions. I cannot understand the “endless stories about Liberty hangings and hotels”: Frances had hardly been inside a hotel since the sad months after Lionel’s death five years before, and that was not a time she would willingly recall.
It is relevant to look at a passage in the book she was working on; surely she was thinking of herself.
I once knew a woman; she was the kind of woman people envy, and whose life seems brilliant and full. It was brilliant and full of the things most people want, but the things she wanted were not for her, and there was a black wound in her soul. She had a child who had come near to healing her, and suddenly he was torn out of her being by death. She said afterwards that she knew she had been mad for months after it happened, though no one suspected her. In the years that followed she dared not allow herself to speak or think of that time of death. “I must not let myself—I must not . . . One thought or word of it drags me back and plunges me deep into the old awful woe . . . It is as if it had happened yesterday.”
Perhaps Frances had wanted to assure Miss Sichel that she was not a fearsome new woman. The Liberty hangings might have been a gesture of cosy domesticity. How little we know what people will remember, or how differently we will appear to different people.
To Frances, the Earl of Crewe was everything that an earl should be, although he had only been made one apparently because no one else wanted to go to Ireland. “He is exquisite and lovable and perfect-natured and of finer clay than the rest of the world.” She was not alone in her high opinion of him; four years later he was to marry, at the age of forty-one, the eighteen-year-old daughter of the Earl of Rosebery, at Westminster Abbey in the presence of the Prince of Wales. He was to become Lord President of the Council, Lord Privy Seal, Secretary of State for India. But to Henry James, he was “quite pathetic and desolate and impossible. He means well but he doesn’t matter.” If only we knew what James really thought of Frances.
Certainly he seems to have had a soft spot for her. A few weeks after the visit to Fryston, on 2nd February 1896, James was writing to his friend Edmund Gosse about the pallbearers at Lord Leighton’s funeral. As for his own funeral, he added, “When I am borne it must be by you & Norris & Arthur B. and Mrs Burnett: with the P. of W. well back.” To us it seems a motley crowd, but Frances would have been well pleased to have been named with Edmund Gosse, W. E. Norris, Arthur Benson and a shadowy Prince of Wales. And soon Henry James would address her himself as “noblest of neighbours and most heavenly of women”.
Chapter Eight
Affairs Theatrical
1896–899
Frances’ life continued to seem “brilliant and full . . . full of the things most people want”. The coin of the realm needed to fill the maw of the Portland Place house—and of that other house in Washington—flowed freely. She was even able in January to contemplate having her portrait painted for the Academy. Zangwill recommended Solomon J. Solomon, A.R.A., but his fee was two hundred pounds for three-quarter length. If she rarely liked photographs—only that one by Barraud had ever been known to please her—might not the portrait turn out to be unflattering too? It would be hard to pay two hundred pounds to be hung on the line looking like a “drunken Irish cook”. The idea was abandoned.
She was entertaining and being entertained as much as usual. Mrs Humphry Ward was not well, but she liked Frances to come and chat. She loved Louisiana and proposed to give Frances Bessie Costrell in exchange. She was at the height of her fame. Robert Elsmere had sold over seventy thousand copies in England alone. Though hampered by writer’s cramp (her letters to Frances are in her daughter’s hand) she was as prolific as Frances herself. She was much concerned with the position of women (she had been the first secretary of Somerville College) and she was deeply involved in all sorts of social work, including the education of physically handicapped children. The large number of crippled children in Frances’ later books (Ughtred in The Shuttle, Tom Hibblethwaite in T. Tembarom, the Rat in The Lost Prince and The Little Hunchback Zia, quite apart from that self-induced cripple Colin) was surely influenced by something more than memories of Swan’s lameness or a recipe for instant pathos. Frances’ cousin’s son, Willie Daniels, may have contributed; but they undoubtedly owed something to her talks with Mrs Ward and her continued interest in the Invalid Children’s Aid Association. Mrs Ward’s attitude to Christianity also influenced Frances. Her belief that it would be revitalized by discarding its ritualistic elements and concentrating on its social mission was one of the seeds of The Dawn of a Tomorrow. Just as Zangwill’s friendship suggests a side of Frances it would have been easy to ignore, so does that of Mary Ward.
There were other friendships in these years which were rewarding. Bernard Berenson was extravagantly grateful for grapes and peaches, when she had heard from Zangwill that he was not well: “Let me know when I may come to see you
. I was listening with big eyes to the fascinating things you were telling me when we were interrupted the other afternoon. I want them continued and I want to know you better. You scarcely can be the first person who has been kind to me but you are the first person whose kindness has come home to me so closely.” “Be kind,” Eliza Hodgson had told her so long ago. In another letter Berenson wrote, “I have not forgotten your kindness and never shall.” It was not just of grapes and peaches he spoke.
Hamilton Aïdé enjoyed her company too. He was a poet and novelist, but what is remembered is his friendships. At his memorial service James was to muse on “the immense number of persons one had always known him to know”. It was at his home in Ascot this year that Frances met Lord Ronald Gower, sculptor, writer and uncle of dukes, who was to become one of the closest friends of her later years. “I went to Ascot on a visit to Hamilton Aïdé” Lord Ronald wrote in his diary. “Mrs Hodgson Burnett came for the day, an interested and interesting lady, with pretty golden hair and a pleasant sunny face and expression.”
When the pressures of the social round became too intense, Frances escaped to Paris to finish In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim. It was a big book, one hundred and thirty thousand words in the end. She was naturally indolent, she surprisingly told Vivian when he had decided at Harvard that he was himself lazy: “You inherit that from me . . . I have reasoned it out long ago that by nature I am lazy. I believe if I allowed myself I should be always dreaming and never doing anything. But being forced either to work or to own none of the graces and beauties of life I have will-power enough to compel myself to do things.” Back in England, Frances put aside the De Willoughby book yet again, to concentrate on the play A Lady of Quality. Frances and Stephen—and Archie—took a cottage at Medmenham, near Marlow on the Thames. The hedges were white with may and the house a mass of purple wistaria. The nightingales sang all night in the trees; but Frances could enjoy nothing; Like Vivian, she wrote, she mistrusted plays “but with every Manager in New York cabling for Clorinda, I could not directly refuse to write it”. It was not an easy book to adapt. The third act was particularly troublesome. Frances and Stephen toiled over it together—“walking, talking, discussing, constructing and reconstructing”. She appears to have forgotten she had vowed the previous summer never to collaborate with anyone again. “It ended last week,” she wrote to Vivian, “in something so like delirium for us both that I made up my mind we must stop entirely for several days. I have written and rewritten until I feel as if I had done the act fifty times. It has fixed itself so in my brain that I dream about it . . . As a Japanese play, continued through a week, it would be delightful . . .”
Frances was “worn out with all the load of responsibilities and work”. She was in the mood to sell all she owned and retire to a cottage in the country. “The book is having a great sale however and one must have courage.” She returned to London in July to be fêted by the Authors’ Club, “at the first public dinner which we have ever given to a lady writer”. Frances was a public speaker again. She laughed at staid ladies who had criticized her Lady of Quality. “Why, I think she is just dreadful,” an American had told her. “She uses such bad language I think she was real unprincipled to kill that man.” “What?” said Frances, “you think it unprincipled to kill a man! I have been gathering the impression lately that societies were to be formed to make that kind of thing a sort of religious observance.” And then more seriously: “I can only say that I meant by it exactly what I meant by Fauntleroy and many other things, that after all good is stronger than evil and that love is greater than hate . . .”
She enjoyed the occasion but she was not well. Vivian recorded that, during that exceptionally warm and dry summer of 1896, she had “a heart weakness that brought her very close to death’s door”. She was not able to do more than dream. Zangwill wrote to her, as she convalesced in the country: “Mind you keep your brain quiet; you think too much . . . London is depressing just now and the TO LET over 63 Portland Place does not add to its attractions for yours glumly, I. Zangwill.”
Frances was well enough by November to sail for New York on the Campania with Archie. She delivered the bulk of the De Willoughby book—still not quite finished—into Burlingame’s hands, and he was relieved to be able to be much more enthusiastic about it than he had been over A Lady of Quality. It was one of the best things she had done: “There is something particularly attractive about the way it is told on large lines, and with a vigor that seems to me uncommon. The construction is very successful; at all events, it held a hardened old reader like myself.”
Frances spent Christmas in Washington with Vivian and her sister Edith’s family, who were still living in the house on Massachusetts Avenue. But the main reason for her visit to America was The First Gentleman of Europe. Daniel Frohman had agreed to produce it and it was to open at the Lyceum Theater, New York, on 25th January 1897. She wrote to Burlingame on 23rd December, “As soon as all this play business is disposed of, I shall take my De Willoughby Claim up again, but just now I am so involved in affairs theatrical that I am not sure I shall emerge alive.” It may be that Frances had to put up some money for the play or perhaps it was to help finance Ernest, Edith’s younger son, an inventor always in need of money to further some idea which one day, surely, would prove to be just what the world needed. Whatever it was for, on 29th December Frances was writing urgently to Charles Scribner asking him to act as a guarantor for a loan from her bank. The letter is interesting for the light it casts on her relationship with Swan.
While waiting the arrival of my English returns, I find I have unexpected need of a thousand dollars. The totally stupid law of the District of Columbia is that I cannot borrow this upon my real estate without applying to Dr Burnett for his signature to the note. As he has never had any connection whatever with anything I own and has conducted himself in such a manner that I should not think of approaching him, this is entirely out of the question.
Frances sent for Stephen to join her in New York to help with the play. He was given the official rôle of stage director but was not to have a part. He had been very obliging about it, although Frances had chosen the period especially for him. “He does not want even Carisbrooke if it makes any difficulty for us in the matter.” Frances suddenly, in one letter to Vivian, starts referring to him as “Mr Townesend”, as if to emphasize that their relationship in New York must appear to be wholly a formal business one. Frances was completely involved in the production. The following letter gives a good idea what this meant, a formidable undertaking for someone who had so recently been seriously ill:
Jan 8
14 West 23rd St
I have been sitting at rehearsal from half past ten till nearly four. I have just returned home, had a little food and am trying to rest before I give up the evening to rehearsing in private the young man who is to play Carteret [Edward J. Morgan] and who now seems hopelessly impossible. But for him I think the play might be excellently acted. Mr Townesend has been working at the thing like a slave for a week so that it might not seem too desperate when I went to my first rehearsal. If we had not come it would not have had a ghost of a chance. It makes me shudder to think of it. If it is acted properly it will be a success and charming. We shall have to work and work and work. I have gone over Lady Sark’s part with her here and must do it again. On Sunday morning I take Daphne. It is no light work I can tell you. It is as exciting as having to play the parts oneself. I am just now in despair about Carteret. We shall have to hammer him into his part—and alas! I am afraid he cannot be hammered. His figure is so bad—his delivery so awful. Pray for your Mammy and burn candles for her. I cannot write more. It is a wonder I am not killed. Edith and Mr Townesend are so frightened for me all the time—but I am behaving wonderfully. This morning Edith took brandy with her in her bag but I had not time to touch it. Still I have not had any faintness today. I enclose you a cheque for 200. Where is the music? I am afraid it will be too late. Frohman wants to
produce the play on the 18th. I tell him he cannot possibly. It will not be perfect enough. I shall be working like a maniac until it is all over.
. . . Your frantic but loving Mammy
Frances had suggested in November that Vivian should “compose some music to be done between the acts. If the play went well and all the music played was yours Vivian Burnett’s career would be begun.” But Vivian, perhaps reluctant to advance himself tied to his mother’s apron strings, had, been dilatory in getting down to it. And did he have sufficient talent to become a professional musician? He was not at all sure.
He did write the music, but it arrived too late to be used:
Your music came but rather too late. Frohman had expected to produce on the 18th and had got his own music man to write an air. It is not half so pretty as yours—but it is more within the range of the ordinary voices. I think it frightfully commonplace but there was no time to change. Together I believe Stephen and I have saved the play and made it a success. How we have worked—how we have had to manage all sorts of things (this in confidence) I will tell you later. I believe it is going to be a brilliant and charming little play and a success. Even Stephen said last night he was very hopeful. I will send for you if I feel I can afford it. I want you here . . . Stephen works, arranges, manages in a way which sets his price above rubies . . .
The reviews were not enthusiastic: “The thoughtful brightness of dialogue that characterized the earlier of Mrs Burnett’s works is marked by a very well-disguised absence in The First Gentleman of Europe.” “A dialogue between the sentimental and the lachrymose, balanced on a solid log of fine dramatic construction.” “It is interesting, pretty throughout—tender and touching. A woman’s play with the line of passion that occurs now and then of an entirely unconvincing character.”