The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit

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The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit Page 14

by Eleanor Fitzsimons


  She inspired several of the love poems he included in his collection English Poems (1892). Yet while he was compiling it, on October 22, 1891, he married Mildred Lee. They had met in Liverpool years earlier while he was training as an accountant and she was working as a waitress in a nearby café. Sweet-natured and delicately pretty, she inspired many of the poems in Volumes in Folio, and their marriage appeared happy. Frederick Rogers declared that “their devotion to each other was a pleasant thing to see.”16

  An intriguing account of this poetic love triangle was left by Arthur James Bennett, a chartered accountant turned journalist who knew Le Gallienne from youth. Bennett established a monthly one-penny paper, which he named The Dawn after Le Gallienne’s fictional newspaper in The Romance of Zion Chapel (1898). He wrote much of the content himself, including Harold Wolfgang, a meandering serial novel that includes a “sentimental episode” between protagonist Robert du Mervyn and “Mrs. Rusk, wife of Alfred Rusk . . . a famous Fabian.” She is “a clever poetess and a very charming woman.” In a key scene, du Mervyn’s wife weeps over “passionate verses” her husband has written for Mrs. Rusk, who is described as “the unintended interloper.” The poem Bennett had in mind was most likely Le Gallienne’s “Why Did She Marry Him?,” included in his collection English Poems.17

  Why did she marry him? Ah, say why!

  How was her fancy caught?

  What was the dream that he drew her by,

  Or was she only bought?

  Gave she her gold for a girlish whim,

  A freak of a foolish mood?

  Or was it some will, like a snake in him,

  Lay a charm upon her blood? Love of his limbs, was it that,

  think you?

  Body of bullock build,

  Sap in the bones, and spring in the thew,

  A lusty youth unspilled?

  But is it so that a maid is won,

  Such a maiden maid as she?

  Her face like a lily all white in the sun,

  For such mere male as he!

  Ah, why do the fields with their white and gold

  To Farmer Clod belong,

  Who though he hath reaped and stacked and sold

  Hath never heard their song?

  Nay, seek not an answer, comfort ye,

  The poet heard their call,

  And so, dear Love, will I comfort me—

  He hath thy lease, that’s all.

  Since Le Gallienne wrote a “Books and Bookmen” column for the Star as “Logroller,” it was Shaw, who wrote music criticism for that newspaper as “Corno di Bassetto,” who was asked to review English Poems. His scathing review appeared under the heading “Bassetto on Logroller” on October 27, 1892. Quoting from “Neaera’s Hair,” which opens “Let me take thy hair down, sweetheart,” Shaw wondered: “Can any man of experience believe that the author of this passage is a strict monogamist?” When he reached a series of poems called “Love Platonic,” he warmed to his theme. “Platonic Indeed!” he humphed before coming straight to the point:

  But the worst is to come. One of the ladies is undoubtedly married. The poem entitled “Why Did She Marry Him?” will set a good many of Mr Le Gallienne’s domesticated friends speculating rather dubiously as to which of them is the subject of it. At any rate, since she did marry him, Mr Le Gallienne’s duty is plain.

  Responding to “The Lamp and the Star,” a poem Edith is believed to have inspired, he exclaimed:

  I wonder what people would say of me if I wrote such things! It is all very well for Mr Le Gallienne to call his poems “Platonic,” and to pitch into the “Decadent Poets” in his virtuous intervals; but if he came round watching my windows in that fashion, I should have a serious talk with Madam di Bassetto on the head of it.

  Having highlighted Le Gallienne’s moral failings, he proceeded to eviscerate the remainder of the collection.18 When challenged on the ferocity of his review, Shaw showed no remorse but countered that it had whipped up controversy and improved sales, which was true. Le Gallienne appeared to take it well. He responded with a playful poem that was published in the Star, but he told his mother that Shaw was a “vulgar-minded man.”

  Less than three years into her marriage, in May 1894, Mildred Le Gallienne died from typhoid fever, leaving behind a daughter, Hesper, who was not yet six months old. This loss blighted her husband’s life. Frederick Rogers, who was certain he never recovered, wrote “for the young author the world was never the same again.”* This tragedy signaled a cooling in his relationship with Edith. He included a qualified and oddly dispassionate critique of her poetry in “Women Poets of the Day,” which he wrote for the English Illustrated Magazine in April 1894. He described her as “Mrs Bland who, until recently has followed the woman’s fashion of writing as a man under the now well-known disguise of ‘E. Nesbit.’” Declaring her “one of the most instinctive of our living poets” he went on to carp:

  Her great lyrical gift tempts her, one fears, to write too fast. She has the “fatal facility.” She does not keep her conceptions long enough in soak. She seldom gives us the loaded, authoritative line. But if she lacks “art,” she has vitality; and some of her love-songs, and perhaps especially her exquisitely tender lullabies, are of that poetic stuff which, to quote Mr Stevenson, “delighted the great heart of man.”19

  Yet in his collection Vanishing Roads and Other Essays (1915), he recalled:

  A beautiful poem [“The Mermaid”] by “E. Nesbit” which has haunted me all my life, a poem I shall beg leave to quote here, because, though it is to be found in that poet’s volume, it is not, I believe, as well known as it deserves to be by those who need its lesson.20

  He included it in The Le Gallienne Book of English Verse (1922) and claimed he could quote it from memory. Ironically, Edith had written it with Shaw in mind.*

  Whether she had any intention of leaving Hubert for Richard Le Gallienne, or anyone else for that matter, remains a matter for speculation. What is certain is that the constant presence of Alice in the household and Hubert’s appetite for “youth in frilled petticoats” gave her cause for unhappiness. In “The Bibliophile’s Reverie,” a poem that was published toward the end of 1887, the year she discovered Hubert was Rosamund’s father, she included the line: “The Marriage Service . . . Well my dear, you know/Who forgot first.”21 Yet Edgar Jepson recalled: “Though it may have been ravaged by these secret storms, the Blands’ was a very pleasant and stimulating house to go to, and they must have been the most hospitable creatures in the County of London.”22 He continued:

  I was under the impression that the patriarchal Bland household lived in admirable harmony, and only once was I aware of strain. I took it that this came from the fact that Bland and Mrs Bland had arranged to go their own ways—an arrangement not uncommon at the end of the last century among both the fashionable and the advanced—and that the arrangement was working as it usually does; with pleasant smoothness as long as only the lady goes her own way, with considerable roughness as soon as the man also goes his. Today that arrangement would be called Modern, but in those days it was called fin-de-siècle.23

  Le Gallienne was not the only young man who entered Edith’s orbit at this time. When Hubert was traveling home by train one evening in 1887, he spotted a young man in the same carriage reading a book by political theorist Herbert Spencer, a man he admired. He engaged this young man in conversation and they realized they were slightly acquainted. Several years earlier, Noel Griffith, a chartered accountant in his early twenties, had audited a set of accounts for the London Hydraulic Power Company while Hubert was secretary there.* They chatted amiably about the Socialist movement and, keen to continue this conversation, Hubert invited Griffith to call on him the following Sunday.

  Once again, Edith’s life was brightened by the attention of an admiring young man. When Griffith turned up, Hubert took him upstairs to meet her since she was in bed recovering from a miscarriage. She captivated him with her bright eyes and unruly masses of shiny br
own curls. The next time he called, he brought her flowers. Griffith was welcomed into their vibrant circle. In November 1889 he joined the Fabian Society. Maggie Doran joined six months later, and Griffith was certain she was still involved in a sexual relationship with Hubert. Yet he believed Edith was reasonably content in their marriage and that it was Alice who found it difficult to cope.

  The Blands enjoyed playing mentor to the enthusiastic young artists and writers who gathered in their home. At mealtimes, everyone present was invited to grab a plate and pile it high with mostly vegetarian fare. Iris remembered her mother as a good home manager who fed everyone well on cheap lentils, beans, and suet pudding.24 In May 1888 their bohemian household featured in a column published in the Star under the heading “Gossip—Mostly About People”:

  E. Nesbit, the gifted poetess of Longman’s Magazine and the Weekly Dispatch, is known among her friends, literary and otherwise, as Mrs Edith Bland, wife of Hubert Bland. She is a tall woman of somewhat over 30, with dark hair and eyes. Although her features are not precisely regular, their expression is full of charm when they are lit up by a smile or animated by any absorbing topic. Mrs Bland has a soft, melodious voice, and her manner may best be described by the French term enlinerie [sic]. She dresses in Liberty’s* fabrics. Mr Hubert Bland is a tall, broad, portly man, with a large head. He is dark, wears a moustache and imperial, and is a little under 40. The Blands used to live at Blackheath, but now reside at Lee, in Kent. They have two children [sic], a boy and girl, the former of whom now bears the familiar name of Fabian Bland.25

  Poor Paul never seemed to make much of an impression.

  By then, Edith was acknowledged as one of Britain’s leading women poets. Hubert too was earning a reputation as a writer. He had assumed sole editorship of the Fabian Society periodical To-day in 1886, and he also contributed book reviews and short articles to the Daily Chronicle. He wrote fiction too, a weekly story for the Stock Exchange Journal and various collaborations with Edith as Fabian Bland. They continued to struggle with plots. In “Only a Joke,” which they wrote for Longman’s Magazine in 1889, they poked fun at this perennial problem, writing: “‘Oh, plots are simple enough: I could think of a dozen in half an hour.’ The person who does not write fiction always says so.”26

  In 1889 Hubert was chosen as one of seven contributors to Fabian Essays in Socialism, a landmark collection that was edited by Shaw. His essay, “The Outlook,” exposed societal inequalities in galvanizing language:

  For years and decades the squirearchy retained an influence in the House of Commons out of all proportion to its potency as an economic force; and even at this moment the “landed interest” bears a much larger part in lawmaking than that to which its real importance entitles it.27

  He may have looked like a Tory, but his instincts were socialist, and he was convinced that the means of production should be nationalized. In 1891 he was invited to write a weekly column as “Hubert of the Chronicle” for the socialist-leaning Manchester Sunday Chronicle. He became enormously popular, and his four thousand words across two columns provoked a huge correspondence. The Daily Chronicle declared of him: “Philandering, philosophising, or shooting folly as it flies, Hubert you invariably comport yourself with manners.”28 A commentator in the Manchester Evening News declared that the key to his success was “the gift, which he shared with very few other writers, of being able to make the most recondite subject to be ‘understood of the people.’”29 Another praised his ability to tackle “a bewildering variety of topics, and always with vivacity and humour, allied with culture.”30

  Ada Chesterton, who remarked that Hubert’s “public ranged from bishops to stable-boys,” believed the secret to his success lay in his ability to interest “the working men of the Industrial North” in the most erudite of topics. She recognized that he had “a supreme gift of exposition, and could write on philosophic, scientific or economic theories in language so lucid, so simple and so touched with humour that the most unlettered, as the most cultured reader, could enjoy and understand.”31 Cecil Chesterton, her husband, remarked that Hubert seized upon ideas “with all the zest of a hungry tiger seizing its prey,” and was not satisfied until he had “torn every scrap of truth that there was out of it.”32 As a contributor to Fabian Essays in Socialism, he was required to lecture. He adapted his columns as spoken word performances and discovered he had a talent for making complex and challenging ideas accessible to any audience. He became enormously popular in working-men’s clubs across the Midlands and the north of England. As Ada Chesterton remarked: “Hubert did not frequent the bars of Fleet Street, but, like G.B.S., he was a familiar figure on the platform.”33

  When Edith’s second collection of poems, Leaves of Life, was published in 1888, Shaw reviewed it for The Star and declared it a “very charming little book.”34 The Overland Monthly described it as “a confusion of love and radicalism, both very fervent, both very honest and loyal, and both put into poetry of considerable excellence.”35 Influential literary critic William Archer regarded it as “chiefly notable for the vigorous rhetoric of some of her revolutionary chants.” He noted, “many of her poems breathe a deeply-felt sympathy with the toilers of the earth, and a burning sense of the inequality of social conditions.”36

  Edith’s radicalism brought her into contact with controversial South African novelist Olive Schreiner, whom she met in in 1885. Schreiner had come to London to train as a doctor, but debilitating ill health put an end to that plan. Her interest in socialism and her liberal views on gender equality, sexuality, birth control, marriage, and the emancipation of women led her to seek out radical thinkers, among them Eleanor Marx and Charlotte Wilson. She developed “a tender regard” for Edith and described her as “one who understands how one’s heart goes out much further than one’s hands can reach in this short life.”37 “You would love Mrs Bland very much,” she told Socialist poet and philosopher Edward Carpenter. “She’s quite genuine.”38

  Edith was grateful for Schreiner’s friendship. “You took me out of my world into another,” she told her.39 In October 1888, poor health and low spirits prompted Schreiner to leave for northern Italy, and Edith lost a useful ally. Schreiner told her friend Henry Havelock Ellis:

  Mrs Bland (“E. Nesbit”) was so kind to me before I left London. I don’t think I should have got away without her. She came the last morning to finish packing my things and see me off. Do you know, she’s one of the noblest women? I can’t tell you about her life, because I mustn’t, but it’s grand. The last night she lay by me on the bed and drew me very close to her and pressed her face against mine, and do you know, I have felt it ever since.40

  Schreiner was aware of turbulence in her friend’s marriage, and her sympathies lay firmly with Edith. A passionate supporter of women’s rights, she had taken issue with Hubert’s à la carte morality; she wrote him a long letter on the subject. Hubert, who disliked being challenged, mocked her in one of his essays:

  The Emancipated Woman too had her points—sharp as needles they were. Let loose by Miss Olive Schreiner from an African Farm, she had a lurid career in Europe. She irritated, bewildered, fascinated, and finally bored us.41

  Schreiner returned to South Africa in 1889. Shortly afterward she sent Edith a postcard via Charlotte Wilson, since she had lost her address. “It’s just to tell you that I never forget you,” she assured her. “Please send me a line.”

  * In 1897, Le Gallienne married Danish writer Julie Nørregaard, but their relationship failed and she left, taking Hesper and their daughter, Eva, with her. In 1903 he left England for America. In 1911 he married Irma Hinton, former wife of American sculptor Roland Hinton Perry. He retired to France and died in Menton on the French Riviera in 1947.

  * By coincidence, Edith and Richard were among the dozen poets selected for the Modern Poets Calendar for 1897; she was June while he was September.

  * According to the census of 1891, Griffith was later appointed actuary with the Bloomsbury Savings B
ank at 30 Montague Street.

  * Liberty is a high-end department store on Great Marlborough Street in the West End of London. It began competing with French fashion houses in 1884 and is known for its distinctive, and expensive, fabrics.

  CHAPTER 10

  “A CHARMING LITTLE SOCIALIST AND LITERARY HOUSEHOLD”

  When the three-year lease on 8 Dorville Road was up in September 1889, the Bland family moved to 2 Birch Grove, a substantial house situated just a few minutes’ walk from Lee station. That same month, an article in the Glasgow Evening Citizen described “‘E. Nesbit’ the Poetess.” She had just turned thirty-one:

  Mrs Bland herself is a very pretty woman, with soft brown eyes, and a delicacy of look, dress and carriage which belongs to the old mythic days, which, in her costume at least, Mrs Bland revives. She delights in soft greens and browns.1

  That same month, readers of “General Gossip of Authors and Writers,” in American magazine Current Literature, learned:

  E. Nesbit, whose beautiful and passionate poems have of late attracted so much attention, is tall, slender, and her dark flowing hair makes her look like the pictures of the Italian angels. She dresses in a most aesthetic fashion and is a picturesque figure in London literary society. Her real name is Mrs Edith Bland, wife of Hubert Bland, and she is a vigorous Socialist and member of the Fabian Society. She is about thirty years of age, and lives at Lee, one of the suburbs of London.2

  Margaret Dilke, wife of radical Liberal politician Ashton Wentworth Dilke, described the impact the arrival of the Bland family had on this most conventional of neighborhoods:

  Passing from art to literature, there is a charming little Socialist and literary household down at Lee in Kent, tenanted by Mr and Mrs Hubert Bland, both of them original members of the [Fabian] Society. This prim suburb, mostly given over to British Philistinism in its most bourgeois manifestation, was terribly scandalised at first by the pleasant sans-gêne of its Socialist neighbours. Mrs Bland was observed personally instructing her domestic in the mysteries of colouring the doorstep with red chalk, and the merry little Bland children in aesthetic pinafores were seen daily running about the garden with bare feet! The gossips of Lee were deeply agitated, but the Bland household went peacefully on its way. Both husband and wife write articles, reviews and stories, the latter often in partnership; but Mrs Bland, under her maiden name of E. Nesbit, has published moreover a great deal of very charming verse.3

 

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