Almost alone of the chief lady novelists of that time, Mrs. Humphry Ward was never at Addison Mansions. The most interesting thing I remember in conversation with her was her confession to me one day when we were at Mrs. W. K. Clifford’s that she enjoys handling the character of a person who is a failure better than the character of a person who achieves success. Heroes apparently do not appeal to her.
Mrs. W. K. Clifford was often at Addison Mansions. She is a very old friend of mine, and a great personality. Mrs. Clifford is an admirable example of the modern woman, breezy, wholesome, warm-hearted, clear-visioned, lucid in expression, interested in all questions of the day, and withal one of our best novelists. Early in life she suffered a loss which would have overwhelmed most women, for she lost her husband, Prof. W. K. Clifford, F.R.S., who was already reckoned the third mathematician in Europe, at the same age as Wolfe fell at Quebec, thirty-three, when they had only been married four years, and she was still a girl. He was the most brilliant Fellow of Trinity (Cambridge) of his day, and the youngest Fellow of the Royal Society. There is nothing he could not have done and would not have done if he had lived, for there was no side of life which did not appeal to him. People of every rank and of every shade of thought came to see him, and no matter how little they agreed with him, they were always hypnotised for the hour.
He had wonderful dark-lashed blue eyes, like his daughter, and a wonderful soul seemed to be looking out of them.
But she did not allow her loss to prostrate her, and she has lived to see her house one of the Meccas of literature in London, and her daughter, Mrs. Fisher Dilke, a recognised poetess.
Talking of Mrs. Clifford reminds me of the chequered career of The Love-letters of a Worldly Woman. It was published just twenty years ago, and though the first edition sold out immediately, no second edition was published in England, but in America, where it was non-copyright, it sold enormously. There were a dozen pirate editions of it, including a marked edition, which means one with the most popular passages indicated. Such a height of popularity did it reach that it was actually sold at street-corners in New York! But I have heard that Mrs. Clifford only got fifteen pounds royalties off the whole dozen editions.
The first batch of love-letters in this volume appeared anonymously in the Fortnightly, and were generally attributed to Oscar Wilde. As a piece of poetical justice when Housman’s An English-woman’s Love-letters were published seven years later, they were attributed to Mrs. Clifford. The Love-letters of a Worldly Woman was a remarkable book, and fully deserved its American popularity.
Mrs. Clifford is, above all things, an idealist and a lover of good work. She has said, in one of her books, “in good love and good work lie the chance of immortality for everything that is worth having or being; and yet, though I’ve aimed at the sun, and longed to put into the beautiful world something worthy of it, I have never hit higher than a gooseberry bush, or achieved anything that gave me satisfaction. And I’ve been so full of enthusiasms and dreams ... perhaps one of the dreams will come true some day—who knows? For if I live to be ninety, I shall still feel, as I do now, that the soul of me is as young and fresh as ever; and it is a sense of the beauty of things, of the kindness that underlies human nature, even when it’s choked with weeds at the top, that gives one courage, and helps one to do.”
Beside Mrs. Clifford I should mention Margaret Woods, whom I first met when I was an undergraduate at Oxford, and her husband, the present Master of the Temple, was my tutor, engaged to her while I was his pupil. I remember his asking me and other undergraduates to meet her in his rooms. I do not think he told us why, but we knew. She was one of the few charming women that the monastic Oxford of that day contained. Her father, afterwards the famous Dean of Westminster, was master of University College; I used to go to his Socrates lectures. He was dissatisfied with the progress we were making, and boldly—it was very bold at Oxford—charged us with paying too much attention to athletics, and it was then that he made his famous mot, that he had never taken any exercise in his life, except by occasionally standing up when he was reading. I have heard that it is equally true of Mr. Chamberlain, but it was Dean Bradley who said it. The Bradleys were an excessively clever family. The Dean had a brother or a half-brother a great philosopher, a don at Merton, and another, Andrew Bradley, a Fellow at Balliol, who became Professor of Literature at another University. I forget what his sister, Emma Bradley, did, but she was famous. Three of his daughters, Mrs. Woods, Mrs. Birchenough, Mrs. Murray Smith, are authoresses, Mrs. Woods being one of the best novelists of the day, and in my opinion the best of all poetesses in the English language. When Tennyson died there was a movement in favour of her being made the laureate, and no woman has ever had such claims for the post. She made her mark very young with A Village Tragedy and Esther Vanhomrigh, and has written notable books ever since. Beautiful workmanship, singularly broad humanity, and truth to life are the characteristics of her prose. In poetry she has the gifts of both Brownings. She lives in an ideal home, the panelled Master’s House at the Temple, which has, however, one drawback, that the only way out of it to a cab on a wet night is to be carried in a sedan chair; a sedan chair of the eighteenth century is kept in the hall for the purpose, and passes from one Master of the Temple to another.
Charles Kingsley’s daughter, Mrs. St. Leger Harrison—the “Lucas Malet” of fame—used to come to us sometimes before she went back to live at Eversley, immortalised by her father; and once her cousin, the famous African explorer, the other Mary Kingsley, came. Lucas Malet is all that one might expect of Charles Kingsley’s daughter and the writer of Sir Richard Calmady.
It seems natural to mention the author of Concerning Isabel Carnaby beside the author of Sir Richard Calmady. The two books made a stir about the same time, and the public mixed their titles with great impartiality. The author of the former, Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler, now the Hon. Mrs. Felkin, with her sister, Edith Fowler, was a good many times at Addison Mansions. I have told the story of her becoming an authoress in my chapter on the Idlers and Vagabonds.