Young men fresh from public schools also informed me that Mr. Gresley was the facsimile of their tutor, and of no one else. I was at that time unacquainted with any schoolmasters, being cut off from social advantages. But that fact did me no good. The dispassionate statement of it had no more effect on my young friends than my father's denial had on my elderly relations.
I am ashamed to say that once again, as in the case of "Aunt Anne," I endeavoured to exculpate myself in order to pacify two old maiden ladies. Why is it always the acutely unmarried who are made miserable by my books? Is it because—odious thought, avaunt!—married persons do not open them? These two ladies did not, indeed, think that I had been "paying out" some particular clergyman, as suggested in their favourite paper, The Guardian,[2] but they were shocked by the profanity of the book. Soon afterwards the Bishop of Stepney (now Bishop of London) preached on "Red Pottage" in St. Paul's. I sent them a newspaper which reprinted the sermon verbatim, with a note saying that I trusted this expression of opinion on the part of their idolised preacher might mitigate their condemnation of the book.
But when have my attempts at making an effect ever come off? My firework never lights up properly like that of others! It only splutters and goes out. I received in due course a dignified answer that they had both been deeply distressed by my information, as it would prevent them ever going to hear the Bishop of Stepney again.
My own experience, especially as to "Red Pottage" and "Prisoners," struck me as so direful, I seemed so peculiarly outside the protection of Providence, like the celebrated plot of ground on which "no rain nor no dew never fell," that I consulted several other brother and sister novelists as to how they had fared in this delicate matter. It is not for me to reveal the interesting skeletons concealed in cupboards not my own, but I have almost invariably returned from these interviews cheered, chuckling, and consoled by the comfortable realisation that others had writhed on a hotter gridiron than I.
Georges Sand, when she was accused of lampooning a certain abbé, said that to draw one character of that kind one must know a thousand. She has, I think, put her finger on the truth which is not easy to find—at least, I never found it until I read those words of hers.
It is necessary to know a very large number of persons of a certain kind before one can evolve a type. Each he or she contributes a twig, and the author weaves them into a nest. I have no doubt that I must have taken such a twig from nearly every clergyman I met who had a soupçon of Mr. Gresley in him.
But if an author takes one tiny trait, one saying, one sentiment, direct from a person, there is always the danger that the contributor will recognise the theft, and, if of a self-regarding temperament, will instantly conclude that the whole character is drawn from himself. There is, for instance, no more universal trait, of what has been unkindly called "the old-maid temperament" in either sex, than the assertion that it is always busy. But when such a trait is noted in a book, how many sensitive readers assume that it is a cruel personality. If people could but perceive that what they think to be character in themselves is often only sex, or sexlessness; if they could but believe in the universality of what they hold to be their individuality! And yet how easily they believe in it when it is pleasant to do so, when they write books about themselves, and thousands of grateful readers bombard the gifted authoress with letters to tell her that they also have "felt just like that," and have "been helped" by her exquisite sentiments, which are the exact replicas of their own!
The worst of it is that with the academic or clerical prig, when the mind has long been permitted to run in a deep, platitudinous groove from which it is at last powerless to escape, the resemblance to a prig in fiction is sometimes more than fanciful. It is real. For there is no doubt that prigs have a horrid family likeness to each other, whether in books or in real life. I have sometimes felt as the puzzled mother of some long-lost Tichborne might feel. Each claimant to the estates in turn seems to acquire a look of the original because he is a claimant. Has not this one my lost Willy's eyes? But no! that one has Willy's hands. True, but the last-comer snuffles exactly as my lost Willy snuffled. How many men have begun suddenly and indubitably in my eyes to resemble one of the adored prigs of my novels, merely because they insisted on the likeness themselves.
The most obnoxious accident which has yet befallen me, the most wanton blow below the belt which Fate has ever dealt me, is buried beneath the snows of twenty years. But even now I cannot recall it without a shudder. And if a carping critic ventures to point out that blows below the belt are not often buried beneath snow, then all I can say is that when I have made my meaning clear, I see no reason for a servile conformity to academic rules of composition.
I was writing "Diana Tempest." One of the characters, a very worldly religious young female prig, was much in my mind. I know many such. I may as well mention here that I do not bless the hour on which I first saw the light. I have not found life an ardent feast of tumultuous joy. But I do realise that it has been embellished by the acquaintance of a larger number of delightful prigs than falls to the lot of most. I have much to be thankful for. Having got hold of the character of this lady, I piloted her through courtship and marriage. I gleefully invented all her sayings on these momentous occasions, and described the wedding and the abhorrent bridegroom with great minuteness. In short, I gloated over it.