The book was finished, sold, finally corrected, and in the press when one of the young women who had unconsciously contributed a trait to the character became affianced. She immediately began throwing off with great dignity, as if by clock-work, all the best things which I had evolved out of my own brain and had put into the mouth of my female prig. At first I was delighted with my own cleverness, but gradually I became more and more uneasy, and when I attended the wedding my heart failed me altogether. In "Diana Tempest" I had described the rich, elderly, stout, and gouty bridegroom whom the lady had captured. There he was before my panic-stricken eyes! The wedding was exactly as I had already described it. It took place in London, just as I had said. The remembrance that the book had passed beyond my own control, the irrevocability of certain ghastly sentences, came over me in a flash, together with the certainty that, however earnestly I might deny, swear, take solemn oaths on family Bibles, nothing, nothing, not even a voice from heaven, much less that of a rural dean still on earth, could make my innocence credible.
I may add that no voice from heaven sounded, and that I never made any attempt at self-exculpation, or invited my father to sacrifice himself a second time.
As I heard "The Voice that breathed o'er Eden" and saw the bride of twenty-five advance up the aisle to meet the bridegroom of forty-five awaiting her deeply flushed, in a distorted white waistcoat—I had mercilessly alluded to his white waistcoat as an error of judgment—I gave myself up for lost; and I was lost.
But all this time, while I have been giving a free rein to my autobiographic instincts, the question still remains unanswered, Why is human nature so prone to think it has been travestied that it becomes impervious to reason on the subject the moment the idea has entered the mind? Once lodged, I have never known such an idea dislodged, however fantastic. Why is it that if, like Mrs. Clifford, one has the good fortune to evolve a type, no one can believe it is not an individual? Why does not the outraged friend console himself with the remembrance that if he is one of many others who are feeling equally harrowed, he cannot really be the object of a malignant spite, carefully disguised till then under the apparel of a cheerful friendship?
I think an answer—a partial answer—to the latter question may be found in the fact that balm was never yet poured on a wounded spirit by the assurance that there are thousands of others exactly like itself. We can all endure to be lampooned. (I have even known a man who was deeply disappointed when he was forced to believe that he had not been victimised.) But to be told we are one of a herd! This flesh and blood cannot tolerate. It is unthinkable; a living death. That we who "look before and after," and "whose sincerest laughter with some pain is fraught"; that we, lonely, superb, pining for what is not, misunderstood by our nearest and dearest, who don't know, and never can know
Half the reasons why we smile or sigh
(unless, indeed, we are autobiographists: then they know all the reasons)—that WE should be confused with the vast mob of foolish, sentimental spinsters, or pedantic clerics, or egotistic old bachelors!
Away!—away! The reeling mind stops its ears against these obscene suggestions.
The only alternative which remains is that an unscrupulous novelist has heard of us—nothing more likely—without being actually acquainted with us, and has listened to garbled accounts of us from our so-called friends; or has actually met us at a bazaar or a funeral, though of course he professes to have forgotten the meeting; has been impressed with our subtle personality—nothing more likely—has felt an envious admiration of what we ourselves value but little—our social charm—and has yielded—nothing more likely—to the ignoble temptation of caricaturing qualities which he cannot emulate. Or perhaps he has known us for years, and has shown a mysterious indifference to our society, an impatience of our deeper utterances, which we can now, at last, trace to its true source, a guilty consciousness of premeditated treachery which has led him to strike us in a dastardly manner, which we can indeed afford—being what we are—to forgive, but which we shall never forget. And if an opportunity offers later on, it is possible that an unprejudiced and judicial mind may feel called upon to indicate what it thinks of such conduct.
Perhaps only those whose temperament leads them to believe themselves ridiculed in a book know the rankling smart, the exquisite pain, the sense of treachery of such an experience. It is probably the most offensive slight that can be offered to a sensitive nature.