Miss Bretherton

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

A few days after the performance of the White Lady, Kendal, in the course of his weekly letter to his sister, sent her a fairly-detailed account of the evening, including the interview with her after the play, which had left two or three very marked impressions upon him. 'I wish,' he wrote, 'I could only convey to you a sense of her personal charm such as might balance the impression of her artistic defects, which I suppose this account of mine cannot but leave on you. When I came away that night after our conversation with her I had entirely forgotten her failure as an actress, and it is only later, since I have thought over the evening in detail, that I have returned to my first standpoint of wonder at the easy toleration of the English public. When you are actually with her, talking to her, looking at her, Forbes's attitude is the only possible and reasonable one. What does art, or cultivation, or training matter!—I found myself saying, as I walked home, in echo of him,—so long as Nature will only condescend once in a hundred years to produce for us a creature so perfect, so finely fashioned to all beautiful uses! Let other people go through the toil to acquire; their aim is truth: but here is beauty in its quintessence, and what is beauty but three parts of truth? Beauty is harmony with the universal order, a revelation of laws and perfections of which, in our common groping through a dull world, we find in general nothing to remind us. And if so, what folly to ask of a human creature that it should be more than beautiful! It is a messenger from the gods, and we treat it as if it were any common traveller along the highway of life, and cross-examine it for its credentials instead of raising our altar and sacrificing to it with grateful hearts!

'That was my latest impression of Friday night. But, naturally, by Saturday morning I had returned to the rational point of view. The mind's morning climate is removed by many degrees from that of the evening; and the critical revolt which the whole spectacle of the White Lady had originally roused in me revived in all its force. I began, indeed, to feel as if I and humanity, with its long laborious tradition, were on one side, holding our own against a young and arrogant aggressor—namely, beauty, in the person of Miss Bretherton! How many men and women, I thought, have laboured and struggled and died in the effort to reach a higher and higher perfection in one single art, and are they to be outdone, eclipsed in a moment, by something which is a mere freak of nature, something which, like the lilies of the field, has neither toiled nor spun, and yet claims the special inheritance and reward of those who have! It seemed to me as though my feeling in her presence of the night before, as if the sudden overthrow of the critical resistance in me had been a kind of treachery to the human cause. Beauty has power enough, I found myself reflecting with some fierceness,—let us withhold from her a sway and a prerogative which are not rightfully hers; let us defend against her that store of human sympathy which is the proper reward, not of her facile and heaven-born perfections, but of labour and intelligence, of all that is complex and tenacious in the workings of the human spirit.

'And then, as my mood cooled still further, I began to recall many an evening at the Français with you, and one part after another, one actor after another, recurred to me, till, as I realised afresh what dramatic intelligence and dramatic training really are, I fell into an angry contempt for our lavish English enthusiasms. Poor girl! it is not her fault if she believes herself to be a great actress. Brought up under misleading conditions, and without any but the most elementary education, how is she to know what the real thing means? She finds herself the rage within a few weeks of her appearance in the greatest city of the world. Naturally, she pays no heed to her critics,—why should she?

'And she is indeed a most perplexing mixture. Do what I will I cannot harmonise all my different impressions of her. Let me begin again. Why is it that her acting is so poor? I never saw a more dramatic personality! Everything that she says or does is said or done with a warmth, a force, a vivacity that make her smallest gesture and her lightest tone impress themselves upon you. I felt this very strongly two or three times after the play on Friday night. In her talk with Forbes, for instance, whom she has altogether in her toils, and whom she plays with as though he were the gray-headed Merlin and she an innocent Vivien, weaving harmless spells about him. And then, from this mocking war of words and looks, this gay camaraderie, in which there was not a scrap of coquetry or self-consciousness, she would pass into a sudden outburst of anger as to the impertinence of English rich people—the impertinence of rich millionaires who have tried once or twice to "order" her for their evening parties as they would order their ices, or the impertinence of the young "swell about town" who thinks she has nothing to do behind the scenes but receive his visits and provide him with entertainment. And, as the quick impetuous words came rushing out, you felt that here for once was a woman speaking her real mind to you, and that with a flashing eye and curving lip, an inborn grace and energy which made every word memorable. If she would but look like that or speak like that on the stage! But there, of course, is the rub. The whole difficulty of art consists in losing your own personality, so to speak, and finding it again transformed, and it is a difficulty which Miss Bretherton has never even understood.

'After this impression of spontaneity and natural force, I think what struck me most was the physical effect London has already exercised upon her in six weeks. She looks superbly sound and healthy; she is tall and fully developed, and her colour, for all its delicacy, is pure and glowing. But, after all, she was born in a languid tropical climate, and it is the nervous strain, the rush, the incessant occupation of London which seem to be telling upon her. She gave me two or three times a painful impression of fatigue on Friday—fatigue and something like depression. After twenty minutes' talk she threw herself back against the iron pillar behind her, her White Lady's hood framing a face so pale and drooping that we all got up to go, feeling that it was cruelty to keep her up a minute longer. Mrs. Stuart asked her about her Sundays, and whether she ever got out of town. "Oh," she said, with a sigh and a look at her uncle, who was standing near, "I think Sunday is the hardest day of all. It is our 'at home' day, and such crowds come—just to look at me, I suppose, for I cannot talk to a quarter of them." Whereupon Mr. Worrall said in his bland commercial way that society had its burdens as well as its pleasures, and that his dear niece could hardly escape her social duties after the flattering manner in which London had welcomed her. Miss Bretherton answered, with a sort of languid rebellion, that her social duties would soon be the death of her. But evidently she is very docile at home, and they do what they like with her. It seems to me that the uncle and aunt are a good deal shrewder than the London public; it is borne in upon me by various indications that they know exactly what their niece's popularity depends on, and that it very possibly may not be a long-lived one. Accordingly, they have determined on two things: first, that she shall make as much money for the family as can by any means be made; and, secondly, that she shall find her way into London society, and secure, if possible, a great parti before the enthusiasm for her has had time to chill. One hears various stories of the uncle, all in this sense; I cannot say how true they are.

'However, the upshot of the supper-party was that next day Wallace, Forbes, and I met at Mrs. Stuart's house, and formed a Sunday League for the protection of Miss Bretherton from her family; in other words, we mean to secure that she has occasional rest and country air on Sunday—her only free day. Mrs. Stuart has already wrung out of Mrs. Worrall, by a little judicious scaring, permission to carry her off for two Sundays—one this month and one next—and Miss Bretherton's romantic side, which is curiously strong in her, has been touched by the suggestion that the second Sunday should be spent at Oxford.

'Probably for the first Sunday—a week hence—we shall go to Surrey. You remember Hugh Farnham's property near Leith Hill? I know all the farms about there from old shooting days, and there is one on the edge of some great commons, which would be perfection on a May Sunday. I will write you a full account of our day. The only rule laid down by the League is that things are to be so managed that Miss Bretherton is to have no possible excuse for fatigue so long as she is in the hands of the society.

'My book goes on fairly well. I have been making a long study of De Musset, with the result that the poems seem to me far finer than I had remembered, and the Confessions d' un Enfant du Siècle a miserable performance. How was it it impressed me so much when I read it first? His poems have reminded me of you at every step. Do you remember how you used to read them aloud to our mother and me after dinner, while the father had his sleep before going down to the House?'

Ten days later Kendal spent a long Monday evening in writing the following letter to his sister:—

'Our yesterday's expedition was, I think, a great success. Mrs. Stuart was happy, because she had for once induced Stuart to put away his papers and allow himself a holiday; it was Miss Bretherton's first sight of the genuine English country, and she was like a child among the gorse and the hawthorns, while Wallace and I amused our manly selves extremely well in befriending the most beautiful woman in the British Isles, in drawing her out and watching her strong naive impressions of things. Stuart, I think, was not quite happy. It is hardly to be expected of a lawyer in the crisis of his fortunes that he should enjoy ten hours' divorce from his briefs; but he did his best to reach the common level, and his wife, who is devoted to him, and might as well not be married at all, from the point of view of marital companionship, evidently thought him perfection. The day more than confirmed my liking for Mrs. Stuart; there are certain little follies about her; she is too apt to regard every distinguished dinner-party she and Stuart attend as an event of enormous and universal interest, and beyond London society her sympathies hardly reach, except in that vague charitable form which is rather pity and toleration than sympathy. But she is kindly, womanly, soft; she has no small jealousies and none of that petty self-consciousness which makes so many women wearisome to the great majority of plain men, who have no wish to take their social exercises too much au sérieux.