Works of Ellen Wood, page 1328
The Times then proceeded to give a long extract from the work, and concluded with a short sentence of high praise.
East Lynne at once became a great success. No one accepted it so quietly as the author; none could have worn her laurels more modestly. To say that she was not profoundly gratified would be to make her more than human, and this, perhaps, was one reason for her calmness. She had also been perfected through suffering, and the things of earth had lost much of their hold upon her. Again, she looked upon her talent as a responsibility, for which she would one day have to give an account: and it must be admitted that never was gift more earnestly devoted to high aims. If Mrs. Henry Wood’s desire was to interest and amuse — as it should be the end and aim of every novelist — she was no less anxious to hold up to her readers a true ideal of goodness and morality; the better side of human nature; the inevitable Divine law that as a man sows so he must reap: the certainty of retribution.
She was deeply affected by her success, but possessing the sensitiveness of genius, she decided never to read reviews. Whether favourable or unfavourable, their effect was unsatisfactory; and, after the criticisms upon East lynne, they seldom came under her notice. One of the exceptions was in the first series of Johnny Ludlow. The book appeared anonymously, and the secret was well kept. No one knew or even guessed at the authorship. The whole press was full of praise for this unknown writer; gifts denied to Mrs. Henry Wood were found in Johnny Ludlow; and points for which Mrs. Wood had been blamed — such as the occasional introduction of an element of superstition into her stories — Johnny Ludlow was especially commended for. Time after time, as each review appeared, she would laugh and enjoy this reading about herself from, as it were, an outside point of view, often wondering that the secret was never suspected.
Time has proved that East Lynne was not to enjoy a mere passing success. The work is even more popular to-day than when it appeared. It has been translated into every known tongue, including Parsee and Hindustance. Indian readers will gather a large circle of Hindoos around them, and read the book to them in their own tongue; seated upon the ground, the listeners rock themselves to and fro and laugh and weep by turns. Some years ago one of the chief librarians in Madrid informed Mrs. Henry Wood, through Messrs. Richard Bentley and Son, that the most popular book on his shelves, original or translated, was East Lynne. Not very long ago it was translated into Welsh and brought out in a Welsh newspaper. It has been dramatised and played so often that, had the author received a small royalty from every representation, it was long since estimated that it would have returned to her no less a sum than a quarter of a million sterling; but she never received anything. Sometimes it has appeared on the same night at three different London theatres, and at many in the provinces, where it is always being played. In America for years it has been one of the most popular of their dramas, as East Lynne has been one of the most popular of their books; but from this also the author reaped no advantage. In the English colonies the sale of the various works increases steadily year by year. In France the story has been dramatised, and is frequently played in Paris and the provinces.
“I think East Lynne the most interesting book I ever read,” said the late Lord Lyttelton to a mutual friend; “and I consider the chapter headed ‘Alone for evermore’ one of the finest and most pathetic chapters in the whole realm of English fiction.” This from one who was admitted to be among the cleverest men in England, who had taken high honours at Cambridge and was bracketed with Dean Vaughan, was great praise.
“I am amazed at the power and interest of East Lynne” wrote Harriet Martineau to another friend; “I do not care how many murders or other crimes form the foundation of plots, if they are to give us such stories as this. I wish I possessed a hundredth part of the authors imagination.” She wrote very much to the same effect of Verner’s Pride, a work which found great favour with her.
Mrs. Wood possessed also the gift of excelling equally in long or short stories, as Harrison Ainsworth was unwilling to admit: two powers not often combined. Our greater novelists have seldom written more than a few short stories; but Mrs. Wood, in addition to nearly forty long novels, must have written not less than from three to four hundred short stories, every one of them with a distinct and carefully-worked-out plot. Yet all was done by one without any physical power, who commenced her work at an age when many writers begin to think of laying down their pen, and whose life, from the day she began to work in earnest, was passed very much in the retirement of her study.
CHAPTER XXII
“Far off thou art, but ever nigh;
I have thee still, and I rejoice;
I prosper, circled with thy voice;
I shall not lose thee though I die.”
MARY HOWITT said of Mrs. Henry Wood that like Lord Byron she awoke one morning and found herself famous. But although East Lynne had been out some time, and was already successful, it was the somewhat late review in the Times which really brought it under universal notice.
The day was a memorable one for the author. Mr. Henry Wood, devoted politician that he was, could scarcely have breakfasted without the help of his beloved Times, and had taken up the paper. Parliament had not assembled, but was about to do so, and the bugle-call was already sounding to battle. The morning was clear and frosty, and the Norwood skies were blue and bright, though not with the blueness of those far-off southern skies which had once been Mrs. Wood’s home.
Mr. Wood opened the Times, and for a moment politics and the money-market were forgotten, as, on the outer column of the page, in the most conspicuous portion of the paper, the words East Lynne in large type caught his eye, followed by a lengthened and appreciative notice. “The Times gives East Lynne a long review this morning,” he remarked to his wife.
The flush of emotion passed over Mrs. Wood’s face, but she made no other sign. She had wondered whether the Times would review it — hoped it would do so, knowing how much depended upon it, what it would mean for her. Yet when it came, she received it, as she did all things, very calmly and quietly. Her anxiety to see the notice must have been as great as the interest at stake; but she remained seated and asked no question until her husband, having read to the end, rose and handed her the paper.
“Forgive me,” he then apologised; “I felt compelled to finish it, and fear I forgot that your interest must be even greater than my own.” She quietly took the paper from his hand, and read to the end without remark.
In those days the Times reviewed only on the rarest occasions, and almost always favourably. Where one person wrote when East Lynne was published, hundreds write now. As we have said, writers were then more confined to the few who felt within them the “sacred fire” of inspiration. It was supposed to be an inborn faculty, like the genius of the poet or the musician, and without that sacred call not to be attempted. It is now taken up as a profession, easily essayed, easily laid down. So there are many failures; and even those who persevere generally discover that the “seven years’ apprenticeship” is no delusion, and nothing lasting is achieved without hard work.
With Mrs. Henry Wood success had been patiently waited and worked for not for seven years, but for ten years. For nearly ten years, when living abroad, she had written for Harrison Ainsworth, contributing short stories month by month to Bentley’s Miscellany and Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine, then the property of that popular author. The stories appeared anonymously, but attracted much attention, and in conjunction with the admirable essays and papers of William Francis Ainsworth, the novelist’s cousin, kept the magazines from falling into oblivion. It is to be regretted that the essays of William Francis Ainsworth were not republished in a complete form, for they deserved far more than a mere passing reputation.
For many of those ten years Mrs. Wood wrote without remuneration, out of love for her work. Popular as the stories were, Mr. Ainsworth made no pecuniary return. At length she declared her unwillingness to continue these contributions month after month and year after year without acknowledgment, and the payment of a small yearly sum was arranged; so small that the old agreement could scarcely be said to have altered.
William Francis Ainsworth was in great part editor of both magazines, and to him all Mrs. Wood’s MSS. were forwarded, and most of the correspondence was carried on between them — letters that were ever very pleasant and cordial. Francis Ainsworth was a traveller, a gentleman, a man of wide sympathies; of a mental tone altogether different from his cousin, Harrison Ainsworth. His acquaintance with Mrs. Wood was almost limited to correspondence, for she was living abroad and he had ceased to travel. But on Mrs. Wood’s rare visits to England she never failed to spend a day with Mr and Mrs. Francis Ainsworth at Hammersmith; visits which always left behind them agreeable recollections. On these occasions Harrison Ainsworth, if in London — he was then living at Kemp Town — was generally also a guest.
Amongst the correspondence of Francis Ainsworth, in one of his old letters, the following passage occurs. It is dated in the fifties, nevertheless Mrs. Wood had already written for some years for both magazines. He had evidently just read her last contribution in MS., and the passage begins the letter:
“My dear Mrs. Wood — Whence comes this deep well of the imagination, that, the more you draw from it, the fresher and more sparkling becomes the pure water?”
This might be very true, but constantly to draw from this “deep well” was a strain even upon the most fertile imagination, and Mrs. Wood wrote more than once to Harrison Ainsworth to tell him so. Many, nay most, of these short stories contained the germ of a long novel. But Harrison Ainsworth was relentless, and would never consent to the longer novel being written. At length the day came when Mrs. Wood grew firm and said she would write no more short stories. She had her way, and at once began East Lynne.
It is not easy to realise the tax upon mind and imagination of writing year after year twenty-four short stories, each complete in itself, and of doing this for nearly ten years before East Lynne was written. Then all the work that followed East Lynne: nearly forty novels; the Johnny Ludlow stories, which were continued for twenty years; the acknowledged work; the immense amount of anonymous literary work written in addition for the Argosy, never known, never to be known; everything requiring earnest care and thought; for we have said that, however light and easily read may be the novels of Mrs. Henry Wood, every one of them cost her immense reflection; every one was carefully and elaborately considered to the utmost of her ability. She always gave of her best, and nothing less satisfied herself. When all this is taken into account, it seems scarcely too much to say that few writers have possessed the gift of ideality in greater measure. As one recently wrote who has had experience above most literary men in England: “Who else but Scott could carry us through forty long novels so absorbingly that interest never flags and attention never wanders?”
Of her own works, Mrs. Henry Wood preferred The Shadow of Ashlydyat, and thought it the most clever.
Many will be inclined to agree with her. It is perhaps the most thoughtful and metaphysical of all her books; and the interest is sustained by simple means. The only mystery in the book is the Shadow itself. The work almost entirely concerns the workings of the human heart and the motives which influence life and action. Again much of it is true, and Mrs. Wood knew well what she was doing; she wrote it with no uncertain pen, no wavering purpose. The career of George Godolphin; the heart-history of Maria; its sorrow and anguish and endurance; its sensitive fear and horror of the evils brought upon her— “afraid to walk through the streets unveiled” — suffering caused by the sins of others — herself only “a little lower than the angels”; keenly alive to right and wrong — the rights and wrongs of others especially; so upright and pure that she could not endure the slightest shadow of a suspicion to be cast upon her name and face the world — nay, could not and did not live under it: all this is painted with no hesitating hand.
Every word, every thought is true to life, and for many of her facts Mrs. Wood did not draw upon her imagination. Nowhere is a stronger picture given of the truth that the sin a man commits frequently affects others more than himself; for such natures as George Godolphin do not as a rule realise all the evil they do, and are not capable of the keenest reproaches of conscience. Remorse came to George Godolphin in a degree: “all his life henceforth a dreary and tenantless mansion, haunted by vain regrets and pallid sorrowful faces.” But this was only when the last blow of all had been struck, and he had lost the sweetest of wives by his own careless neglect and thoughtless cruelty, all the trouble and anguish he had brought upon her; and found himself in a new and lonely life, on the desolate shores of a foreign land; wife gone, brother gone, without companion, without fortune, without child, and Miss Charlotte Pain flourishing in England — as such sirens so often flourish to the end.
But much of Mrs. Henry Wood’s heart was in such books as The Channings, Roland Yorke, and Johnny Ludlow; whilst Mildred Arkell and St. Martin’s Eve were both great favourites with her. She thought Lord Oakburn’s Daughters the most sensational of her works — as it is one of the most interesting; whilst few are more powerful than George Canterbury’s Will, and few in their way perhaps so complete as Mrs. Halliburton’s Troubles, or read so powerful a lesson.
No one took greater pleasure than herself in her own books. As the years went on she keenly enjoyed her own stories, and would re-read them every few years with as much interest as when they first appeared. Perhaps the only thing that gave her greater pleasure was to write them. For, as we have said, she lived amongst her characters, and sorrowed in taking leave of them as in parting with real friends. In the humorous parts laughter would often cause the pen to be laid down for the tears that flowed. There were tears of sorrow also; regret for the inevitable misfortunes, or it might be the death, of one or other of her characters. A keen sense of humour more often than not is accompanied by an equal sense of the pathetic. In a letter received soon after her death from her friend Canon M’Cormick, he begged that in whatever was written about her, justice might be done to this sense of humour. “Not only as seen in her books, but as manifested in her life; the keenness and quickness with which she saw and appreciated the point of a good story.”
One finds this in her works, and especially in Johnny Ludlow, where one is as quickly moved to tears as to laughter. It was so in life. She possessed in the highest degree a living interest in things and people, indicative of strong vital force as well as human sympathy; combined in her, as often in others, with great powers of observation. This interest in things and people extended itself to everything that concerned their welfare; to all social topics of the day. Seldom, however, did her pen take up the cause of such matters. She felt it was not her vocation, for these things often led to arguments, which she would never be drawn into. But if she departed from her rule, her insight into the curious workings of the human heart, her clear judgment went straight to the root of the matter. There sometimes came proof of this, and on two occasions they were nearly parallel cases.
The first was in connection with Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine.
Mrs. Wood was at that time writing stories that touched upon certain religious topics and a danger that seemed threatening to England. The stories pointed out the subtle evil in question. After a time, a deputation interested in the evils exposed waited upon Mr. Francis Ainsworth and demanded the name of the author, promising untold retribution, beginning with Mr. Ainsworth himself, if the name were withheld. It was not given; and nothing happened, and Mr. Ainsworth is still living. But the incident caused both author and editor much amusement and some lively correspondence: and was moreover a tribute to the truth and power of the stories.
The second occasion happened when A Life’s Secret was passing through one of the magazines of the Religious Tract Society. This work touched upon the effects of Strikes and matters connected with them — movements then only commencing, but from which the author saw that danger might arise to the industry of the country and trouble to the working classes.
The dangers, by a series of dramatic incidents, were vividly portrayed in the course of the story, and those most concerned in the matter presently demanded the name of the writer who thus exposed and prophesied. The house in Paternoster Row was besieged and the windows were threatened. Again the name was withheld, and again house and windows were spared. This took place very many years ago, and many of the consequences foretold in A Lifts Secret have become matters of history.
