New Grub Street (14 page)

'Where is Hinks's book?'

Marian reached it from a side table; under this roof, literature
was regarded almost as a necessary part of table garnishing.

'I thought it would be bigger than this,' Yule muttered, as he
opened the volume in a way peculiar to bookish men.

A page was turned down, as if to draw attention to some passage.
Yule put on his eyeglasses, and soon made a discovery which had the
effect of completing the transformation of his visage. His eyes
glinted, his chin worked in pleasurable emotion. In a moment he
handed the book to Marian, indicating the small type of a
foot-note; it embodied an effusive eulogy—introduced a propos of
some literary discussion—of 'Mr Alfred Yule's critical acumen,
scholarly research, lucid style,' and sundry other distinguished
merits.

'That is kind of him,' said Marian.

'Good old Hinks! I suppose I must try to get him half-a-dozen
readers.'

'May I see?' asked Mrs Yule, under her breath, bending to
Marian.

Her daughter passed on the volume, and Mrs Yule read the
footnote with that look of slow apprehension which is so pathetic
when it signifies the heart's good-will thwarted by the mind's
defect.

'That'll be good for you, Alfred, won't it?' she said, glancing
at her husband.

'Certainly,' he replied, with a smile of contemptuous irony. 'If
Hinks goes on, he'll establish my reputation.'

And he took a draught of ale, like one who is reinvigorated for
the battle of life. Marian, regarding him askance, mused on what
seemed to her a strange anomaly in his character; it had often
surprised her that a man of his temperament and powers should be so
dependent upon the praise and blame of people whom he justly deemed
his inferiors.

Yule was glancing over the pages of the work.

'A pity the man can't write English.' What a vocabulary!
Obstruent—reliable—particularization—fabulosity—different to—averse
to—did one ever come across such a mixture of antique pedantry and
modern vulgarism! Surely he has his name from the German hinken—eh,
Marian?'

With a laugh he tossed the book away again. His mood was wholly
changed. He gave various evidences of enjoying the meal, and began
to talk freely with his daughter.

'Finished the authoresses?'

'Not quite.'

'No hurry. When you have time I want you to read Ditchley's new
book, and jot down a selection of his worst sentences. I'll use
them for an article on contemporary style; it occurred to me this
afternoon.'

He smiled grimly. Mrs Yule's face exhibited much contentment,
which became radiant joy when her husband remarked casually that
the custard was very well made to-day. Dinner over, he rose without
ceremony and went off to his study.

The man had suffered much and toiled stupendously. It was not
inexplicable that dyspepsia, and many another ill that literary
flesh is heir to, racked him sore.

Go back to the days when he was an assistant at a bookseller's
in Holborn. Already ambition devoured him, and the genuine love of
knowledge goaded his brain. He allowed himself but three or four
hours of sleep; he wrought doggedly at languages, ancient and
modern; he tried his hand at metrical translations; he planned
tragedies. Practically he was living in a past age; his literary
ideals were formed on the study of Boswell.

The head assistant in the shop went away to pursue a business
which had come into his hands on the death of a relative; it was a
small publishing concern, housed in an alley off the Strand, and Mr
Polo (a singular name, to become well known in the course of time)
had his ideas about its possible extension. Among other instances
of activity he started a penny weekly paper, called All Sorts, and
in the pages of this periodical Alfred Yule first appeared as an
author. Before long he became sub-editor of All Sorts, then actual
director of the paper. He said good-bye to the bookseller, and his
literary career fairly began.

Mr Polo used to say that he never knew a man who could work so
many consecutive hours as Alfred Yule. A faithful account of all
that the young man learnt and wrote from 1855 to 1860—that is, from
his twenty-fifth to his thirtieth year—would have the look of
burlesque exaggeration. He had set it before him to become a
celebrated man, and he was not unaware that the attainment of that
end would cost him quite exceptional labour, seeing that nature had
not favoured him with brilliant parts. No matter; his name should
be spoken among men unless he killed himself in the struggle for
success.

In the meantime he married. Living in a garret, and supplying
himself with the materials of his scanty meals, he was in the habit
of making purchases at a little chandler's shop, where he was
waited upon by a young girl of no beauty, but, as it seemed to him,
of amiable disposition. One holiday he met this girl as she was
walking with a younger sister in the streets; he made her nearer
acquaintance, and before long she consented to be his wife and
share his garret. His brothers, John and Edmund, cried out that he
had made an unpardonable fool of himself in marrying so much
beneath him; that he might well have waited until his income
improved. This was all very well, but they might just as reasonably
have bidden him reject plain food because a few years hence he
would be able to purchase luxuries; he could not do without
nourishment of some sort, and the time had come when he could not
do without a wife. Many a man with brains but no money has been
compelled to the same step. Educated girls have a pronounced
distaste for London garrets; not one in fifty thousand would share
poverty with the brightest genius ever born. Seeing that marriage
is so often indispensable to that very success which would enable a
man of parts to mate equally, there is nothing for it but to look
below one's own level, and be grateful to the untaught woman who
has pity on one's loneliness.

Unfortunately, Alfred Yule was not so grateful as he might have
been. His marriage proved far from unsuccessful; he might have
found himself united to a vulgar shrew, whereas the girl had the
great virtues of humility and kindliness. She endeavoured to learn
of him, but her dulness and his impatience made this attempt a
failure; her human qualities had to suffice. And they did, until
Yule began to lift his head above the literary mob. Previously, he
often lost his temper with her, but never expressed or felt
repentance of his marriage; now he began to see only the
disadvantages of his position, and, forgetting the facts of the
case, to imagine that he might well have waited for a wife who
could share his intellectual existence. Mrs Yule had to pass
through a few years of much bitterness. Already a martyr to
dyspepsia, and often suffering from bilious headaches of extreme
violence, her husband now and then lost all control of his temper,
all sense of kind feeling, even of decency, and reproached the poor
woman with her ignorance, her stupidity, her low origin. Naturally
enough she defended herself with such weapons as a sense of cruel
injustice supplied. More than once the two all but parted. It did
not come to an actual rupture, chiefly because Yule could not do
without his wife; her tendance had become indispensable. And then
there was the child to consider.

From the first it was Yule's dread lest Marian should be
infected with her mother's faults of speech and behaviour. He would
scarcely permit his wife to talk to the child. At the earliest
possible moment Marian was sent to a day-school, and in her tenth
year she went as weekly boarder to an establishment at Fulham; any
sacrifice of money to insure her growing up with the tongue and
manners of a lady. It can scarcely have been a light trial to the
mother to know that contact with her was regarded as her child's
greatest danger; but in her humility and her love for Marian she
offered no resistance. And so it came to pass that one day the
little girl, hearing her mother make some flagrant grammatical
error, turned to the other parent and asked gravely: 'Why doesn't
mother speak as properly as we do?' Well, that is one of the
results of such marriages, one of the myriad miseries that result
from poverty.

The end was gained at all hazards. Marian grew up everything
that her father desired. Not only had she the bearing of
refinement, but it early became obvious that nature had well
endowed her with brains. From the nursery her talk was of books,
and at the age of twelve she was already able to give her father
some assistance as an amanuensis.

At that time Edmund Yule was still living; he had overcome his
prejudices, and there was intercourse between his household and
that of the literary man. Intimacy it could not be called, for Mrs
Edmund (who was the daughter of a law-stationer) had much
difficulty in behaving to Mrs Alfred with show of suavity. Still,
the cousins Amy and Marian from time to time saw each other, and
were not unsuitable companions. It was the death of Amy's father
that brought these relations to an end; left to the control of her
own affairs Mrs Edmund was not long in giving offence to Mrs
Alfred, and so to Alfred himself. The man of letters might be
inconsiderate enough in his behaviour to his wife, but as soon as
anyone else treated her with disrespect that was quite another
matter. Purely on this account he quarrelled violently with his
brother's widow, and from that day the two families kept apart.

The chapter of quarrels was one of no small importance in
Alfred's life; his difficult temper, and an ever-increasing sense
of neglected merit, frequently put him at war with publishers,
editors, fellow-authors, and he had an unhappy trick of exciting
the hostility of men who were most likely to be useful to him. With
Mr Polo, for instance, who held him in esteem, and whose commercial
success made him a valuable connection, Alfred ultimately broke on
a trifling matter of personal dignity. Later came the great quarrel
with Clement Fadge, an affair of considerable advantage in the way
of advertisement to both the men concerned. It happened in the year
1873. At that time Yule was editor of a weekly paper called The
Balance, a literary organ which aimed high, and failed to hit the
circulation essential to its existence. Fadge, a younger man, did
reviewing for The Balance; he was in needy circumstances, and had
wrought himself into Yule's good opinion by judicious flattery. But
with a clear eye for the main chance Mr Fadge soon perceived that
Yule could only be of temporary use to him, and that the editor of
a well-established weekly which lost no opportunity of throwing
scorn upon Yule and all his works would be a much more profitable
conquest. He succeeded in transferring his services to the more
flourishing paper, and struck out a special line of work by the
free exercise of a malicious flippancy which was then without rival
in the periodical press. When he had thoroughly got his hand in, it
fell to Mr Fadge, in the mere way of business, to review a volume
of his old editor's, a rather pretentious and longwinded but far
from worthless essay 'On Imagination as a National Characteristic.'
The notice was a masterpiece; its exquisite virulence set the
literary circles chuckling. Concerning the authorship there was no
mystery, and Alfred Yule had the indiscretion to make a violent
reply, a savage assault upon Fadge, in the columns of The Balance.
Fadge desired nothing better; the uproar which arose—chaff, fury,
grave comments, sneering spite—could only result in drawing
universal attention to his anonymous cleverness, and throwing
ridicule upon the heavy, conscientious man. Well, you probably
remember all about it. It ended in the disappearance of Yule's
struggling paper, and the establishment on a firm basis of Fadge's
reputation.

It would be difficult to mention any department of literary
endeavour in which Yule did not, at one time or another, try his
fortune. Turn to his name in the Museum Catalogue; the list of
works appended to it will amuse you. In his thirtieth year he
published a novel; it failed completely, and the same result
awaited a similar experiment five years later. He wrote a drama of
modern life, and for some years strove to get it acted, but in
vain; finally it appeared 'for the closet'—giving Clement Fadge
such an opportunity as he seldom enjoyed. The one noteworthy thing
about these productions, and about others of equally mistaken
direction, was the sincerity of their workmanship. Had Yule been
content to manufacture a novel or a play with due disregard for
literary honour, he might perchance have made a mercantile success;
but the poor fellow had not pliancy enough for this. He took his
efforts au grand serieux; thought he was producing works of art;
pursued his ambition in a spirit of fierce conscientiousness. In
spite of all, he remained only a journeyman. The kind of work he
did best was poorly paid, and could bring no fame. At the age of
fifty he was still living in a poor house in an obscure quarter. He
earned enough for his actual needs, and was under no pressing fear
for the morrow, so long as his faculties remained unimpaired; but
there was no disguising from himself that his life had been a
failure. And the thought tormented him.

Now there had come unexpectedly a gleam of hope. If indeed, the
man Rackett thought of offering him the editorship of The Study he
might even yet taste the triumphs for which he had so vehemently
longed. The Study was a weekly paper of fair repute. Fadge had
harmed it, no doubt of that, by giving it a tone which did not suit
the majority of its readers—serious people, who thought that the
criticism of contemporary writing offered an opportunity for
something better than a display of malevolent wit. But a return to
the old earnestness would doubtless set all right again. And the
joy of sitting in that dictatorial chair! The delight of having his
own organ once more, of making himself a power in the world of
letters, of emphasising to a large audience his developed methods
of criticism!