NEW! Why, there is nothing new. The only luck is to pitch on something old enough to be forgotten.

The writing profession is a hard and often underpaid one, but one thing may be said, that writers are ever ready and willing to help each other.

We can most of us testify to this by kindnesses received.

Sir Walter Besant was the very embodiment of this spirit of helpfulness, not only to me personally, but also to the literary world at large, and it was he who conceived the idea of bringing this same friendliness into a common centre by establishing the Incorporated Society of Authors.

Having touched on the toil, sorrows, and worries of “work,” it is pleasant to pass on to the silver lining to the cloud.

I cannot remember when I first met Sir Walter Besant, although two or three meetings stand forth distinctly in the tangled web of recollection. One of the many kind things he did for me was soon after my election to the Society of Authors. A dinner was announced. I had never been to a public dinner in my life, but as a member of that august body I had a right to be present.

Naturally wishing to go, I wrote a little letter to Sir Walter, saying that I simply dared not go alone; did he know any lady who would join forces with me?

“I quite understand,” he replied; “you are young and new at the game, and may bring any guest you like. If you take my advice you will let it be a man, and not a woman, because, I think, you will have a better evening’s enjoyment.”

From that moment women writers were allowed a guest.

Accordingly, with a man as my “chaperon,” I attended my first public dinner.

Afterwards, when I was in great anxiety as to ways and means of obtaining a pension for the late Mrs. J. H. Riddell, I went one day to see Besant at his office in Soho Square. He was surrounded—half buried, in fact—by manuscripts, for he was then correcting his books on London—the really joyful work of his literary life. Volumes strewed the floor, volumes were stacked upon the writing-table, volumes lay pell-mell on the chairs. In fact, there was nowhere to sit or stand; London on paper filled the room.

He quite sympathised with my difficult task, but said there was then no fund available to which one could apply; and I asked if it would not be possible to form, in connection with the Society of Authors, some sort of Pension Fund for writers who had made fame but not fortune.

“Well, I don’t know; it might be,” he said.

As I poured forth a string of enthusiastic suggestions the dear old gentleman listened calmly and quietly, gazing through his gold spectacles in wonderment at my volubility.

“Not a bad idea,” he remarked.

Several interviews were the result, and not long afterwards the Pension Fund of the Society of Authors was formed, under the able Chairmanship of Mr. Anthony Hope. On the Original Committees of which I served, and still serve.

Besant was a real practical help to young writers. Quaint, old-fashioned, and prim, he addressed even his best friends as “Madam.” The following letter is in connection with a further pension for Mrs. Riddell, which I was then endeavouring to procure from the Civil List, and did afterwards succeed in obtaining from Mr. Balfour:

No man did more for writers than Walter Besant. He raised their status, he demanded more pay for their products, he attempted to make a copyright with America; and the present-day position of authors, unsatisfactory though it is, is a thousand times better than it was before Sir Walter Besant took the matter up and maintained that literary wares were property, and as such should be treated legally. I merely quote this letter to show the kindness of heart of the man, and how even the busiest people find time to do a good deed. He wrote:

His death was a loss to the entire literary profession.

He lived at Hampstead in a charming old house not far from George du Maurier and Frank Holl; in fact, in the early days of my married life, there was quite a little colony of interesting people living in that neighbourhood, and we often drove up on Sundays for luncheon or to call on those delightful folk.

Are there any novelists to-day who make enormous sums? When Sir Walter Besant himself died he left only £6000.

Looking back into the recesses of one’s memory two women writers, who died within a few weeks of each other (1906), come to mind; two women entirely distinct in their lives and in their deaths, in their writings, in their purpose. One rich, popular, and brilliant; the other poor, popular, and—less brilliant, perhaps, but so extraordinarily brave and persevering, that if it be true that genius is the capacity to take infinite pains, no one will deny the late Mrs. J. H. Riddell’s genius.

The first woman writer of these two was Mrs. Craigie (John Oliver Hobbes).

And Mrs. Craigie was herself a dual personality. As a girl she was full of romance, sentiment, enthusiasm, and fire. Mrs. Craigie as a woman renounced romance—of which she had but a sad experience—and sought solace in religion. The dissection of love and the solace of religion became the keynotes of her writings.

“John Oliver Hobbes” was another person altogether. He was a cynic, clever, brilliant, at times as hard as his name implied. He was the mask, the curb by which the budding womanhood of Mrs. Craigie was extinguished and held in check. The death of this duplex personality was a real loss.

A paradox often ends conversation, the listener is so busy trying to unravel its meaning. But a paradox in a book often stimulates the reader, and Mrs. Craigie was a master of paradoxes.

No one could honestly wish her back. Her death was ideal. At the zenith of her power, in the prime of her life and looks, with the happiness of unfulfilled dreams still before her, she lay down quietly to rest and passed away. She was a handsome woman, with wit and charm; her parents were rich, she acquired position, and she commanded respect by her work. She did not live to grow old or grey, she just slipped the cable when all the world was rose-colour and the sun shone.

Mrs. Craigie’s face when in repose had a melancholy aspect, her tongue was often bitter. Like all Americans, she loved titles and craved for social success; for, clever and brilliant writer as “John Oliver Hobbes” was, Mrs. Craigie was undoubtedly a woman of the world.

To a certain extent her life was dwarfed. An unhappy marriage, in which she early divorced her husband, kept the woman in her nature from expanding; she imposed restraint upon all her actions, all her thoughts. She never—even in her writings—let herself go.

Mrs. Craigie was of medium height, with a slight figure, piercing eyes, and dark hair, which she wore very simply. She was an excellent raconteur, and a delightful neighbour at a dinner-table. She certainly showed to greater advantage in the company of men than of women, in which characteristic she was somewhat un-American.

Knowing this want of sympathy with her own sex, she rarely appeared at women’s functions.

Mrs. Craigie’s name appeared in many papers as attending dinners or committees, and making speeches; but in reality Mrs. Craigie herself came seldom, ill-health or retirement into a convent being a frequent excuse at the last moment for her non-appearance. She spoke well when she did speak, although it was not really a speech at all, but a carefully prepared little treatise which she read word for word to her audience. She delivered it well, the matter was always worth listening to, and she was pleasing to look upon.

“John Oliver Hobbes” was a weird pseudonym. The titles of her books were equally incongruous. Imagine such anomalies as Some Emotions and a Moral, The Gods, Some Mortals and Lord Wickenham, The Herb Moon, or the latest—The Dream and the Business. Mrs. Craigie will be remembered as a novelist, not as she aspired to be—a dramatist.

None of her plays achieved any real success except The Ambassador, which had a considerable run at the St. James’s Theatre, ably helped by that excellent manager, Sir George Alexander. Smart epigrams, pretty setting, and French frocks won’t make a play. Her characters lacked blood and sinew; they meant well and generally began well, but they were not healthy, living beings. In a novel that lack of characterisation was not so obvious as on the stage, and her smart lines, her epigrams, and ironic thoughts, or rather the irony of “John Oliver Hobbes” (her double), covered the lack of plot and thinness of character more satisfactorily.

As years rolled on and the sentimental woman was lost in the thoughtful religionist, swayed by the Romish Church, the philosopher found satisfaction, and her later books became deeper in tone, stronger in handling, and likely to be more lasting on the shelves of time. She was a literary personality, with high aims where her art was concerned, and had she lived she might some day have rivalled George Meredith, whose style she so much admired. Much mystery surrounded her death; she was barely forty when she suddenly and swiftly passed, as it were, like a person going out of a house without a good-bye.

People pray against sudden death. Let me pray for it. What more lovely ending than to sleep away into the Unknown? It may be a selfish wish, because the shock is greater for those left behind, but, after all, to them the death of a dear one is always a shock, come quick, come slow, and why should the parting be harrowed by tardiness? Yes, let me pray for sudden death, and at an early age before one gets dependent on others.

And my body. Well, if I die of anything interesting—disease or accident—that will make my body of any value whatever to medicine or science, I bequeath it for dissection to University College, Gower Street (or to any other hospital that may be nearer me at my decease). It is only right we should help the living to the last, and interesting cases should always be investigated; at least, my love and admiration for science and medicine tell me so.

Then the scraps can be cremated, because they will have fulfilled their end. Putrefaction is disgusting and harmful to living things; so let my remains be consumed by fire to clean white ash, and let that (in one of those beautiful urns designed by Watts) rest inside Kingsbury Church, or in the vault outside, beside my husband and father.

None of this is morbid, it is only common sense. Death has no horrors for me. I am content to die, and have even paid for and arranged my own cremation to save my survivors time and expense.

But let us return to Mrs. J. H. Riddell, who was the second of these two well-known women writers. Of her one thinks and writes differently; and for myself it is difficult not to hold her in memory more as the woman than the writer, for she was an intimate friend of my earliest years. Even then she was approaching middle life, and, unlike “John Oliver Hobbes,” who passed away when so much of the best of life seemed before her, Mrs. Riddell had reached the eve of her seventy-fifth birthday before death at last—in September, 1906—released her from her prolonged struggle.

She was writing as early as 1858, when women writers were little known. At one time she was among the most popular novelists of the day; but she only declared her identity in 1865, after the enormous success of George Geith of Fen Court.

The death of her husband whom she adored, the failure of her publishers, and her own constant ill-health, brought her much trouble, but she bravely struggled on with her writing for nearly half a century, producing some thirty or forty novels, many of which ran into second and third editions and are now in sixpenny numbers. Her insight into character was her strong point, and her people gradually unfolded themselves with skill and thought as the stories proceeded. She reaped little reward, however, as her best work was done before there was any copyright with America, and, being poor, she sold her books out for an average of about one hundred pounds each.

Although born on the hill-side in Ireland, at Carrickfergus, the daughter of a squire, and a lover of fresh air, fowls, flowers, and country pursuits and produce, Mrs. Riddell settled in London. She hated it at first, and then became an enthusiast over its charms. By day and by night she wandered into its highways and peered into its alleys. She learnt the City off by heart, and penetrated the mysteries of business life so successfully that, woman though she was, she wrote The Senior Partner, City and Suburb, etc. At that time business was not thought a suitable subject for the novelist except in France, by men like Balzac, so to Mrs. Riddell is due the honour of introducing the City gentleman and making him known to the West End.

Many of the tragedies, the failures, and mysteries of business routine which she so often depicted in her books, she wrote from personal knowledge. Misfortunes fell upon her family and, as she was the one to try to put matters right, she naturally learnt many curious ins and outs of speculation and failure. Had she not always had her hand in her pocket for someone, she would not have been so miserably off financially when old age and sickness overtook her.

She wrote her first novel when only fifteen; but this she candidly admitted never saw the light.

In my early writing days I remember asking Mrs. Riddell for an introduction.

“What?” she replied. “Introductions are no good; the best and only introduction to an editor is a good article.”

How right she was!

Mrs. Riddell once told me she collected the whole of a three-volume novel in her head—all novels were then in three volumes—and for weeks and months she worried out the story. When it was quite complete she wrote the last, or the most telling chapter of the book, first. For instance, Beryl’s death scene in George Geith was set down just as it appeared in print three years subsequently.

As I have said, it was my privilege to know Mrs. J. H. Riddell from my childhood. She was an old and valued friend of my father, and in the curious jumbling of early recollections I recall eating my first ice at her house at Hampstead, and being obliged to confess, with a cold lump of surprise on my tongue, “It isn’t as nice as I ’spected.” A remark she recalled with amusement years afterwards.

I do not suppose I was more than five years of age at that time, but I can remember perfectly well the kindly and charming face of the hostess, and her dark brown hair, which she wore in a loose curl hanging behind each ear.

Her Hampstead home existed in Mrs. Riddell’s palmy days; she went through much subsequent trouble, backing a bill for a friend, paying debts for her husband, keeping a paralysed brother whose health necessitated constant care, and who was for many years a heavy drag upon her purse, all of which brought incessant anxiety upon the authoress. My father and my husband helped her substantially many times—so when they both died so suddenly she was even more handicapped by Fortune. She nobly struggled on until the year 1900, when, as already mentioned, I made a personal application to Mr. Balfour, then Prime Minister, for a sum of money towards purchasing an annuity for her. Much correspondence ensued, and, thanks to the courtesy of Mr. Balfour, a cheque for three hundred pounds was finally handed to me from the Civil List. Through the help of Mr. J. M. Barrie, a further couple of hundred pounds was obtained from the Royal Literary Fund. This, with some kindly contributions from my own personal friends, among whom may be mentioned Sir W. S. Gilbert, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Justin Huntley McCarthy, E. W. Hornung, and Anthony Hope Hawkins, was, however, found to be too small a sum to buy an annuity of real value, and, accordingly, I made that bold suggestion to the Society of Authors. It was finally agreed that I should hand over three hundred pounds direct to them, in consideration of their granting her a pension for life, the Society retaining the three hundred at her death.

Mrs. Riddell thus became the first pensioner of the Society of Authors, of which she was one of the original members; and time after time she expressed to me her gratitude for that sixty pounds a year, her own private income being practically nil. The Society conferred a great benefit in bestowing this pension, and, at the same time, must feel proud to know it was given to one so worthy to claim it in the world of literature.

Her struggles to work were magnificent, and she actually published her last book after she was seventy years of age. Nearly fifty years of penmanship is indeed a record. During the last months of her life she suffered much pain from cancer, and was constantly in her bed, not being able to write at all, and to read but little. I constantly went to see her, and wondered at her patience and grieved at her poverty and suffering.

Then came her release; for such was the messenger of death to her tired spirit. And the few friends who saw her laid in the grave, felt it was so, and had the relief of knowing they had added to her comfort—and even the necessaries of life—in her last darkened years.

Since those days I have collected purses for a dozen or more folk. Men and women whose names are known in every land—but who have fallen on evil days—generally ill-health having been the cause. The Arts are shockingly paid, the mental strain is great. Exponents of great work live on their health capital, their brain-force, and sometimes the chain snaps and the wheels refuse to go round. Then a few hundred pounds, or a pension, or the kindly sympathy of friendship that backs up their faltering strength, comes like a new fuse, inspiring the recipient to take up the threads of work almost as well as before.

Yes, I collected between seven and eight hundred pounds for Mrs. Riddell, which I doled out weekly till her death. I paid her servant’s wages, rent, the doctor, and all the necessities of years of illness. Just as my little store was coming to an end her life flickered out. There was enough left for a modest funeral and a stone slab above her grave. That was the first time I undertook a big job of the kind; but not long after I did the same for one of the most famous singers of the day.

Then again, the people who do things that will live have proverbially bad business heads. Just as judges die without wills, and Chancellors of the Exchequer leave their own affairs in a muddle, so artists, writers, painters, scientists, reap little reward themselves when weighed against the intense pleasure they give to others.

Each little monetary collection or pension has necessitated dozens, almost hundreds, of letters, all of which have come into extremely busy days. I only wish I could have done twice as much, for well I know what a few hundred pounds handed over to me by friends and sympathisers would have been in those early days of widowhood.

He who gives quickly gives twice. The generous people are those who have been poor and suffered. The rich so seldom think of anyone but themselves, although writing a cheque costs them no self-sacrifice.

Then comes another notable woman; a power in her day. One who, herself strong-minded and a pioneer without recognising it, bitterly denounced other women for so-called strong-mindedness; but, while inflicting the lash on imaginary victims, she poured balm on the wounds of real sufferers. Unhappily deserted in her married life, she yet extolled the virtues of mankind to the skies—a living paradox.

Woman has advanced very far since Mrs. Lynn Linton invented the phrase of “the shrieking sisterhood.”

That was in the distant ’eighties, when the modern young woman, who filled her with such holy horror, was, after all, but a poor, shrinking creature compared with the amazons of 1907, who marched to Hyde Park to demand votes for women. A desire for the development of her own individuality, freed from the control of parents and the enforced escort of brothers, a latch-key, a club, and a mode of short hair, waistcoats, men’s coats, and even hard shirts, besides a horse-shoe pin, were all that the “Girl of the Period” advanced; but, in contemptuous condemnation of her, Mrs. Lynn Linton dipped her pen in gall.

Dear me! what an archaic type she already seems, that original “new woman” whom one used to find at the Pioneer Club in its early days.

Perhaps it is as well that Mrs. Lynn Linton did not live to see suffragists concealed in pantechnicon vans for the purpose of raiding Parliament, or shouting down Cabinet Ministers, assaulting policemen, smashing windows, and going to prison in hundreds with as much self-glorification as if they were notorious criminals and heroines of a “Penny Dreadful.” The dictionary surely does not contain words so scathing as the old lady would have required for such flagrant revolters against her ideal of womanhood. That women suffragettes have an ideal she would not have understood. The curt indifference of men to their more peaceable demands has forced women to perpetrate these antics to draw attention to their creed. She was herself a woman who was greatly misunderstood. The conception formed by the public, who knew Mrs. Lynn Linton only by her writings, was entirely different from that of people who were privileged to know her personally. All her venom was in her pen, all her heart in her home and her friends.

I have reason to recall her name with gratitude, for she was one of the first to assist me by helpful advice and example along the slippery path of authorship. Indeed, her readiness to place her long experience at the service of young writers, who were often entirely unknown to her, even at the sacrifice of considerable time and convenience to herself, was one of the most delightful points in her character.

One day, late in the last century, I was chatting with her in her flat eight stories up in Queen Anne’s Mansions, the windows of which looked out high over the neighbouring chimney-pots and far away beyond the grey mist of smoky London to the Surrey hills. Lying on the table was a large bundle of manuscripts, upon which I naturally remarked, “What a lot of work you have there on hand; surely that means two or three new books?”

“Not one page is my own,” she replied, peering at me through her gold-rimmed spectacles. “Bundles of manuscripts like these have haunted my later life. I receive large packets from men and women I have never seen and know nothing whatever about. One asks for my advice; another if I can find a publisher; a third enquires if the material is worth spinning out into a three-volume novel; a fourth lives abroad and places the MS. in my hands to do with it exactly as I think fit.

“How fearful! But what do you do with them all?”

“Once I returned one unread, for the writing was so bad I could not decipher it. But only once; the rest I have always conscientiously read through and corrected page by page, if I have thought there was anything to be made of them. But to many of my unknown correspondents, I have had to reply sadly that the work had not sufficient merit for publication, and, as gently as I could, suggest their leaving literature alone and trying something else.”

“You are very good to bother yourself with them.”

“No, not good exactly; but I feel very strongly the duty of the old to the young, and how the established must help the striving. I am so sorry for young people, and know how a little help or advice given at the right moment may prove the making of a career; kindly words of discouragement, given also at the right time, may save many a bitter tear of disappointment in the future.”

This was the “dragon” who, I do not doubt, existed in the minds of thousands of readers of Mrs. Lynn Linton’s magazine essays—essays which were full of fire; critical, analytical, clear-sighted and written unflinchingly. Who would dream after reading one of her splendidly forcible arguments, written in her trenchant style, that the real author was one of the most domesticated, home-loving women possible, full of kindness and sympathy, and keenly interested in the welfare of all around her? How little a book reveals the true author. How often the pen disguises the real person, as words disguise the inmost thoughts.

Indeed, one might go far to find another such lovable old lady.

It is often supposed by the outside world that jealousies and rivalries exist between authors, as is too often said to be the case in other professions. Nonsense! Here is one example to the contrary. And many another could easily be furnished.

At the very time that Mrs. Lynn Linton was earning her living by writing novels, Mrs. Alexander, in private life Mrs. Hector (another dear memory), was doing the same. Rivalry there was none between these two; more than that, they actually helped each other. And in the end, when Mrs. Lynn Linton died, she left her most cherished cabinet of china and many other souvenirs to her woman writer friend, who prized them above rubies.

The following is a characteristic letter from Mrs. Lynn Linton, anent an article I had written about her:

I had sat between her and Beerbohm Tree at the first performance in England of “Hedda Gabler,” which I had seen Ibsen rehearse in Christiania shortly before in his slow pompous manner.

To understand humanity is a work of intelligence, and Mrs. Lynn Linton had that gift in a marked degree. She was a woman of strong individuality.