MY CONTEMPORARIES IN FICTION
By David Christie Murray
LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS
1897
CONTENTS:
INTRODUCTORY
MY CONTEMPORARIES IN FICTION
I.—FIRST, THE CRITICS, AND THEN A WORD ON DICKENS
II.—CHARLES READE
III.—ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
IV.—LIVING MASTERS—MEREDITH AND HALL CAINE
V.—LIVING MASTERS—RUDYARD KIPLING
VI.—UNDER FRENCH ENCOURAGEMENT—THOMAS HARDY
VII.—UNDER FRENCH ENCOURAGEMENT—GEORGE MOORE
VIII.—MR. S. R. CROCKETT—IAN MACLAREN
IX.—DR. MACDONALD AND MR. J. M. BARRIE
X.—THE PROBLEM SEEKERS—SEA CAPTAIN AND LAND CAPTAIN
XI.—MISS MARIE CORELLI
XII.—THE AMERICANS
XIII.—THE YOUNG ROMANCERS
INTRODUCTORY
When these essays were originally printed (they appeared simultaneously
in many newspapers), I expected to make some enemies. So far, I have
been most agreeably disappointed in that regard; but I can affirm that
they have made me many friends, and that I have had encouragement
enough from fellow craftsmen, from professional critics, and from casual
readers at home, in the colonies, and the United States to bolster up
the courage of the most timorous man that ever held a pen. As a set-off
against all this, I have received one very noble and dignified rebuke
from a Contemporary in Fiction, whom the world holds in high honour,
who regrets that I am not engaged in creative work--in lieu of this--and
pleads that ‘authorship should be allowed the distinction of an
exemption from rank and title.’ With genuine respect I venture to
urge that this is an impossible aspiration, and in spite of the lofty
sanction which the writer’s name must lend to his opinion, I have been
unable to surrender the belief that the work done in these pages is
alike honourable and useful. It is, as will be seen, in the nature of
a crusade against puffery and hysteria. It is not meant to instruct the
instructed, and it makes no pretence to be infallible, but it is issued
in its present form in the belief that it will (in some degree) aid the
average reader in the formation of just opinions on contemporary art,
and in the hope that it may (in some degree) impose a check on certain
interested or over-enthusiastic people.
MY CONTEMPORARIES IN FICTION
I.--FIRST, THE CRITICS, AND THEN A WORD ON DICKENS
The critics of to-day are suffering from a sort of epidemic of kindness.
They have accustomed themselves to the administration of praise in
unmeasured doses. They are not, taking them in the mass, critics any
longer, but merely professional admirers. They have ceased to be useful
to the public, and are becoming dangerous to the interests of letters.
In their over-friendly eyes every painstaking apprentice in the art of
fiction is a master, and hysterical schoolgirls, who have spent their
brief day in the acquisition of ignorance, are reviewed as if they were
so many Elizabeth Barrett Brownings or George Eliots. One of the most
curious and instructive things in this regard is the use which the
modern critic makes of Sir Walter Scott. Sir Walter is set up as a sort
of first standard for the aspirant in the art of fiction to excel. Let
the question be asked, with as much gravity as is possible: What _is_
the use of a critic who gravely assures us that Mr. S. R. Crockett ‘has
rivalled, if not surpassed, Sir Walter’? The statement is, of course,
most lamentably and ludicrously absurd, but it is made more than once,
or twice, or thrice, and it is quoted and advertised. It is not Mr.
Crockett’s fault that he is set on this ridiculous eminence, and
his name is not cited here with any grain of malice. He has his
fellow-sufferers. Other gentlemen who have ‘rivalled, if not surpassed,
Sir Walter,’ are Dr. Conan Doyle, Mr. J. M. Barrie, Mr. Ian Maclaren,
and Mr. Stanley Weyman. No person whose judgment is worth a straw can
read the writings of these accomplished workmen without respect and
pleasure. But it is no more true that they rival Sir Walter than it is
true that they are twelve feet high, or that any one of them believes in
his own private mind the egregious announcement of the reviewer. The one
great sufferer by this craze for setting men of middling stature side
by side with Scott is our beautiful and beloved Stevenson, who, unless
rescued by some judicious hand, is likely to be buried under foolish and
unmeasured praises.
It would be easy to fill pages with verifications of the charge here
made. Books of the last half-dozen years or so, which have already
proved the ephemeral nature of their own claim, have been received with
plaudits which would have been exaggerated if applied to some of our
acknowledged classics. The critical declaration that ‘Eric Bright-eyes’
could have been written by no other Englishman of the last six hundred
years than Mr. Rider Haggard may be allowed its own monumental place in
the desert of silly and hysteric judgments.
It is time, for the sake of mere common-sense, to get back to something
like a real standard of excellence. It is time to say plainly that our
literature is in danger of degradation, and that the mass of readers is
systematically misled.
Before I go further, I will offer one word in self-excuse. I have taken
this work upon my own shoulders, because I cannot see that anybody else
will take it, and because it seems to me to be calling loudly to be
done. My one unwillingness to undertake it lies in the fact that I have
devoted my own life to the pursuit of that art the exercise of which
by my contemporaries I am now about to criticise. That has an evil and
ungenerous look. But, whatever the declaration may seem to be worth, I
make it with sincerity and truth. I have never tasted the gall of envy
in my life. I have had my share, and my full share, of the critical
sugarplums. I have never, in the critics, apprehension, ‘rivalled
or surpassed Sir Walter,’ but on many thousands of printed pages
(of advertisement) it is recorded that I have ‘more genius for the
delineation of rustic character than any half-dozen surviving novelists
put together.’ I laugh when I read this, for I remember Thomas Hardy,
who is my master far and far away. I am quite persuaded that my critic
was genuinely pleased with the book over which he thus ‘pyrotechnicated’
(as poor Artemus used to say), but I think my judgment the more sane
and sober of the two. I have not the faintest desire to pull down other
men’s flags and leave my own flag flying. And there is the first and
last intrusion of myself. I felt it necessary, and I will neither erase
it nor apologise for its presence.
Side by side with the exaggerated admiration with which our professional
censors greet the crowd of new-comers, it is instructive to note the
contempt into which some of our old gods have fallen. The Superior
Person we have always with us. He is, in his essence, a Prig; but when,
as occasionally happens, his heart and intelligence ripen, he loses the
characteristics which once made him a superior person. Whilst he holds
his native status his special art is not to admire anything which common
people find admirable. A year or two ago it became the shibboleth of his
class that they couldn’t read Dickens. We met suddenly a host of people
who really couldn’t stand Dickens. Most of them (of course) were ‘the
people of whom crowds are made,’ owning no sort of mental furniture
worth exchange or purchase. They killed the fashion of despising Dickens
_as_ a fashion, and the Superior Person, finding that his sorrowful
inability was no longer an exclusive thing, ceased to brag about it.
When a fashion in dress is popular on Hampstead Heath on Bank Holiday
festivals, the people who originally set the fashion discard it, and set
another. In half a generation some of our superiors, for the mere sake
of originality in judgment, will be going back to the pages of that
immortal master-immortal as men count literary immortality--and will
begin to tell us that after all there was really something in him.
It was Mr. W. D. Howells, an American writer of distinguished ability,
as times go, who set afloat the phrase that since the death of Thackeray
and Dickens fiction has become a finer art. If Mr. Howells had meant
what many people supposed him to mean, the saying would have been merely
impudent He used the word ‘finer’ in its literal sense, and meant only
that a fashion of minuteness in investigation and in style had come upon
us. There is a sense in which the dissector who makes a reticulation of
the muscular and nervous systems of a little finger is a ‘finer’ surgeon
than the giant of the hospitals whose diagnosis is an inspiration, and
whose knife carves unerringly to the root of disease. There is a sense
in which a sculptor, carving on cherrystones likenesses of commonplace
people, would be a ‘finer’ artist than Michael Angelo, whose custom it
was to handle forms of splendour on an heroic scale of size. In that
sense, and in the hands of some of its practitioners, fiction for a
year or two became a finer art than it had ever been before. But the
microscopist was never popular, and could never hope to be. He is dead
now, and the younger men are giving us vigorous copies of Dumas, and
Scott, and Edgar Allan Poe, and some of them are fusing the methods of
Dickens with those of later and earlier writers. We are in for an era of
broad effect again.
But a great many people, and, amongst them, some who ought to have known
better, adopted the saying of Mr. Howells in a wider sense than he ever
intended it to carry, and, partly as a result of this, we have arrived
at a certain tacit depreciation of the greatest emotional master of
fiction. There are other and more cogent reasons for the temporary
obscuration of that brilliant light. It may aid our present purpose to
discover what they are.
Every age has its fashions in literature as it has in dress. All the
beautiful fashions in literature, at least, have been thought worthy of
revival and imitation, but there has come to each in turn a moment when
it has begun to pall upon the fancy. Every school before its death
is fated to inspire satiety and weariness. The more overwhelming its
success has been, the more complete and sweeping is the welcomed change.
We know how the world thrilled and wept over Pamela and Clarissa, and
we know how their particular form of pathos sated the world and died.
We know what a turn enchanted castles had, and how their spell withered
into nothing. We know what a triumphal progress the Sentimental Sufferer
made through the world, and what a bore he came to be. It is success
which kills. Success breeds imitation, and the imitators are a
weariness. And it is not the genius who dies. It is only the school
which arose to mimic him. Richardson is alive for everybody but the
dull and stupid. Now that the world of fiction is no longer crowded with
enchanted castles, we can go to live in one occasionally for a change,
and enjoy ourselves. Werther is our friend again, though the school he
founded was probably the most tiresome the world has seen.
Now, with the solitary exception of Sir Walter Scott, it is probable
that no man ever inspired such a host of imitators as Charles Dickens.
There is not a writer of fiction at this hour, in any land where fiction
is a recognised trade or art, who is not, whether he knows it and owns
it, or no, largely influenced by Dickens. His method has got into the
atmosphere of fiction, as that of all really great writers must do,
and we might as well swear to unmix our oxygen and hydrogen as to stand
clear of his influences. To stand clear of those influences you must
stand apart from all modern thought and sentiment. You must have read
nothing that has been written in the last sixty years, and you must have
been bred on a desert island. Dickens has a living part in the life of
the whole wide world. He is on a hundred thousand magisterial benches
every day. There is not a hospital patient in any country who has not
at this minute a right to thank God that Dickens lived. What his blessed
and bountiful hand has done for the poor and oppressed, and them
that had no helper, no man knows. He made charity and good feeling a
religion. Millions and millions of money have flowed from the coffers of
the rich for the benefit of the poor because of his books. A great part
of our daily life, and a good deal of the best of it, is of his making.
No single man ever made such opportunities for himself. No single man
was ever so widely and permanently useful. No single man ever sowed
gentleness and mercy with so broad a sweep.
This is all true, and very far from new, but it has not been the fashion
to say it lately. It is not the whole of the truth. Noble rivers have
their own natural defects of swamp and mudbank. Sometimes his tides ran
sluggishly, as in ‘The Battle of Life,’ for example, which has always
seemed to me, at least, a most mawkish and unreal book. The pure stream
of ‘The Carol,’ which washes the heart of a man, runs thin in ‘The
Chimes,’ runs thinner in ‘The Haunted Man,’ and in ‘The Battle of Life’
is lees and mud. ‘Nickleby,’ again, is a young man’s book, and as full
of blemishes as of genius. But when all is said and done, it killed the
Yorkshire schools.
The chief fault the superficial modern critic has to find with Dickens
is a sort of rumbustious boisterousness in the expression of emotion.
But let one thing be pointed out, and let me point it out in my own
fashion. Tom Hood, who was a true poet, and the best of our English
wits, and probably as good a judge of good work as any person now alive,
went home after meeting with Dickens, and in a playful enthusiasm told
his wife to cut off his hand and bottle it, because it had shaken hands
with Boz. Lord Jeffrey, who was cold as a critic, cried over little
Nell. So did Sydney Smith, who was very far from being a blubbering
sentimentalist. To judge rightly of any kind of dish you must bring
an appetite to it. Here is the famous Dickens pie, when first served,
pronounced inimitable, not by a class or a clique, but by all men in
all lands. But you get it served hot, and you get it served cold, it is
rehashed in every literary restaurant, you detect its flavour in your
morning leader and your weekly review. The pie gravy finds its way into
the prose and the verse of a whole young generation. It has a striking
flavour, an individual flavour, It gets into everything. We are weary
of the ceaseless resurrections of that once so toothsome dish. Take it
away.
The original pie is no worse and no better, but thousands of cooks have
had the recipe for it, and have tried to make it. Appetite may have
vanished, but the pie was a good pie.
No simile runs on all fours, and this parable in a pie-dish is a poor
traveller.
But this principle of judgment applies of necessity to all great work
in art. It does not apply to merely good work, for that is nearly always
imitative, and therefore not much provocative of imitation. It happens
sometimes that an imitator, to the undiscerning reader, may even
seem better than the man he mimics, because he has a modern touch. But
remember, in his time the master also was a modern.
The new man says of Dickens that his sentiment rings false. This is a
mistake. It rings old-fashioned. No false note ever moved a world, and
the world combined to love his very name. There were tears in thousands
of households when he died, and they were as sincere and as real as if
they had arisen at the loss of a personal friend.
We, who in spite of fashion remain true to our allegiance to the
magician of our youth, who can never worship or love another as we loved
and worshipped him, are quite contented in the slight inevitable dimming
of his fame. He is still in the hearts of the people, and there he has
only one rival.
No attempt at a review of modern fiction can be made without a mention
of the men who were greatest when the art was great When we have done
with the giants we will come down to the big fellows, and by that time
we shall have an eye for the proportions of the rest. But before we
part for the time being, let me offer the uncritical reader one valuable
touchstone. Let him recall the stories he has read, say, five years ago.
If he can find a live man or woman anywhere amongst his memories, who
is still as a friend or an enemy to him, he has, fifty to one, read a
sterling book. Dickens’ people stand this test with all readers, whether
they admire him or no. Even when they are grotesque they are alive. They
live in the memory even of the careless like real people. And this is
the one unfailing trial by which great fiction may be known.
II.--CHARLES READE
Reade’s position in literature is distinctly strange. The professional
critics never came within miles of a just appreciation of his greatness,
and the average ‘cultured reader’ receives his name with a droll air of
allowance and patronage. But there are some, and these are not the least
qualified as judges, who regard him as ranking with the great masters.
You will find, I think, that the men holding this opinion are, in the
main, fellow-workers in the craft he practised. His warmest and most
constant admirers are his brother novelists. Trollope, to be sure,
spoke of him as ‘almost a man of genius,’ but Trollope’s mind was a
quintessential distillation of the commonplace, and the man who was on
fire with the romance and passion of his own age was outside the limit
of his understanding. But amongst the writers of English fiction whom
it has been my privilege to know personally, I have not met with one who
has not reckoned Charles Reade a giant.
The critics have never acknowledged him, and, in a measure, he has been
neglected by the public. There is a reason for everything, if we could
only find it, and sometimes I seem to have a glimmering of light on this
perplexing problem. Sir Walter Besant (Mr. Besant then) wrote in the
‘Gentleman’s Magazine’ years ago a daring panegyric on Reade’s work,
giving him frankly a place among the very greatest. My heart glowed as I
read, but I know now that it took courage of the rarer sort to express
a judgment so unreserved in favour of a writer who never for an hour
occupied in the face of the public such a position as is held by three
or four men in our day, whom this dead master could have rolled in the
hollow of his hand.
Let me try for a minute or two to show why and how he is so very great
a man; and then let me try to point out one or two of the reasons for
which the true reward of greatness has been denied him.
The very first essential to greatness in any pursuit is that a man
should be in earnest in respect to it. You may as well try to kindle
your household fire with pump water as to excite laughter by the
invention of a story which does not seem laughable to yourself, or to
draw real tears by a story conceived whilst your own heart is dry, ‘The
wounded is the wounding heart.’ In Charles Reade’s case this essential
sympathy amounted to a passion. He derided difficulties, but he derided
them after the fashion of the thorough-going enthusiast, and not after
that of the sluggard. He made up his mind to write fiction, and he
practised for years before he printed a line. He assured himself of
methods of selection and of forms of expression. Better equipped by
nature than one in a hundred of those who follow the profession he had
chosen he laboured with a fiery, unresting patience to complete his
armoury, and to perfect himself in the handling of its every weapon. He
read omnivorously, and, throughout his literary lifetime, he made it
his business to collect and to collate, to classify and to catalogue,
innumerable fragments of character, of history, of current news, of
evanescent yet vital stuffs of all sorts. In the last year but one of
his life he went with me over some of the stupendous volumes he had
built in this way. The vast books remain as an illustration of his
industry, but only one who has seen him in consultation with their pages
can guess the accuracy and intimacy of his knowledge of their contents.
They seem to deal with everything, and with whatever they enclosed he
was familiar.
This encyclopaedic industry would have left a commonplace man
commonplace, and in the estimate of a great man’s genius it takes rank
merely as a characteristic. His sympathy for his chosen craft was backed
by a sympathy for humanity just as intense and impassioned. He was a
glorious lover and hater of lovable and hateful things.
In one respect he was almost unique amongst men, for he united a savage
detestation of wrong with a most minute accuracy in his judgment of its
extent and quality. He laboured in the investigation of the problems
of his own age with the cold diligence of an antiquary. He came to a
conclusion with the calm of a great judge. And when his cause was sure
he threw himself upon it with an extraordinary and sustained energy. The
rage of his advocacy is in surprising contrast with the patience exerted
in building up his case.
Reade had a poet’s recognition for the greatness of his own time. He saw
the epic nature of the events of his own hour, the epic character of the
men who moulded those events. Hundreds of years hence, when federated
Australia is thickly sown with great cities, and the island-continent
has grown to its fulness of accomplished nationhood, and is grey in
honour, Reade’s nervous English, which may by that time have grown
quaint, and only legible to learned eves, will preserve; the history of
its beginnings. That part of His work, indeed, is purely and wholly epic
in sentiment and discernment, however colloquial in form, and it is
the sole example of its kind, since it was written by one who was
contemporary with the events described.
Reade was pretty constantly at war with his critics, but he fairly
justified himself of the reviewer in his own day, and at this time the
people who assailed him have something like a right to sleep in peace.
In private life one of the most amiable of men, and distinguished for
courtesy and kindness, he was a swash-buckler in controversy. He had a
trick of being in the right which his opponents found displeasing,
and he was sometimes cruel in his impatience of stupidity and
wrong-headedness. Scarcely any continuance in folly could have
inspired most men to the retorts he occasionally made. He wrote to one
unfortunate: ‘Sir,--You have ventured to contradict me on a question
with regard to which I am profoundly learned, where you are ignorant
as dirt.’ It was quite true, but another kind of man would have found
another way of saying it.
That trick of being right came out with marked effect in the discussion
which accompanied the issue of ‘Hard Cash’ in ‘All the Year Round,’ A
practitioner in lunacy condemned one of the author’s statements as a
bald impossibility. Reade answered that the impossibility in question
disguised itself as fact, and went through the hollow form of taking
place on such and such a date in such and such a public court, and was
recorded in such and such contemporary journals. Whenever he made a
crusade against a public evil, as when he assailed the prison system,
or the madhouse system, or the system of rattening in trades unions, his
case was supported by huge collections of indexed fact, and in the fight
which commonly followed he could appeal to unimpeachable records; but
again and again the angry fervour of the advocate led people to forget
or to distrust the judicial accuracy on which his case invariably
rested.
When all is said and done, his claim to immortality lies less in the
books which deal with the splendours and the scandals of his own
age than in that monument of learning, of humour, of pathos, and of
narrative skill, ‘The Cloister and the Hearth.’* It is not too much to
say of this book that, on its own lines, it is without a rival. To the
reader it seems to be not less than the revival of a dead age. To assert
dogmatically that the bygone people with whom it deals could not have
been other than it paints them would be to pretend to a knowledge
greater than the writer’s own. But they are not the men and women with
whom we are familiar in real life, and they are not the men and women
with whom other writers of fiction have made us acquainted. Yet they are
indubitably human and alive, and we doubt them no more than the people
with whom we rub shoulders in the street. Dr. Conan Doyle once said
to me what I thought a memorable thing about this book; To read it, he
said, was ‘like going through the Dark Ages with a dark lantern,’ It
is so, indeed. You pass along the devious route from old Sevenbergen to
mediaeval Rome, and wherever the narrative leads you, the searchlight
flashes on everything, and out of the darkness and the dust and death of
centuries life leaps at you. And I know nothing in English prose which
for a noble and simple eloquence surpasses the opening and the closing
paragraphs of this great work, nor--with some naïve and almost childish
passages of humour omitted--a richer, terser, purer, or more perfect
style than that of the whole narrative. Nowadays, the fashion in
criticism has changed, and the feeblest duffer amongst us receives
welcome ten times more enthusiastic and praise less measured than was
bestowed upon ‘The Cloister and the Hearth’ when it first saw the light.
Think only for a moment--think what would happen if such a book should
suddenly be launched upon us. Honestly, there _could_ be no reviewing
it. Our superlatives have been used so often to describe, at the best,
good, plain, sound work, and, at the worst, frank rubbish, that we have
no vocabulary for excellence of such a cast.
* It is worth while to record here a phrase used by Charles
Reade to me in reference to this work. He was rebutting the
charge of plagiarism which had been brought against him, and
he said laughingly, ‘It is true that I milked three hundred
cows into my bucket, but the butter I churned was my own.’
And now, how comes it that with genius, scholarship, and style, with
laughter and terror and tears at his order, this great writer halts in
his stride towards the place which should be his by right? It seems to
me at times as if I had a partial answer to that question. I believe
that a judicious editor, without a solitary act of impiety, could give
Charles Reade undisputed and indisputable rank. One-half the whole
business is a question of printing. This great and admirable writer had
one constant fault, which is so vulgar and trivial that it remains
as much of a wonder as it is of an offence. He seeks emphasis by the
expedient of big type and small type, of capitals and small capitals,
of italics and black letter, and of tawdry little illustrations. Long
before the reader arrives at the point at which it is intended that his
emotions shall be stirred, his eye warns him that the shock is coming.
He knows beforehand that the rhetorical bolt is to fall just there, and
when it comes it is ten to one that he finds the effect disappointing.
Or the change from the uniformity of the page draws his eye to the
‘displayed’ passages, and he is tantalised into reading them out of
their proper place and order. Take, for instance, an example which just
occurs to me. In ‘It is Never Too Late to Mend,’ Fielding and Robinson
are lost in an Australian forest--‘bushed,’ as the local phrase goes. At
that hour they are being hunted for their lives. They fall into a sort
of devil’s circle, and, as lost men have often done, they come in the
course of their wanderings upon their own trail. For awhile they follow
it in the hope that it will lead them to some camp or settlement.
Suddenly Fielding becomes aware that they are following the track of
their own earlier footprints, and almost in the same breath he discovers
that these are joined by the traces of other feet. He reads a fatal and
true meaning into this sign, looks to his weapons, and starts off at a
mended pace. ‘What are you doing?’ asks Robinson, and Fielding answers
(in capital letters): ‘I am hunting the hunters!’ The situation is
admirably dramatic. Chance has so ordered it that the pursued are
actually behind the pursuers, and the presence of the intended murderers
is proclaimed by a device which is at once simple, natural, novel, and
surprising. All the elements for success in thrilling narrative are
here, and the style never lulls for a second, or for a second allows
the strain of the position to relax. But those capital letters have
long since called the eye of the reader to themselves, and the point the
writer tries to emphasise is doubly lost. It has been forestalled, and
has become an irritation. You come on it twice; you have been robbed of
anticipation and suspense, which, just here, are the life and soul of
art. You know before you ought to be allowed to guess; and, worst of
all, perhaps, you feel that your own intelligence has been affronted.
Surely you had imagination enough to feel the significance of the line
without this meretricious trick to aid you. It is not the business of
a great master in fiction to jog the elbow of the unimaginative, and
to say, ‘Wake up at this,’ or ‘Here it is your duty to the narrative to
experience a thrill.’
Another and an equally characteristic fault, though of far less frequent
occurrence, is Reade’s fashion of intruding himself upon his reader.
He stands, in a curiously irritating way, between the picture he has
painted and the man he has invited to look at it. In one instance he
drags the eye down to a footnote in order that you may read: ‘I, C. R.,
say this’--which is very little more or less than an impertinence. The
sense of humour which probably twinkled in the writer’s mind is faint at
the best. We know that he, C. R., said that. We are giving of our time
and intelligence to C. R., and we are rather sorry than otherwise to
find him indulging in this small buffoonery.
It should, I think, be an instruction to future publishers of Charles
Reade to give him Christian printing--to confine him in the body of
his narrative to one fount of type, and rigorously to deny him the use
(except in their accustomed and orthodox places) of capitals, small
capitals, and italics. And I cannot think that any irreverence could be
charged against an editor who had the courage to put a moist pen through
those expressions of egotism and naive self-satisfaction and vanity
which do occasionally disfigure his pages.
I ask myself if these trifles--for in comparison with the sum of Reade’s
genius they are small things indeed--can in any reasonable measure
account for the neglect which undoubtedly besets him. In narrative
vigour he has but one rival--Dumas _père_--and he is far and away the
master of that rival in everything but energy. No male writer surpasses
him in the knowledge of feminine human nature. There is no love-making
in literature to beat the story of the courtship of Julia Dodd and
Alfred Hardy in ‘Hard Cash.’ In mere descriptive power he ranks with the
giants. Witness the mill on fire in ‘The Cloister and the Hearth’; the
lark in exile in ‘Never too Late to Mend’; the boat-race in ‘Hard Cash’;
the scene of Kate Peyton at the firelit window, and Griffith in the
snow, in ‘Griffith Gaunt.’ There are a thousand bursts of laughter in
his pages, not mere sniggers, but lung-shaking laughters, and the man
who can go by any one of a hundred pathetic passages without tears is
a man to be pitied. Let it be admitted that at times he wrenches his
English rather fiercely, and yet let it be said that for delicacy,
strength, sincerity, clarity, and all great graces of style, he is side
by side with the noblest of our prose writers. Can it be that a few
scattered drops of vulgarity in emphasis dim such a fire as this?
Does so small a dead fly taint so big a pot of ointment? I will not be
foolish enough to dogmatise on such a point, and yet I can find no other
reasons than those I have already given why a master-craftsman should
not hold a master-craftsman’s place. Solomon has told us what ‘a little
folly’ can do for him who is in reputation for wisdom.’ The great mass
of the public can always tell what pleases it, but it cannot always tell
why it is pleased.
And the man who writes for wide and lasting fame has to depend, not upon
the verdict of the expert and the cultured, but on the love of those who
only know they love, and who have no power to give the critical why and
wherefore. The public--‘the stupid and ignorant pig of a public,’ as
‘Pococurante’ called it years ago--is always being abused, and yet it is
only the public which, in the end, can tell us if we have done well or
ill. We have all to consent to be measured by it, and, in the long run,
it estimates our stature with a perfect accuracy.
I hope I may not be thought impertinent in intruding here a reminiscence
of Reade which seems characteristic of his sweeter side. In reading over
these pages for the press I have been moved to a mournful and tender
remembrance of the only one of the three great Vanished Masters whom it
was my happy chance to meet in the flesh. I dedicated to him the second
novel which left my pen--the third to reach the public--and in sending
him the volumes on the day of issue I wrote what I remember as a rather
boyish letter, in which I was at no pains to disguise my admiration for
his genius. That admiration was not then tempered by the considerations
which are expressed above, for they touched me only after many years of
practice in the art he adorned so richly. He answered with a gentle and
sad courtesy, and concluded with these words: ‘It is no discredit in a
young man to esteem a senior beyond his merits.’ I have always thought
that very graceful and felicitous, and now that I am myself grown to be
a senior I am more persuaded of its charm than ever.
III.--ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
In the scheme of this series, as originally-announced, Thackeray’s work
should have formed the subject of the third chapter. But, on reflection,
I have decided that, considering my present purpose, it would be little
more than a useless self-indulgence to do what I at first intended.
There is no sort of dispute about Thackeray. There is no need for any
revision of the general opinion concerning him. It would be to me,
personally, a delightful thing to write such an appreciation as I had in
mind, but this is not the place for it.
Let us pass, then, at once to the consideration of the incomplete and
arrested labours of the charming and accomplished workman whose loss all
lovers of English literature are still lamenting.
I have special and private reasons for thinking warmly of Robert Louis
Stevenson, the man; and these reasons seem to give me some added warrant
for an attempt to do justice to Robert Louis Stevenson, the writer. With
the solitary exception of the unfortunate cancelled letters from Samoa,
which were written whilst he was in ill-health, and suffered a complete
momentary eclipse of style, he has scarcely published a line which may
not afford the most captious reader pleasure. With that sole exception
he was always an artist in his work, and always showed himself alive
to the fingertips. He was in constant conscious search of felicities in
expression, and his taste was exquisitely just. His discernment in the
use of words kept equal pace with his invention--he knew at once how to
be fastidious and daring. It is to be doubted if any writer has laboured
with more constancy to enrich and harden the texture of his style,
and at the last a page of his was like cloth of gold for purity and
solidity.
This is the praise which the future critics of English literature will
award him. But in this age of critical hysteria it is not enough to
yield a man the palm for his own qualities. With regard to Stevenson our
professional guides have gone fairly demented, and it is worth while to
make an effort to give him the place he has honestly earned, before the
inevitable reaction sets in, and unmerited laudations have brought about
an unmerited neglect. His life was arduous. His meagre physical means
and his fervent spirit were pathetically ill-mated. It was impossible to
survey his career without a sympathy which trembled from admiration to
pity. Certain, in spite of all precaution, to die young, and in the face
of that stern fact genially and unconquerably brave, he extorted love.
Let the whole virtue of this truth be acknowledged, and let it stand
in excuse for praises which have been carried beyond the limits of
absurdity. It is hard to exercise a sober judgment where the emotions
are brought strongly into play. The inevitable tragedy of Stevenson’s
fate, the unescapable assurance that he would not live to do all which
such a spirit in a sounder frame would have done for an art he loved so
fondly, the magnetism of his friendship, his downright incapacity for
envy, his genuine humility with regard to his own work and reputation,
his unboastful and untiring courage, made a profound impression upon
many of his contemporaries. It is, perhaps, small wonder if critical
opinion were in part moulded by such influences as these. Errors of
judgment thus induced are easily condoned. They are at least a million
times more respectable than the mendacities of the publisher’s tout, or
the mutual ecstasies of the rollers of logs and the grinders of axes.
The curious ease with which, nowadays, every puny whipster gets the
sword of Sir Walter has already been remarked. If any Tom o’ Bedlam
chooses to tell the world that all the New Scottish novelists are Sir
Walter’s masters, what does it matter to anybody? It is shamelessly
silly and impertinent, of course, and it brings newspaper criticism into
contempt, but there is an end of it. If the writers who are thus made
ridiculous choose to pluck the straws out of their critics’ hair and
stick them in their own, they are poorer creatures than I take them for.
The thing makes us laugh, or makes us mourn, just as it happens to hit
our humour; but it really matters very little. It establishes one of two
things--the critic is hopelessly incapable or hopelessly dishonest. The
dilemma is absolute. The peccant gentleman may choose his horn, and no
honest and capable reader cares one copper which he takes.
But with regard to Stevenson the case is very different. Stevenson
has made a bid for lasting fame. He is formally entered in the list of
starters for the great prize of literary immortality. No man alive can
say with certainty whether he will get it. Every forced eulogy handicaps
his chances. Every exaggeration of his merits will tend to obscure them.
The pendulum of taste is remorseless. Swing it too far on one side, it
will swing itself too far on the other.
In his case it has unfortunately become a critical fashion to set him
side by side with the greatest master of narrative fiction the world has
ever seen. In the interests of a true artist, whom this abuse of praise
will greatly injure if it be persisted in, it will be well to
endeavour soberly and quietly to measure the man, and to arrive at some
approximate estimate of his stature.
It may be assumed that the least conscientious and instructed of our
professional guides has read something of the history of Sir Walter
Scott, and is, if dimly, aware of the effect he produced in the realm of
literature in his lifetime. Sir Walter (who is surpassed or equalled
by six writers of our own day, in the judgment of those astounding
gentlemen who periodically tell us what we ought to think) was the
founder of three great schools. He founded the school of romantic
mediaeval poetry; he founded the school of antiquarian romance; and he
founded the school of Scottish-character romance. He did odds and
ends of literary work, such as the compilation and annotation of ‘The
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,’ and the notes to the poems and the
Waverley Series. These were sparks from his great stithy, but a man
of industry and talent might have shown them proudly as a lifetime’s
labour. The great men in literature are the epoch makers, and Sir Walter
is the only man in the literary history of the world who was an epoch
maker in more than one direction. It is the fashion to-day to decry him
as a poet. There are critics who, setting a high value on the verse
of Wordsworth or of Browning, for example, cannot concede the name of
poetry to any modern work which is not subtle and profound, metaphysical
or analytical. But as a mere narrative poet few men whose judgment is of
value will deny Scott the next place to Homer. As a poet he created
an epoch. It filled no great space in point of time, but we owe to Sir
Walter’s impetus ‘he Giaour,’ ‘he Corsair,’ the ‘Bride of Abydos.’ In
his second character of antiquarian romancist, he awoke the elder Dumas,
and such a host of imitators, big and little, as no writer ever had at
his heels before or since. When he turned to Scottish character he made
Galt, and Robert Louis Stevenson, and Dr. George Macdonald, and all the
modern gentlemen who, gleaning modestly in the vast field he found, and
broke, and sowed, and reaped, are now his rivals.
Do the writers who claim to guide our opinions read Scott at all? Do
they know the scene of the hidden and revealed forces in the Trossach
glen--the carriage of the Fiery Cross--the sentence on the erring nun
--the last fight of her betrayer? Do they know the story of Jeannie
Deans? But it is useless to ask these questions or to multiply these
instances. Scott is placed. Master of laughter, master of tears, giant
of swiftness; crowned king, without one all-round rival.
One of those astonishing and yet natural things which sometimes startle
us is the value some minds attach to mere modernity in art. An old thing
is tossed up in a new way, and there are those who attach more value
to the way than the thing, and are instantly agape with admiration of
originality. But originality and modishness are different things. People
who have a right to guide public opinion discern the difference.
The absurd and damaging comparison between Scott and Stevenson has been
gravely offered by the latter’s friends. They are doing a beautiful
artist a serious injustice, You could place Stevenson’s ravishing
assortment of cameos in any chamber of Scott’s feudal castle. It is
an intaglio beside a cathedral, a humming-bird beside an eagle. It is
anything exquisite beside anything nobly huge.
Let any man, who may be strongly of opinion that I am mistaken, conceive
Scott and Stevenson living in the same age and working in complete
ignorance of each other. Scott would still have set the world on fire.
Stevenson with his deft, swift, adaptive spirit, and his not easily
over-praised perfection in his craft, would have still done something;
but he would have missed his loftiest inspiration, his style would have
been far other than it is.
As a bit of pure literary enjoyment there are not many things better
than to turn from Stevenson’s more recent pages to Scott’s letters in
Lockhart’s ‘Life,’ and to see where the modern found the staple of his
best and latest style.
The comparison, which has been urged so often, will not stand a moment’s
examination. Stevenson is not a great creative artist. He is not an
epoch maker. He cannot be set shoulder to shoulder with any of the
giants. It is no defect in him which prompts this protest. Except in
the sense in which his example of purity, delicacy, and finish in verbal
work will inspire other artists, Stevenson will have no imitators, as
original men always have. He has ‘done delicious things,’ but he has
done nothing new. He has with astonishing labour and felicity built a
composite style out of the style of every good writer of English.
Even in a single page he sometimes reflected many manners. He is
the embodiment of the literary as distinguished from the originating
intellect. His method is almost perfect, but it is devoid of
personality. He says countless things which are the very echo of Sir
Walter’s epistolary manner. He says things like Lamb, and sometimes they
are as good as the original could have made them. He says things like
Defoe, like Montaigne, like Rochefoucauld.
His bouquet is culled in every garden, and set in leaves which have
grown in all forests of literature. He is deft, apt, sprightly,
and always sincerely a man. He is just and brave, and essentially a
gentleman. He has the right imitative romance, and he can so blend Defoe
and Dickens with a something of himself which is almost, but not quite,
creative, that he can present you with a blind old Pugh or a John
Silver. He is a _littérateur_ born--and made. A verbal invention is meat
and drink to him. There are places where you see him actively in pursuit
of one, as when Markheim stops the clock with ‘an interjected finger,’
or when John Silver’s half-shut, cunning, and cruel eye sparkles ‘like
a crumb of glass.’ Stevenson has run across the Channel for that crumb,
and it is worth the journey.
Stevenson certainly had that share of genius which belongs to the man
who can take infinite pains. Add to this a beautiful personal character,
and an almost perfect receptivity. Add again the power of sympathetic
realisation in a purely literary sense, and you have the man. Let me
make my last addition clear. It is a common habit of his to think as
his literary favourites would have thought He could think like Lamb. He
could think like Defoe. He could even fuse two minds in this way,
and make, as it were, a composite mind for himself to think with.
His intellect was of a very rare and delicate sort, and whilst he was
essentially a reproducer, he was in no sense an imitator, or even for a
single second a plagiarist. He had an alembic of his own which made old
things new. His best possession was that very real sense of proportion
which was at the root of all his humour. ‘Why doesn’t God explain these
things to a gentleman like me?’ There, a profound habitual reverence
of mind suddenly encounters with a ludicrous perception of his own
momentary self-importance. The two electric opposites meet, and emit
that flash of summer lightning.
Stevenson gave rare honour to his work, and the artist who shows his
self-respect in that best of ways will always be respected by the
world. He has fairly won our affection and esteem, and we give them
ungrudgingly. In seeming to belittle him I have taken an ungrateful
piece of work in hand. But in the long run a moderately just estimate of
a good man’s work is of more service to his reputation than a strained
laudation can be. It is not the critics, and it is not I, who will
finally measure his proportions. He seems to me to stand well in the
middle of the middle rank of accepted writers. He will not live as an
inventor, for he has not invented. He will not live as one of those who
have opened new fields of thought. He will not live amongst those who
have explored the heights and the deeps of the spirit of man. He
may live--‘the stupid and ignorant pig of a public’ will settle the
question--as a writer in whose works stand revealed a lovable, sincere,
and brave soul and an unsleeping vigilance of artistic effort.
The most beautiful thing he has done--to my mind--is his epitaph. There
are but eight lines of it, but I know nothing finer in its way:
Under the wide and starry sky
Lay me down and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will!
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be:
Home is the Sailor, home from sea,
And the Hunter home from the hill.
Sleep there, bright heart! In your waking hours you would have laughed
at the exaggerated praises which do you such poor service now!
IV.--LIVING MASTERS--MEREDITH AND HALL CAINE
There is a very old story to the effect that a party of gentlemen who
were compiling a dictionary described a crab as ‘a small red animal
which walks backwards.’ Apart from the facts that the crab is not
red, is not an animal, and does not walk backwards, the definition was
pronounced to be wholly admirable. I was reminded of this bit of ancient
history when, some time ago, I read a criticism on George Meredith from
the pen of Mr. George Moore. Mr. Moore represented his subject as a
shouting, gesticulating man in a crowd, who, in spite of great efforts
to be heard, remained unintelligible. As a description of a curiously
calm sage who soliloquises for his own amusement in a study this is
perfect. The enormous growth in the number of unthinking readers, and
the corresponding increase in our printed output, have brought about
some singular conditions, and, amongst them, this: that it is possible
to sustain a reputation by the mere act of being absurd.