critical press in recent years, one has to admit that in its treatment
of George Meredith it has performed a very considerable and praiseworthy
public service. For many years Meredith worked in obscurity so far as
the general public were concerned. Here and there he won an impassioned
admirer, and from his beginning it may be said that he found audience
fit though few; but he owes much of the present extent of his reputation
to the efforts of generous and enlightened critics, who would not let
the public rest until they had at least given his genius a hearing. He
is now, and has for some time been, a fashionable cult. It is not likely
that in the broad sense he will ever be a popular writer, for the mass
of novel-readers are an idle and pleasure-loving folk, and no mere idler
and pleasure-seeker will read Meredith often or read him long at a time.
The little book which the angel gave to John of Patmos, commanding that
he should eat it, was like honey in the mouth, but in the belly it was
bitter. To the reader who first approaches him, a book of Meredith’s
offers an accurate contrast to the roll presented by the angel. It is
tough chewing, but in digestion most suave and fortifying. The people
who instantly enjoy him, who relish him at first bite, are rare. Fine
intelligences are always rare. Personally, I am not one of the happy
few. I am at my third reading of any one of Meredith’s later books
before I am wholly at my ease with it. I can find a most satisfying
simile (to myself). A new book of Meredith’s comes to me like a hamper
of noble wines. I know the vintages, and I rejoice. I set to work to
open the hamper. It is corded and wired in the most exasperating way,
but at last I get it open. That is my first reading. Then I range my
bottles in the cellar--port, burgundy, hock, champagne, imperial tokay;
subtle and inspiring beverages, not grown in common vineyards, and
demanding to be labelled. That is my second reading. Then I sit down to
my wine, and that is my third; and in any book of Meredith’s I have a
cellarful for a lifetime.
In view of a benefaction like this it becomes a man to be grateful,
but for all that it is a pity that a great writer and a willing reader
should be held apart by any avoidable hindrances. It is quite true that
an immediate popularity is no test of high merit. But the real man of
genius is, after all, he who permanently appeals to the widest public.
To the middle-aged and the elderly fiction is a luxury. A story-book
is like a pipe. It soothes and gratifies, and it helps an idle hour to
pass. But younger people find actual food or actual poison where their
elders find mere amusement. There are hundreds of thousands of young
men and women who feel that they would like to have a clear outlook
on things, who are searching more or less in earnest for a mental
standing-place and point of view. If I had my way they should all be
made to read Meredith, and the book at which I would start them should
be ‘The Shaving of Shagpat.’ It is in the nature of a handbook or guide
to a young person of genius, it is true, and we can’t all be persons of
genius; but there is enough human nature in it to make it serviceable to
all but the stupid. In the midst of its fantastic phantasmagoria
there is a view of life so sane, so lofty, so feminine-tender, so
masculine-strong, so piercing, keen and clear, that it is not easy to
find an expression for admiration which shall be at once adequate and
sober. On the mere surface it is almost as good as the ‘Arabian Nights,’
and at the first flush of it you think that fancy is running riot. But
when once the intention is grasped you find beneath that playful foam of
seeming fun and frolic a very astonishing and deep philosophy, and
the whole wild masquerade is filled with meaning. Read ‘The Shaving
of Shagpat,’ earnest young men and maidens. There is not much that is
better for mere amusement in all the libraries, and if you care for the
ripe conclusions of a scholar and a gentleman who knows the whole game
of life better than any other man now living, you may find them there.
I learn, on very good authority, that Meredith has but a poor
comparative opinion of his earlier work, and that he would dissent
rather strongly from the critic who pronounced ‘The Ordeal of Richard
Feverel’ his masterpiece. Yet it seems to me to be so, and in one
particular it takes high rank indeed. It is remarkable that whilst
love-making is so essential a part of the general human business, and
whilst no novel or play which ignores it stands much chance of success,
there are only two or three really virile presentations in fiction of
‘the way of a man with a maid.’ Shakspere gave us one in ‘Romeo and
Juliet,’ but then Shakspere gave us everything. Charles Reade, in ‘Hard
Cash,’ has shown us a pure girl growing into pure passion--a bit of
truth and beauty which alone might make a sterling and enduring name for
him. And Meredith in ‘Feverel’ has given us scenes of young courtship
which are beyond the praises of a writer like myself. The two young
people on their magic island are amongst the real-ideal figures which
haunt my mind with sweetness. Nature on either side is virginal. It
flames and trembles with natural passion both in boy and girl, and
they are as pure as a pair of daisies. Any workman in the school
of Namby-Pamby could have kept their purity. Any writer of the
Roman-candle-volcanic tribe could have heaped up their fires, after
a fashion. But for this special piece of work God had first to make a
gentleman, and then to give him genius.
One peculiarity in Meredith is worthy of notice. He makes known to us
the interior personality of his characters; he does this so completely
that we are persuaded that we could predict their line of conduct in
given circumstances; and then a set of circumstances occur in which
they do something we should never have believed of them, and we have
to confess that their maker is just and right, and that there is no
disputing him.
There are inconsistencies in his pages more glaring than anything we
can imagine outside real life. The average artist, dealing with these
manifestations, is a spectacle for pity, as the average man would be
on Blondin’s tight rope. The faintest deviation, the most momentary
uncertainty of footing, a doubt, even, and it is all over. But Meredith
never falters. He proves the impossible true by the mere fact of
recording it.
He has no cranks or crazes or ‘isms. He sees human nature with an eye
which is at once broad and microscopic. What seem the very faults of
style are virtues pushed to an extreme. He says more in a page than
most men can say in a chapter. Modern science can put the nutritive
properties of a whole ox into a very modest canister. Meredith’s best
sentences have gone through just such a digestive process. He is not
for everybody’s table, but he is a pride and a delight to the pick of
English epicures.
From Meredith to Hall Caine is from the study of the analyst to the
foundry of the statuary; from art in cold calm to art in stormy fire.
Here, too, is a force at work but it is strength at stress, and not
at ease. Meredith is not very greatly moved. He sympathises, but he
sympathises from the brain. His heart is right towards the world, but it
is cool. The man we are now dealing with has a passionate sympathy. He
is hot at heart, and he does not look on at the movement of mankind as
merely understanding it, and analysing it, and liking it,--and making
allowances for it. He is tumultuous and urgent, daring and impetuous,
eager to say a great word. His conceptions shake him. They are all
grandiose and huge. The great passions are awake in them--avarice, lust,
hate, love, god-like pity, supreme courage, base fear. The whole trend
of his mind is towards the heroic. He struggles to be in touch with the
actual, and he makes many incursions upon it, but Romance snatches him
away again, and claims him for her own. His native and ineradicable
concept of a work of art in fiction is a story that shall shake the
soul. This inborn passion for the vast and splendid in spiritual things
is always in strict subordination to a moral purpose. Here is the reason
for his hold upon the English-speaking people, which is probably, at
this moment, deeper and wider than that of any other living writer.
I do not deal in what I am now about to say with the critical adjustment
of relative powers, but simply with a question of temperament You may
draw a triangle, and at one of its extremes you may place Meredith, at
another Stevenson, and at another Hall Caine. At one extremity you have
an artist whose methods are almost purely intellectual, at the next you
have an embodiment of sympathetic receptivity, and at the third a man
whose forces are almost wholly emotional and dynamic. Stevenson’s main
literary prompting was to say a thing as well as it could possibly be
said. Hall Caine’s chief spur is a fiery impulse to a moral warning.
From the earliest stages of Hall Caine’s literary career until now
his impulse has not changed, but he has made such a steady advance in
craftsmanship as could not be made by any man who did not take his work
in serious earnest. The faults of his first style still linger, but they
are chastened. He has the defect of his quality. In each of his books
he strives for an increasing stress of passion, a sustained crescendo; a
full and steady breeze for the beginning, and then a gale, a tempest,
a tornado. The story is always constructed with this view towards
emotional growth and culmination. Sometimes he lets us see the effort
this prodigious task imposes upon him, but in his later work more and
more rarely. The natural temptation is towards a resonant and insistent
eloquence, and he occasionally still forgets that he might, with ease to
himself, profitably leave the catastrophe he has created to make its
own impression. The artistic demand in the form of work to which his
instinct draws him is heavier than in any other. It is simply to be
white-hot in purpose and stone-cold in self-criticism at the same
instant of time.
Bar Meredith, who is quite _sui generis_, and Rudyard Kipling, whose
characteristics will be dealt with later on, Hall Caine has less of the
mark of his predecessors upon him than any of his contemporaries. His
work has grown out of himself. He has had a word to speak, and he has
spoken it So far he has increased in strength with every book, has grown
more master of his own conceptions and himself. In ‘A Son of Hagar’ he
forced his story upon his reader in defiance of possibility; but no such
blot on construction as the continued presence of a London cad in the
person of a Cumberland man in the latter’s native village has been seen
in his more recent work. It is worth notice that even in this portion of
his story the narrator shows no remotest sign of a disposition to crane
at any of the numerous fences which lie before him. He takes them all
in his stride, and the reader goes with him, willy-nilly, protesting
perhaps, but helplessly whirled along in the author’s grip. This faculty
of daring is sometimes an essential to the story-teller’s art, and
Hall Caine has it in abundance, not merely in the occasional facing of
improbabilities, but in that much loftier and more admirable form where
it enables him to confront the cataclysmic emotions of the mind, and to
carry to a legitimate conclusion scenes of tremendous conception and
of no less tremendous difficulty. In the minds of vulgar and careless
readers the defects which are hardest to separate from this form of art
are so many added beauties, just as the over-emphasis of a tragic actor
is the very thing which best appeals to the gallery. But Hall Caine does
not address himself to the vulgar and the careless. He is eager to
leave his reputation to his peers and to posterity. With every year of
ripening power his capacity for self-restraint has grown. When it has
come of age in him, there will be nothing but fair and well. There has
been no man in his time who has shown a deeper reverence for his work,
or a more consistent increase in his command of it. His method is large
and noble, in accord with his design. He has given us the right to look
to him for better and better and always better, and it is only in the
direction indicated that he can mend.
V.--LIVING MASTERS--RUDYARD KIPLING
I was ‘up in the back blocks’ of Victoria when I lighted upon some stray
copies of the weekly edition of the ‘Melbourne Argus,’ and became aware
of the fact that we had amongst us a new teller of stories, with a voice
and a physiognomy of his own. The ‘Argus’ had copied from some journal
in far-away India a poem and a story, each unsigned, and each bearing
evidence of the same hand. A year later I came back to England, and
found everybody talking about ‘The Man from Nowhere,’ who had just taken
London by storm. Rudyard Kipling’s best work was not as yet before us,
but there was no room for doubt as to the newcomer’s quality, and the
only question possible was as to whether he had come to stay. That
inquiry has now been satisfactorily answered. The new man of half a
dozen years ago is one of England’s properties, and not the one of which
she is least proud. About midway in his brief and brilliant career,
counting from his emergence until now, people began to be afraid that he
had emptied his sack. Partly because he had lost the spell of novelty,
and partly because he did too much to be always at his best, there came
a time when we thought we saw him sinking to a place with the ruck.
Sudden popularity carries with it many grave dangers, but the gravest
of all is the temptation to produce careless and unripe work. To this
temptation the new man succumbed, but only for awhile. Like the candid
friend of Lady Clara Vere de Vere, he saw the snare, and he retired. But
at the time when, instead of handing out the bread of life in generous
slices, he took to giving us the sweepings of the basket I wrote a set
of verses, which I called ‘The Ballad of the Rudyard Kipling.’ I never
printed it, because by the time it was fairly written.
Kipling’s work had not merely gone back to its first quality, but seemed
brighter and finer than before, and the poor thing, such as it was, was
in the nature of a satire. I venture to write down the opening verses
here, since they express the feeling with which at least one writer of
English fiction hailed his first appearance.
I
Oh, we be master mariners that sail the snorting seas,
Right red-plucked mariners that dare the peril of the storm
But we be old and worn and cold, and far from rest and ease,
And only love and brotherhood can keep our tired hearts warm.
II
We were a noble company in days not long gone by,
And mighty craft our elders sailed to every earthly shore.
Men of worship, and dauntless soul, that feared nor sea nor sky;
But God’s hand stilled the valiant hearts, and the masters sail no more.
III
And for awhile, though we be brave and handy of our trade,
We sailed no master-galleon, but wrought in cockboats all,
Slight craft and manned with a single hand; yet many a trip we made,
Though we but crept from port to port with cargoes scant and small.
IV
But on a day of wonder came ashining on the deep,
A royal Splendour, proud with sail, and generous roar of guns;
She passed us, and we gaped and stared.
Her lofty bows were steep,
And deep she rode the waters deep with a weight of countless tons.
V
Her rig was strange, her name unknown, she came we knew not whence,
But on the flag at her peak we read ‘The Drums of the Fore and Aft.’
And--I speak for one--my breath came thick and my pulse beat hard and tense,
And we cheered with tears of splendid joy at sight of the splendid craft.
VI
She swept us by; her master came and spoke us from the side;
We knew our elder, though his beard was scarce yet fully grown;
She spanked for home through churning foam with favouring wind and tide,
And while we hailed like mad he sailed, a King, to take his own.
Some men are born rich, and some are born lucky, and some are born both
to luck and riches. Kipling is one of the last. Nature endowed him with
uncommon qualities, and circumstances sent him into the sphere in which
those qualities could be most fortunately exercised. It seems strange
that the great store of treasure which he opened to us should have
been unhandled and unknown so long. His Indian pictures came like a
revelation. It is always so when a man of real genius dawns upon the
world. It was so when Scott showed men and women the jewelled mines of
romance which lay in the highways and byways of homely Scotland. It was
so when Dickens bared the Cockney hearth to the sight of all men. Meg
Merrilies, and Rob Roy, and Edie Ochiltree were all _there_--the wild,
the romantic, the humorous were at the doors of millions of men before
Scott saw them. In London, in the early days of Dickens, there were
hordes of capable writers eager for something new. Not one of them saw
Bob Cratchit, or Fagin, or the Marchioness until Dickens saw them. So,
in India, the British Tommy had lived for many a year, and the jungle
beasts were there, and Government House and its society were there,
and capable men went up and down the land, sensible of its charm, its
wonder, its remoteness from themselves, and yet not discerning truly.
At last, when a thousand feet have trodden upon a thing of inestimable
price, there comes along a newspaper man, doing the driest kind of
hackwork, bound to a drudgery as stale and dreary as any in life, and he
sees what no man has ever seen before him, though it has been plain in
view for years and years. Through scorn and discouragement and contumely
he polishes his treasure, in painful hours snatched from distasteful
labour, and at last he brings it where it can be seen and known for what
it is.*
* I learn, on the very best authority, that Mr. Kipling
regards his early and unrecognised days in India with much
kindlier eyes than this would seem to indicate. It may be
thought that, knowing this, I should amend or delete the
passage. I let it stand, however, with this note as a
qualification, because I think it possible that he, like the
rest of us, looks on the past through tinted spectacles.
It is only genius which owns the seeing eye. There are in Great Britain
to-day a dozen writers of fine faculty, trained to observe, trained
to give to observation its fullest artistic result; and they are all
panting for something new. The something new is under their noses. They
see it and touch it every day. If I could find it, my name in a year
would sail over the seas, and I should be a great personage. But I
shall not find it. None of the men who are now known will find it. It is
always the unknown man who makes that sort of discovery. He will come in
time, and when he comes we shall wonder and admire, and say: ‘How new!
How true!’ Why, in that very matter of Tommy Atkins, whose manifold
portraits have done as much as anything to endear Kipling to the English
people--it is known to many that in my own foolish youth I enlisted in
the Army. I lived with Tommy. I fought and chaffed and drank and drilled
and marched, and went ‘up tahn’ with him, and did pack drill, and had
C.B. with him. I turned novel-writer afterwards, and never so much as
dreamt of giving Tommy a place in my pages. Then comes Kipling, not
knowing him one-half as well in one way, and knowing him a thousand
times better in another way, and makes a noble and beautiful and merited
reputation out of him; shows the man inside the military toggery, and
makes us laugh and cry, and exult with feeling. There was a man in New
South Wales--a shepherd--who went raving mad when he learnt that the
heavy black dust which spoilt his pasture was tin, and that he had waked
and slept for years without discovering the gigantic fortune which was
all about him. I will not go mad, if I can help it, but I do think it
rather hard lines on me that I hadn’t the simple genius to see what lay
in Tommy.
A good deal has been said of the occasional coarseness of Kipling’s
pages. There are readers who find it offensive, and they have every
right to the expression of their feelings. I confess to having
been startled once or twice, but never in a wholly disagreeable
fashion--never as ‘Jude the Obscure’ startled. Poor Captain Mayne Reid,
who is still beloved by here and there a schoolboy, wrote a preface to
one of his books--I think ‘The Rifle Rangers,’ but it is years on years
since I saw it--in order to put forth his defence for the introduction
of an occasional oath or impious expletive in the conversation of his
men of the prairies. He pleaded necessity. It was impossible to portray
his men without it. And he argued that an oath does not soil the mind
‘like the clinging immorality of an unchaste episode.’ The majority
of Englishmen will agree with the gallant Captain. Kipling is rough
at times, and daring, but he is always clean and honest. There are no
hermaphroditic cravings after sexual excitement in him. He is too much
of a man to care for that kind of thing.
What a benefactor an honest laughter-maker is! Since Dickens there has
been nobody to fill our lungs like Kipling. Is it not better that the
public should have ‘My Lord the Elephant’ and ‘Brugglesmith’ to
laugh outright at than that they should be feebly sniggering over the
jest-books begotten on English Dulness by Yankee humour, as they were
eight or nine years ago? That jugful of Cockney sky-blue, with a feeble
dash of Mark Twain in it, which was called ‘Three Men in a Boat’ was not
a cheerful tipple for a mental bank-holiday, but we poor moderns got no
better till the coming of Kipling. We have a right to be grateful to the
man who can make us laugh.
The thing which strikes everybody who reads Kipling--and who does
not?--is the truly astonishing range of his knowledge of technicalities.
He is very often beyond me altogether, but I presume him to be accurate,
because nobody finds him out, and that is a thing which specialists are
so fond of doing that we may be sure they would have been about him in
clouds if he had been vulnerable. He gives one the impression at times
of being arrogant about this special fund of knowledge. But he
nowhere cares to make his modesty conspicuous to the reader, and his
cocksureness is only the obverse of his best literary virtue. It comes
from the very crispness and definiteness with which he sees things.
There are no clouds about the edges of his perceptions. They are all
clear and _nette_, Things observed by such a man dogmatise to the mind,
and it is natural that he should dogmatise as to what he sees with such
apparent precision and completeness.
A recent writer, anonymous, but speaking from a respectable vehicle
as platform, has told us that the short story is the highest form into
which any expression of the art of fiction can be cast. This to me looks
very like nonsense. I do not know any short story which can take rank
with ‘Père Goriot,’ or ‘Vanity Fair,’ or ‘David Copper-field.’ The short
story has charms of its own, and makes demands of its own. What those
demands are only the writers who have subjected themselves to its
tyranny can know. The ordinary man who tries this form of art finds
early that he is emptying his mental pockets. Kipling’s riches in this
respect have looked as if they were without end, and no man before him
has paid away so much. But it has to be remembered here that in many
examples of his power in this way he has been purely episodic, and the
discovery or creation of an episode is a much simpler thing than the
discovery or creation of a story proper, which is a collection of
episodes, arranged in close sequence, and leading to a catastrophe,
tragic or comic, as the theme may determine.
In estimating the value of any writer’s work you must take his range
into consideration. Kipling stretches, in emotion, from deep seriousness
to exuberant laughter; and his grasp of character is quite firm and
sure, whether he deal with Mrs. Hawksbee or with Dinah Shadd; with
a field officer or with Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd; with the
Inspector of Forests or with Mowgli. He knows the ways of thinking
of them all, and he knows the tricks of speech of all, and the outer
garniture and daily habitudes of all. His mind seems furnished with an
instantaneous camera and a phonographic recorder in combination; and
keeping guard over this rare mental mechanism is a spirit of catholic
affection and understanding.