break out with greater force than ever. What he calls--with one of
those tumbles into foreign idiom which occasionally mark his pages--‘the
fever of the gamble’ has never been truly diagnosed in English fiction,
and the theme is undeniably fertile. He knows absolutely nothing about
the manifestations of the disorder, to begin with; but that is of no
consequence, for the world is open to observation; and the note-book,
the inquiring mind, and the sleuthhound patience are all as available
as ever. Then a combination occurs to him. Servantgalism awaits; its
painter. The life is picturesque from a certain point of view: it
impinges more or less on the lives of all of us, and nobody has hitherto
thought it worth while to search into its mysteries, and to tell us what
it is really like. He knows nothing at all about this either, but
he will make inquiries. He does make inquiries, and they result in a
picture which is, on the whole, a piece of surprising accuracy. But
still all the fire is for the work. The subject is sought for, the
details are gathered, the workman’s patience and labour are truly
conscientious--at times they excite admiration and surprise--but the
net result is lifeless. In the way of waxwork--it would be hard to find
anything more effective than the people in ‘Esther Waters.’ They are
clothed with an exactitude of detail which would do credit to Madame
Tussaud’s exhibition in its latest development. They are carefully
modelled and coloured and posed. They are capital waxwork, and if the
author had only cared a little bit about them, they might have even that
mystic touch of life which thrills us in the finer sorts of fiction. It
is eternally true that the wounded is the wounding heart, and the mere
descriptive and analytical method not only misses the natural human
movement, but it is untrue in its results. Vivisection teaches
something, no doubt, but it does not bring a knowledge of the natural
animal. To get that knowledge you had better live with him a little, and
even love him a little, and teach him to love you. All the scientific
inquiry in the world is not worth--in art--one touch of affectionate
understanding.
Esther Waters is to go to a lying-in hospital, and thither goes her
author before her, bent on what he can picturesquely set down about
her surroundings. Her husband is to go to a hospital for consumption.
Thither goes the author, and sets down things seen and heard with the
wooden, conscientious precision of a bailiff’s clerk. The conception of
things inquired into seems never to move him to interest, though one
is forced to believe that once, at least, he has narrowly escaped the
contagion of a great scene. Esther’s illegitimate child is born, and
the mother, who has temporarily left him for his own sake, to accept a
position as wet-nurse, is inspired by a hungry maternal longing, which
drags her irresistibly from warmth and comfort to a poverty whose
bitterness has but a single solace--the joy of satisfied motherly love.
There are writers who have not a hundredth part of Mr. Moore’s industry
who would have moved the reader deeply with such a scene. But, if Mr.
Moore feels at all, he is ashamed to show it. This mother-hunger is
apparently just as affecting a thing to him as the position of the
chest of drawers between the two windows--a fact made note of, and,
therefore, to be chronicled. Either the writer is content coldly to
survey this rage of passion, or he would have us believe he is so; and
in either case he misses the mark of the artist, which is, after all, to
show such things as he deals with as they truly are, and to seize upon
their inwardness. We do not ask for a slavering flux of sentiment, or
an acrobat’s display in gesticulation. But, from a gentleman whose
corns when trodden on are probably as painful as his neighbours’, we are
content with something less than a godlike indifference to the emotions
of humanity. Let us suppose, charitably, that this is no more than
a pretence, and that Mr. Moore is neither at heart so callous nor in
vanity so far removed from mere emotional interests as he would seem.
The most patient of investigators in strange regions will make slips
sometimes. Mr. Moore, for instance, investigating the racing stable,
treats us to a view of a horse whose legs are tightly bandaged from
his knees to his forelocks, and his vulgarest peasants and servants say
‘that is he,’ or ‘if it be.’ One characteristic of the common speech of
our country he has caught with accuracy, though it can scarcely be said
that it needed much observation to secure it. The very objectionable
word ‘bloody,’ as it is used by the vulgar, is Mr. Moore’s ‘standby’
in ‘Esther Waters,’ It is very likely that it takes a sort of daring to
introduce the word freely into a work of fiction, but the courage does
not seem very much more respectable than the word.
VIII.--MR. S. R. CROCKETT--IAN MACLAREN
When I undertook the writing of this series, Mr. S. R. Crockett, except
for his ‘Mad Sir Uchtred of the Hills,’ was unknown to me by actual
reading. My opinion of that story was not a high one. I thought it, and
on a second reading still think it, feebly pretentious. But for some
reason or another Mr. Crockett’s name has been buzzed about in such
a prodigality of praise that it came natural to believe and hope that
later work from his pen had shown a quality which the first little
_brochure_ had not revealed, and that the world had found in him a
genuine addition to its regiment of literary workmen. The curiosity
with which a section of the newspaper press has been inspired as to
Mr. Crockett’s personal whereabouts, as to his comings and goings, his
engagements for the future, and his prices ‘per thousand words,’ would
have seemed to indicate that in him we had discovered a person of
considerably more than the average height.
The result of a completer perusal of his writings is not merely
destructive of this hope. It is positively stunning and bewildering.
Mr. Crockett is not only not a great man, but a rather futile very small
one. The unblushing effrontery of those gentlemen of the press who
have set _him_ on a level with Sir Walter is the most mournful and most
contemptible thing in association with the poorer sort of criticism
which has been encountered of late years.
It is no part of an honest critic’s business to be personally offensive.
It is no part of his function to find a pleasure in giving pain. But
it is a part of his business, which is not to be escaped, to do his
fearless best to tell the truth, and the truth about Mr. Crockett and
the press is not to be told without giving deep offence, to him and it.
Fortunately, the press is a very wide corporation indeed, and if
there are venal people employed upon it, there are at least as many
scrupulously honourable; and if there are stupid people who can be
carried by a cry, there are men of all grades of brilliant ability,
ranging from genius to talent To put the matter in plain English will
offend neither honesty nor ability, and to give offence to venality or
incompetence is not an act of peculiar daring.
In plain English, then, it is not a matter of opinion as to whether Mr.
Crockett is worthy of the stilted encomium which has mopped and mowed
about him. It is not a matter of opinion as to whether Mr. Crockett has
or has not rivalled Sir Walter. It is a matter of absolute fact, about
which no two men who are even moderately competent to judge can dispute
for a second. The newspaper press, or a very considerable section of it,
has conspired to set Mr. Crockett upon an eminence so removed from his
fitness for it that he is made ridiculous by the mere fact of being
perched there. When Robert Louis Stevenson suffered from the hysteria
of praise, the natural feeling was to save an exquisite artist from the
excusable exaltations of enthusiasm. When the genuine art and real
fun and touching pathos of Mr. J. M. Barrie hurried his admirers into
uncritical ecstasy, one’s only fear was lest the popular taste should
take an undeserved revenge in coldness and neglect. To say in the first
flush of affection and enjoyment that ‘A Window in Thrums’ is as good
as Sir Walter, or that ‘The Master of Ballantrae’ is better, is not to
exercise the faculty of a critic; but it is not monstrous or absurd. It
is the expression of a momentary happy ebullience, a natural ejaculation
of gratitude for a beautiful gift. It is only when the judgment comes
to be persisted in that we find any element of danger in it. It is only
when gravely and strenuously repeated, as in Stevenson’s case, that it
is to be resented, and then mainly on the ground that it does harm to
the object of it. But in the case now under review the conditions are
not the same. Poor Stevenson, whose early death is still a poignant
grief was indubitably a man of genius. Settle the question of stature
how you may, there is no denying the species to which such a writer
belongs. Mr. Barrie _has_ genius--which is a slightly different thing.
But Mr. Crockett in the great rank of letters is ‘as just and mere a
serving-man as any born of woman,’ and there has been as much banging
of the paragraphic drum concerning him, and as assured a proclamation of
his mastership, as if every high quality of genius were recognisable in
him at a glance. If I knew of any unmistakable and tangible reason for
all this I would not hesitate to name it, but I am not in the secret,
and I have no right to guess. There are some sort of strings somewhere,
and somebody pulls them. So much is evident on the face of things.
Who work the contemptible _fantoccini_ who gesticulate to the Ephesian
hubbub of ‘greatness’ I neither know nor care, but it is simply out of
credence that their motions are spontaneous.
_Expede Herculem_. I will take a solitary story from Mr. Crockett’s
‘Stickit Minister.’
It is called ‘The Courtship of Allan Fairley,’ The tale is of a young
minister of the peasant class, whose parents through much privation have
kept their son at college. He is elected to a living in an aristocratic
parish, and takes his old peasant mother to keep house for him. Some of
his more polished parishioners object to the old lady’s presence at the
manse, and they have the rather astonishing impertinence to propose
that the son shall send her away. He refuses, and shows his visitors the
door. These are the bare lines of the story so far as we are concerned
with it.
Think how Dr. Macdonald or J. M. Barrie would have handled this! The
humour of either would have danced round the crass obtuseness of the
deputation and the mingled wrath and amusement of the minister. The
story bristles with opportunity for the presentation of human contrast.
The chances are all there, and a story-teller of anything like genuine
faculty could not have failed to see and to utilise some of them. Mr.
Crockett misses every conceivable point of his own tale, and with a
majestic clumsiness drags in the one thing which could possibly make it
offensive. The minister has nothing to fear from his visitors, for it is
expressly stated that he has a majority of three hundred and sixty-five
in his spiritual constituency of four hundred and thirty-five. But Mr.
Crockett’s point is that he was a hero for refusing to kick his own
mother out of doors. He makes Mr. Allan Fairley tell his own tale, and
the end of this portion of it runs thus:
‘He got no further; he wadna hae gotten as far if for a moment I had
jaloosed his drift I got on my feet I could hardly keep my hands off
them, minister as I was, but I said: “Gentlemen, you are aware of what
you ask me to do? You ask me to turn out of the house the mither that
bore me, the mither that learnt me ‘The Lord’s my Shepherd,’ the mither
that wore her fingers near the bone that I might gang to the college,
that selled her bit plenishin’ that my manse micht be furnished! Ye ask
me to show her to the door--I’ll show you to the door!”--an’ to the door
they gaed!’ “Weel done! That was my ain Allan!” cried I.’
Was there ever a piece of sentiment cheaper, falser, more tawdry?
Who applauds a man for not turning his old mother out of doors at the
impertinent request of a meddling nobody? Look at the stormy small
capitals of this oatmeal hero, who is supposed to electrify us by the
mere fact of his not being an incredible ass and scoundrel! Does any
sober person think for a moment that a man of genius could have made
this revolting blunder? It is beyond comparison the densest bit of
stupidity in dealing with the emotions I have encountered anywhere.
Anybody but Mr. Crockett can see where the point of the story lies. It
lies in the cool impertinence and heartlessness of his visitors. To
put the emphasis on the rejection of their proposal--to make a point of
_that_--is to insult the reader. Of course it was rejected. How should
it possibly, by any stretch of poltroonery and baseness, be otherwise?
_Ex pede Herculem_. This bedrummed and betrumpeted man of genius
cannot read the A B _ab_ of the human emotions. ‘Here!’ says the subtle
tempter, ‘I’ll give you twopence if you’ll put your baby on the fire!’
The god-like hero thunders: ‘No! He is my flesh and blood. He is the
sacred trust of Heaven. He is innocent, he is helpless. I’ll show you to
the door!’ Oh! what emotions stir within the heart when a master’s hand
awakes a chord like this!
There is, of course, a certain angry pleasure in this necessary work;
but it does not endure, and it is followed rapidly by a reaction of pain
and pity. But we have a right to ask--we have a right to insist--that
undeserved reputations shall not be manufactured for us by any clique.
We have a right to protest when the offence is open and flagrant. Let
it be said, if it be not too late to say it, that Mr. Crockett, if left
alone by his indiscreet admirers, or only puffed within the limits of
the reasonable, might have been regarded as an honest workman as times
go, when everybody, more or less, writes fiction.
If his pages had come before me as the work of an unknown man, seeking
his proper place in the paper republic, it is certain that I could
have found some honest and agreeable things to say about him. But,
unfortunately, he, more than any other writer of his day, has been
signalled out for those uncostly extravagances of praise which are fast
discrediting us in our own eyes, and are making what should be the art
of criticism a mockery, and something of a shame. In what I have written
I have dealt less with his work than with the false estimate of it
which, for a year or two, has been thrust upon the public by a certain
band of writers who are either hopelessly incompetent to assess our
labours or incurably dishonest, It is very possible indeed that Mr.
Crockett is wholly undeserving of censure in this regard, that he has
not in any way asked or aided the manufacture of this balloon of a
reputation in which he has been floated to such heights. Apart from the
pretensions of his _claque_, there is no earthly reason why a critic
should hold him up to ridicule. It is not he who is ridiculous, but at
its best his position is respectable, and he holds his place (like the
mob of us who write for a living) for the moment only. To pretend that
he is a man of genius, to talk about him in the same breath with Sir
Walter Scott, to chronicle his comings and his goings as if he were
the embodiment of a new revelation, is to provoke a natural and just
resentment The more plainly that resentment is expressed--the more it
is seen that a false adulation is the seed of an open contempt--the
less likely writers of middling faculty will be to encourage a bloated
estimate of themselves.
[Since the above was written and printed Mr. Crockett has
published his story of ‘Lads’ Love,’ the final chapter of
which is so good that in reading it I experienced a twinge
of regret for the onslaught I had made. But after all it is
not the author who is attacked in what goes before, and if,
in the fray with the critics, he is, incidentally, as it
were, somewhat roughly handled, the over-enthusiasm of his
professional admirers must bear the blame. There is much
prentice work in ‘Lads’ Love,’ some strenuously enforced
emotion, which is not genuine, and a congenital
misunderstanding of the essential difference between tedium
and humour; but if the whole of Mr. Crockett’s work had
reached its level, the protest against his reviewers would
have stood in need of modification.]
Mr. Ian Maclaren, though he is distinctly an imitator, and may be said
to owe his literary existence to Mr. J. M. Barrie, is both artistic
and sympathetic. His work conveys to the reader the impression of an
encounter with Barrie in a dream. The keen edges of the original are
blurred and partly lost, but the author of ‘Beside the Bonnie Brier
Bush’ has many excellent qualities, and if he had had the good fortune
or the initiative to be first in the field, his work would have been
almost wholly charming. As it is, he still shows much faculty of
intuition and of heart, and his work is all sympathetically honest His
emotions are genuine, and this in the creation of emotional fiction is
the first essential to success. Here is another case where the
hysteric overpraise of the critics has done a capable workman a serious
injustice, and but for it a candid reviewer could have no temptation
towards blame. His inspiration is from the outside, but that is the
harshest word that can honestly be spoken, and in days when literature
has become a trade such a judgment is not severe.
IX.--DR. MACDONALD AND MR. J. M. BARRIE
When one calls to mind the rapid and extensive popularity achieved by
the latest school of Scottish dialect writers, one is tempted to wonder
a little at the comparative neglect which has befallen a real master of
that _genre_, who is still living and writing, and who began his work
within the memory of the middle-aged. With the single exception of ‘A
Window in Thrums,’ none of the new books of this school are worthy to be
compared with ‘David Elginbrod,’ or ‘Alec Forbes of Howglen,’ or ‘Robert
Falconer.’ Yet not one of them has failed to find a greater vogue or
to bring to its author a more swelling reputation than Dr. Mac-donald
achieved. Perhaps the reasons for these facts are not far to seek. To
begin at the beginning, Sir Walter, who created the Scottish character
novel, had made, in other fields, a reputation quite unparalleled in the
history of fiction before he took broadly to the use of Scottish rural
idiom, and the depiction of Scottish character in its peculiarly local
aspects. The magic of his name compelled attention, and his genius gave
a classic flavour to dialects until then regarded as barbarous and ugly.
The flame of Burns had already eaten all grossness out of the rudest
rusticities, and in the space of twenty years at most the Auld Braid
Scots wore the dignity of a language and was decorated with all the
honours of a literature. But this, in spite of the transcendent genius
of the two men to whom northern literature owes its greatest debt,
brought about very little more than a local interest and a local pride.
Scott was accepted in spite of the idiom which he sometimes employed,
and not because of it, and one can only laugh at the fancy presented to
the mind by the picture of an English or a foreign reader who for the
first time found himself confronted by Mrs. Bartlemy Saddletree’s query
to her maid: ‘What gart ye busk your cockernony that gait?’ To this
hour, indeed, there are thousands of Scott’s admirers for whom the
question might just as well be framed in Sanscrit.
In Sir Walters own day and generation he had one considerable imitator
in Galt, whose ‘Andrew Wylie of that Ilk’ and ‘The Entail’ can still
afford pleasure to the reader. Then for a time the fiction of Scottish
character went moribund. The prose Muse of the North was silent, or
spoke in ineffectual accents. After a long interregnum came George
Macdonald, unconsciously paving the way for the mob of northern
gentlemen who now write with ease. He brought to his task an unusual
fervour, a more than common scholarship, a more than common richness,
purity, and flexibility in style, a truly poetic endowment of
imagination, and a truly human endowment of sympathy, intuition, and
insight. It would be absurd to say that he failed, but it is certain
that he scarcely received a tithe either of the praise or the pudding
which have fallen to the share of Mr. S. R. Crockett, for example, who
is no more to be compared with him than I to Hercules. Such readers as
were competent to judge of him ranked him high, but, south of the Tweed,
such readers were few and far between, for he employed the idiomatic
Scotch in which he chose to work with a remorseless accuracy, and in
this way set up for himself a barrier against the average Englishman.
His genius, charming as it was, was not of that tremendous and
compulsive sort which lays a hand on every man, and makes the breaking
down of such a barrier an essential to intellectual happiness. There was
a tacit admission that he was, in his measure, a great man, but that the
average reader could afford to let him alone. And then, things were
very different with the press. The northern part of this island, though
active in press life, had nothing like its influence of to-day. To-day
the press of Great Britain swarms with Scotchmen, and the ‘boom’ which
has lately filled heaven and earth with respect to the achievements of
the new Scotch school has given ample and even curious evidence of that
fact. The spoils to the victor, by all means. We folk from over the
border are a warlike and a self-approving race, with a strong family
instinct, and a passionate love for the things which pertain to our own
part of the world. If Scotchmen had been as numerous amongst pressmen as
they are to-day, and as certain of their power, they would have boomed
Dr. Macdonald beyond a doubt. Such recognition as he received came
mainly from them. But if only the present critical conditions had
existed in his early day, with what garlands would he have been
wreathed, what sacrifices would have been made before him!
Apart from that rugged inaccessibility of dialect (to the merely English
reader) which so often marks Dr. Macdonald’s work, there is in the main
theme of his best books a reason why he should not be widely
popular. The one issue in which he is most passionately interested is
theological. He has been to many a Moses in the speculative desert,
leading to a land of promise. He has preached with a tender and
persuasive fire the divine freedom of the soul, and its essential
oneness with the Fatherhood of God. He has expended many beautiful
faculties on this work, and his influence in the broadening and
deepening of religious thought in Scotland is not to be denied. But
his insistence on this great theme has naturally scared away the
empty-headed and the shallow-hearted, and many also of the careless
clever. There must be somewhere a fund of sincerity and of reason in
the reader to whom he appeals. There is a public which is prepared to
encounter thought, which can be genuinely stirred by a high intellectual
passion, which is athirst indeed for that highest and best enjoyment,
but it is numerically small, and the writer who deals mainly with
spiritual problems, and who, in doing so, is reticent and reverent, can
scarcely hope to draw the mob at his wheels. In each of his three best
books, Dr. Macdonald has traced the growth of a soul towards freedom.
His conception of freedom is a reasoned but absolute submission to a
Divine Will; a sense of absorption in the manifest intent of a guiding
Power which is wholly loving and wholly wise. To all who are able to
read him he is exquisitely interesting and delightful, and to some he
appeals with the authority of a prophet and divinely-appointed guide.
Along with this experience of abiding faith in him goes a dash of
mysticism, of pantheism. He is essentially a poet, and had he chosen to
expend more labour upon his verse he might have risen to high rank on
that side. But with him the thing to be said has seemed vastly more
important than the way of saying it, and he has, perhaps rightly,
disdained to be laborious in the mere texture of his verse. It is
rational to argue that if the poetic, inspiration is not vital enough
to find an immediate expression it is not true enough to make it worth
while to remould and recast it. It would seem--judging by results--that
Dr. Macdonald’s conception of a lyric is of something wholly
spontaneous. Be this as it may, the poetic cast of his mind is revealed
in his prose with greater freedom and a completer charm than in his
verse. The best of him is the atmosphere he carries. It is not possible
to read his books and not to know him for a brave, sincere, and loyal
man, large both in heart and brain, and they purify and tone the mind
in just such fashion as the air of mountain, moor, or sea purifies and
tones the body.