than any other campaign of any age, and it has quite recently furnished
reason for the novel, ‘The Red Badge of Courage,’ by Mr. Stephen Crane,
which is out of counting the truest picture of the sort the world has
seen. It seemed at first impossible to believe that it had been written
by any but a veteran. It turns out that the author is quite a young man,
and that he gathered everything by reading and by hearsay. Here again
the method is national and characteristic. After all these years of
natural submission to British influence American writers are growing
racy of their own soil.
XIII.--THE YOUNG ROMANCERS
In the combined spelling and reading book which was in use in schools
more than forty years ago there was printed a story to the following
effect:--Certain Arabs had lost a camel, and in the course of their
wanderings in search of him they met a dervish, whom they questioned.
The dervish answered by offering questions on his own side. ‘Was your
camel lame in one foot?’ he began. ‘Yes,’ said the owners. ‘Was he blind
in one eye?’ he continued. ‘Yes,’ said the owners again. ‘Had he lost a
front tooth?’ ‘Yes,’ ‘Was he laden with corn on one side and with honey
on the other?’ ‘Yes, yes, yes. This is our camel. Where have you seen
him?’ The dervish answered: ‘I have never seen him.’ The Arabs, not
without apparent reason, suspected the dervish of playing with them,
and were about to chastise him, when the holy man asked for a hearing.
Having secured it, he explained. He had seen the track of the camel.
He had known the animal to be lame of one foot because that foot left
a slighter impression than the others upon the dust of the road. He had
argued it blind of one eye because it had cropped the herbage on one
side of the road alone. He knew it to have lost a tooth because of the
gap left in the centre of its bite. Bees and flies argued honey on one
side of the beast, and ants carrying wheat grains argued wheat on the
other. The name of this observant and synthetic-minded dervish was not
Sherlock Holmes, but he had the method of that famous detective, and in
a sense anticipated the plots of all the stories which Dr. Conan Doyle
has so effectively related of him. Possibly the best stories in the
world which depend for their interest on this kind of induction are
Edgar Allan Poe’s. ‘The Gold Bug,’ ‘The Murder in the Rue Morgue,’ and
‘The Stolen Letter’ have not been surpassed or even equalled by any
later writer; but Dr. Doyle comes in an excellent second, and if he has
not actually rivalled Poe in the construction and development of any
single story, he has run him close even there, and has beaten him in the
sustained ingenuity of continuous invention; The story of ‘The Speckled
Band’ has a flavour almost as gruesome and terrible as Poe’s ‘Black
Cat,’ and an unusual faculty for dramatic narrative is displayed
throughout the whole clever series. The Sherlock Holmes stories are
far, indeed, from being Dr. Doyle’s best work, but it is to them that
he mainly owes his popularity. They took the imaginative side of the
general reader, and their popular properties are likely to keep them
before the public mind for a long while to come. To estimate Dr. Doyle’s
position as a writer one has to meet him in ‘The Refugees,’ in ‘The
White Company,’ and in ‘Rodney Stone.’ In each of these there is evident
a sound and painstaking method of research, as well as a power of
dramatic invention; and in combination with these is a style of
unaffected manliness, simplicity, and strength, which is at once
satisfactory to the student and attractive to the mass of people who are
content to be pleased by such qualities without knowing or asking why.
The labour bestowed on ‘The White Company’ may very well be compared
to that expended by Charles Reade on ‘The Cloister and the H earth.’ It
covers a far less extent of ground than that monumental romance, and
it has not (and does not aim at) its universality of mood, but the same
desire of accuracy, the same order of scholarship, the same industry,
the same sense of scrupulous honour in matters of ascertainable fact,
are to be noted, and being noted, are worthy of unstinted admiration.
It is, perhaps, an open question as to whether Dr. Doyle, in his latest
book, has not run a little ahead of the time at which a story on such a
theme could be written with entire safety. ‘Rodney Stone’ is a story
of the prize-ring, and of the gambling, hard-drinking, and somewhat
brutalised days in which that institution flourished There are many of
us (I have made public confession half a score of times) who regret the
abolition of the ring, on grounds of public policy. We argue that man
is a fighting animal, and that in the days of the ring there was a
recognised code of rules which regulated his conduct at times when
the combative instinct was not to be restrained. We observe that our
commonalty now use the knife in quarrel, and we regret the death of that
rough principle of honour which once imposed itself upon the worst of
rowdies. But there is little doubt that the feeling of the community at
large is overwhelmingly against us, and it is for this reason that I
am dubious as to the success of Dr. Doyle’s last literary venture.
The makings of romance are in the story, and are well used. There are
episodes of excellent excitement in it; notable amongst these being the
race on the Godstone Road, which is done with a swing and passion not
easy to overpraise. In the narrative of the fight and of the incidents
which preceded it the feeling of the time is admirably preserved, and
the interest of the reader is held at an unyielding tension. But the
prize-ring is a little too near as yet to offer unimpeachable matter for
romance; and people who can read of the bloodthirsty Umslopogaas and
his semi-comic holocausts with an unshaken stomach, or feel a placid
historic pleasure in the chronicles of Nero’s eccentricities, will find
‘Rodney Stone’ objectionable because it chronicles a ‘knuckle fight,’
and because a ‘knuckle fight’ is still occasionally brought off in
London, and more occasionally suppressed by the police.
But a more serious criticism awaits Dr. Conan Doyle’s last work. It is
offered respectfully, and with every admiration for the high qualities
already noticed. In the re-embodiment of a bygone age in fiction, three
separate and special faculties are to be exercised. The first is the
faculty for research, which must expend its energy not merely on the
theme in hand, but on the age at large. The second is the imaginative
and sympathetic faculty, which alone can make the dry bones of social
history live again. The third is the faculty of self-repression,
the power to cast away all which, however laboriously acquired, is
dramatically unessential. Two of these powers belong in generous
measure to Dr. Conan Doyle. The third, which is as necessary to complete
success, he has not yet displayed. In ‘Rodney Stone’ an attempt has been
made to cover up this shortcoming, in the form in which the story has
been cast, and in the very choice of its title. But when the book comes
to be read it is not the tale of Rodney Stone (who is a mere outsider
privileged to narrate), but of his fashionable uncle’s combat with Sir
Lothian Hume, with the ring in which their separate champions appear
as a battle ground. Many pages are crowded with people who are named in
passing and forgotten. They have no influence on the narrative, and no
place in it. Their presence assuredly displays a knowledge of the time
and its chronicles, but they are just so many obstacles to the clear run
of the story, and no more. This is the chief fault to be found with
the book, but it is a grave fault, and the writer, if he is to take the
place which his powers and his industry alike join in claiming for him,
must learn to cast ‘as rubbish to the void’ many a painfully acquired
bit of knowledge. To be an antiquary is one thing, and to be an
antiquarian romancer is another. Dr. Doyle has aimed at being both one
and the other in the same pages. A true analogy may be taken from the
stage, where the supernumeraries are not allowed to obscure the leading
lady and gentleman at any moment of action.
Mr. Stanley Weyman, who is not Dr. Doyle’s equal in other matters, is
in this sole respect his master. He keeps his hero on the scene, and his
action in full swing. He gives no indication of a profound or studious
knowledge of his time, but he knows it fairly well. Mr. Doyle’s method
is at bottom the truer, when once the detailed labour is hidden, but
when it bares its own machinery it loses most of its gain. Mr. Weyman
tells a rattling story in rattling fashion. His is the good old style
of easy-going romance, where courage and adventure never fail. He has
chosen the realm of D’Artagnan and Aramis, of Porthos and Athos, and he
has plenty of vivacity, and can invent brilliantly on the lines on
which the brave Dumas invented long before him. He is a cheerful and
inspiriting echo. He cannot wind the mighty horn the elders sounded,
but he can imitate it fairly from a distance. It is only when that crass
reviewer comes along to tell us that the old original hunter of romance
is back again that his music gives us anything but pleasure. For my own
part, I hope he may flourish long, and give us stories as good as ‘A
Gentleman of France’ as often as he can. My ‘Bravo!’ shall be as
ready as any man’s and as hearty. Why--to change the simile used just
now--when a man is resting his legs in a comfortable _auberge_, and
drinking the honest light wine of the country (which doesn’t pretend to
be better than it is), should the asinine enthusiast come to spoil
his enjoyment by swearing that he sits in the enchanted palace of Sir
Walter, and has before him the mighty wine Sir Walter bottled? The
enthusiast provokes to wrath. It’s a very good _duberge_--it’s a
capital, comfortable house of call, and we should like to sit there
often. And the wine--we found no fault with the wine. It’s an honest
tap, and a wholesome and a palatable, and here’s the landlord’s health
in it. But the magic vintage? Rubbish!
Mr. Anthony Hope has been so lucky as to please the public in two
styles. In the one _genre_ he has displayed an undoubted capacity,
marred here and there to some tastes by a not very defined seeming
of superciliousness, and in the other he has taken us into the most
agreeable regions of unrestrained romance in which English readers have
had leave to wander this many a day. He has caught the very tone of
simple-hearted sincerity in which his later stories demand to be told.
As an example of the adaptation of literary method to the exigencies
of narrative it would not be easy to light on anything better. It is a
little surprising that the trivial story and the trivial style of
‘Mr. De Witt’s Widow’ should have come from the hand which gave us the
histories of the Princess Osra, and created the Kingdom of Ruritania.
The one kind of work is clever, and smart, and knowingly--rather
pretentiously--man-of-the-worldish. The other is large and simple, sweet
and credulous. Mr. Hope, from his latest pages, has breathed on a tired
and jaded time the breath of a pure and harmless fancy, and has earned
its thanks for that benefaction.
It has been seen that the art of fiction as practised at this hour
includes almost all known forms of romance, and that no school may be
said to have its own way to the exclusion of another. It has been seen,
too, that though this is not a day of pre-eminent greatness, we can
boast an astonishing industry and fertility. The output of literary work
has never been so large, nor has the average of excellence ever been so
equal or so high. It has been demonstrated--it is being demonstrated in
new instances two or three times a year--that literary talent is not at
all the uncommon and half-miraculous thing it was once supposed to be.
Genius is as rare as ever, and is likely to continue so, but talent
multiplies its appearances in full accordance with economic rules. No
age ever submitted so constantly as ours to be amused or soothed by the
romancer’s art. The permission has opened the door to a great number
of capable, industrious, and workmanlike men and women, who have learnt
their business of amusement well. To the vast majority of us literature
is as much a trade as any of the accepted businesses of Holborn or
Cheapside, and, apart from a lingering sentimentalism, there is no
reason why the fact should not be owned. There is no shame in honest
craftwork done for hire, and when the work is so excellent as at least
a score of living English writers can make it, we have a right to take
Some pride in it But with this day’s newspaper before me I learn that
Mr. ------, who is the thin mimic of a fine imitator, has surpassed his
last ‘masterpiece,’ and that a lady of name to me unknown has ‘rivalled’
his masterpiece, and that a gentleman to me unknown has produced a book
which must necessarily be a ‘classic.’ A masterpiece is a rare thing,
and words have a definite meaning. We call ‘Vanity Fair’ and ‘Esmond’
masterpieces, when we desire to be enthusiastic. We call ‘David
Copperfield’ a masterpiece, and we find plenty of people to dispute the
judgment. A masterpiece is the master work of a master hand. It must
needs be a rare thing. It is not for the dignity of our work that it
should be greeted by that sort of hysteric hiccoughing against which
these pages have protested. It is a shameless insult to letters at large
when the hysteria is bought and paid for, as does sometimes happen, and
not less insulting when the gentleman who grinds the axe is fee’d in
kind by the other gentleman who rolls the log.
And now, what is done is done, and I leave my task with some misgiving.
If here and there I have given pain, I have not written a word in
malice. The pleasantest part of my work has lain in the fact that with
every desire to be honest I have so often been compelled to praise.
Spottiswoode & Co. Printers, New-street Square, London.