(1834-)
The Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould was born in Exeter, England, in 1834. The
addition of Gould to the name of Baring came in the time of his
great-grandfather, a brother of Sir Francis Baring, who married an only
daughter and heiress of W.D. Gould of Devonshire. Much of the early life
of Baring-Gould was passed in Germany and France, and at Clare College,
Cambridge, where he graduated in 1854, taking orders ten years later,
and in 1881 becoming rector of Lew Trenchard, Devonshire, where he holds
estates and privileges belonging to his family.
He has worked in many fields, and in all with so much acceptance that a
list of his books would be the best exposition of the range of his
untiring pen. To a gift of ready words and ready illustration, whether
he concerns himself with diversities of early Christian belief, the
course of country-dances in England, or the growth of mediaeval legends,
he adds the grace of telling a tale and drawing a character. He has
published nearly a hundred volumes, not one of them unreadable. But no
one man may write with equal pen of German history, of comparative
mythology and philology, of theological dissertations, and of the
pleasures of English rural life, while he adds to these a long list
of novels.
His secret of popularity lies not in his treatment, which is neither
critical nor scientific, but rather in a clever, easy, diffuse, jovial,
amusing way of saying clearly what at the moment comes to him to say.
His books have a certain raciness and spirit that recall the English
squire of tradition. They rarely smell of the lamp. Now and then appears
a strain of sturdy scholarship, leading the reader to wonder what his
author might have accomplished had he not enjoyed the comfortable ease
of a country justice of the peace, and a rector with large landed
estates, to whom his poorer neighbors appear a sort of dancing puppets.
Between 1857 and 1870, Baring-Gould had published nine volumes, the best
known of these being 'Curious Myths of the Middle Ages.' From 1870 to
1890 his name appeared as author on the title-page of forty-three books:
sermons, lectures, essays, archaeological treatises, memoirs,
curiosities of literature, histories, and fiction; sixteen novels,
tales, and romances being included. From 1890 to 1896 he published
seventeen more novels, and many of his books have passed through several
editions. His most successful novels are 'Mehalah; a Tale of the Salt
Marshes,' 'In the Roar of the Sea,' 'Red Spider,' 'Richard Cable,' and
'Noémi; a Story of Rock-Dwellers.'
In an essay upon his fiction, Mr. J.M. Barrie writes in The Contemporary
Review (February, 1890):--
"Of our eight or ten living novelists who are popular by
merit, few have greater ability than Mr. Baring-Gould. His
characters are bold and forcible figures, his wit is as ready
as his figures of speech are apt. He has a powerful
imagination, and is quaintly fanciful. When he describes a
storm, we can see his trees breaking in the gale. So enormous
and accurate is his general information that there is no
trade or profession with which he does not seem familiar. So
far as scientific knowledge is concerned, he is obviously
better equipped than any contemporary writer of fiction. Yet
one rises from his books with a feeling of repulsion, or at
least with the glad conviction that his ignoble views of life
are as untrue as the characters who illustrate them. Here is
a melancholy case of a novelist, not only clever but sincere,
undone by want of sympathy.... The author's want of
sympathy prevents 'Mehalah's' rising to the highest art; for
though we shudder at the end, there the effect of the story
stops. It illustrates the futility of battling with fate, but
the theme is not allowable to writers with the modern notion
of a Supreme Power.... But 'Mehalah' is still one of the
most powerful romances of recent years."