Nov. 12, 1892. Mr. Gilbert Parker.
Mr. Gilbert Parker's book of Canadian tales, "Pierre and His People"
(Methuen and Co.), is delightful for more than one reason. To begin
with, the tales themselves are remarkable, and the language in which
they are told, though at times it overshoots the mark by a long way
and offends by what I may call an affected virility, is always
distinguished. You feel that Mr. Parker considers his sentences, not
letting his bolts fly at a venture, but aiming at his effects
deliberately. It is the trick of promising youth to shoot high and
send its phrases in parabolic curves over the target. But a slight
wildness of aim is easily corrected, and to see the target at all is a
more conspicuous merit than the public imagines. Now Mr. Parker sees
his target steadily; he has a thoroughly good notion of what a short
story ought to be: and more than two or three stories in his book are
as good as can be.
Open Air v. Clubs.
But to me the most pleasing quality in the book is its open-air
flavor. Here is yet another young author, and one of the most
promising, joining the healthy revolt against the workshops. Though
for my sins I have to write criticism now and then, and use the
language of the workshops, I may claim to be one of the rebels, having
chosen to pitch a small tent far from cities and to live out of doors:
and it rejoices me to see the movement growing, as it undoubtedly has
grown during the last few years, and find yet one more of the younger
men refusing, in Mr. Stevenson's words, to cultivate restaurant fat,
to fall in mind "to a thing perhaps as low as many types of
_bourgeois_--the implicit or exclusive artist." London is an alluring
dwelling-place for an author, even for one who desires to write about
the country. He is among the paragraph-writers, and his reputation
swells as a cucumber under glass. Being in sight of the newspaper men,
he is also in their mind. His prices will stand higher than if he go
out into the wilderness. Moreover, he has there the stimulating talk
of the masters in his profession, and will be apt to think that his
intelligence is developing amazingly, whereas in fact he is developing
all on one side; and the end of him is--the Exclusive Artist:--
"_When the flicker of London sun falls faint on the
Club-room's green and gold
The sons of Adam sit them down and scratch with their
pens in the mould--
They scratch with their pens in the mould of their
graves and the ink and the anguish start,
For the Devil mutters behind the leaves: 'It's pretty,
but is it Art?'_"
The spirit of our revolt is indicated clearly enough on that page of
Mr. Stevenson's "Wrecker," from which I have already quoted a
phrase:--
"That was a home word of Pinkerton's, deserving to be writ in
letters of gold on the portico of every School of Art: 'What I
can't see is why you should want to do nothing else.' The dull
man is made, not by the nature, but by the degree of his
immersion in a single business. And all the more if that be
sedentary, uneventful, and ingloriously safe. More than half of
him will then remain unexercised and undeveloped; the rest will
be distended and deformed by over-nutrition, over-cerebration and
the heat of rooms. And I have often marvelled at the impudence of
gentlemen who describe and pass judgment on the life of man, in
almost perfect ignorance of all its necessary elements and
natural careers. Those who dwell in clubs and studios may paint
excellent pictures or write enchanting novels. There is one thing
that they should not do: they should pass no judgment on man's
destiny, for it is a thing with which they are unacquainted.
Their own life is an excrescence of the moment, doomed, in the
vicissitude of history, to pass and disappear. The eternal life
of man, spent under sun and rain and in rude physical effort,
lies upon one side, scarce changed since the beginning."
A few weeks ago our novelists were discussing the reasons why they
were novelists and not playwrights. The discussion was sterile enough,
in all conscience: but one contributor--it was "Lucas Malet"--managed
to make it clear that English fiction has a character to lose. "If
there is one thing," she said, "which as a nation we understand, it is
_out-of-doors_ by land and sea." Heaven forbid that, with only one
Atlantic between me and Mr. W.D. Howells, I should enlarge upon any
merit of the English novel: but I do suggest that this open-air
quality is a characteristic worth preserving, and that nothing is so
likely to efface it as the talk of workshops. It is worth preserving
because it tends to keep us in sight of the elemental facts of human
nature. After all, men and women depend for existence on the earth and
on the sky that makes earth fertile; and man's last act will be, as it
was his first, to till the soil. All empires, cities, tumults, civil
and religious wars, are transitory in comparison. The slow toil of
the farm-laborer, the endurance of the seaman, outlast them all.
Open Air in Criticism.
That studio-talk tends to deaden this sense of the open-air is just
as certain. It runs not upon Nature, but upon the presentation of
Nature. I am almost ready to assert that it injures a critic as
surely as it spoils a creative writer. Certainly I remember that
the finest appreciation of Carlyle--a man whom every critic among
English-speaking races had picked to pieces and discussed and
reconstructed a score of times--was left to be uttered by an inspired
loafer in Camden, New Jersey. I love to read of Whitman dropping the
newspaper that told him of Carlyle's illness, and walking out under
the stars--
"Every star dilated, more vitreous, larger than usual. Not as in
some clear nights when the larger stars entirely outshine the
rest. Every little star or cluster just as distinctly visible and
just as high. Berenice's hair showing every gem, and new ones. To
the north-east and north the Sickle, the Goat and Kids,
Cassiopeia, Castor and Pollux, and the two Dippers. While through
the whole of this silent indescribable show, inclosing and
bathing my whole receptivity, ran the thought of Carlyle dying."
In such a mood and place--not in a club after a dinner unearned by
exercise--a man is likely, if ever, to utter great criticism as well
as to conceive great poems. It is from such a mood and place that we
may consider the following fine passage fitly to issue:--
"The way to test how much he has left his country were to
consider, or try to consider, for a moment the array of British
thought, the resultant _ensemble_ of the last fifty years, as
existing to-day, _but with Carlyle left out._ It would be like an
army with no artillery. The show were still a gay and rich
one--Byron, Scott, Tennyson, and many more--horsemen and rapid
infantry, and banners flying--but the last heavy roar so dear to
the ear of the trained soldier, and that settles fate and
victory, would be lacking."
For critic and artist, as for their fellow-creatures, I believe an
open-air life to be the best possible. And that is why I am glad to
read in certain newspaper paragraphs that Mr. Gilbert Parker is at
this moment on the wide seas, and bound for Quebec, where he starts to
collect material for a new series of short stories. His voyage will
loose him, in all likelihood, from the little he retains of club art.
Of course, a certain proportion of our novelists must write of town
life: and to do this fitly they must live in town. But they must
study in the town itself, not in a club. Before anyone quotes Dickens
against me, let him reflect, first on the immensity of Dickens'
genius, and next on the conditions under which Dickens studied London.
If every book be a part of its writer's autobiography I invite the
youthful author who now passes his evenings in swapping views about
Art with his fellow cockneys to pause and reflect if he is indeed
treading in Dickens' footsteps or stands in any path likely to lead
him to results such as Dickens achieved.