Much has been said about the writing of a boys' book and the changes
that have taken place during the present generation or two. It may be
taken into consideration that to go back to, say, 1830, there were
hardly any books for a boy to read. We had _Evenings at Home_ and
_Robinson Crusoe_, of course, and there were some cheaply-issued stories
by Pierce Egan the younger. A very attractive volume, too, was a
tremendously thumbed and dog's-eared _Boy's Country Book_, by William
Howitt. Marryat's and Cooper's works, with a few of Scott's, however,
found plenty of favour with boys, who soon afterwards began to read
Dickens, a writer who caught on with them at once. Soon after this
Kingston and Ballantyne had the field almost to themselves, while the
publishers were shy about publishing exclusively for boys; even to this
day the trade, as it is termed, class books written especially for boys
as juvenile literature. The term is correct, of course, for our
recollections of Latin teach us that juvenile relates to youth; but to a
boy the very term seems to suggest a toy-book, untearable, perhaps, with
gaudy coloured pictures, and this begets in him a feeling of scorn. He
does not want juvenile literature. His aim is to become a man and read
what men do and have done. Hence the great success of George Henty's
works. They are essentially manly, and he used to say that he wanted
his boys to be bold, straightforward, and ready to play a young man's
part, not to be milksops. He had a horror of a lad who displayed any
weak emotion and shrank from shedding blood, or winced at any encounter.
The result is shown again and again in his pages, and though some of
his readers may object to the deeds of his heroes, no one could look
down upon their vigour and determination. The fact is, he painted his
own boyhood in all--the boy--the young man as he wished him to be, and
the man.
There was a reality and power about Henty's work which caused many of
his characters to be remembered long after the book had been laid aside,
though, of course, it was not really characterisation which was his
forte, but rather the depicting of historical incidents and brave deeds
on the frontiers of the empire. He did a great work for the boy reader
in throwing open for him the big doorway of history. There was scarcely
a book from his pen, and especially is this the case with the later
ones, which did not serve to impress some important period of fighting
or diplomatic action upon the mind of the reader. Knowledge thus gained
is generally the most useful, for it is imbibed with avidity. Henty
came out of long years of exciting work as a chronicler of things seen
on the battlefields of the world, and he had the gift of ready
portrayal, allied to a retentive and observant mind. Amidst the purple
slopes and white walls of Italy he seemed as much at home as on the
Venetian lagoons or in the forests of Germany. The entire panorama of
the world was his sphere of action, and old-world romance suggestive of
forgotten stairways and ancient palaces was, so to speak, a department
in which he excelled. He could write as few men could of that mediaeval
tramp of crusading hosts, of glinting armour, of all that stirring
pageantry of the old, old days which sometimes in the heat of interest
makes our own time seem trivial and of poor account; and yet, although
he possessed this key to romance, maybe he was really at his best in
dealing with the thin red line of modern times. Still, among his older
books, _The Cornet of Horse_ stands out as pre-eminently strong and
dramatic, and the account of a remarkable adventure during the campaign
in the Netherlands, when the commander, who was afterwards cited as
"Marlbrouck" to naughty French children, defeated the French at.
Oudenarde and Malplaquet, is outlined clearly in the memory; so does the
miller near Lille who befriended the young Englishman. The writing was
strong, the colour vivid, and the reader had a bird's-eye view of what
was passing at that time when Good Queen Anne was on the throne, and, as
a bard put it, sometimes counsel took and sometimes tea, while in France
the Grand Monarque ruled as few kings have ever ruled before or since.
It was a book that made boys think, giving them a wonderful impression
of the time, making John Churchill a real live general, and showing why
we went to war with France in defence of the stolid Dutch. Then a story
of quite another type is probably still a first favourite, namely, _The
Young Franc Tireurs_, which deals with the Franco-German War in a style
to be expected from one who was there. How real is the talk between
some German soldiers after the capture of Napoleon the Third!
The merit of these stories is their directness. No nervous under-view,
no imagining of things which are not there, but the easy,
straightforward writing of a manly Englishman who took things as they
were, who disdained the building of structures on flimsy
might-have-beens, but liked a solid foundation of fact. His campaigning
stories brought the stress of war right home. He imparted a real touch
to these with maps and charts. He had been close into so many firing
lines that these tales had the ring of absolute truth, while he knew the
soldier by heart and could depict him to life without any sham heroics
or exaggeration. War's grim traffic had indeed few mysteries for the
pleasant, frank Englishman who could talk of the graver issues of life
with distinction and advantage to the listener.
Far less known than his boys' books are his novels. Yet there is
ingenuity and interest in such stories as _The Curse of Carnes Hold_,
while through one and all of his works there is to be found a spirit of
bold endeavour and a deep insight into the apparent puzzles of life. It
was inevitable that a war correspondent who had had a front seat for
years in the great arena of the world's happenings should know better
than most men how events would shape themselves, and what occurrences
might be looked for in the largest sphere of politics. Perhaps this
acquaintance with the greater issues of life gave him more sympathy. He
knew men, knew their failings, their ambitions. You met him in some
spring-time in the Strand with its unceasing rumble of traffic and its
colour, and the glimpse of green at the end of a street leading to the
Embankment Gardens, and you heard that he was just back from "over
there", a long way beyond town and the Silver Streak, maybe from Ashanti
or Abyssinia. He had the warrior's look--the look of one who knows too
much ever to be trivial--and the stirring days of European war were all
familiar to him. Perhaps this is what gives even his books which deal
with the long ago a vital interest. Fashions change; humanity scarcely
at all. On the battle-field men are much the same as when Alexander
swept southward with his legions to India, or when the great wars of the
Middle Ages threatened to obliterate the arts. So it is that his
historical books have a deep significance. Pick up one of these, and
you are taken back into the dim old past, and realise why men fought,
though the reasons for the warfare are now as cold as the watch-fires of
then. Here we have the grandeur of the chronicler's task. His to
revive any latent ardour in a nation or an individual by drawing aside
the curtain on what men did, and how they acted nobly for God and the
king, for truth and the right, in the bygone days. Not in vain these
wars, though the map of Europe has changed; and the historical writer
who re-creates the best out of the stirring times that have lapsed, who
shows in dramatic style why this guage of battle was thrown down, why
that edict went out from Versailles, and what really was the inwardness
of the long campaigns, which at a casual glance seem only to bewilder
the mind, has a task which in importance is second to none. The young
generation which has read his books and had its imagination fired will
contain, of course, only a small percentage of soldiers, but the sense
of grit and the dogged indomitable spirit to be derived from such works
will stand in good stead to all, whether the battle be faced in the
humdrum of daily life or actually with the forces of the king. Henty's
was a grand influence for good in times of easy belittlement and cheap
disparaging criticism of many of those elemental virtues which are
nevertheless supreme in the making of a nation. He showed in rugged,
graphic style what had been done--on tented field, in grim old mediaeval
castle. He recalled deeds which are a lesson for all time, and in his
brilliant martial scenes there is the echo of the clash of arms. It
does not require a poet to give value and significance to such a
retrospect, though in this re-creation of past scenes, of the going and
coming, the tramp of armies, the riding in of couriers to unfamiliar
cities, there necessarily is much poetry as well as brave and
heart-stirring effect, for in the panorama conjured up there is the
whole sum of life, its doubt, its passion, and its tears.
As for his soldiers, they are excellent. The soldier is the soldier all
the ages through--full of strange oaths, and with a particular view of
things. In this connection it may be permissible to refer to the
cosmopolitan side of Henty, to his intimate acquaintance with the byways
of Europe, and to the undeniable grip he possessed of the European way
of looking at matters--a way which is far more excitable than ours. He
could talk of the days before the '70 War which brought the Teuton into
Alsace and made of fragmentary Germany a consolidated state; of the
times when Bismarck was, comparatively speaking, a young man, and when
men were more given to sonorous phrase-making than is the case at
present. He had the "behind the scenes" attitude, and with reason, for
a war correspondent, like a diplomatist, is the one who is there. He
had met the leading men, the statesmen, the Herzog of the Fatherland,
the Gospodar of Holy Russia, and the hysterical agitator of Paris who
seized the moment of his country's downfall venomously to compass
further ruin, and in a lighter vein he had, too, all that rare anecdotal
interest of the man who has met the bold Bulgar in Sofia and knows him
_an fond_, and who has fraternised with the Serb in the questionable
security of Belgrade.
Small wonder, indeed, that Henty, who knew of what the world was capable
and what men could accomplish, held in light esteem the narrow but
loud-talking cult which condemns patriotism, scoffs at civic merit, and
would reduce society to an unsatisfactory incoherent brew. He was one
of those whose influence makes for the greatness of England, an England
which will fight, if duty really calls, at one of those crises in a
nation's life which show which is the true worth and which the base.
His stories reflect the man, and their great and enduring success among
boys, who are perhaps the most difficult of all to satisfy, must be
looked for in part in the great seriousness with which he went to work.
There was no difficulty about his style, which was as smooth-running as
the Thames, and no parade, while he pleased his readers especially by a
simple, unaffected touch of confidence and certainly attractive
suggestion of doing his utmost to satisfy the legion who looked to him
for literary fare. With such a character, typical of many, as Signor
Polani in _The Lion of Saint Mark_, he showed his really great skill in
portraiture; and though season by season his books were reviewed as
boys' books, there was much that necessarily escaped the notice of the
critic, much that was as deeply imaginative and inwardly significant as
passages in genre stories which received a larger measure of the
critic's attention. It could not have come as any particular
disappointment to Henty when he found that his _metier_ was writing
boys' books rather than novels. We are told that there are many people
who can write novels, and maybe with certain qualifications this is
true, but there are comparatively few who can write for, and please, the
exacting boy. The latter severe, if not absolutely erudite, critic may
not be able to define precisely what he wants, but he knows enough to be
certain that Henty could and did supply the requisite article. He knew,
like a great artist, what to leave out, which knowledge is the prime
factor in the making of the greatest works. It was the intuitive
perception of where the youthful imagination required to come into play.
It was grateful, gracious work this, of supplying boys with literature
which held them engrossed and helped them to think, and think well.
Youth has its troubles, its little ennuis, its griefs, the same as the
rest of the world, and despite disparity in years these phases are not
to be considered in miniature, for the imagination is larger and more
elastic in early days, and trouble assumes a very extended front. The
boy who is plagued by a dead tongue, or the perversity of circumstance,
or any other worriment of the flying day, as likely as not picks up his
favourite author to help him to forget the suggestion of the presence of
black care.
The name of Henty became one to refer to in another sort of literature--
the smart afternoon paper with its flippant dialogues referred to him
jocularly as the panacea for boys. It was all correct enough. The boys
worshipped him; and for years he went on working, pushing as it were
into untouched galleries in his mining after fresh subjects--and the
simile may be allowed, as even Carlyle speaks of the pursuit of
literature as subterranean labour. He never lost a point. No work was
too arduous, no preparation too exacting; and as regards many of his
books, a vast amount of "prep", as students dub their preliminary
labours, was entailed. He would have accuracy if history had to be
dealt with, and through all the years during which he was delving for
new treasures in the lumber rooms or cellars of the past, he kept up his
custom of carefully studying each phase or epoch before he commenced his
romance or made ready his mould. He imbibed many tomes to make one.
It is a great mistake to place any reliance on the glib statements
concerning the length of time that a book takes to write. Henty gave an
interviewer certain facts, but it must have been with an inward smile,
since all such figures are misleading, though not intentionally so. One
man will take five months to write a book, another two, and so on, for
there is practically no limit one way or the other; but the lay observer
who hears such statements as these generally makes a gross misuse of
them, and in his calculations as to how many books a man may write a
year, absolutely forgets that in writing time is not a very accurate
vehicle for arriving at an estimate. The author lays down his pen and
goes to his club to dine, but he takes his work with him; it is keeping
him close company in the train, and a new situation, or the germ of an
additional complication, is woven into the scenery as he is being borne
townwards. He cannot escape. Nothing is more pertinacious than an
unfinished character; while in the cab as likely as not one of his
creations is sitting by him, insisting on his being allowed a little
more elbow-room, or a minor satellite peers at him through the judas in
the roof. That is to say, there are no early hours, so-called, for
writers, no getting away from work and comfortably shutting up the shop.
It is not in the nature of things that this should be so. The writer
has never done, and practically every thousand words composed by Henty
was the result of long and careful prior work and thought.
As regards many of his stories, he admitted starting them on the
"go-as-you-please" system; that is to say, events and characters were
allowed to shape themselves in their own way; but then it must be
remembered that Henty had a good store to work upon, and that he had,
moreover, accustomed himself, through many years of press work, to
quickness of thought and the swift maturing of the line of reasoning,
since in writing for newspapers the man who hesitates is lost, for the
master printer takes no denial.
In popularity he may be reckoned to have passed W.H.G. Kingston and R.M.
Ballantyne, while he was, as it were, quite level with Captain Mayne
Reid and Jules Verne; the last-named writer's skeleton frameworks rather
than romances had deservedly an enormous vogue, partly because of their
tremendous scope, and also on account of the fillip they gave to the
imagination of the young reader. With such a man as Henty it seems like
begging the question to speak of "atmosphere"; but by whatever name that
intangible quality is designated, certain it is that Henty possessed
himself of it before he started work. Francis Hammond in his gondola in
old-world Venice, or Mademoiselle de Pignerol in the days of the Grand
Monarque, are all part and parcel of their respective times, and it is
this ring of truth which makes his stories prevail. The neurotic was as
far from Henty as are the poles asunder; but in giving to boyhood
something more substantial to dream about than "the gay castles of the
clouds that pass," in the story of the azure main, of England's
greatness, and the whole stirring, many-coloured panorama of ancient
days and battles fought on the other side of uncounted sunsets, it is
reasonable to imagine that at times he lived and perhaps almost lost
himself in the old world which he re-created. The man who knew the
byways of history as he did would be graceless and inconsistent if he
did not feel the grandeur of all those things, seen for a flying moment
down the winding turret stairway as the curtain is drawn aside. It is
as good to regard his masterly treatment of historic themes as it is
painful to witness the wretched spectacle of feeble handling of subjects
vast as these. Life, as Macbeth said, is but a walking shadow; but
there is a good deal of reality in it too, and there was nothing
visionary about the people Henty created: they were genial,
good-humoured, time-serving, sluggish, magnificent, or Boeotian, as
circumstance and occasion warranted, while in delineating a soldier of
our time his hand was unerring. His sketch of the linesman or the
trooper was as true as that of the mediaeval Spaniard in his shabby
cloak, the plump landlady of the inn, the bragging mountebank in
questionable buskins, the adventurer ready to sell his sword to the
highest bidder, or any other of the sometimes brilliant, sometimes
lack-lustre company with whom he had to deal on that broad white route
of historical romance which it was given to him to traverse that others
might appreciate these things. It is not only a question of boys, for
many an old stager whose life now is his club, likes these breezy,
healthy stories, and enjoys meeting once more the grave signors who
managed the political world in the bygone, and saluting yet once again
the kings whose weaknesses and whose grandeur filled a world that has
vanished. And his treatment of these legends, or facts, as the case may
be, is full of charm, just as his writing is simple and sincere and
instinct with the insight of a mind which had that greatest of all
gifts--the gift of keeping young.