The state of being “rather in want of money” was to be chronic with
Marryat, if we are to judge by the amount of writing he did during the
remaining nine years of his life. Before very long, indeed, he began to
have very serious reason indeed for complaining of straitened means. His
father’s fortune, which must have been considerable, had been invested in
the West Indies in those golden days at the end of the Great War, when
the languor of Spain, and the ruin of San Domingo by the negro revolt,
had given the English sugar islands a monopoly of the market for colonial
produce. In the forties, however, these happy times had disappeared for
ever. Competition and free trade brought down prices, the abolition of
slavery stopped production, and the value of West Indian property went
down with a run. The Marryat family suffered with the rest of the world.
The novelist had resources which were wanting to his brothers; but then
this advantage was compensated, as has been said before, by extravagant
and speculative habits. In 1839 the pinch was not as yet felt so severely
as it was later on. Marryat, immediately upon his return, went over to
Paris for his family, which had moved thither from Lausanne during his
stay in the States; and, bringing them to England, settled at 8, Duke
Street, St. James’s. For some four years he led, as he had hitherto done,
a somewhat wandering life. After a brief year in Duke Street, he moved
to Wimbledon House; which had belonged to his father, and was still
occupied by his mother. A short stay there was succeeded by a brief
residence in chambers at 120, Piccadilly, and then by another year or so
of occupation of a house in Spanish Place, Manchester Square. In 1843 be
broke away from London for good, and established himself at his own house
at Langham, in Norfolk.
All this restlessness speaks for itself. Men who possess the faculty of
managing their affairs with judgment, or who wish to apply themselves
to steady work, do not run in this way from pillar to post. Once again
I have to remark that much in Marryat’s life is left to be guessed at.
It is as well that it should be so. The indications we possess tell the
world all that it is entitled to learn. There is--though the contrary
proposition is frequently maintained in these days--no inherent right in
the public to be made acquainted with the private affairs of a gentleman
simply because he has done it the inestimable service of supplying it
with readable books. That Marryat, who has just been found expressing
a wish to retire from the “fraternity of authors,” was writing himself
blind in these years, is a fact which tells its own tale. Add to this a
few indications which Mrs. Ross Church has thought it right to supply--a
brief reference to some family misfortune of which the details are
not given; a complaint in one of Marryat’s letters that somebody,
apparently a relation, had suspected him of a wish to borrow money;
and an increasing tone of grief and trouble in all his letters--and
we have enough to form a general estimate of his position with. More
we probably could not learn, and would have no right to hunt up if we
could. That Marryat had a difficulty in making both ends meet; that his
expedients did not always succeed; that some of them were, too probably,
undignified; that the need for them was, at least partly, due to his own
mismanagement, are acknowledged facts. We may, and must, be satisfied
with them.
It is also easily to be believed that Marryat would enjoy the
hard living, and even hard drinking--artistic, literary, and
semi-literary--life of his time. Clarkson Stanfield was an intimate
friend. Rogers, who was acquainted with everybody, was an acquaintance.
With Dickens and Forster his friendship was of long standing, and
seems to have remained unbroken. One of the few, and too generally
insignificant, letters to her father printed by Mrs. Ross Church, is
an invitation to dinner from Dickens, ending with a pleasing promise
to give him some hock which would do him good. He was a guest at those
merry children’s parties which Mr. Forster has described. In his quarters
in his various London lodgings we are given to understand that there
was much and gay hospitality. Friends were profusely entertained in
rooms adorned with furs, trophies, Burmese idols, and weapons--all
the miscellaneous curios collected by a sailor and traveller during
many wandering hours. In Burmah, Marryat had even made a collection of
jewels cut from out of the bodies of slain enemies. The Burman who has
a gem makes an incision in his leg and hides it there, as our sailors
discovered more or less to their profit. Unfortunately the curios and the
talk are all scattered and irrecoverable. “It has all vanished like ‘air,
thin air’”--as Marryat wrote himself of certain common reminiscences
to “a lady for whom, to the time of his death, he retained the highest
sentiments of friendship and esteem.” Marryat’s friendships were not all
of this enduring kind. “Like most warm-hearted people,” as his daughter
puts it, “he was quick to take offence, and no one could have decided,
after an absence of six months, with whom he was friends and with whom he
was not.” Eager restlessness is the quality which seems to have been most
noticed in him by all his friends. It kept him on the move, not only from
house to house, but on excursions to Langham or other parts of England.
The toil which circumstances forced upon Marryat must have greatly aided
his natural restlessness in wearing out his life. Steady work and hard
work are not necessarily synonymous, and Marryat worked very hard by fits
and starts. While in America, and amid all the racket of his tour, he
had written “The Phantom Ship” which appeared in 1839. The six volumes
of his “Diary in America” followed in the same year. That was not off
his hands before he was at work on “Poor Jack,” “Masterman Ready,” “The
Poacher,” and “Percival Keene,” followed before the end of 1842. Here was
an amount of work (six books within five years) which might not be found
excessive by the orderly business-like novelist of to-day, but which must
have put a severe strain on a man who wrote at irregular times, but when
actually at it, wrote furiously. It was a distinct aggravation of the
burden that his handwriting was very minute. A man who, having to write a
great deal, writes very small, must either be very sure of his eyesight
and his nerves, or prepared through ignorance or recklessness to ruin
them both. It is, therefore, not to be wondered at that Marryat’s letters
between 1839 and 1840 contain references to the state of his health of a
constantly more melancholy nature. “I shall,” he wrote to the same lady
friend in the first of these years, “be at leisure, I really believe,
about the first week in December; but the second portion of ‘America’ has
been a very tough job. I am now correcting press (_sic_) of the third
volume, and half of it is done. I hope to be quite finished by the end
of the month, and also to have the other work ready for publication on
the 1st of January; but what with printers, engravers, stationers, and
publishers, I have been much overworked. I have written and read till my
eyes have been no bigger than a mole’s, and my sight about as perfect.
I have remained sedentary till I have had _un accés de bile_, and have
been under the hands of the doctor, and for some days obliged to keep my
bed; all owing to want of air and exercise. Now I am quite well again.”
Some two years later the news is much worse, and there is no mention of
complete recovery. “That you may not think me unkind,” he writes again
to the same correspondent, “in refusing your invitation, I must tell you
that I am much worse than I have made myself out in my former letters. I
fell down as if I had been shot a few days ago, and have been ever since
obliged to be very quiet, and am not permitted to drink anything but
water, or undergo the least excitement, and you would offer me every
description in the shape of beauty, mirth, revelry, and feasting, putting
yourself out of the question! No; for my sins--sins in the shape of three
volumes chiefly--and heavy sins, too, I must now submit to mortification
and penance. I am positively forbidden to write a line, but you may
tell William and Dunny that the little book is finished, and will be
out at Easter, when they will be able to read it.” Obviously work, and
forms of relaxation as wearing as any work, had begun already to ruin a
constitution not really robust. Marryat’s tendency to break blood vessels
had already crippled him when a lieutenant in the navy, and should have
warned him that though he might be muscularly powerful, he had no great
reserve of constitutional strength to draw on.
The visit to America makes a break in the character as well as in the
continuity of Marryat’s work. He had said all he had to say about the sea
life of his own time, and had to turn elsewhere. The “Diary in America”
is perhaps a sign that he thought for a moment of rivalling Captain Basil
Hall. If he was indeed tempted to do so, the temptation ceased to be
difficult to resist after his return to Europe. The toil of travel, and
then of writing out his impressions of travel, had been greater than he
had expected, and had produced no equivalent result--either in money or
reputation. Mrs. Ross Church states that he received for the “Diary,”
“on first publishing the manuscript,” £1,600. But, according to the same
authority, he had received nearly as much for several of his other books
in a lump sum, and they continued to bring him in a yearly harvest,
whereas the “Diary” sank at once into the position of a mere book about
America. In truth, this kind of writing had been overdone. There was no
longer a market for books of the Trollope or even the Martineau order.
Everything had been said about the United States which the public wanted
to hear for the time. The publishers of the “Diary” must have discovered
that, in taking the “Diary,” they had made the mistake not uncommonly
committed by the trade, and by theatrical managers, the mistake of
overestimating the length of time during which the public will continue
to care for the same thing. They, doubtless, told Marryat that the taste
for stories was more enduring than the liking for descriptions, abusive,
laudatory, or philosophical, of our American cousins. With or without
advice of this kind, he returned to stories, and remained steadily
faithful to them.
“The Phantom Ship,” written during the American tour, differs materially
from all the tales which had preceded it, except “Snarley Yow.” It is a
romance with a strong element of _diablerie_. Possibly because it was
not written in a hurry for the press, it shows more signs of care in
construction than most of the earlier books. Also, it is an historical
romance, and proves that Marryat had worked at the history of the
sea-life--not, doubtless, very hard, but still to some purpose. The
result makes one regret that he did not find, or seek for, the leisure to
dig further, and to avail himself of his discoveries. No great amount of
research can have been required to collect the materials for “The Phantom
Ship.” Admiral Burney’s “Discoveries in the South Seas” would alone have
given Marryat all he wanted for this picture of the old Dutch seamanship.
Still he brought with him so much knowledge acquired by actual experience
that a little was enough. Had he so pleased he might, with the help of
Hakluyt, of Monson, and of Sir Richard Hawkins’ “Voyage,” have given us a
picture of the Elizabethan seamen. He might have drawn the “chivalry of
the sea,” as Washington Irving asked him to do. A “Westward Ho” he would
not have written. We should not have had from him (nor have expected)
anything equivalent to the dream of Amyas Leigh, or the exquisite speech
at the grave of Salvation Yeo. But what he could have done was what
Kingsley could not do, and, with the tact of an artist, did not try to
do too much. He might have realized the actual sea life of the time--the
ships, the seamen, and the seamanship of the past. It was a work in
which only a sailor could have succeeded. The pictorial imagination of
Kingsley and the conscientious workmanship of Charles Reade alike fail
to give reality to their sea scenes. The first was a great artist, and
the second an exceedingly clever man with no contemptible share of the
imagination of the historian and biographer--the power of seeing the
value of materials, of deducing from the report of a thing done the
manner of the doing and the nature of the doer. They both worked hard to
realize the sea, and yet, if we compare the cruises of the _Rose_ and
the _Vengeance_, or the fight with the pirates in “Hard Cash,” with the
“club-hauling” of the _Diomede_, there is a perceptible difference. I am
not unaware that one may be unconsciously influenced by the knowledge
that Marryat was a seaman, to expect, and see more truth in his pictures
than in theirs. Remembering that, however, I still think that his sea
scenes differ from Kingsley’s, or Reade’s, as the thing seen differs from
the thing “got up”--with imagination, with insight, with conscientious
industry, no doubt,--but still “got up.”
In this, and in other ways, Marryat did not do all he might have
done. “The Phantom Ship,” with “Snarley Yow” which preceded, and the
“Privateersman” which followed it, must be taken for what they are worth
in place of the possible better. Even so, however, the value of the first
of them is considerable. Marryat made a good use of what Leigh Hunt
has somewhat hastily decided is the only sea legend. There is no great
originality in the incidents. Vanderdecken was made to his hand, and he
had German enough--or failing that had translations enough--to supply him
with the _diablerie_. But the materials are well used. The story swings
along. Philip Vanderdecken, the Pilot Schriften, the greedy Portuguese
governor, and the priests have a distinct vitality. Amine is by far
his nearest approach to an acceptable heroine; for indeed it must be
confessed that this sailor had an altogether maritime ignorance of women,
except bumboat women and the ladies of the Hard. The scenes in which his
heroines are on the stage are skip. Amine’s appearances, however, are not
skip. She is a very acceptable heroine of melodrama, good of her kind,
with a decided character of her own. The Inquisition scenes in which she
is the central figure are the highest point Marryat reached in romance.
Very good too are the successive appearances of the Phantom Ship, done
as was commonly the case with Marryat, simply, without straining, without
obvious desire to make you shiver. If the last scene of all trenches on
the namby pamby, as I am afraid it does, it is preceded by a very good
one indeed. Marryat has indicated the loneliness, the weary waiting, the
heart-broken striving of Vanderdecken’s doomed crew, very sufficiently
by the futile effort of the poor mate, who would fain persuade the
Portuguese to carry the _Flying Dutchman’s_ fatal letters home. That
Marryat was content to indicate is not the least of his claims to be
considered an artist. He knew by instinct, or deduction, the advantage
of coming suddenly on his reader. Too many other story-tellers prepare,
and accumulate, and pour forth, the materials of the shower (too commonly
of adjectives) which is to cause us the _frisson_. We see them doing it,
and know what is meant, and, human nature being perverse, hold ourselves
steady and refuse to shiver. The princess whose husband could not shiver
gave him the emotion by turning the cold water and tittlebats down his
back when he was expecting no such shock. If he had seen her filling the
tub, putting in the little fishes, and coming to tilt it all over him,
there would have been no surprise, and, too probably, he would never have
known that delightful sensation.
“Poor Jack,” the immediate successor of “The Phantom Ship,” is somewhat
closer to “Mr. Midshipman Easy,” but it, too, is something of an
historical study, whether it was deliberately designed to be so or
not. Greenwich Hospital has become something very different from the
retreat for wounded seamen which Marryat knew, and his picture of it,
somewhat sketchy as it is, will always have the value of a document.
The story one need not stop to analyse at any length. Incidents and
characters are of the kind familiar with Marryat--not inferior to the
average of the others, but not distinguished from them by any very marked
characteristics. One piece of fun it does contain not inferior to his
best, the immortal apology of the midshipman who had told the master that
he was not fit to carry guts to a bear. The palpable absurdity of the
incident is on a par with Mr. Easy’s amazing use of the Articles of War.
“The Poacher” and “Percival Keene,” which also belong to these years,
both have a flavour of work done only because the author was “rather
in want of money.” The first is another venture in the same line as
“Japhet.” The second is the least pleasant, take it for all in all, of
the books which bear Marryat’s name. It is the only one which had better
not be re-read in maturer years by him who has read it as a boy. The fun
is forced--of the horse-play practical joking kind--and the serious parts
are somewhat spoilt by fustian. The negro pirate captain and his crew
are good enough for boyish tragedy, but that is not what we expect from
Marryat. Finally, too, there is a disagreeable flavour in the book. The
hero is a low fellow--not in a healthy human way even, but in a very mean
intriguing fashion, and he plays his part in the meanest possible manner.
The one story of these days which could least be spared from Marryat’s
work is “Masterman Ready.” This, the first of his children’s books,
is also one of the best, perhaps the very best, thing of its kind in
English. It is a child’s story in which there is not one word above the
intelligence of the readers it was designed for, one situation or one
character they could not grasp, and yet it is distinctly literature. It
is didactic, and yet there is no preachment. It is pathetic, and yet it
is not mawkish. It ends with a death bed scene which is not an offence.
In point of mere cleverness of workmanship it ranks, in my opinion, first
among Marryat’s works, and yet it is perfectly simple and unstrained.
Marryat was indeed well qualified to write for children. He had loved
their company at all times, and had served a long apprenticeship in
telling stories to his own. The practice had taught him to avoid the
fatal mistake of condescension. An intelligent child, as even so weighty
a writer as Guizot has remarked, can understand a great deal more than
the duller kind of adult is disposed to allow. It does not like to be
effusively addressed as “my little friend,” and made to see that the
kind gentleman or lady who speaks is intent on improving its mind. “I
can’t be always good,” said Tommy; “I’m very hungry; I want my dinner.”
The unsophisticated youthful mind is apt to be equally direct about its
literature. It can’t be always imbibing preachment; it becomes languid,
and wants to be amused: but it also likes precision of detail, and is
eager to learn the why and how of everything. With these two rules to
guide him--not to be too obtrusively instructive, and yet to explain
every incident as it came, Marryat wrote a model child’s story. Forster
was certainly in the right in declaring it to be the most read, and the
most willingly re-read, of its class. For its mere cleverness the book
can be enjoyed by the oldest of readers who is not too dreadfully in
earnest. It was no small feat to have taken so well worn a situation as
the shipwreck and the desert island, and to have made out of it a book
which may stand next to Defoe’s. The desertion of the _Pacific_ and her
passengers by the crew, her wreck, the life on the island, the fight with
the savages, and the rescue, are as probable, they follow one another
as naturally, as the events in the life of Robinson Crusoe. Marryat
had too much tact and knowledge to fall into the extravagances of the
“Swiss Family Robinson.” The beasts and plants of the island are not an
impossible collection of the flora and fauna of three continents. Then,
too, the book contains two of Marryat’s very best characters. Masterman
Ready is an ideal old sailor, brave, modest, kind, helpful, able to turn
his hand to anything, and to do it well, yet, withal, no mere bundle of
abstract virtues, but a most credible human being--such a man as might
have been formed by such a life. Very different, but equally good, is
Master Tommy Seagrave, the ideal of greedy, naughty boys. Tommy’s ever
vigorous appetite and irrepressible passion for making a noise, for
meddling with everything, for trying everything, for spoiling everything,
are as perfect in their way as the meek heroism of Masterman Ready. At
the end, the collision of the two produces very genuine tragedy. Master
Tommy was just the boy who would have emptied the water-butt, under
pretext of bringing water from the well, and would have accepted the very
undeserved praise bestowed on his zeal without the faintest scruple. The
consequences of his bad behaviour are absolutely natural and inevitable.
That Masterman Ready should have met his death through Master Tommy was
an artistic stroke of the highest merit. And Marryat tells it all with
a calm detachment which might reduce the average Russian novelist to
despair. He is not wroth with Tommy. He accepts him as inevitable, and
only describes him with a calm artistic precision, simply as the type
of “The Boy.” Then, too, consider the final no-repentance and escape of
Tommy. He howled for water and got it, and Masterman Ready died that he
might have it. The little wretch never knew what mischief he had done. He
sailed away to Sydney with an excellent appetite, and as long as he had
enough to eat, and things to break, was no doubt perfectly happy. There
is a something colossal in the truth, and the artistic calmness of the
whole story.
While Marryat was at work on “The Poacher,” he had a slight literary
skirmish--not unworthy of notice as a proof that certain things are
unchanging in the literary world. The story appeared in _The Era_ in
weekly numbers. One of those remarkable persons, who, in every successive
generation, find it necessary to make a protest in favour of the dignity
of literature, and whose idea of dignity commonly is that literature can
only be good when it appears in a certain way and at a certain price,
fell foul of Marryat for choosing this low method of publication. This
egregious person wrote in _Fraser_, and very gratuitously attacked
Marryat, in the course of some remarks on Harrison Ainsworth, in the
following “slashing” style: “If writing monthly fragments threatened
to deteriorate Mr. Ainsworth’s productions, what must be the result of
this _hebdomadal_ habit? Captain Marryat, we are sorry to see, has
taken to the same line. Both these popular authors may rely on our
warning, that they will live to see their laurels fade unless they more
carefully cultivate a spirit of _self-respect_. That which was venial in
a miserable starveling of Grub Street is _perfectly disgusting_ in the
extravagantly paid novelists of these days--the _caressed_ of generous
booksellers. Mr. Ainsworth and Captain Marryat ought to disdain such
_pitiful peddling_. Let them eschew it without delay.”
These were very bitter words, but the only influence they had on Marryat
was to provoke him to show that he could do the single-stick style as
well as the _Fraser_ men themselves. With less wit, but more good humour
than Thackeray, he, too, wrote his Essay on Thunder and Small Beer. He
pointed out that there is no necessary connection between the manner
of publication and the method of composition of a book, and even made
quite respectable fun of _Fraser’s_ pedantry. “In the paragraph,” he
says, “which I have quoted there is an implication on your part which
I cannot pass over without comment. You appear to set up a standard
of _precedency_ and _rank_ in literature, founded upon the rarity
or frequency of an author’s appearing before the public, the scale
descending from the ‘caressed of generous publishers’ to the ‘starveling
of Grub Street’--the former, by your implication, constituting the
_aristocracy_ and the latter the _profanum vulgus_ of the quill. Now
although it is a fact that the larger and nobler animals of creation
produce but slowly, while the lesser, such as rabbits, rats, and mice,
are remarkable for their fecundity; I do not think that the comparison
will hold good as to the breeding of brains; and to prove it, let us
examine--if this argument by implication of yours is good--at what
grades upon the scale it would place the writers of the present day.” By
applying “this argument by implication” in a rigid fashion, Marryat has
no difficulty in showing that “my Lady ---- anybody,” who produces one
novel a year, is necessarily twice as great a writer as Hook or James
who produces two, and twelve times as great as the _Fraser_ man himself,
whose production is monthly. The reasoning is burlesquely fallacious, but
it was meant to be so. Marryat spoke with more gravity, and more point
too, when he urged that he was doing a good work by spreading his story
“among the lower classes, who, until lately (and the chief credit of the
alteration is due to Mr. Dickens), had hardly an idea of such recreation.”
“In a moral point of view I hold that I am right. We are educating the
lower classes; generations have sprung up who can read and write; and may
I inquire what it is they have to read, in the way of amusement?--for
I speak not of the Bible, which is for private examination. They
have scarcely anything but the weekly newspapers, and as they cannot
command amusement, they prefer those which create the most excitement;
and this I believe to be the cause of the great circulation of _The
Weekly Despatch_, which has but too well succeeded in demoralizing the
public, in creating disaffection and ill-will towards the Government,
and assisting the nefarious views of demagogues, and chartists. It is
certain that men would rather laugh than cry--would rather be amused than
rendered gloomy and discontented--would sooner dwell upon the joys and
sorrows of others, in a tale of fiction, than brood over their supposed
wrongs. If I put good and wholesome food (and, as I trust, sound moral)
before the lower classes, they will eventually eschew that which is
coarse and disgusting, which is only resorted to because no better is
supplied. Our weekly newspapers are at present little better than records
of immorality and crime, and the effect which arises from having no other
matter to read and comment on, is of serious injury to the morality of
the country.… I consider, therefore, that in writing for the amusement
and instruction of the poor man, I am doing that which has been but too
much neglected--that I am serving my country, and you surely will agree
with me that to do so is not _infra dig._ in the proudest Englishman:
and, as a Conservative, you should commend, rather than stigmatise my
endeavours in the manner which you have so hastily done.”
The intention and the argument here are better than the style. Marryat
was better at narrative than exposition, and could at times be as free
with the relative pronouns as that distinguished officer, Captain
Rawdon Crawley. The confidence Marryat, in common with most of his
contemporaries, reposed in the influence of wholesome amusement was
doubtless excessive. It has not been found that when the “poor man” [or
other reader for that matter], has a choice of Hercules given him between
good literature and bad, he will cleave to the first and reject the last.
Also, there is a candid confession of the faith “that there is nothing
like leather” in Marryat’s confidence that good weekly stories would
soothe the discontent which was seething in England before 1848. But
in spite of slips of grammar, optimism, and over-confidence, Marryat’s
answer to the priggery in _Fraser_ is a creditable manifesto. To desire
to kill the trash of _The Weekly Despatch_ was at least a respectable
ambition, and a man has a good right to believe in his causes, and his
weapons.