Langham, to which Marryat betook himself for good in 1843, had been
in his possession for some thirteen years. Its history, as far as he
was concerned, may be taken to have been characteristic of the man.
He acquired it, according to Mrs. Ross Church, by exchange--having
“swapped” it, after dinner and copious champagne, against Sussex House,
Hammersmith. From that period it had been an interesting but unprofitable
possession to him. Before he left for America he had already had
occasion to complain of the difficulty of getting rent. A tenant had
been expelled, and replaced by another of the fairest character. But
appearances had proved delusive. Langham had been all along more of a
burden than a profit to its owner. In 1843 he seems to have decided to
see what he could do with it himself. A passage in his fragmentary life
of Lord Napier, quoted by his daughter, shows that he shared to the full
the common delusion of men, and the especial delusion of sailors, that it
is easy to manage a small property. In this pleasing but fatal belief he
set out to see what he could do with the 700 acres of the estate himself.
Again I have to acknowledge my inability to give any account of the
motives for this sudden (for it appears to have been sudden) decision.
Considerations of economy were doubtless of weight with him. The fall in
the value of West Indian property had, as has been said, hit him hard.
The demands on his purse were as heavy as ever--indeed, to judge from
a somewhat plaintive reference in one of his letters--even heavier. He
speaks in this place of actions brought by tradesmen to recover money
for goods supplied to his sons Frederick and Frank--from which we may
conclude that the young men had inherited their share of the paternal
faculty for spending money. Their father was driven to express the wish
that the value of this necessary was taught in schools. Neither at school
nor at home do the young Marryats appear to have gained this knowledge,
and in those years the navy, which they had both entered, was no school
of thrift. Doubtless they were among the causes which first induced
Captain Marryat to betake himself to the country, and then kept him hard
at work when he was there.
Langham is in the northern division of Norfolk, halfway between
Wells-next-the-Sea and Holt. The Manor House, says Mrs. Ross Church,
“without having any great architectural pretensions, had a certain
unconventional prettiness of its own. It was a cottage in the Elizabethan
style, built after the model of one at Virginia Water belonging to his
late Majesty, George IV., with latticed windows opening on to flights
of stone steps ornamented with vases of flowers, and leading down from
the long narrow dining-room, where (surrounded by Clarkson Stanfield’s
illustrations of ‘Poor Jack,’ with which the walls were clothed) Captain
Marryat composed his later works, to the lawn behind. The house was
thatched and gabled, and its pinkish white walls and round porch were
covered with roses and ivy, which in some parts climbed as high as the
roof itself.” When Marryat came down to examine his property with an
intention of living on it, he found it suffering from all the evils which
commonly fall upon the property of absentee landlords. The tenant of the
larger of the two farms into which the estate was divided had not only
mismanaged his land. Having the house itself at his mercy, he had turned
the drawing-room into a common lodging-house, in which tramps and other
necessitous persons could have a bed for the modest sum of twopence a
night. The windows were smashed or unclosed, and the birds of the air had
built their nests in the rooms. This state of neglect was soon changed
for the better, and Langham Manor became habitable.
In it Marryat sat down during the last five years of his life, to show in
practice the soundness of his theory touching the fitness of sailors for
the management of small properties. It will surprise few to learn that
the result only proved once more that small properties are not so easily
forced to yield a profit. Even before actually coming to live on the
estate, Marryat had tried various speculations with his land. The results
of his efforts, personal and vicarious, are illustrated in his daughter’s
“Life” by the following extracts, taken at random from his farm accounts.
£ s. d.
1842. Total receipts 154 2 9
Expenditure 1637 0 6
1846. Total receipts 898 12 6
Expenditure 2023 10 8
It will be seen that the balance was less heavily against Marryat in
’46 when he was present, than in ’42 when he could only look on from
afar. Even in these cases the master’s eye is of value. It is better to
lose on your own ventures than to be robbed all round, and in so far
Marryat no doubt gained by living on his land. In 1845 he even secured
some compensation for the damage done to his house and property by the
dishonest tenant--at least the courts decided that compensation should
be paid him. After a lawsuit, an unsuccessful effort at compromise, and
(Marryat declares) much hard swearing by his opponent, he was awarded
£150. Whether he ever got it is a question, for the tenant seems to
have been meditating bankruptcy immediately afterwards. The end of the
business is wrapt up in mystery. On the whole, one can quite believe
that the Captain’s “agricultural vagaries appeared almost like insanity
to those steady plodding minds that could not understand that a man
may have genius, and no common sense.” Quite credible, too, is it that
Marryat was very particularly proud of his common sense, and “would have
been very much hurt” if any man had doubted his claim to possess it in
an eminent degree. If there is anything of which the more flighty kind
of speculator is firmly persuaded, it is of his practical faculty and
sober good sense. It is very characteristic that in all Marryat’s stories
for children, and in touches scattered over his earlier works, there
are proofs of a taste for thinking about matters of business, and for
constructing plausible narratives of profitable investments of money and
labour. It would seem that, among writing men (and not among them only)
this taste is an infallible sign of a natural incapacity to acquire three
pennyworth of anything for less than eighteen pence. Balzac had it, and
he never could keep his fingers off a losing speculation. Marryat is so
exact about sums of money, and has such a turn for showing how profits
are to be made, that we are quite prepared to hear of him bursting into
his brother’s room at 3 o’clock a.m., with splendid schemes for draining
the marshes of Clay-by-the-Sea, and thereby realizing wealth beyond
the dreams of avarice. It follows as a matter of course that his only
surviving son, Frank, found Langham a worthless inheritance.
It is at this period of his life that we can obtain the best, and,
indeed, almost the only personal view of Marryat. Of the last years
of his life at Langham, Mrs. Ross Church speaks from memory, and her
evidence has independent support. The picture we obtain is in the main
pleasant, though it is sufficiently clear that Marryat was not exactly
an angel. “Many people,” says his daughter, “have asked whether Captain
Marryat, when at home, was not ‘very funny.’ No, decidedly not. In
society, with new topics to discuss, and other wits about him on which to
sharpen his own--or, like flint and steel, to emit sparks by friction--he
was as gay and humorous as the best of them; but at home he was always
a thoughtful, and, at times, a very grave man; for he was not exempt
from those ills that all flesh is heir to, and had his sorrows and his
difficulties and moments of depression like the rest of us. At such times
it was dangerous to thwart or disturb him, for he was a man of strong
passions and indomitable determination; but, whoever felt the effects
of his moods of perplexity or disappointment, his children never did.”
Mrs. Ross Church must forgive it if this description reminds me more
than a little of a certificate to character I once heard given to a
British skipper, a mahogany-faced man of immense strength and violence,
in the office of one of Her Majesty’s consuls, in a Mediterranean port.
This gallant seaman had been summoned by one of his men for assault
and battery. He confessed the beating, but denied that it had been so
aggravated as the plaintiff alleged. Moreover he pleaded provocation,
and called up his boatswain as a witness to character. The boatswain,
an honest-looking rather chuckle-headed fellow, was obviously torn by
conflicting desires. He did not wish to displease his captain, and yet
he did not wish to tell lies which would go against his comrade. Nothing
definite could be got out of him while in the presence of the parties.
When asked in confidence (and in an outer office) what the truth of
the matter was, he answered, “Why, you see, sir, it’s just this--the
captain he’s a very good sort of man as long as he has everything his own
way--but when he’s crossed he clears the place.”
It may be taken as proved, then, that Marryat had in abundance that
kind of good nature which is displayed when the owner is pleased and
happy--of which this may at least be said, that it is vastly superior to
no good nature at all. Moreover, we have to consider what things it was
that made him displeased and unhappy. Mrs. Ross Church’s qualification
to the character just quoted shows that he did not entirely hang his
fiddle up when he came home. To his children “he was a most indulgent
father and friend, caring little what escapades they indulged in so
long as they were not afraid to tell the truth. ‘Tell truth and shame
the devil’ was a quotation constantly on his lips; and he always upheld
falsehood and cowardice as the two worst vices of mankind. He never
permitted anything to be locked or hidden away from his children, who
were allowed to indulge their appetites at their own discretion; nor were
they ever banished from the apartments which he occupied. Even whilst he
was writing, they would pass freely in and out of the room, putting any
questions to him that occurred to them, and the worst rebuke they ever
encountered was the short determined order, ‘Cease your prattle, child,
and leave the room,’ an order that was immediately obeyed. For with all
his indulgence of them, Captain Marryat took care to impress one fact
upon his children--that his word was law.”
The children were aware that they were dealing with a parent not
incapable of getting in a rage, and therefore stopped in time--which
is one of the many advantages of not possessing a too equable temper.
These collisions of theirs with the sovereign authority at Langham
cannot, however, have been frequent, as this further quotation from Mrs.
Ross Church will show: “The long-expected governess [there were great
negotiations over the engagement of this official], when eventually
secured and transplanted to Langham, was not received by the children,
who had been accustomed to have their own way in everything, with much
enthusiasm; and their father was the friend to whom they invariably
appealed for protection against her authority. Captain Marryat had
rather an original plan with respect to punishment and reward. He kept
a quantity of small articles for presents in his secretary, and at the
termination of each week the children, and governess armed with a report
of their general behaviour, were ushered with much solemnity into the
library to render up an account. Those who had behaved well during the
preceding seven days received a prize, because they had been so good;
and those who had behaved ill also received one, in hopes that they
would never be naughty again. The governess was also presented with a
gift, that her criticism on the justice of the transaction might be
disarmed. Thus all parties left the room perfectly satisfied; an end
which, Captain Marryat used to observe, it required some diplomacy to
attain. The governess was in the habit of restraining the children’s
thoughtlessness by imposition of fines or lessons when they tore their
clothes; but, as tearing their clothes was an event of daily occurrence,
the punishment became rather heavy; and one of the younger ones, having
made a large rent in a new frock, ran in dismay to her father in order
to consult him how best to escape the impending doom. Captain Marryat,
without any regard to the future of the garment in question, took hold of
the rent and tore off the whole lower part of the skirt. ‘Tell her _I_
did it,’ he said in explanation as he walked away.” This story, which had
previously made its appearance in an article in the _Cornhill Magazine_,
is supported there by the general assertion that whenever any of the
young Marryats required punishment they were doubly petted for the rest
of the day. “It seemed as if no amount of indulgence was thought too much
for compensation; like the jam to take the taste of the physic out of the
mouth.”
Persons who make a serious study of the art of training children may not
all agree that a system which recommended courage by giving them nothing
to fear, inculcated the love of truth by making it safe and pleasant to
tell it, and developed the moral virtues by unlimited indulgence, was one
to be held up as a model to fathers. No doubt, however, it was abundantly
pleasant for the children, and it may readily be believed that Captain
Marryat was loved by his own house. With his children he lived on terms
of affectionate freedom, making them his companions, and even training
them to play piquet, for which scientific game he had a great affection,
in order that they might share with him in all things.
For animals, too, he had a genuine but not a maudlin affection. His
dogs and his pony Dumpling figure much in the accounts given of his
last years. His favourite bull, Ben Brace, was kept tethered opposite
the window of the room in which he wrote. It is a good sign of his
genuine kindness for animals that he seems to have been made rather
impatient by the gushing talk about them, and the wondrous tales of
their intelligence, which are (in the opinion of some) nearly the most
nauseous of all forms of twaddle. We have it on his own authority that
he joined Theodore Hook in inventing outrageous stories about the
intelligence of animals, and palming them off on the too credulous
popular naturalist. To his men Marryat seems to have been a kind master.
He at least gave them copious feasts on proper occasions. “All the men
who were on the farm,” he tells his god-daughter, “were invited to a
Christmas dinner in the kitchen, and they sat down two-and-twenty at the
table in the servants’ hall, and were waited upon by our own servants.
They had two large pieces of roast beef, and a boiled leg of pork; four
dishes of Norfolk dumplings; two large meat pies; two geese, eight ducks,
and eight widgeon; and after that they had four large plum puddings.”
This, with “plenty of strong beer,” which was also duly supplied, made,
as Marryat seems to have felt with pardonable satisfaction, a feed
likely to be remembered by the two-and-twenty farm hands. He was not so
original as he perhaps thought himself, or as some have supposed him to
have been, in employing an ex-poacher, one Barnes, as gamekeeper. That
particular kind of thief had often been set to catch the other thieves
before Captain Marryat went to live at Langham. The poacher who is not
merely the paid hand of a London poulterer is commonly enough not such a
bad fellow, and when he is allowed to combine his sporting tastes with
a regular salary, and a position of some authority, is capable of doing
fairly well. In this case whatever risk Marryat ran was justified by the
result. Barnes proved not only a good servant to him, but is said to have
been a loyal follower to his son Frank when he emigrated to California.
Here, on his own land, surrounded by his family, Marryat spent what were,
doubtless, not the least happy years of his life. An occasional friend
from London found the ex-_viveur_ and dandy in velveteen shooting jacket
and coloured trousers, turning out at five in the morning, trotting about
his farm on Dumpling, attentive to scientific farming, and invincible
in hope of profit from that deceptive venture. For company, he had his
romps with his children, his game of piquet, and an occasional, or even
frequent, visit from Lieutenant Thomas, of the coastguard station at
Morston. The two old seamen met, and talked of the rapid progress of
the service to the d----, as old seamen have done from the beginning,
and will do to the end of time. From the outer world came requests for
work from editors, suggestions that he should take up this subject or
the other, and at times invitations to come up and take part in farewell
dinners to Macready or to Dickens. These last he steadily declined.
Except during a few brief visits to London on matters of business, he
remained fixed at Langham till the disease which proved fatal drove him
up to town in search of better medical help than he could obtain in
Norfolk.
He has himself described the work of these last years in a letter
to Forster, who had written in 1845 to Marryat, suggesting that he
should give “a month or two to a short biography, of about a volume;
something of the size and manner of Southey’s ‘Nelson,’ and the subject
‘Collingwood.’” Marryat thought it over, but declined, giving, among
other reasons, this: “That I have lately taken to a different style of
writing, that is, for young people. My former productions, like all
novels, have had their day, and for the present, at least, will sell
no more; but it is not so with the _juveniles_; they have an annual
demand, and become _a little income_ to me; which I infinitely prefer
to receiving any sum in a mass, which very soon disappears somehow
or other.” Marryat justified his unwillingness to write the life of
Collingwood by other than business reasons. “I should like,” he told
Forster, “to write about Collingwood, but if I were to write it in
anything like a stipulated time I should not do it well. Biography is
most difficult writing, and requires more time and thought than any
original composition, and if I take it up I must be free as air.” In
addition to this (justly high) estimate of the difficulty and dignity
of biography, Marryat, with sound critical judgment, decided that
Collingwood was not a proper subject. There is not enough known or to be
known about him. So much of his work was done as a subordinate under St.
Vincent or Nelson. With them he was always in the second place at best,
and when he reached great independent command, the heroic days of the
naval war were over, and there was little for him to do beyond duties of
a mainly routine character, performed in the midst of chronic illness.
It is a pity perhaps that Marryat did not devote some part of his work
to naval biography, but he would hardly have made a real success with
Collingwood. For Forster himself, Marryat wrote a series of letters to
the _Examiner_ on the “Condition of England Question,” or that part of
England which he saw about him in Norfolk. “I have,” he wrote to Forster,
“been amusing myself with putting together my thoughts and knowledge of
the condition of the agricultural class--I mean the common labourer
principally--and I believe I know more of the subject than anything I
have seen in print. What I can say is from personal knowledge. I was
thinking of writing some letters to Peel as a Norfolk farmer, ‘The Poor
Man _versus_ Sir Robert Peel.’ It would not do to put my name to them as
they would be anything but Conservative, but they would be the _truth_.”
It was not Marryat’s destiny to be a politician, and his opinion of Sir
Robert Peel is perhaps not very valuable. His own political activity was
not particularly consistent, for he appears to have swayed from Reformer
to Conservative, and back again, but it may be noted that he ended by
sharing that dislike of the leader who always led his followers to
surrender which was so widely felt in Peel’s last days.
His main work was always his stories for children. Five of these belong
to the Langham period--“The Narrative of the Travels and Adventures of
Monsieur Violet,” “The Settlers in Canada,” “The Mission,” “The Children
of the New Forest,” and “The Little Savage.” There may be some doubt
whether the first ought to come under this heading. Marryat did not
consider it a child’s story himself; but if it is not _that_ one has some
difficulty in deciding what it was. The materials were, Mrs. Ross Church
says, supplied by a young Frenchman, named Lasalles, who turned up at
Langham, and astonished the neighbourhood by lassoing cattle and doing
other barbarous feats. The matter supplied by this amusing adventurer
was “licked into shape” by Marryat. This account of the origin of the
book is certainly borne out by its contents. It is a somewhat rambling
story of adventure among the Red Men, starting from an improbability, and
ending somewhat abruptly. No small part of it consists of an account of
the early Mormons, and has sadly the air of padding. On the whole, it has
much more the look of a collection of notes for a tale of adventure than
anything else, and has always been one of the least read, if not entirely
the least read, of the books which bear Marryat’s name. Of “The Mission”
its author gave an exact account in a letter to his friend Mrs. S----:
“It is composed of scenes and descriptions of Africa in a journey to the
Northward from the Cape of Good Hope--full of lions, rhinoceroses, and
all manner of adventures, interspersed with a little common sense here
and there, and interwoven with the history of the settlement of the Cape
up to 1828--written for young people of course, and, therefore trifling,
but amusing.” “The Mission,” although this promising sketch of it is
strictly correct, has not been much more popular than “Monsieur Violet,”
and the reason is obvious enough. It is not so much a story as a series
of unconnected, or very loosely connected, incidents; and moreover, it
contains what any right-minded boy could only regard as a cruel “sell.”
The hero starts forth to clear up the fate of a relative--a lady who
has been wrecked on the Caffre coast many years before. It is not known
for certain whether she was drowned or died on shore, and a fear has
always existed that she survived as a prisoner among the natives, and
had grown up to be the wife of some Caffre chief, and bear him young
barbarians in his kraal--a fate which it is believed did actually befall
the daughters of an English officer, who were wrecked on that coast on
their way back from India. He goes on, hears of a renowned chief, whose
mother was an Englishwoman, finds him, and then discovers that it was
another shipwrecked lady, who had the happiness to produce a half-bred
hero in that distant region. His own relative has certainly perished. Now
this is cruel. It was not worth while to go so far to learn so little,
and the feeling of disappointment caused is too acute. Marryat made a
fatal mistake when he overlooked the possibilities of the situation.
For the rest, it is a pity he did, because the background of the story
is particularly good. Marryat seems to have obtained a very clear idea
of the Cape, which he must have visited during his service in the South
Atlantic. His hunting adventures, his Zulu warriors, his Dutch Boers, and
Hottentot boys are distinctly good. There is even a touch of something
grandiose in the references to the invaders from the North, who were then
pressing down on Caffraria. They weigh in an imposing fashion on the
fortunes of the adventurers in “The Mission.” It is somewhat unfair to
look at it all now, when these materials have again been made popular.
But good as it is of its kind, the book has a feeble, aimless look,
simply from want of satisfactory ending.
Of the three children’s stories which remain--“The Settlers,” “The
Children of the New Forest,” and “The Little Savage”--the second is
most likely to be interesting to children, and the last is, in part at
least, the most original. There is something rather gruesome in the
picture of the child born on a desert island, and growing up by the side
of a ruffian who bullies him. The natural savagery of the human animal
is developed in him unchecked, and Marryat has shown some power in the
scenes in which the boy discovers the helplessness of his companion,
who has been blinded by a flash of lightning, and then turns on him
with cool ferocity. But the promise of the beginning is not kept. “The
Little Savage” becomes didactic--full of repetitions--and ends by being
more than a little tiresome. On the whole, after all, “The Children” is
better. Our old friends, the Cavaliers and Roundheads, are less new than
“The Little Savage,” but they last out more briskly. It is a child’s
story of merit--nothing more--and the historical erudition of it, if
somewhat shallow, is on a level with that of more pretentious books. “The
Privateersman” has a certain interest as being the last of Marryat’s sea
stories, and as a picture, or at least a rough sketch, of the strange old
privateer life of which “The Voyages and Cruises of Commodore Walker” is
almost our only record from the inside. It is not a pleasant book, or a
strong. Moreover, Marryat puts his hero in the very most ignoble position
any hero was ever in. It may be safely laid down as a rule that under
no conditions ought a gentleman to desert a woman in a forest full of
Red American Indians. It is one of those things which a gentleman cannot
do. Now the hero of “The Privateersman” does it--and the deduction is
obvious. The story has touches which remind one of “Colonel Jack,” but
it is too clearly a book written simply to fill space in a magazine.
Marryat’s fun had gone when he wrote it for Harrison Ainsworth and _The
New Monthly Magazine_. “Valerie,” a species of Japhet in petticoats, is
not even all Marryat’s, and was, in any case, written when he was slowly
dying.