Life of Frederick Marryat

CHAPTER IV.

When the great war came at last to an end in 1815, leaving Marryat a commander at the age of three-and-twenty, his ambition was still to be the successful naval officer, and not the portrait painter of the sea life. Twelve years were to pass before he ceased to be employed. During this period he held three commands, and once more saw the face of war. It was a small and poor war after the heroic conflicts of his boyhood, but still it had its own difficulties and trials. He began to use his pen in these years, but at first it was for merely professional purposes. His code of signals must have been prepared, and his pamphlet on the best method of recruiting the navy, and his scheme for stopping Channel smuggling, were certainly written, in this second period, while he was still looking forward to the chance of hoisting his flag.

Marryat was one of the great swarm of Englishmen who profited by the peace to visit the Continent, which had been as nearly as might be shut to the peaceful traveller for twenty-two years. He is credited with having “occupied himself in acquiring a perfect knowledge of such branches of science as might prove useful should the Lords of the Admiralty think fit to employ him in a voyage of discovery or survey.” Doubtless Marryat loved his profession, and worked at it, but when he was recalled from Italy, in 1818, on some vague scheme of African exploration he was probably engaged in amusing himself. The scheme came to nothing, and in January, 1819, he married—a most convincing proof that his intention of exploring Africa had not lasted long. Mrs. Marryat was a Miss Shairp, daughter of a Scotch gentleman who had been Consul-General in Russia. Marryat never agreed with St. Vincent that married men are ruined for the service, and some eighteen months later he was at sea again in command of the Beaver sloop.

In this commission he saw the end of the man who had kept Europe in turmoil for the major part of a generation. The Beaver was ordered on an all-round cruise in the South Atlantic to show the flag at Madeira and the Azores, at the solitary rock of Tristan d’Acunha, at our own possessions at the Cape, and finally to do guard duty at St. Helena. When the Beaver arrived at her station Napoleon was just reaching the end of his final years of imprisonment. We still maintained a naval guard against the enterprises of any Buonapartist adventurer who might try to take the Emperor off the rock where he sat, consumed with unavailing regrets, and disgracing his fall by undignified squabbles with Sir Hudson Lowe. An English man-of-war was always kept cruising to windward of the island. The last officer who performed this duty was Captain Marryat. The Beaver was watching for the possible liberator, who never came, when Napoleon died. Marryat, who was a clever draughtsman, took a sketch of the Emperor on his death-bed. He was already apparently suffering from dysentery or he fell ill immediately (and somewhat conveniently) afterwards. As his health did not permit him to remain in the South Atlantic station any longer, he was allowed to exchange into the Rosario. In her he brought the despatches announcing the Emperor’s death home to Spithead. From Spithead he was ordered round to Harwich to form part of the squadron which escorted the body of Queen Caroline to Cuxhaven. This piece of ceremonial duty was followed by work of a very different kind. The Rosario was told off for revenue duty in the Channel, and continued cruising for smugglers till she was put out of commission in February, 1822. This was service of a very sufficiently serious kind. There was indeed no fighting to be done, but the cruising was arduous and incessant. The smugglers were among the smartest seamen in the Channel, and to catch them required on the part of the revenue officers constant vigilance, great activity, and an intimate knowledge of the coast—that is to say, if the work was to be properly done. As a matter of fact it seems to have been scamped. Marryat, who had perhaps been infected by Cochrane with an inability to let a comfortable old abuse alone, forwarded to the Admiralty a long despatch showing that the preventive service was inefficiently performed, and pointing out how it could be improved. The despatch was written after the Rosario had been paid off, and was founded on his own experience. It gives a curious glimpse into a phase of sea life which has entirely disappeared since the establishment of free trade ruined the smugglers by making it not worth any man’s while to smuggle. The industry which went on all round the coast, from the mouth of the Clyde to the mouth of the Firth of Forth, was conducted on varying principles in different districts. Marryat dealt only with what he had seen himself:—the smuggling carried on in that part of the English Channel which lies between Portsmouth and the Start.

When he came to write as a novelist, Marryat displayed a certain sympathy with the adventurous scamps who ran cargoes of brandy from Cherbourg to the coast of Hampshire and Dorsetshire. But Captain Marryat the revenue officer was a very different person. In this severe and official capacity he did his best to suppress what he afterwards described with a distinctly humorous sympathy. The smugglers, he pointed out, profited by the system adopted by the English revenue boats. Cherbourg was the centre of the trade—the free trade, as the smugglers called it, not knowing, poor fellows, who their real enemy was. Their vessels were almost exclusively manned by Portland or Weymouth men. When they were going to run a cargo to a point of the coast with which they were not familiar, they would take on a local hand, but as a rule they kept the trade pretty exclusively to themselves. When one of their luggers was sighted by the revenue boats and could not show a clean pair of heels, the cargo was jettisoned. If this happened in mid-channel it was a clear loss to everybody. The smuggler crews were only paid when they landed a cargo. The revenue boats could get no prize money unless they seized the tubs of spirits. If, however, the cargo was jettisoned in shallow water, the case was different. The smugglers might return, or their confederates on shore could fish up the sunken kegs, and then of course they earned their money. On the other hand, if the landing was stopped, or the kegs were dredged up by the revenue officers they earned their prize money. It is therefore perfectly obvious that it was the interest of the revenue officers not to see the smuggling luggers in mid-channel. The more brandy they picked up, the more prize money they earned, and the more credit also. But by allowing the smugglers to approach the English coast they gave them many opportunities of running cargoes. Partly because they wished to secure the approval of their chiefs, who took no account of any service which did not include the capture of kegs—partly also out of a natural human desire for prize money, the revenue boats nursed the illicit trade. They went very little to sea, and confined their exertions to scouring the coasts in cutters and gigs. Marryat’s idea was that much more effect would be produced by pursuing the luggers in mid-channel. If, he argued with great force, the smugglers found that they were compelled to make a dead loss, voyage after voyage, they would soon become tired. As it was, the immense profits earned on any cargo successfully run, paid them for the loss of two, or even three. Of course if his system were adopted there would be no captures to show for the credit of the coastguard, and no prize money to be earned. But the smuggling would be put a stop to. The despatch in which he set forth his opinions is a thoroughly able and business-like document, and shows that if Marryat was allowed to fall out of the service it was not because he was wanting in zeal or ability.

Although Marryat, like every other naval officer who ever held His Majesty’s commission, thought himself “no favourite” with the Admiralty, he had no intelligible reason to complain—at least as yet. The grumblings of naval officers are generally, indeed, unintelligible to the landsman, who is apt, after hearing much of them, to arrive at the conclusion that if every gentleman in the service were promoted to be Lord High Admiral and made G.C.B. to morrow morning, they would all be as discontented as ever by midday. Certainly Marryat, who was a commander at twenty-three, and had received a command, on service which brought him into notice, in time of profound peace and reduction of armaments, when the great majority of his fellow officers were vegetating on half pay on shore, had little cause to growl. He must, in truth, have had very good influence at the Admiralty, for though he was only paid off the Rosario in February, 1822, he was re-appointed to the Larne, of twenty guns, in March, 1823, so that he had barely a year on shore. The Larne was fitted out at Portsmouth for service in the East Indies. In July Marryat sailed from Spithead for his station, this time taking out his wife and family. An entry in his log briefly records an accident which might, if the amplified form of the story given in his biography is to be taken as literally true, have ended his career in a somewhat absurd manner. His gig upset in Falmouth Harbour while he was in it. To an athletic man and good swimmer a ducking in the month of July was no great disaster, but the boat carried a bumboat woman and a midshipman. The woman swam like a fish, and was delighted at the prospect of distinction and profit apparently thrown in her way. She fastened on Marryat, intent on saving a captain, and refused peremptorily to let him go when she was asked to transfer her help from the superior officer, who did not need it, to the obscure midshipman, who, not being able to swim, was in imminent danger of drowning. In some way or another Marryat did contrive to get rid of the incumbrance of her assistance, and the mid was not sacrificed. Whether he did not invent the bumboat woman’s devotion to rank, is perhaps doubtful. A bumboat woman was capable of acting in this way, no doubt, but then Marryat was equally capable of seeing that she ought to behave in this way, and of crediting her with fulfilling her duty.

When the Larne reached India, Marryat found that she was to form part of the combined force ordered to invade Burmah. This war, which filled 1824 and 1825, was of a kind common with us before we learnt that in war, as in building, it is more economical to employ a hundred men for one day, than one man for a hundred days—before also the common use of steam had made great rapidity of movement possible. Sir Archibald Campbell’s force was not numerous enough, and was unable to move quick. The operations dragged on for months, till fevers, cholera, and scurvy, had almost annihilated our army, and had almost unmanned the squadron. The duties of the navy, in the war, were to clear the Irrawaddy of Burmese war-boats, to transport the troops, protect their landing, cover their flank, and now and then to help storm a stockade, or beat down the fire of native batteries mounted with guns which would not fire, handled by gunners who could not shoot. The enemy fought fiercely, according to his lights, but then he had neither good weapons, nor discipline, nor experience. Except when attacked in a particularly strong position, by an insufficient force, the poor Burmese were sent into action as cattle to the slaughter. We naturally make the most of these wars, and politically they are often of the utmost importance, but as far as fighting is concerned, a wilderness of them is not equal to the action between the Shannon and the Chesapeake or the Blanche and the Pique. Yet Marryat was well entitled to say, as he did in a letter to his brother Samuel, that the crew of the Larne had in the course of five months “undergone a severity of service almost unequalled.” The climate was deadly to unseasoned men exposed to it in an unhealthy season. Much toil had to be gone through in moving the troops, in rowing guard against the Burmese war-boats, and even in doing engineer work. It is a complaint sometimes made by the navy that, in combined operations with the army, a disproportionate amount of the toil falls to them, while the redcoats get all the fun and the glory of the fighting. In this war the navy had plenty of work, and suffered proportionately from the strain. It also complained, in later days, that its exertions were hardly sufficiently recognized by military historians. Yet their comparatively subordinate position was a necessity of the case. The war was a land, and not a naval war, and the sailors could hardly expect to be more than accessories in it.

Marryat’s share, both of the work and the credit, was as large as that of any naval officer engaged. From the beginning of the campaign, in May, 1824, he was employed until September; at first as subordinate, and then, when Commodore Grant was invalided, as senior naval officer at Rangoon. The five months almost destroyed the crew of the Larne, and greatly damaged his own health. His men had been on salt provisions since February, and when fatigue and exposure were added to unwholesome diet, they naturally suffered grievously from scurvy. After a rest at Pulo Penang, he was back at Rangoon in December, and then, after being despatched on service to India, he was recalled to Burmah to take part in an attack on Bassein. There were more river work, more attacks on stockades, more exposure to fever. In July, 1824, on the death of Commodore Grant, he was transferred into the Tees, 26, a post-ship, which—as it was a death vacancy—should have given him post rank. The nomination was not, however, confirmed by the Admiralty, and Marryat was not actually posted till 1825, a loss of a year, which affected his seniority. It was in the Larne that he took part in the occupation of Bassein, and the attack on the Burmese stockades at Negrais and Naputah, but he brought the Tees home and paid her off early in 1826. The thanks of the general and the Indian Government, the Companionship of the Bath, and the command of the Ariadne, 28, were his rewards for good service in Burmah. This command he held for exactly two years, from November, 1828, to November, 1830, when “private affairs” induced him to resign. The Ariadne was his last ship. He was never employed again, nor does he ever seem to have applied for a command. When there was a prospect of war with the United States some years later, he spoke of going on active service again, but he was in ordinary times quite reconciled apparently to the termination of his career as a naval officer. The end was rather sudden. Up to 1830 he had been in constant employment and very successful. He could hardly have hoped for more than to be a post-captain and a C.B. at thirty-four. The truth doubtless is that he had begun to have other ambitions.

As is not uncommonly the case, the end of the old life overlapped the beginning of the new. Indeed, the old cannot have consciously come to an end with Marryat for some years. The evidence as to his wishes and hopes is scanty—extraordinarily scanty considering his prominence and that he lived almost into this generation; but what has been made known about him shows that he did not cease to think and work for “the service,” or quite gave up for a long time expecting that he might again hold a command. As an active naval officer, however, his career ended when he resigned the command of the Ariadne. Before that date he had written and published “Frank Mildmay,” and had written the “King’s Own.” What the private affairs may have been which induced him to resign his ship does not appear very clearly. Mrs. Ross Church supposes that he wished to devote himself to his duties as equerry to the Duke of Sussex, which hardly appears a sufficient explanation. Perhaps, like many other sailors, he may have had a period of revolt against the routine work, and long absence from friends and family imposed by naval life, and for which there is little compensation in peace time. With a growing family to look after he had a strong attraction to the shore. Then service in peace time cannot have had many temptations to a man who enjoyed excitement as Marryat did. To be sent on “diplomatic duties,” which in practice would mean visits, in the company of His Majesty’s Consuls, to foreign governors, or to be ordered off in winter to look for reefs in the Atlantic, which never existed except in the bemused brains of some merchant skipper, must have been very trying. An experience or two of this kind, coinciding with the success of his first book and the equerryship, would be enough to decide him to try his fortune on shore—all the more as he had private means. Whatever the exact motives may have been, in 1830 he was on shore for good, and established in Sussex House, Hammersmith.

His equerryship seems to have led him to no particular good. “The smiles of princes,” says Mrs. Church, “are by nature evanescent.” The favour of princes at least, like that of other men, requires to be cultivated with due skill and attention. Possibly Marryat may have been wanting in the will or the capacity to practise the art. Certain it is that neither from the Duke of Sussex, nor from the duke’s royal brother, William IV., did he ever obtain any visible good beyond invitations to festivities which appear to have been of a somewhat dreary character. According to a story given in the preface to Bone’s edition of the “Pirate and Three Cutters,” and quoted on that authority by Mrs. Ross Church, the King, who all through his life seems to have been moved to do something silly whenever he remembered that he was a naval officer, was offended by Marryat’s condemnation of the press-gang. He not only refused to consent to the conferring of some mark of distinction on Marryat in addition to the C.B. given for the Burmah campaign, but would not even allow him to wear the Legion of Honour sent him by Louis Philippe as a reward for the code of signals. The story is credible enough of William IV., who, saving the reverence of the Crown, was very little better than a fool, and a spiteful fool, too, at times. The Admiralty of its own motion, or the Admiralty and the King together, seem to have decided that Marryat need not be employed again. In the enjoyment of literary success and liberty, he probably reconciled himself to the want of employment readily enough. He must have been prepared to do without it when he threw up his command. The Admiralty does not love captains who resign their ships.

CHAPTER V.

From 1830 to his death in 1848 Marryat was a working man of letters, and a busy one. His books were many, and they do not represent all his labours. There was a life of his old messmate, Lord Napier, begun—and stopped—at the request of the widow, and much miscellaneous journalism—if that is the correct description of contributions to magazines. His pen was rapid, and he had no fear of tackling new subjects, so that the length of the shelf which would hold his complete works would be considerable, and the variety of the contents of the edition not small. Sea stories and land stories, plays which never reached the stage, diaries on the Continent and in America, letters of Norfolk farmers, and didactic tales for children all went in.

There is a difficulty in the way of the telling of Marryat’s own life during these busy eighteen years—the not uncommon difficulty, want of information. The biography published by his family leaves much unexplained, for reasons into which it would be useless, even if one had the right, to inquire. The causes of Marryat’s sudden changes of residence, and of his hasty journey to the Continent in 1835, are only to be guessed at. He did not live much in the literary world of his time. Of the eighteen years of his writing activity, several in the middle were spent on the Continent, and several at the end in Norfolk. In a general way one gathers that the question of money was a very important, sometimes a very pressing one, with Marryat. Money earned, inherited, spent—money to be recovered from debtors, and, doubtless, paid to creditors, had much of his attention. It is manifest that he was what Carlyle would have called “a very expensive Herr.” He liked to lead a large life, and to show a gentlemanly indifference to money. By preference he lived in good houses, in good neighbourhoods, and it is not overrash or uncharitable to guess that his income was not always adequate to his expenses. Finally, he was addicted to some of the most effectual of all methods of evacuation. If he did not promote, or have to face, a petition, at least he went through a contested election; and he had Balzac’s mania for ingenious speculations, which ought to have realized wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, and did achieve a dead loss with the most unfailing regularity. Like many another sailor before and since, he was sure that he could show the trained farmer how to extract more than he had yet done from the land. He undertook to do so on his small estate at Langham, in Norfolk—with disastrous financial results. That farming speculation was undoubtedly the type of much in his life.

His movements, if not the causes of them, can be followed easily enough. Between 1830 and his departure for America in 1837, he was successively at Sussex House, Hammersmith; at Langham, in Norfolk; then back in London; then in Brighton; then in sudden haste off to Brussels; and from thence to Lausanne. “Frank Mildmay; or, The Naval Officer,” appeared in 1829. Nine months later, when he was fixed on shore, came out the “King’s Own.” In 1830 he acquired a thousand acres of land in Norfolk, which remained in his possession till his death. He exchanged Sussex House for it, but how Sussex House was got we are not told. It cannot have been bought either out of prize money, or the proceeds of the two books he had published already, although his prices were remarkably good for a beginner. Four hundred pounds is the sum said to have been given by Colburn for “Frank Mildmay”—a good deal more than the most sanguine of novices would expect to receive from the most generous of publishers for a first book in these days. Certainly, in 1830, Marryat was working as a man works who has reasons for making all the money he can. He was contributing to the Metropolitan Magazine, and receiving his sixteen pounds a sheet—which, again, is good magazine pay. It did not take him long to acquire a shrewd idea how to deal with publishers, and a distinct understanding of the due privileges of an editor. His knowledge of these important matters is shown conclusively in a letter to Bentley, setting forth the terms on which he would be prepared to edit a new nautical magazine, a proposed imitation of, or rather rival to, the United Service Journal.

“My terms,” he says, with the confidence of a man who knew the market, and his own value in it, “would be as follows: The sole control of the work, for when I do my best I must be despotic or I shall not succeed; to be paid for all my writings at the price I received in the Metropolitan, sixteen guineas per sheet. The editorship I would then take at £400 per annum until the end of the first year, when, if the work succeeded, I should expect an addition of £100, and if it continued profitable, another £100, so as to raise the final pay of the editor to £600 per annum. The stipulations may be talked over afterwards. To choose my sub-editor is indispensable. He must be a nautical man.” Marryat had learnt plainly how necessary it is to be captain of your own ship—and withal he quite understood how to launch the new kind of craft he was about to sail. “The first number must be most carefully got up, to insure success, and the papers ought now to be in preparation. You must, therefore, take but few days to decide, as I tell you honestly I have reason to expect the offer from another quarter, who are now talking the matter over, and I must be allowed to consider myself as unpledged to you after a short time.”

As it is not recorded that Marryat had, like Arthur Pendennis, any George Warrington to guide his literary beginnings, he deserves all the more credit for his spontaneous appreciation of the advantage to be obtained by playing Bacon off against Bungay.

“The offer from another quarter,” which was thus quoted to hasten the decision of Mr. Bentley, was the editorship of the Metropolitan, which he took in 1832, and held until he left England for Brussels. He either received as part payment, or purchased a proprietary right in the magazine, which he afterwards sold to Saunders and Otley for £1,050. For the next four or five years the Metropolitan had the major part of Marryat’s time and work. He had, according to his wish, a nautical sub editor, the E. Howard, who wrote that strange book, “Rattlin the Reefer,” which still continues to be catalogued with Marryat’s own stories. There were contributors to be hunted up—kept up to the mark, more or less successfully—and occasionally soothed down—Thomas Moore for one, who wrote in agony to insist on the necessity there was that he should see his proofs, and also to make monetary arrangements. Of course there were quarrels to be fought out, for in those days no periodical was able to exist without its regular battle. But in the midst of these forgetable and forgotten things—Marryat contributed to the Metropolitan five of the best of his books. “Newton Forster” appeared in 1832, “Peter Simple” in 1833; and in 1834 no less than three—“Jacob Faithful,” “Mr. Midshipman Easy,” and “Japhet in Search of a Father.” Not a little of what, to apply nautical language, may be called dunnage appeared with and after these—a comedy, a tragedy (of neither of which does Marryat seem to have thought highly), and a host of miscellaneous papers collected under the title of “Olla Podrida”—these last being only what Marryat frankly called his “Diary on the Continent”—namely, “very good magazine stuff.”

His extraordinary industry in 1834 can be confidently accounted for by the need of money. In 1833 he had taken effectual means to lighten his purse by standing for Parliament. The constituency chosen for the venture was the Tower Hamlets, and Marryat stood as a Reformer. Although the year immediately following the passing of the Reform Bill was as good a one as he could well have found in which to try in that character, he was not successful. His reforming zeal was possibly too purely naval for the constituency, and he was wanting in the very necessary readiness to say ditto to a popular fad. Marryat seems to have considered that his dislike of the press-gang was claim enough to the character of Liberal Reformer. But in the midst of profound peace the press-gang was not a burning grievance, and on some other points he took a line not likely to prove pleasing to the sentimental among the Liberals, for whose votes he was asking. He could not be got to show a burning interest in the sorrows of the slave. He took up the logically strong, but practically ineffective, position of the man who declined to be troubled for the slave while there was so much suffering unremedied at home. This might be a very sensible decision, but unfortunately it was discredited by the fact that it had been a favourite one with the slave-holders, whose tenderness for sufferers at home was never heard of till their own property in the West Indies seemed to be in danger. On another question, which proved a trying one to candidates till very recently, Marryat took a disastrously sensible course. He was called upon to give his opinion of the practice of flogging in the navy—and committed himself to the side of discipline most fatally. “Sir,” he said to a heckler, who wanted to know whether the “gallant captain” would be capable of flogging him or his sons; “Sir, you say the answer I gave you is not direct; I will answer you again. If ever you, or one of your sons, should come under my command, and deserve punishment, if there be no other effectual mode of conferring it, I shall flog you.” After that it is not surprising to hear that “Captain Marryat and the Chairman left the room together, amidst a tumult of united applause and disapprobation”—in the midst, in fact, of an uproar, in which the part of the meeting which admired his pluck was engaged in shouting against the other part which detested his good sense. There was something of Colonel Newcome in the politics of Captain Marryat, and he had not the good fortune to contend against a Barnes Newcome. His parliamentary ambition had to take its place with the other schemes of his life which came to nothing. A plan for the establishment of brevet rank in the navy, which he sent in about this time to Sir James Graham, was part of his activity as a political naval officer. It also came to nothing, and nobody can well regret that it was still-born.

After the misspent energy of 1833, Marryat had to make up by hard pen-work. He settled in Montpelier Villas, Western Road, Brighton, and there, in 1834, wrote his three books. The effort was a severe one, and he felt the effects later on, when fatigue, and possibly questions of money, had induced him to go abroad. He had not yet altogether given up thinking of Parliament—or, at least, if he had ceased hoping to sit as member, he kept up his correspondence with ministers on those naval affairs which he understood. He forwarded observations on the Merchant Shipping Bill of that year—one of our portentous list of shipping measures—to Sir James Graham. His volunteer help was well received, and the First Lord, one of the ablest men who ever was at the head of the department, invited him to come to Whitehall and talk the Bill over. This invitation may be taken as a proof, among others, that if Marryat remained unemployed, it was mainly by his own wish. He had already, by his writing on the manning of the navy, and, in less public ways, shown that in professional matters, at least, he was an excellent man of business. Sir James Graham was not the man to have refused employment to an officer of proved ability if he had wished for it, but it is tolerably plain that Marryat had other irons of a more attractive kind, for the moment, in the fire.

The particular iron which he had heating in Norfolk—the estate at Langham—was not likely to relieve him from the necessity of making every penny he could by his pen. “No rent,” was his return in 1834, and as a rule ever after—till he took it in hand himself, and then it still realized him a steady yearly deficit. This year of “no rent” was also a year of legal unpleasantness in connection with his father’s memory—which he bore in a fashion to be recommended to the imitation of all who suffer from similar misfortunes. “As for the Chancellor’s judgment,” he wrote to his mother, who had plainly been hurt, “I cannot say I thought anything about it; on the contrary, it appears to me that he might have been much more severe if he had thought proper. It is easy to impute motives, and difficult to disprove them. I thought, considering his enmity, that he let us off cheap, as there is no punishing a Chancellor, and he might say what he pleased with impunity. I did not, therefore, roar, I only smiled. The effect will be nugatory. Not one in a thousand will read it; those who do, know it refers to a person not in this world, and of those, those who knew my father will not believe it; those who did not will care little about it, and forget the name in a week. Had he given the decision in our favour, I should have been better pleased, but it’s no use crying; what’s done can’t be helped.” With that piece of the philosophy of the elder Faithful, Marryat ends as neat a statement of reasons for not making a fuss, and as admirable an estimate of the relative unimportance of any man’s private affairs in a busy world, as will be found by much searching.

Next year Marryat was off in haste to the Continent. “Not one day was our departure postponed; with post horses and postillions, we posted, post haste, to Brussels.” As is too commonly the case, Mrs. Ross Church has nothing to say as to the cause of this flight—and we are left to conclude that it was due to that desire to economize with dignity which has driven so many Englishmen to the same voluntary exile. At Brussels or at Spa he went on working for the Metropolitan. He cannot have edited it, but he sent in his “Diary on the Continent,” and he wrote, in this year, “The Pirate” and “The Three Cutters,” in which, for the first time, he had the advantage of being illustrated by Clarkson Stanfield. With the Metropolitan his connection was coming to an end. In 1836 he returned to England, to get rid of his proprietary interest in it to Saunders and Otley, and to part with those publishers in a friendly manner—but to part decisively, on the ground that they would hear nothing of an advance for fresh work. The New Monthly was now his resource—at the increased rate of twenty guineas a sheet. To 1836 belong “Snarley Yow” and “The Pasha of Many Tales,”—and also the beginning of that “Life of Lord Napier” which was never to be finished. In 1837 he had begun to feel the need of a change, the desire to break fresh ground, and in April, leaving his family at Lausanne, he started for the United States.

His life during these two years of foreign residence may probably be fairly well realized by the reader who will give himself the pleasure to remember some parts of Thackeray and many parts of Lever. The Marryats must have formed part of that English colony on the Continent at the head of which marched the Marquess of Steyne, while Captain Rook and the Honourable Mr. Deuceace brought up the rear. It was a society much more merry than wise, and it is to be feared more easy than honest. Its members lived abroad to escape something—perhaps it was only restraint, perhaps it was the heavy bills of English tradesmen not yet reclaimed from the evil ways of long credit and high prices, sometimes it was the sheriff’s-officer. Now and then it was only the English winter. That was the most wholesome reason; but it was the least commonly genuine, and the most frequently assumed. In all that curious expatriated world there was something of the Cave of Adullam. It was often only the more pleasant on that account. Acquaintances matured quickly; among people who were all more or less fugitives, few questions were asked; even Captain Rook and Mr. Deuceace were received without too much inquiry by people who neither imitated nor liked all their ways. Now we are less strict at home, and by a natural reaction more circumspect abroad. Besides railways keep people rolling, and have greatly broken up the old English colonies. Still even now there is a continental English society, less Bohemian than the old, but still somewhat free and easy, addicted as it were to living in its shirt sleeves, very pleasant to see, and to go through, but not at all good to be lived in for the moral man. During the thirties this Cave of Adullam was in full swing, crowded with refugees—not for political causes—with veterans of the old war intent on making pension and half-pay go as far as possible, and with pleasure-seeking people ready for any amusement (the cheaper the better), and not too exacting as to the moral qualities or social position of those with whom they were prepared to amuse themselves.

Marryat with his abundant spirits, his faculty for story-telling, and his sufficient command of money, would naturally fall on his feet in this rather gypsy world. He spoke French fluently, and his wife, as the daughter of an English consul in Russia, would be at home in continental society. Once more it must be confessed that the details are wanting. Mrs. Ross Church says, that “to this hour” (she wrote in 1872) “many anecdotes are related of him by the older residents at Brussels.” Sadly few of them seem to have been collected, for Mrs. Ross Church can only muster two—neither, it must be confessed, very brilliant nor very honourable. According to the first, Marryat was asked to dinner to meet a company of celebrities and friends of his own, in hopes that he would talk. He held his tongue, and when asked whether he had been silent because he was bored, answered, “Why did you imagine I was going to let out any of my jokes for those fellows to put in their next books? No, that is not my plan. When I find myself in such company as that, I open my ears and hold my tongue, glean all I can, and give them nothing in return.” The story needs a good deal of explaining before the point of it becomes obvious; and unluckily the circumstances, which could alone explain it, are wanting. The fun, if there was any, was supplied (we must suppose) by the character of the person it was said to—and who was he? The other story contains a repartee—an awful repartee—a thing to be put in a collection of witticisms with the comment that “so and so smiled, but never forgave the jest.” It is about the bridge of somebody’s nose, and is not greatly inferior to the recorded jokes of Douglas Jerrold.

There is little to be gleaned out of such reminiscences as these, which hardly reach the dignity of “dead nettles”: neither do we gather much from a surviving letter to Mr. Osmond de Beauvoir Priaulx about a debt of frs. 1250, owed to Marryat by R——, a hopeless debt. “I consider that if I have no better chance of heaven than of R——’s 1250 francs, I am in a bad way. Both he and Z—— are evidently a couple of rogues. The only chance of obtaining the money from R—— is by telling him that I am coming to Paris as soon as I can, and that I shall expose him by publishing the whole affair, his letters, &c.; and, moreover that you strongly suspect that it is my intention, independent of exposure, to break every bone in his body on my arrival. He holds himself as a gentleman, being the son of some post-captain, and will not like that message, and may perhaps pay the money rather than incur the risk.” Here obviously was a very pretty quarrel; but who was R——, and had he a case, and who was Mr. Osmond de Beauvoir Priaulx, and did any assault follow? Who knows? and indeed who cares? The rest of the letter is full of scandal about capital letters and dashes. The sight of it only make one remember how much entirely unimportant trash contrives to survive in this world.

All the scraps of knowledge about Marryat which have escaped destruction are not so unpleasant, though they are nearly as obscure, as that letter to Mr. Osmond de Beauvoir Priaulx. It is recorded that he gave parties and Christmas trees, that he looked after children well, and was a neat hand at packing a portmanteau,—qualities which must have made him the most tolerable of husbands and fathers on his travels. He was at all times tender-hearted with children, as befitted an author who ended by writing almost wholly for them; and would quiet his own by telling them stories, when the rattling of carriages and diligences had made them fractious. A letter to his mother survives from these years which is worth quoting—not because it gives much information about his own life, but because it is kindly, and gives a very different picture of Marryat to that afforded by the threats against R——, and the vapid scandal written to the gentleman with the handsome French name.

The letter is not a masterpiece, but it is good-natured and wholesome. The “Fred,” who had been playing truant so enviably in Paris, was afterwards the Lieutenant Frederick Marryat who perished in the wreck of the Avenger.

CHAPTER VI.

His departure for America is a convenient date at which to stop and survey Marryat’s literary work. After 1837, he did some things as good as anything he had done before, and some at once unlike what he had already written, and yet excellent of their kind. “Poor Jack” and “Percival Keene” have touches of the old sea life, and flashes of fun, not inferior to his earlier writing. The “Phantom Ship” has a character of its own; the children’s stories of his last years are excellent. All these are later than 1837. Still, if he had ceased to write entirely in that year, his place in literature would be as high as it is. We should have “The King’s Own,” “Peter Simple,” “Mr. Midshipman Easy,” “Japhet,” “Jacob Faithful,” and “Snarley Yow,” and with these we should possess the best of him. In those eight busy years Marryat had poured out the harvest of his experience profusely. His beginning in literature had been singularly fortunate. The time was favourable to writers of any originality certainly. A brilliant magazine article made a reputation. There was a marked readiness to recognize ability and reward it. What amount of praise and pudding would be given in these days for another essay on Milton it would be useless to guess, but undoubtedly it could hardly be greater than the share which fell to Macaulay for his early effort. Carlyle made a place for himself by a few articles. The wind which blew for them blew for others also. As has almost always been the case in great literary periods, the readiness of the reader to recognize and admire was as strong as the productive power of the writer. The audience met the playwright half way. Sir Walter Scott had prepared the market for the novelist. He had enormously increased the taste for novels, and whoever could write at all was the surer of a hearing, because “Waverley” had made stories a necessity to readers. There is among the more atrabilious kind of men of letters a secret belief that the sum of popularity is a fixed quantity, of which whatever is earned by one man is necessarily lost by another. That one nation’s gain is another’s loss in commerce, was an accepted axiom with economists of the days of darkness before Adam Smith. It has been given up on maturer consideration, and is assuredly no more true in literature than international trade. A great writer who gains a great popularity increases the chance of the smaller men. Sir Walter and Jane Austen helped the Mrs. Meeke in whom Macaulay delighted.

Marryat had profited amply by the opening. With great adaptability he had thrown himself into the literary fight of his time. As has been already said, he soon showed himself at home in the regular business of literature—in writing for the press and in editing. To take the satisfactory though vulgar test of money, he was able to make his market, and put his price up. Nor was he at all reluctant to insist on the value of his goods. “I do not,” he said in 1837, “write for sixteen guineas a sheet now. I let them off for twenty guineas, as I do not wish to run them hard; and I now have commenced with the New Monthly at that rate for one year certain, and the copyright secured to me. Times are hard, and I do not wish to break the backs of the publishers, although I ride over them roughshod. I have also made very much better terms for my books. ‘Snarley Yow,’ comes out on the 1st of June. I have parted very amicably with Saunders and Otley, who would not stand an advance. I will make hay when the sun shines; for every dog has his day, and I presume my time will come as that of others.” Twenty guineas a sheet was the exceptional price which Fraser was paying Carlyle in those very years, and was five guineas above the usual rate. Obviously here was a gentleman who knew that business was business. With this determination to make the last penny there was to make, he naturally contributed his chapter to the history of the quarrels of authors with their publishers.

“Although Captain Marryat,” says his daughter, “and his publishers mutually benefited by their transactions with each other, one would have imagined from the letters exchanged between them that they had been natural enemies.” It is a mistake which is not uncommon in these transactions, and particularly likely to arise when, as in this case, a publisher frankly tells the author that he thinks him “eccentric,” and an “odd creature,” and adds that he is himself “somewhat warm-tempered.” Who the particular publisher was who sent these pieces of criticism and self-criticism to Marryat we are not told. The answer he received might supply a clue to the Marryatist who was prepared to follow it up with the proper devotion.