Life of Frederick Marryat

A postscript gives directions to B—— B——, who appears to have decided to come out and settle on the desirable piece of land which Marryat had purchased in Canada.

The American tour was near its end. Marryat never made that examination of the South which he had very justly thought necessary, if he was to obtain a thorough knowledge of the States. When he returned to New York in January, 1839, the country was in no condition to attract English travellers. The already existing hostility to England had been excited to a storm, and there was copious talk of the tallest kind about war going on from end to end of the Union. Everybody was waiting for the President’s message and professing to expect the outbreak of hostilities. Marryat waited to see what would come of it all. The prospect of serious war had for a moment swept all thought of books out of his mind. He waited for a summons to join Sir F. Head if his services were further needed in Canada; but while there was a prospect that he might again have “a man-of-war on the ocean,” he was in no hurry to run the risk of being shut up in Canada, where the best he could hope for would be a lake command. In a letter from New York to his mother he expresses very explicitly his wishes to serve again, and his hopes of further employment on blue water, and even ends up with one of those growls at the business of book-writing not uncommon among writing men when they happen to be languid, or to have heard bad news. “Mr. Howard” (his former sub-editor no doubt, and the author of “Rattlin the Reefer”) “writes me in very bad spirits. He says that I am injured by remaining away from England, and my popularity is on the wane. I laugh at that; it is very possible people will be ill-natured while I am not able to defend myself; but what I have done they cannot take from me, and if I wrote no more, I have written quite enough. If I were not rather in want of money I certainly would not write any more, for I am rather tired of it. I should like to disengage myself from the fraternity of authors, and be known in future only in my profession as a good officer and seaman.”

There is about this a ring of manly good sense. Marryat could well afford to laugh at Mr. Howard’s croaking, knowing as he did, with his robust self-confidence, that his popularity was in no danger; that he had it in him to make another popularity if the old was indeed waning. It may well be that his wish to be back in active service was wise. His life might have been longer, and happier, if he had again walked his own quarter-deck. The wish was certainly no vague one, floating idly in his mind. He made plans in Canada, drew maps, and sent home information to the Admiralty in the manifest hope that his exertions would serve him at headquarters. If war had broken out with the United States it is certain that Marryat, recommended as he was not only by his past services, but by his knowledge of the American coast, would have stood well for employment. But the storm blew over; the British Empire settled down into peace again, and Marryat remained on shore, driving away with his pen under the pressure of that tyranny which he describes as the state of being “rather in want of money.” He left the States early in 1839, and by June of that year was settled in quarters of his own in 8, Duke Street, St. James’s.

CHAPTER VIII.

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.

CHAPTER IX.

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.

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.

CHAPTER X.

The weakness which proved fatal to Marryat had shown itself while he was still a young lieutenant in the West Indies. He had then been invalided home for rupture of a blood vessel in the lungs, and a military doctor “also certified to his tendency to ‘hæmoptysis,’ and prophesied that, without great care, ‘the most dangerous and perhaps fatal results’ would be the consequence” of rashness. The danger had passed at that time—had probably been avoided by the use of care—and for many years Marryat had to all appearance been a very robust man. He was of the best possible height and build for strength. He was some five feet ten inches high, with broad deep chest, and his muscular force was exceptionally great. His portrait, as far as it can be judged of from the engraving prefixed to “Frank Mildmay,” gives the impression of a man of boundless energy, open-faced, alert, and keen-eyed. He was black-haired with blue eyes, and his beard grew so thick and so fast that he was compelled to shave twice a day. When he came to Langham, in 1843, his strength was apparently still unbroken, and he might appear sure of long years of health and capacity for work. But it is clear that there was more appearance than reality in his strength. When a man has turned fifty he begins to suffer for the unwisdom of former years. Marryat, unfortunately, had never given himself any quarter. He had spared himself no burden a man can lay upon his strength. He had played and worked to excess, had lived in a whirl of nervous excitement, had spent beyond his means in constitution as well as in purse. If he had not spent his summer while it was May—at least he had run through it far too soon. Langham, which might have given him rest, was only the scene of more nervous excitement, more strenuous work. In 1847 the end began. In August of that year he speaks, in a letter to his sister, of having recently ruptured two blood vessels. The following letter shows that the accident occurred in London, but Marryat returned to Langham, and remained there till the want of medical advice likely to inspire more confidence than a country doctor’s drove him to London again. He remained at his mother’s house at Wimbledon for two months, and from it wrote to Lord Auckland, then at the Admiralty, on December 14th.