When I undertook the writing of this series, Mr. S. R. Crockett, except for his ‘Mad Sir Uchtred of the Hills,’ was unknown to me by actual reading. My opinion of that story was not a high one. I thought it, and on a second reading still think it, feebly pretentious. But for some reason or another Mr. Crockett’s name has been buzzed about in such a prodigality of praise that it came natural to believe and hope that later work from his pen had shown a quality which the first little brochure had not revealed, and that the world had found in him a genuine addition to its regiment of literary workmen. The curiosity with which a section of the newspaper press has been inspired as to Mr. Crockett’s personal whereabouts, as to his comings and goings, his engagements for the future, and his prices ‘per thousand words,’ would have seemed to indicate that in him we had discovered a person of considerably more than the average height.
The result of a completer perusal of his writings is not merely destructive of this hope. It is positively stunning and bewildering. Mr. Crockett is not only not a great man, but a rather futile very small one. The unblushing effrontery of those gentlemen of the press who have set him on a level with Sir Walter is the most mournful and most contemptible thing in association with the poorer sort of criticism which has been encountered of late years.
It is no part of an honest critic’s business to be personally offensive. It is no part of his function to find a pleasure in giving pain. But it is a part of his business, which is not to be escaped, to do his fearless best to tell the truth, and the truth about Mr. Crockett and the press is not to be told without giving deep offence, to him and it. Fortunately, the press is a very wide corporation indeed, and if there are venal people employed upon it, there are at least as many scrupulously honourable; and if there are stupid people who can be carried by a cry, there are men of all grades of brilliant ability, ranging from genius to talent To put the matter in plain English will offend neither honesty nor ability, and to give offence to venality or incompetence is not an act of peculiar daring.
In plain English, then, it is not a matter of opinion as to whether Mr. Crockett is worthy of the stilted encomium which has mopped and mowed about him. It is not a matter of opinion as to whether Mr. Crockett has or has not rivalled Sir Walter. It is a matter of absolute fact, about which no two men who are even moderately competent to judge can dispute for a second. The newspaper press, or a very considerable section of it, has conspired to set Mr. Crockett upon an eminence so removed from his fitness for it that he is made ridiculous by the mere fact of being perched there. When Robert Louis Stevenson suffered from the hysteria of praise, the natural feeling was to save an exquisite artist from the excusable exaltations of enthusiasm. When the genuine art and real fun and touching pathos of Mr. J. M. Barrie hurried his admirers into uncritical ecstasy, one’s only fear was lest the popular taste should take an undeserved revenge in coldness and neglect. To say in the first flush of affection and enjoyment that ‘A Window in Thrums’ is as good as Sir Walter, or that ‘The Master of Ballantrae’ is better, is not to exercise the faculty of a critic; but it is not monstrous or absurd. It is the expression of a momentary happy ebullience, a natural ejaculation of gratitude for a beautiful gift. It is only when the judgment comes to be persisted in that we find any element of danger in it. It is only when gravely and strenuously repeated, as in Stevenson’s case, that it is to be resented, and then mainly on the ground that it does harm to the object of it. But in the case now under review the conditions are not the same. Poor Stevenson, whose early death is still a poignant grief was indubitably a man of genius. Settle the question of stature how you may, there is no denying the species to which such a writer belongs. Mr. Barrie has genius—which is a slightly different thing. But Mr. Crockett in the great rank of letters is ‘as just and mere a serving-man as any born of woman,’ and there has been as much banging of the paragraphic drum concerning him, and as assured a proclamation of his mastership, as if every high quality of genius were recognisable in him at a glance. If I knew of any unmistakable and tangible reason for all this I would not hesitate to name it, but I am not in the secret, and I have no right to guess. There are some sort of strings somewhere, and somebody pulls them. So much is evident on the face of things. Who work the contemptible fantoccini who gesticulate to the Ephesian hubbub of ‘greatness’ I neither know nor care, but it is simply out of credence that their motions are spontaneous.
Expede Herculem. I will take a solitary story from Mr. Crockett’s ‘Stickit Minister.’
It is called ‘The Courtship of Allan Fairley,’ The tale is of a young minister of the peasant class, whose parents through much privation have kept their son at college. He is elected to a living in an aristocratic parish, and takes his old peasant mother to keep house for him. Some of his more polished parishioners object to the old lady’s presence at the manse, and they have the rather astonishing impertinence to propose that the son shall send her away. He refuses, and shows his visitors the door. These are the bare lines of the story so far as we are concerned with it.
Think how Dr. Macdonald or J. M. Barrie would have handled this! The humour of either would have danced round the crass obtuseness of the deputation and the mingled wrath and amusement of the minister. The story bristles with opportunity for the presentation of human contrast. The chances are all there, and a story-teller of anything like genuine faculty could not have failed to see and to utilise some of them. Mr. Crockett misses every conceivable point of his own tale, and with a majestic clumsiness drags in the one thing which could possibly make it offensive. The minister has nothing to fear from his visitors, for it is expressly stated that he has a majority of three hundred and sixty-five in his spiritual constituency of four hundred and thirty-five. But Mr. Crockett’s point is that he was a hero for refusing to kick his own mother out of doors. He makes Mr. Allan Fairley tell his own tale, and the end of this portion of it runs thus:
‘He got no further; he wadna hae gotten as far if for a moment I had jaloosed his drift I got on my feet I could hardly keep my hands off them, minister as I was, but I said: “Gentlemen, you are aware of what you ask me to do? You ask me to turn out of the house the mither that bore me, the mither that learnt me ‘The Lord’s my Shepherd,’ the mither that wore her fingers near the bone that I might gang to the college, that selled her bit plenishin’ that my manse micht be furnished! Ye ask me to show her to the door—I’ll show you to the door!”—an’ to the door they gaed!’ “Weel done! That was my ain Allan!” cried I.’
Was there ever a piece of sentiment cheaper, falser, more tawdry? Who applauds a man for not turning his old mother out of doors at the impertinent request of a meddling nobody? Look at the stormy small capitals of this oatmeal hero, who is supposed to electrify us by the mere fact of his not being an incredible ass and scoundrel! Does any sober person think for a moment that a man of genius could have made this revolting blunder? It is beyond comparison the densest bit of stupidity in dealing with the emotions I have encountered anywhere. Anybody but Mr. Crockett can see where the point of the story lies. It lies in the cool impertinence and heartlessness of his visitors. To put the emphasis on the rejection of their proposal—to make a point of that—is to insult the reader. Of course it was rejected. How should it possibly, by any stretch of poltroonery and baseness, be otherwise?
Ex pede Herculem. This bedrummed and betrumpeted man of genius cannot read the A B ab of the human emotions. ‘Here!’ says the subtle tempter, ‘I’ll give you twopence if you’ll put your baby on the fire!’ The god-like hero thunders: ‘No! He is my flesh and blood. He is the sacred trust of Heaven. He is innocent, he is helpless. I’ll show you to the door!’ Oh! what emotions stir within the heart when a master’s hand awakes a chord like this!
There is, of course, a certain angry pleasure in this necessary work; but it does not endure, and it is followed rapidly by a reaction of pain and pity. But we have a right to ask—we have a right to insist—that undeserved reputations shall not be manufactured for us by any clique. We have a right to protest when the offence is open and flagrant. Let it be said, if it be not too late to say it, that Mr. Crockett, if left alone by his indiscreet admirers, or only puffed within the limits of the reasonable, might have been regarded as an honest workman as times go, when everybody, more or less, writes fiction.
If his pages had come before me as the work of an unknown man, seeking his proper place in the paper republic, it is certain that I could have found some honest and agreeable things to say about him. But, unfortunately, he, more than any other writer of his day, has been signalled out for those uncostly extravagances of praise which are fast discrediting us in our own eyes, and are making what should be the art of criticism a mockery, and something of a shame. In what I have written I have dealt less with his work than with the false estimate of it which, for a year or two, has been thrust upon the public by a certain band of writers who are either hopelessly incompetent to assess our labours or incurably dishonest, It is very possible indeed that Mr. Crockett is wholly undeserving of censure in this regard, that he has not in any way asked or aided the manufacture of this balloon of a reputation in which he has been floated to such heights. Apart from the pretensions of his claque, there is no earthly reason why a critic should hold him up to ridicule. It is not he who is ridiculous, but at its best his position is respectable, and he holds his place (like the mob of us who write for a living) for the moment only. To pretend that he is a man of genius, to talk about him in the same breath with Sir Walter Scott, to chronicle his comings and his goings as if he were the embodiment of a new revelation, is to provoke a natural and just resentment The more plainly that resentment is expressed—the more it is seen that a false adulation is the seed of an open contempt—the less likely writers of middling faculty will be to encourage a bloated estimate of themselves.
Mr. Ian Maclaren, though he is distinctly an imitator, and may be said to owe his literary existence to Mr. J. M. Barrie, is both artistic and sympathetic. His work conveys to the reader the impression of an encounter with Barrie in a dream. The keen edges of the original are blurred and partly lost, but the author of ‘Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush’ has many excellent qualities, and if he had had the good fortune or the initiative to be first in the field, his work would have been almost wholly charming. As it is, he still shows much faculty of intuition and of heart, and his work is all sympathetically honest His emotions are genuine, and this in the creation of emotional fiction is the first essential to success. Here is another case where the hysteric overpraise of the critics has done a capable workman a serious injustice, and but for it a candid reviewer could have no temptation towards blame. His inspiration is from the outside, but that is the harshest word that can honestly be spoken, and in days when literature has become a trade such a judgment is not severe.
When one calls to mind the rapid and extensive popularity achieved by the latest school of Scottish dialect writers, one is tempted to wonder a little at the comparative neglect which has befallen a real master of that genre, who is still living and writing, and who began his work within the memory of the middle-aged. With the single exception of ‘A Window in Thrums,’ none of the new books of this school are worthy to be compared with ‘David Elginbrod,’ or ‘Alec Forbes of Howglen,’ or ‘Robert Falconer.’ Yet not one of them has failed to find a greater vogue or to bring to its author a more swelling reputation than Dr. Mac-donald achieved. Perhaps the reasons for these facts are not far to seek. To begin at the beginning, Sir Walter, who created the Scottish character novel, had made, in other fields, a reputation quite unparalleled in the history of fiction before he took broadly to the use of Scottish rural idiom, and the depiction of Scottish character in its peculiarly local aspects. The magic of his name compelled attention, and his genius gave a classic flavour to dialects until then regarded as barbarous and ugly. The flame of Burns had already eaten all grossness out of the rudest rusticities, and in the space of twenty years at most the Auld Braid Scots wore the dignity of a language and was decorated with all the honours of a literature. But this, in spite of the transcendent genius of the two men to whom northern literature owes its greatest debt, brought about very little more than a local interest and a local pride. Scott was accepted in spite of the idiom which he sometimes employed, and not because of it, and one can only laugh at the fancy presented to the mind by the picture of an English or a foreign reader who for the first time found himself confronted by Mrs. Bartlemy Saddletree’s query to her maid: ‘What gart ye busk your cockernony that gait?’ To this hour, indeed, there are thousands of Scott’s admirers for whom the question might just as well be framed in Sanscrit.
In Sir Walters own day and generation he had one considerable imitator in Galt, whose ‘Andrew Wylie of that Ilk’ and ‘The Entail’ can still afford pleasure to the reader. Then for a time the fiction of Scottish character went moribund. The prose Muse of the North was silent, or spoke in ineffectual accents. After a long interregnum came George Macdonald, unconsciously paving the way for the mob of northern gentlemen who now write with ease. He brought to his task an unusual fervour, a more than common scholarship, a more than common richness, purity, and flexibility in style, a truly poetic endowment of imagination, and a truly human endowment of sympathy, intuition, and insight. It would be absurd to say that he failed, but it is certain that he scarcely received a tithe either of the praise or the pudding which have fallen to the share of Mr. S. R. Crockett, for example, who is no more to be compared with him than I to Hercules. Such readers as were competent to judge of him ranked him high, but, south of the Tweed, such readers were few and far between, for he employed the idiomatic Scotch in which he chose to work with a remorseless accuracy, and in this way set up for himself a barrier against the average Englishman. His genius, charming as it was, was not of that tremendous and compulsive sort which lays a hand on every man, and makes the breaking down of such a barrier an essential to intellectual happiness. There was a tacit admission that he was, in his measure, a great man, but that the average reader could afford to let him alone. And then, things were very different with the press. The northern part of this island, though active in press life, had nothing like its influence of to-day. To-day the press of Great Britain swarms with Scotchmen, and the ‘boom’ which has lately filled heaven and earth with respect to the achievements of the new Scotch school has given ample and even curious evidence of that fact. The spoils to the victor, by all means. We folk from over the border are a warlike and a self-approving race, with a strong family instinct, and a passionate love for the things which pertain to our own part of the world. If Scotchmen had been as numerous amongst pressmen as they are to-day, and as certain of their power, they would have boomed Dr. Macdonald beyond a doubt. Such recognition as he received came mainly from them. But if only the present critical conditions had existed in his early day, with what garlands would he have been wreathed, what sacrifices would have been made before him!
Apart from that rugged inaccessibility of dialect (to the merely English reader) which so often marks Dr. Macdonald’s work, there is in the main theme of his best books a reason why he should not be widely popular. The one issue in which he is most passionately interested is theological. He has been to many a Moses in the speculative desert, leading to a land of promise. He has preached with a tender and persuasive fire the divine freedom of the soul, and its essential oneness with the Fatherhood of God. He has expended many beautiful faculties on this work, and his influence in the broadening and deepening of religious thought in Scotland is not to be denied. But his insistence on this great theme has naturally scared away the empty-headed and the shallow-hearted, and many also of the careless clever. There must be somewhere a fund of sincerity and of reason in the reader to whom he appeals. There is a public which is prepared to encounter thought, which can be genuinely stirred by a high intellectual passion, which is athirst indeed for that highest and best enjoyment, but it is numerically small, and the writer who deals mainly with spiritual problems, and who, in doing so, is reticent and reverent, can scarcely hope to draw the mob at his wheels. In each of his three best books, Dr. Macdonald has traced the growth of a soul towards freedom. His conception of freedom is a reasoned but absolute submission to a Divine Will; a sense of absorption in the manifest intent of a guiding Power which is wholly loving and wholly wise. To all who are able to read him he is exquisitely interesting and delightful, and to some he appeals with the authority of a prophet and divinely-appointed guide. Along with this experience of abiding faith in him goes a dash of mysticism, of pantheism. He is essentially a poet, and had he chosen to expend more labour upon his verse he might have risen to high rank on that side. But with him the thing to be said has seemed vastly more important than the way of saying it, and he has, perhaps rightly, disdained to be laborious in the mere texture of his verse. It is rational to argue that if the poetic, inspiration is not vital enough to find an immediate expression it is not true enough to make it worth while to remould and recast it. It would seem—judging by results—that Dr. Macdonald’s conception of a lyric is of something wholly spontaneous. Be this as it may, the poetic cast of his mind is revealed in his prose with greater freedom and a completer charm than in his verse. The best of him is the atmosphere he carries. It is not possible to read his books and not to know him for a brave, sincere, and loyal man, large both in heart and brain, and they purify and tone the mind in just such fashion as the air of mountain, moor, or sea purifies and tones the body.
The worthiest of his successors is Mr. J. M. Barrie, who has much in common with him, though he displays differences of a very essential kind. Mr. Barrie has no such spiritual obsession as besets his elder. He has the national reverence for sacred things, but it is probably rather habitual and racial than dogmatic. I think his greatest charm lies in the fact that he is at once old and new fashioned. He loves to deal with a bygone form of life, a form of life which he is too young to remember in all its intricacies, whilst he is not too young to have heard of it plenteously at first hand, or to have known many of its exemplars. Few things of so happy a sort can befall a child of imagination as to be born on such a borderland of time. About him is the atmosphere of the new, and dotted every here and there around him are the living mementoes of the old—a dying age, which in a little while will cease to be, and is already out of date and romantic. Steam and electricity and the printing-press, and the universal provider and the cheap clothing ‘emporium,’ have worked strange changes. It was Mr. Barrie’s fortune to begin to look on life when all these changes were not yet wrought; to bring an essentially modern mind to bear on the contemplation of a vanishing and yet visible past, to live with the quaint, yet to be able, by mere force of contrast, to recognise its quaintness, and to be in close and constant and familiar touch with those to whom the disappearing forms of life had been wholly habitual. That the mere environment thus indicated was the lot of hundreds of thousands makes little difference to the especial happiness of the chance, for, as I have said already, we can’t all be persons of genius, and it is only to the man of genius that, the good fortune comes home.
If there is one truth in relation to the craft of fiction of which I am more convinced than another, it is that all the genuine and original observation of which a man is capable is made in very early life. There are two very obvious reasons why this should be so. The fact that they are obvious need not prevent me from stating them here, since I am not writing for those who make a business of knowing such things. In the first place, the mind is at its freshest; and all objects within its scope have a keen-edged interest, which wears away in later life. In the next place, the earliest observations are our own, unmixed with the conclusions and prepossessions of other minds. A child has not learnt the Dickens’ fashion, or the Thackeray fashion, or the Superior Person fashion of surveying particulars and generals. He has not begun to obscure his intelligence by the vicious habit of purposed note-takings for literary uses. He looks at the things which interest him simply, naturally, and with entire absorption. It is true of the most commonplace people that as they grow old their minds turn back to childhood, and they remember the things of half a century ago with more clearness than the affairs of last week. Lord Lytton’s definition of a man of genius was that he preserved the child’s capacity for wonder.
One of the astutest of living critics tells me that he finds a curiously logical characteristic in Mr. Barrie’s humour, but I confess that I am not wholly clear as to his meaning. I find it characteristically Scotch, and perhaps at bottom we mean the same thing. It is often sly, and so conscious in its enjoyment of itself as to be content to remain unseen. Often it lies in a flavour of the mind, as in whole pages of ‘My Lady Nicotine,’ where it is a mere placid, lazy acquiescence in the generally humorous aspect of things. Here the writer finds himself amused, and so may you if you happen to be in the mood. At other times the fun bubbles with pure spontaneity, as in the courtship of ‘Tnowhead’s Bell, which is, I make bold to believe, as good a bit of Scotch rural comedy as we have had for many a day. The comedy is broad, and touches the edge of farce at times, but it is always kept on the hither-side by its droll appreciation of character, and an air of complete gravity in the narrator, who, for any indication he gives to the contrary, might be dealing with the most serious of chronicles.
As I write I have before me a letter of Mr. Barrie’s, written to a fellow-workman, in which he speaks of the ‘almost unbearable pathos’ of an incident in one of the latter’s pages. The phrase seems to fit accurately that chapter in the ‘Window in Thrums’ where Jamie, after his fall in London, returns to his old home, and finds his own people dead and scattered. The story is simple, and the style is severe even to dryness, but every word is like a nail driven home. It would be hard to find in merely modern work a chapter written with a more masterly economy of means, than this. And this economy of means is the most striking characteristic of Mr. Barrie’s literary style. It is as different from the forced economy of poverty as the wordy extravagance of Miss Corelli is different from the exuberance of Shakspeare. It is a reasoned, laborious, and self-chastening art, and within its own limitations it is art at its acme of achievement What it has set itself to do it has done.
These two, then, Dr. George Macdonald and Mr. J. M. Barrie, are the men who worthily carry on, in their separate and distinct fashions, the tradition which Sir Walter established. In a summary like this, where it is understood that at least a loyal effort is being made to recognise and apportion the merits of rival writers, the task of the critic occasionally grows ungrateful. Nothing short of sheer envy can grudge to Mr. Barrie a high meed of praise, but I think that his elder is his better. The younger man’s distinction is very largely due to a fine self-command, a faculty of self-criticism, which in its way cannot easily be overpraised. He has not Stevenson’s exquisite and yet daring appropriateness in the choice of words, but his humour is racier and scarcely less delicate, and in passages of pathos he knows his way straight to the human heart As the invention or discovery of new themes grows day by day less easy—as the bounds of the story-teller’s personal originality are constantly narrowing—the purely literary faculty, the mere craft of authorship in its finer manifestations must of necessity grow more valuable. Mr. Barrie is a captain amongst workmen, and there is little fear that in the final judgment of the public and his peers he will be huddled up with Maclarens and Crocketts, as he sometimes is to-day. But Dr. Mac-donald, though he has not sought for the finenesses of mere literary art with an equal jealousy, has inherited a bigger fortune, and has spent his ownings with a larger hand. He has perhaps narrowed his following by his faithfulness to his own inspiration, but his books are a genuine benefaction to the heart, and no man can read them honestly without drawing from them a spiritual freshness and purity of the rarer sort. There is an old story of a discussion among the students of their time as to the relative merits of Schiller and Goethe, The dispute came to Schiller’s ears, and he laughingly advised the combatants to cease discussion, and to be thankful that they had both. I could take a personal refuge there with all pleasure, but the critical rush to crown the new gods is a new thing, and, without stealing a leaf from the brow of the younger writer, I should like to see a fresher and a brighter crown upon the head of his elder and bigger brother.
It is so long a time since Mr. W. H. Mallock published the ‘Romance of the Nineteenth Century’ that the book might now very well be left alone, if it were not for the fact that in a fashion it marked an epoch in the history of English literature. It was, so far as I know, the first example of the School of the Downright Nasty. For half a year it ran in ‘Belgravia’ side by side with a novel of my own, and under those conditions I read as much as I could stand of it. Its main object appears to be to establish the theory that a young woman of refined breeding may be an amateur harlot. The central male figure of the book is a howling bounder, who has a grievance against the universe because he can’t entirely understand it. Within the last two or three years it has occurred to Mr. Mallock to recast the book, and in a preface dated 1893 (I think) he informs the world that on re-reading the story he personally has found portions of it to be offensive. These portions he declares himself to have eliminated, and he now thinks—or thought in 1893—that there is nothing on that score to cavil at. All I remembered of the story was that a certain Colonel Stapleton debauched the mind of the heroine by lending her obscene books with obscene prints attached. This episode is retained, in spite of the work of purification which has been performed; and it may be said that if the original novel were nastier than this deodorised edition of it, it is very much of a wonder how the critical stomach kept it down.
It is a refreshment to turn from this particular problem seeker to the work of a writer like Mrs. Humphry Ward, who, if she invests the questions she handles with more importance than actually belongs to them, is as wholesome and sincere as one could ask. She has read both deeply and widely, she thinks with sanity and clearness, she discerns character, she can create and tell a story, her style is excellently succinct and full, and any book from her pen may safely be guaranteed to fill many charmed and thoughtful hours. She is still a seeker of problems, and shares the faults of her school, inasmuch as she sets herself to the solution of themes which all thoughtful people have solved for themselves at an early age. It would be difficult, perhaps, to find a better and more salutary stimulant for the mind of a very young man or woman than ‘Robert Elsmere,’ to cite but one work of hers, but to the adult intelligence she seems a day behind the fair. She expends something very like genius in establishing a truth which is only doubted by here and there a narrow bigot—that truth being that a man may find himself forced to abandon the bare dogma of religion, and may yet conserve his faith in the Unseen and his spiritual brotherhood with men. ‘Robert Elsmere’ is a very beautiful piece of work, and it is impossible not to respect the ardour which inspires it, and the many literary excellences by which it is distinguished. But, all the same, it leaves upon the mind a sense of some futility. It would be easy to write a story which would prove—if a story can be imagined to prove anything—the precise opposite of the truth so eloquently preached in ‘Robert Elsmere,’ and the tale might be perfectly true to the experience of life. There are men who, parting with dogmatic religion, part with religion altogether, and whose only chance of salvation from themselves lies in the acceptance of a hard and fast creed. It would be easy enough, and true enough, to show such a man assailed by doubt, struggling and succumbing, and then going headlong to the devil. The thing has happened many a time. Mrs. Humphry Ward shows another kind of man, and depicts him most ably. Robert Elsmere is even a better Christian when he has surrendered his creed than he was whilst he held it, for he has reached to a loftier ideal of life, and he dies as a martyr to its duties. But the story has the air of being controversial, and fiction and controversy do not work well together. It is possible to establish any theory, so far as a single instance will do it, when you have the manufacture both of facts and of characters in your own hands. Accept an extreme case. A practised novelist might take in hand the character of a morose and surly fellow who was generous and expansive in his cups. So long as the wretch was sober he might be made hateful; half fill him with whisky, and you gift him with all manner of emotional good qualities. The study might be real enough, but it would prove nothing. The novelist who assails a controversial question begs everything, and the answer to a problem so posed is worthless except as the expression of an individual opinion. It may be urged—and there is force in the contention—that there are many people who are only induced to think of serious themes when they are dressed in the guise of fiction, as there are people who cannot take pills unless they are sugar-coated. Again—as admitted already—a mind in process of formation might be strengthened and broadened by the influence of such a book as ‘Robert Elsmere.’ There are some to whom its apparent trend of thought will appear to be simply damnable. That one may have scant respect for their judgment, and no share at all in their opinion, does not alter the fact that the weapon employed against them is not and cannot be fairly used.
Many years ago, Mr. Clark Russell, whose name is now a household word, was the editor of an ill-fated society journal. I was a contributor to its little-read pages, and I came one day upon an article entitled ‘Pompa Mortis.’ This article was written in such astonishingly good English, so clean, so hardbitten and terse, and yet so graceful, that I could not resist the temptation to ask its author’s name. My editor modestly acknowledged it for his own, and when I told him what I thought of its style he confessed to a close study of Defoe and a great admiration for him. I saw nothing more from his hand until I read ‘The Wreck of the Grosvenor,’ the first of that series of sea stories which has carried Mr. Russell’s name about the world. An armchair voyage with Russell is almost as good as the real thing, and sometimes (as when the perils and distresses of shipwreck are in question) a great deal better. Had any man ever such an eye for the sea before, or such a power of bringing it to the sight of another? Few readers, I fancy, care a copper for his fable, or very much for his characters, except for the mere moment when they move in the page; but his descriptions of sky and sea linger in the mind like things actually seen. They are so sharp, so vivid, so detailed, so true, that a marine painter might work from them. And the really remarkable thing about them is the infinite variety of these seascapes and skyscapes. He seems never to repeat himself. He is various as the seas and skies he paints. One figures his mind as some sort of marvellous picture gallery. He veritably sees things, and he makes the reader see them. And all the strange and curious sea jargon, of which not one landsman in a thousand understands anything—combings and back-stays and dead-eyes, and the rest of it—takes a salt smack of romance in his lips. He can be as technical as he pleases, and the reader takes him on faith, and rollicks along with him, bewildered, possibly, but trusting and happy. And Clark Russell has not only been charming. He has been useful, too, and Foc’sle Jack owes him a debt of gratitude. For though he does not shine as a draughtsman where the subtleties of character are concerned, he knows Jack, who is not much of a metaphysical puzzle, inside and out, and he has brought him home to us as no sea-writer ever tried to do before. Years ago it seemed natural to fancy that he might write himself out, but he goes on with a freshness which looks inexhaustible. If I cannot read him with the old enjoyment it is my misfortune and not his fault. If his latest book had been his first I should have found in it the charm which caught me years ago. But it is in the nature of things that an individual writer like Clark Russell should be his own most dangerous rival.
Clark Russell is captain on his own deck, whether he sail a coffin or a princely Indiaman of the old time. Sir Walter Besant is lord of his own East End, and of that innocent seraglio of delightful and eccentric young ladies to which he has been adding for years past Sir Walter Besant is chiefly remarkable as an example of what may be done by a steadfast cheerfulness in style. His creed has always been that fiction is a recreative art, and we have no better sample of a manly and stout-hearted optimist than he. He is optimistic of set purpose, and sometimes his cheerfulness costs him a struggle, for he is tender-hearted and clear-sighted, and he is the Columbus of ‘the great joyless city’ of the East. He has had a double aim—to keep his work recreative and to make it useful. In one respect he has been curiously happy, for he once dreamt aloud a beautiful dream, and has lived to find it a reality. It was his own bright hope which built the People’s Palace, and a man might rest on that with ample satisfaction.
He has given us many well-studied types of character, but he excels in the portraiture of the manly young man and the lovable young woman. In this regard I find him at his apogee with Phyllis Fleming and Jack Dunquerque, who are both frankly alive and charming. He is good, too, at the portraiture of a humbug, and finds a humorous delight in him, very much as Dickens did. There is more than a touch of Dickens in his method, and in his way of seeing people, and, most of all, in the warm-hearted cheer he keeps.
It is outside the purpose of this series to dwell on anything but the literary value of the works of the people dealt with; but little apology, after all, is needed for a side-glance at the work which Sir Walter Besant has done for men of letters. He has worked hard at the vexed and difficult question of copyright; he has founded an Authors’ Club and an authors’ newspaper; and he has devoted with marked unselfishness much valuable time and effort to the general well-being of the craft. He has stood out stoutly for the State recognition of authorship, and in his own person he has received it. Esprit de corps is a capital thing in its way. Whether it is well to have too much of it in a body of men who hold the power of the Press largely in their own hands, whilst at the same time publicity is the breath of their nostrils, is perhaps an open question. But of Sir Walter Besant’s single-mindedness in this voluntary work there is no shadow of doubt. Remembering his popularity with the public, and the price he can command for his work, it is evident that he has expended in the pursuit of his ideal time which would have been worth some thousands of pounds to him. He has striven in all ways to do honour to letters, and the esteem in which he is held is a just payment for high purpose and unselfish labour.
In an article intended for this series and set under this lady’s name (an article now suppressed, and therefore to be re-written), I fell into an error which appears to have been shared by several of the critics who dealt with what was then the latest of her books, ‘The Sorrows of Satan,’ I assumed Miss Corelli to have drawn her own portrait, as she sees things, in the character of ‘Mavis Clare.’ This belief has been expressed—so it turns out—by other people, and I learn that Miss Corelli has authoritatively denied it ‘She objects very strongly,’ so says an inspired defender, ‘to a notion which was started by one of the most distinguished of her interviewers, and absolutely denies the assertion that she described herself as “Mavis Clare” in “The Sorrows of Satan.”’ Miss Corelli, of course, knows the truth about this matter, and nobody else can possibly know it, but it is at least permissible to examine the evidence which led many separate people to the same false conclusion. ‘Mavis Clare’ and Marie Corelli own the same initials, and until the fact that this was a mere fortuitous chance was made clear by Miss Corelli herself it seemed natural to suppose that an identity was coyly hinted at. ‘Mavis Clare’ is a novelist, and so is Miss Corelli. ‘Mavis Clare’ is mignonne and fair, ‘is pretty, and knows how to dress besides,’ is a ‘most independent creature, too; quite indifferent to opinions,’ All these things, as we learn from many sources, are true of Miss Corelli also. It is said of Miss Corelli herself that ‘dauntless courage, a clear head, and a tremendous power of working hard without hurting herself have helped her to make a successful use of her great gift. She is not afraid of anything. She “insists on herself,” and is unique,’ It is to be noted that all this is said by Miss Corelli of ‘Mavis Clare,’ Miss Corelli is at war with the reviewers. So is ‘Mavis Clare,’ Miss Corelli’s books circulate by the thousand. So do ‘Mavis Clare’s.’ ‘Mavis Clare’ is utterly indifferent to outside opinion. So is Miss Corelli. In point of fact, if anybody thought Miss Corelli a woman of astonishing genius, and wrote an honest account of her, he would describe her precisely as Miss Corelli has described ‘Mavis Clare.’
There is, in fact, a point up to which ‘Mavis Clare’ and Miss Corelli are not to be separated. There are a score of things in any description of the one which are indubitably true of the other. But when Miss Corelli writes of ‘Mavis Clare’ in such terms as are now to be quoted we begin to see that she is and must be indignant at the supposition that she is still writing of herself: ‘She is too popular to need reviews. Besides, a large number of the critics—the “log-rollers” especially—are mad against her for her success, and the public know it. Clearness of thought, brilliancy of style, beauty of diction—all these are hers, united to consummate ease of expression and artistic skill. The potent, resistless, unpurchasable quality of Genius. She wrote what she had to say with a gracious charm, freedom, and innate consciousness of strength. She won fame without the aid of money, and was crowned so brightly and visibly before the world that she was beyond criticism.’
But is it not just within the bounds of possibility that Miss Corelli began with some idea of depicting herself, and, discarding that idea, took too little care to obliterate resemblances? Even here she trenches too closely upon the truth to escape the calumnious supposition that she is writing of herself. She is too popular to need reviews. She is at war with the critics, and she has induced a very large portion of the public to believe that ‘a number of the critics—the “log-rollers” especially—are mad against her for her success.’
Were I, the present writer, to invent a fictional character, to give him for the initials of his name the letters D. C. M., to describe him as awkward and burly, with an untidy head of grey hair, to make him a novelist, a Bohemian and a wanderer, and then to paint him as a man of genius and an astonishing fine fellow, I should expect to be told that I had been guilty of a grave insolence. If I could honestly say that the resemblances had never struck me, and that the egregious vanity of the picture was a wholly imaginary thing, I should, of course, desire to be believed, and I should, of course, deserve to be believed. But I should encounter doubt, and I should not be disposed to wonder at it. If I were annoyed with anybody I should be annoyed with myself for having given such a handle to the world’s ill-nature.
Accepting Miss Corelli’s disclaimer, one is still forced to the conclusion that she has fallen into a serious indiscretion.
In ‘The Murder of Delicia’ we are made acquainted with another lady-writer who enjoys all the popularity of Miss Corelli and of ‘Mavis Clare,’ who has the genius and the eyes and the stature and the hair of both. ‘As a writer she stood quite apart from the rank and file of modern fictionists.’ ‘The public responded to her voice, and clamoured for her work, and as a natural result of this, all ambitious and aspiring publishers were her very humble suppliants. Whatsoever munificent and glittering terms are dreamed of by authors in their wildest conceptions of a literary El Dorado were hers to command; and yet she was neither vain nor greedy.’ One thanks God piously that yet she was neither vain nor greedy; but one can’t keep the mouth from watering. Ah! those wildest conceptions of a literary El Dorado! ‘Delicia’ gets 8,000L. for a book. May it be delicately hinted that this sum is only approached in the receipts of one living lady-writer, and that the lady-writer’s name is ———? Wild horses shall not drag this pen further.
Miss Corelli complains, in a preface to this recent work, that ‘every little halfpenny ragamuffin of the press that can get a newspaper corner in which to hide himself for the convenience of throwing stones,’ pelts every ‘brilliant woman’ with the word ‘unsexed.’ Honestly, I don’t remember the reproach being hurled at Mrs. Browning, or George Eliot, or Mrs. Cowden Clarke, or Charlotte Brontë, or Maria Edgeworth, or Mrs. Hemans. Miss Corelli tells us that the woman who is ‘well-nigh stripped to man’s gaze every night,’ and who ‘drinks too much wine and brandy,’ is not subjected to this reproach, whilst if another woman ‘prefers to keep her woman’s modesty, and execute some great work of art which shall be as good or even better than anything man can accomplish, she will be dubbed “unsexed” instantly,’ Where has Miss Corelli found the society of which these amazing things are true? Does anybody else know it? And where are the better works of art from woman’s hand than man can accomplish? ‘Aurora Leigh’ and the Portuguese Sonnets are at the top of feminine achievement, and Shakespeare is not dethroned. And here is a pearl of common sense: ‘To put it bluntly and plainly, a great majority of the men of the present day want women to keep them,’ This is Miss Corelli in her own person in her preface, and, ‘to put it bluntly and plainly,’ the statement is not true, or approximately true, or within shouting distance of the truth. And what of the ‘persons of high distinction who always find something curiously degrading in paying their tradesmen’? Are they commoner than persons of high distinction who meet their bills? Are they as common? Miss Corelli sweeps the board. She is angry because some people will not take her seriously, but whilst her pages are charged with this kind of matter, she cannot fairly blame anybody but herself. She burns to be a social reformer. It would be unjust to deny her ardour. But when she tells the tale of a penniless nobleman who lives on his wife’s money and breaks her heart, and assures us that ‘there are thousands of such cases every day,’ she undoes her own sermon by one rampant phrase of nonsense There are such men, more’s the pity, and they are the social satirist’s honest game There have been foolish people who thought that women unsexed themselves by doing artistic work, but they died many years ago, for the most part. There are men who want to marry rich women, and live lazy lives, but they are not ‘a great majority.’ Miss Corelli knows these things, of course, for they are patent to the world; but she allows zeal to run away with judgment. The rules for satire are the rules for Irish stew. You mustn’t empty the pepper-castor, and the pot should be kept at a gentle bubble only. There is reason in the profitable denunciation of a wicked world, as well as in the roasting of eggs.
But Miss Corelli has hit the public hard, and it is the self-imposed task of the present writer to find out, as far as in him lies, why and how she has done this. Miss Corelli’s force is hysteric, but it is sometimes very real. A self-approving hysteria can do fine things under given conditions. It has been the motive power in some work which the world has rightly accepted as great. In the execution of certain forms of emotional art it is a positive essential. Much genuine poetry has been produced under its influence. It is a sort of spiritual wind, which, rushing through the harp-strings of the soul, may make an extraordinary music. But the sounds produced depend not upon the impulse conveyed to the instrument, but on the quality and condition of the instrument itself. Without the impulse a large and various mind may lie quiescent. With the impulse a small and disordered spirit may make a very considerable sound. In the very loftiest flights of genius we discern a sort of glorious dementia. All readers have found it in the last splendid verse of ‘Adonaïs.’ It proclaims itself in Keats in the wild naïveté of the inquiry, ‘Muse of my native land, am I inspired?’ The faculty of the very greatest among the great lies in the existence of this inrush of emotion, in strict subordination to the intellectual powers. To be without it precludes greatness; to be wholly subject to its influence is to be insane. Miss Corelli experiences the inrush of emotion in great force, but, unfortunately for her work, and for herself, the sense of power which it inspires is not co-ordinate with the strength of intellect which is essential to its control.
Miss Corelli has ventured freely into the domain of spiritual things, and has dealt, with more daring than knowledge, with esoteric mysteries. The great reading public knows little of these matters, because, as a rule, they have been expressed by writers whose works are too abstruse to catch the popular ear. It is only when they are handled by writers of imaginative fiction that they become popularly known at all. In ‘The Sorrows of Satan’ Miss Corelli has earned a reputation for originality by advancing a theory which is older than many of the hills. It has been for ages a rooted religious belief, but it is wholly in conflict with the theological ideas which are taught in our churches and chapels, and has, therefore, a startling air of strangeness to the average church and chapel-goer.
The theory is thus expressed in Mr. C. G. Harrison’s lectures on ‘The Transcendental Universe’: ‘It is generally supposed that Satan is the enemy of spirituality in man; that he delights in his degradation, and views with diabolical satisfaction the development of his lower nature and all its evil consequences. The wide, and almost universal, prevalence of this mediaeval superstition only makes it all the more necessary to protest against it as a grotesque error.... It would probably be much nearer the truth to say that the degradation and suffering of mankind, for which the adversary of God is responsible, so far from affording him any satisfaction, afflict him with a sense of failure and deepen his despair of ultimate victory.’
This is, of course, the root idea of ‘The Sorrows of Satan,’ and if the theme had been handled with reserve and dignity a very noble book indeed might without doubt have been built upon it. But Miss Corelli has not had the power to confine herself within the limits of the severe and lofty conception of the old Theosophists. Her sorrowful Satan grows first melodramatic and then absurd. The notion that the great sad adversary of Almighty Goodness is settled in a modern London hotel, with a private cook of his own, and a privately engaged bath of his own, carries the reader away from the original conception to the burlesque—vulgar and flagrant—of the mystery-plays of the Middle Ages; and the devotion of supernatural power to the preparations for a suburban garden-party is purely ludicrous. Miss Corelli has seized the Theosophic thought, which in itself is far nobler and more poetic than the Miltonic, but she has not been strong enough to use it. She has fallen under the weight of her chosen theme, and the result is that her demoniac hero is at one time presented as a majestic and suffering spirit, and at another as a mere Merry Andrew.
The curious and instructive part of all this is that, if Miss Corelli had been gifted with any power of self-criticism, her ardour would have been damped, and any work she might have done would have suffered proportionately. Her work has hit the public hard, and it has done so because, of its kind, her inspiration has been genuine. The wind does not blow through the strings of a well-ordered instrument, but it blows, and however grotesque the sound produced may sometimes be, it is of a sort which is not to be produced by any mere mechanism of the mind. To the critical ear the tunes played in ‘Wormwood’ and ‘The Sorrows of Satan’ are not, and cannot be, agreeable. The writer, to speak in plain English, and without the obscurity of symbols, is the owner of genius on the emotional side, and is not the owner of genius, or anything approaching to it, even from afar, on the intellectual side. The result of this disproportion between impulse and power is, to the critical mind, disastrous; but it does not so make itself felt with the ordinary reader. It is rather an unusual thing with him to come into contact with a real force in books. He has not read or thought enough to know that the ideas offered to him with such transcendental pomp are old and commonplace. It is enough for him to feel that the writer understands herself to be a personage.
She succeeds in imposing herself upon the public because she has first been convinced of her own authority. Her inward conviction of the authority of her own message and her own power to deliver it is the one qualification which makes her different from the mob of writing ladies. Even when she deals with purely social themes the same air of overwhelming earnestness sits upon her brow. In a little trifle published in the November of 1896, and entitled ‘Jane,’ she goes to work with a quite prophetic ardour to tell a story almost identical with that related in a scrap of Thackeray’s ‘Cox’s Diary.’ The reader may find the tale in the second chapter of that brief work, where it is headed ‘First Rout.’ Thackeray tells his version of it with a sense of fun and humour. Miss Corelli tells hers with the voice and manner of a Boanerges.. Nothing is to be done without the divine afflatus, and plenty of it. The temperamental difference between the satirist and the scold is well illustrated by a large handling and a little handling of the same theme.
The point upon which it seems worth while to insist is this: That the mass of the reading public is always ready to submit itself to the influence of sincerity. It does not seem much to matter what inner characteristics the sincerity may have. In the case now under analysis the quality seems to resolve itself into pure self-confidence. Miss Corelli’s method of capturing the public mind is not a trick which anybody else might copy. It is the result of a real, though perilous, gift of nature—a gift which she possesses in something of a superlative degree. Nobody could pretend to such a gift and succeed by virtue of the pretence. Miss Corelli is, at least, quite serious in the belief that she is a woman of genius. She is only very faintly touched with doubt when she thinks that the people who are laughing at her are writhing with envy. She speaks, therefore, with precisely that air of authority to which she would have a right if her ideas with regard to her own mental power were based on solid fact.
So far we arrive at little more than the long-established truth that the unthinking portion of the public is not only longing for a moral guide, but is ready to accept anybody who is conscious of authority. It would be well if we could leave Miss Corelli here, but something remains to be said which is not altogether pleasant to say. In ‘The Sorrows of Satan’ many pages are devoted to the bitter (and merited) abuse of certain female writers who deal coarsely with the sexual problem. But Miss Corelli appears to think that she may be as frankly disagreeable as she pleases so long as she is conscious of a moral purpose. Whatever she may feel, and whatever estimable purposes may guide her, she has published many things which run side by side with her denunciation of her sister writers, and are as offensive as anything to be found in the work of any living woman. Take as a solitary example the following passage:
‘I soon found that Lucio did not intend to marry, and I concluded that he preferred to be the lover of many women, instead of the husband of one. I did not love him any the less for this; I only resolved that I would at least be one of those who were happy enough to share his passion. I married the man Tempest, feeling that, like many women I knew, I should, when safely wedded, have greater liberty of action. I was aware that most modern men prefer an amour with a married woman to any other kind of liaison, and I thought Lucio would have readily yielded to the plan I had preconceived.’
I do not know of any passage in any of the works so savagely assaulted by Miss Corelli which goes beyond this; and I think it the more, and not the less, objectionable, because the lady who wrote it can see so very plainly how sinful her offence is when it is committed by other people.