At the library table

by Adrian H. Joline

GEORGE PAYNE RAINSFORD JAMES

In a vainglorious mood I said not long ago to a well-dressed and apparently intelligent gentleman whom I met in the house of an accomplished lawyer in Washington City, that I had just had the privilege of conversing with the extremely modern novelist, Mr. Henry James. He smiled amiably and remarked airily, “Oh, the two horsemen fellow”.

The remark was not without significance, because it betrayed the fact that my casual acquaintance, who might well be presumed to represent what is called “the average citizen” of this enlightened country; who was fairly well educated; who had read enough to know of the famous horsemen and of their habitual appearance in the opening chapter; who assuredly had skimmed the book-notices in our wonderful newspapers; was, after all, more distinctly impressed by the writer of sixty years ago than by the contemporaneous author whose volumes bid fair to rival in number those of his namesake—an author whose style defies definition and bewilders the simple-minded searcher after a good story.

I confess that I am puzzled by these subtle writers with their involved sentences, their clouds of verbiage, and their incomprehensible wanderings in speculative mysteries. There is a delight about the direct and there is often disappointment about the indirect. The true lover of fiction revels in the directness of Dumas and of Dickens, but he usually accepts the intricacies of the modern school because he is told that he ought to do so or because, alone and unaided, he can discover nothing better in the product of the day.

To my Washington friend I replied, with that offensive assumption of superiority which marks the man familiar with his encyclopædia, that the writer of whom he was thinking had closed his career and finished the last chapter of his life nearly half a century ago, when Henry James was only seventeen and had not yet dreamed of Daisy Miller or forecasted the genesis of the two closely printed volumes of The Golden Bowl. I discerned the truth, however, that the subject was not interesting and we changed the topic of conversation.

The earlier James has not been favored by the men who compile histories of English literature. Nicoll and Seccombe merely call him “the prolific James”, but devote large space to many inferior writers. Garnett and Gosse ignore him entirely. It seems to be a rule among self-constituted critics to speak of him with indifference; I think he deserves more respectful treatment. It may be that he has been a victim of that merciless propensity of men to throw stones at him who has been the subject of ridicule by those who have won popularity; when one cur barks, the whole pack joins vigorously. As Mr. Stapleton in Jacob Faithful profoundly observes, it is “human natur”. When Macaulay damned poor Montgomery to lasting ignominy, he deliberately consigned the luckless poet to undeserved contempt; and Macaulay’s essay will live while but for its caustic condemnation Montgomery would be utterly forgotten.

The “horseman” tag has for many years attached itself to G. P. R. James and has done much to bring him into ridicule. It is strange how such tags preserve immortality, despite the fact that they are often unjust and deceiving. What is printed, remains. A New York journal said recently: “An error once made in print, it seems will never die; a mis-statement may be corrected within the hour, but it goes on its travels without the correction and becomes a bewildering part of written history”. It is true also concerning a “tag”. In literature, Bret Harte’s parodies, the Rejected Addresses, and the many clever things contained in Mr. Hamilton’s amusing compilation, show how easy it is to discover a mannerism and to attach to an author a label which will always identify him.

Possibly the popularity of the “horseman” remark is due in some degree to Thackeray, who began “that fatal parody,” the burlesque “Barbazure, by G. P. R. Jeames Esq. etc.” in this wise: “It was upon one of those balmy evenings of November which are only known in the valleys of Languedoc and among the mountains of Alsace, that two cavaliers might have been perceived by the naked eye threading one of the rocky and romantic gorges that skirt the mountain land between the Marne and the Garonne.” Our own John Phœnix in his review of the “Life of Joseph Bowers the Elder”—I quote from the original edition, and not from the one printed’ by the Caxton Club which omits this gem—says of one of Mr. Bowers’s supposititious works: “The following smacks, to us, slightly of ‘Jeems.’ ‘It was on a lovely morning in the sweet spring time, when two horsemen might have been seen slowly descending one of the gentle acclivities that environ the picturesque valley of San Diego.’” Mr. Edmund Gosse continues the tradition when in his Modern English Literature, he tells us of the days when “the cavaliers of G. P. R. James were riding down innumerable roads”; while Justin McCarthy in the History of Our Own Times remarks pleasantly—“Many of us can remember, without being too much ashamed of the fact, that there were early days when Mr. James and his cavaliers and his chivalric adventures gave nearly as much delight as Walter Scott could have given to the youth of a preceding generation. But Walter Scott is with us still, young and old, and poor James is gone. His once famous solitary horseman has ridden away into actual solitude, and the shades of night have gathered over his heroic form”. Here we perceive a variation from the familiar allusion. The “two horsemen” have condensed themselves into a single rider.

While we are speaking of the horsemen, it may not be amiss to recall what James thought of them. In 1851 he published a story called “The Fate,” and in the sixteenth chapter he deals with them in a manner quite amusing but also quite pathetic. He is talking about plagiarism and he wanders into other fields. He says:

“As to repeating one’s self, it is no very great crime, perhaps, for I never heard that robbing Peter to pay Paul was punishable under any law or statute, and the multitude of offenders in this sense, in all ages, and in all circumstances, if not an excuse, is a palliation, showing the frailty of human nature, and that we are as frail as others—but no more. The cause of this self-repetition, probably, is not a paucity of ideas, not an infertility of fancy, not a want of imagination or invention, but like children sent daily to draw water from a stream, we get into the habit of dropping our buckets into the same immeasurable depth of thought exactly at the same place; and though it be not exactly the same water as that which we drew up the day before it is very similar in quality and flavor, a little clearer or a little more turbid, as the case may be.

Now this dissertation—which may be considered as an introduction or preface to the second division of my history—has been brought about, has had its rise, origin, source, in an anxious and careful endeavor to avoid, if possible, introducing into this work the two solitary horsemen—one upon a white horse—which, by one mode or another, have found their way into probably one out of three of all the books I have written and I need hardly tell the reader that the name of these books is legion. They are, perhaps, too many; but, though I must die, some of them will live—I know it, I feel it; and I must continue to write while this spirit is in this body.

To say truth, I do not know why I should wish to get rid of my two horsemen, especially the one on the white horse. Wouvermans always had a white horse in all his pictures; and I do not see why I should not put my signature, my emblem, my monogram, in my paper and ink pictures as well as any painter of them all. I am not sure that other authors do not do the same thing—that Lytton has not always, or very nearly, a philosophizing libertine—Dickens, a very charming young girl, with dear little pockets; and Lever a bold dragoon. Nevertheless, upon my life, if I can help it, we will not have in this work the two horsemen and the white horse; albeit, in after times—when my name is placed with Homer and Shakespeare, or in any other more likely position—they may arise serious and acrimonious disputes as to the real authorship of the book, from its wanting my own peculiar and distinctive mark and characteristic.

But here, while writing about plagiarism, I have been myself a plagiary; and it shall not remain without acknowledgment, having suffered somewhat in that sort myself. Here, my excellent friend, Leigh Hunt, soul of mild goodness, honest truth, and gentle brightness! I acknowledge that I stole from you the defensive image of Wouverman’s white horse, which you incautiously put within my reach, on one bright night of long, dreamy conversation, when our ideas of many things, wide as the poles asunder, met suddenly without clashing, or produced but a cool, quiet spark—as the white stones which children rub together in dark corners emit a soft phosphorescent gleam, that serves but to light their little noses.”[^[23]]

I hold no brief for James. I cannot assert truthfully that I am particularly well acquainted with more than four or five of his numerous books, although I remember with delight the perusal of some of them when I was a boy, reading for the story alone. But I am confident that he had his merits, and that much of the abuse showered upon him by critics has been undeserved; that he was a careful and conscientious writer whose novels are fit to be read, and that while he may no longer be ranked among “the best sellers”, he deserves a high place of honor among those who have entertained, amused and instructed their fellow men. It is only about two years ago that the Routledges of London considered it wise to begin the new career of their house by re-issuing in twenty-five volumes the historical novels, and cheaper reproductions are widely circulated. In a recent number of a New York magazine the editor says that “the fact is that James has always had a big public of his own—the public in fact that does not consult the ‘Dictionary of National Biography’”—referring to the disparaging article in the Dictionary about which I will have something to say later on. There are authors who are always praised by the critics but ignored by the proletariat of readers; there are authors whom the critics affect to despise but who have many readers whose judgments are not embalmed in print. James seems to belong to the last-mentioned class. Yet few are acquainted with the man himself, and I have thought that it might not be amiss to give a short account of him, referring to the estimates of his character and ability by those of his own time and also to some autograph letters of his which are in my possession and which have not been published.

The details of his life are not very well known; it was not a stirring or an eventful one. It was the life of a quiet, dignified and unostentatious man of letters, unmarked by fierce controversies and wholly devoid of domestic troubles. If his reputation has not long survived him among the critical it is because of a law of literature which Mr. Brander Matthews says is inexorable and universal. The man who has the gift of story telling and nothing else, who is devoid of humor, who does not possess the power of making character, who is a “spinner of yarns” only, has no staying power, and “however immense his immediate popularity may be, he sinks into oblivion almost as soon as he ceases to produce”.[^[24]] James seems to have had only in a small degree “the power of making character”, and although he had a sense of humor, it manifests itself in his novels only in a mildly unobtrusive way.

George Payne Rainsford James was born in George Street, Hanover Square, London, on August 9th, 1799. His father was a physician who had seen service in the navy and was in America during the Revolution, serving in Benedict Arnold’s descent on Connecticut. The son of the novelist, who is still living in Wisconsin, tells me that his grandfather (as he hinted) shot a man with his own hands to stop the atrocities of the siege in which Ledyard fell. The physician was also in the vessel which brought Rodney the news of De Grasse and enabled him to win the great naval victory which assisted England to make peace creditably. His paternal grandfather was Dr. Robert James, whose “powders” for curing fevers enjoyed great celebrity at one time,[^[25]] but his chief title to fame is that he was admired by Samuel Johnson who said of him, “no man brings more mind to his profession.”[^[26]] I regret that there is a cruel insinuation by the great personage which implies that Doctor Robert was not sober for twenty years, but there is some doubt whether Johnson was really referring to James.[^[27]] Those were days of free indulgence, and much may be pardoned; at all events, no one could ever accuse the grandson of such an offence.

Young George attended the school of the Reverend William Carmalt at Putney, but he was not fortunate enough to have the advantage of a university education, which despite the sneers of those who never attended a university, is an important element in the life of any man who devotes himself to literature. It is a great corrective, and those who regard the subject from a point of view wholly utilitarian do not comprehend in the least degree what is meant by it. James soon developed a fondness for the study of languages, not only what are called “the classics,” but of Persian and Arabic although he says he “sadly failed in mastering Arabic.” This taste of his may account in part for his extensive vocabulary, and it may be that his diffuseness, so much criticised, was due in some degree to his ready command of an unusual number of words. In his younger days, he studied medicine, as might have been expected, but his inclination was in a different direction. He wanted to go into the navy, but says Mr. C. L. James, “his father, who had a sailor’s experience and manners, said, ‘you may go into the army if you like—it’s the life of a dog; but the navy is the life of a d——d dog, and you shan’t try it.’”

He did accordingly go into the army for a short time during the “One Hundred Days,” and was wounded in one of the slight actions which followed Waterloo; but he never rose beyond the rank of lieutenant. His son writes: “The British and Prussian forces were disposed all along the frontier to guard every point, and Wellington, with whom my father was acquainted, did not like the arrangement—it was Blucher’s. When Napoleon crossed the Sambre at Charlevoi, the Duke saw his purpose of taking Quatre Bras, between the English and Prussians, so he sent word to all his own detachments to fall in, ‘running as to a fire.’*** My father’s company was among those too late for the great battle. I have heard him tell how the cuirassiers lay piled up, men and horses, to the tops of lofty hedges.*** My father also said that he saw a dead cuirassier behind our lines, showing there must have been a time when they actually pierced the allied centre. When he was on the field they were bringing in French prisoners, who would have been massacred by the Prussians but that English soldiers guarded them. Many years afterwards the Duke of Wellington said to my father, in his abrupt way, ‘You were at Waterloo, I think?’ ‘No,’ he replied ‘I am sorry to say.’ ‘Why sorry to say,’ rejoined Wellington, ‘if you had been there, you might not have been here.’ Another of his anecdotes about the Duke is that just after Waterloo, where it is well known that a great part of the allied army was wholly routed, some officers were talking about who ‘ran’, when Wellington, who had been quietly listening to these unhopeful personalities, cut in thus: ‘Run! who wouldn’t have run under a fire like that? I am sure I should—if I had known any place to run to.’”

One incident in his army life is of interest. Some thirty years ago Mr. Maunsell B. Field, a gentleman whose title to fame is somewhat dubious, published a book called “Memories of Many Men.” He knew James well, and collaborated with him in one of his books—“Adrian, or the Clouds of the Mind.” Mr. Field says, after mentioning an alleged fact which is not a fact, viz: that James was taken prisoner before the battle of Waterloo and detained until after the battle, “The incident which occurred during his confinement there cast a gloom upon the rest of his life. For some cause which he never explained to me, he became engaged in a duel with a French officer. He escaped unhurt himself, but wounded his adversary who died, after lingering for months. I have still in my possession the old-fashioned pistols with which this duel was fought, which my deceased friend presented to me at the time of our early acquaintance.”[^[28]] Field’s story is made up in a ridiculously inaccurate way. James was not captured before Waterloo, or after it, for that matter. During his later travels he became involved in a difficulty with a French officer and found himself compelled, according to the absurd practice of the time, to fight a duel with him. The Frenchman was not killed, but only wounded in the arm, and the duel was fought with swords, not with pistols! The truth is, that after the sword-duel, James was challenged to fight again with pistols. Mr. C. L. James writes me thus: “It made him (G. P. R. James) very angry; and, being a good shot then, he felt confident of the result if he should accept but said he would put the point of honor to the French officer’s regiment. They replied by inviting him to dine at the mess. On receiving this message, he took up his pistols which were ready, loaded, saying ‘then we shall have no use for these,’ and at that moment one of them went off, sending the bullet through the floor close to his foot, though he felt sure they were not cocked.” Mr. Field undoubtedly meant to tell the truth, but his reminiscences cannot be relied upon in regard to James or to any one else.

As a lad of seventeen he wrote a number of sketches, afterwards published under the title of “A String of Pearls,” which were rather free translations from the oriental tales he had studied so fondly.[^[29]] He travelled extensively for those times, visiting France and Spain soon after the abdication of Napoleon. These early travels and adventures supplied him with the idea of Morley Ernstein. He became acquainted with Cuvier and other men of eminence, and it is gratifying to Americans to know that Washington Irving liked him and gave him encouragement. It has been said that his first work was the Life of Edward the Black Prince, said to have been produced in 1822, but one of my letters, written in 1835, indicates that it was not produced earlier than 1836. The son thinks it must have been written before 1830. He had a disposition to enter political life, but he abandoned the idea in 1827. He was a mild Tory. His ambition was in the direction of a diplomatic career. His father had some influence with Lord Liverpool, who offered him the post of Secretary to an Embassy to China,—a temporary appointment only, and one which promised him no preferment. It was declined, and a week later Lord Liverpool died suddenly.

In 1828 he married the daughter of Honoratus Leigh Thomas, an eminent physician of that day. She survived her husband exactly thirty-one years, dying at Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on June 9th, 1891. The assertion made in some accounts of him that James married in the United States is wholly untrue. After the marriage, they lived in France, Italy and Scotland.

In 1825 he wrote his first novel, Richelieu, which was not published until 1829. Regarded by many as the best of his novels, it is an excellent example of his strength and of his weakness. It deals with elementary emotions, and makes but slight attempts to portray character except in the simplest and most obvious way. Although it bears the name of the great Cardinal, it might as well have been called “Louis XIII”, or “Chavigni,” or “The Count de Blenau”, for Richelieu himself appears but seldom on the scene and is not the hero or the central figure. The narrative runs briskly on, plentifully seasoned with deeds of daring and hairbreadth escapes, culminating in the familiar climax of the almost miraculous arrival of a pardon when the hero has bared his neck to receive the axe of the executioner. It is evident from the outset that the nobleman whose fortunes are the subject of the story and the conventional lady of his love will marry and “be happy ever after.” The abundant historical and antiquarian padding is admirably devised and executed, well placed and never tiresome. The tale is skilfully constructed and if it teaches any lesson, it is that of courage, truth, honor and loyalty. Our modern “historical novels” are in many respects distinctly inferior to Richelieu. Singularly enough, he did not include it in the revised edition of his Works.

After reading Richelieu, Sir Walter Scott advised him to adopt literature as a profession, and as he imitated Scott, the value of the advice is not to be underestimated. As Mr. Field’s story goes, James had kept the manuscript concealed from his father, but he managed to get an introduction to Scott, who promised to give him his opinion. After six months no news had come from Scotland. James was riding one day in Bond Street, when, his horse shying, his carriage was pressed against another. The occupant of the other carriage was Scott, and he invited James to call upon him. To his surprise and delight, Scott praised the book highly, and wrote his opinion, which enabled the lucky author to find a publisher, to whom he sold the copyright for a song. In his General Preface to the Works (1844–1849) James himself gives a very different account of the matter. He says that a friend showed Sir Walter one volume of a romance written long before, and he himself sent a letter to Scott asking advice in regard to persevering in a literary career. Some months passed, and James “felt somewhat mortified and a good deal grieved” at receiving no response, but one day, on returning from the country to London, he found a packet on his table containing the volume and a note. “The opinion expressed in that note” adds James “was more favourable than I had ever expected, and certainly more favourable than I deserved; for Sir Walter was one of the most lenient of critics, especially to the young. However, it told me to persevere, and I did so.”[^[30]] Irving and Scott united in encouraging him to produce his next novel, Darnley, with another great Cardinal as a principal character. Darnley was sketched and drafted at Montreuil-sur-Mer in December, 1828, and was completed in a few months. It is still popular with readers of fiction and has much of the charm which pervades its predecessor. James lived for a time at Evreux, and De l’Orme, written there in 1829, appeared in 1830. Philip Augustus was produced in less than seven weeks, and was published in 1831. Under William IV he was appointed Historiographer Royal, and published several pamphlets officially.[^[31]] In 1842 he lived at Walmer, and was frequently a guest of the Duke of Wellington at Walmer Castle—a fact jocosely mentioned in the Life of Charles Lever, where it is recorded that Lever said to McGlashan that he must beware of James, who had become dangerous from irritation, but suggested that as James had been dining twice a week with the Duke, “he had eaten himself into a more than ordinary bilious temper.”[^[32]] In 1845 he went to Germany, partly for recreation and partly to obtain information to be used in the History of Richard Cœur de Lion, upon which he was then engaged. The illness of his children detained him for a year; and at Karlsruhe and Baden-Baden he wrote Heidelberg and the Castle of Ehrenstein. On his return to England he lived for some time near Farnham, Surrey, where he wrote voluminously. He was accustomed to rise at five in the morning, to write with his own hand until nine, and later in the day to dictate to an amanuensis, walking to and fro meanwhile.

Towards 1850 he decided to leave England and go to America. His original intention was to settle in Canada. He had met with severe pecuniary reverses. The collected edition of his works was illustrated with steel engravings, but after a few volumes had appeared the publisher failed. The engraver sued James as a partner in the enterprise, and poor James had to pay several thousand pounds. In this plight he sought his friend, the Duke of Northumberland, who endeavored to dissuade him from leaving England and offered him a signed check, with the amount left blank, asking him to accept it and fill the blank himself. To his credit, James declined the generous gift.[^[33]]

When he reached New York in July, 1850, he took lodgings in the old New York Hotel. He had many letters of introduction, including one to Horace Greeley, who, he said, had “the head of a Socrates and the face of a baby.” Hotel life proving unsatisfactory, he rented Charles Astor Bristed’s house at Hell Gate, opposite Astoria. Of his many troubles in getting into his new home, he wrote an amusing account in verse which Mr. Field prints.[^[34]] Field tells a story of a wealthy man of New York who was introduced to James, and remarked that he was a great admirer of the works, that he believed he had read all that were published, and that there was one “which he vastly preferred to all the others.” “And which is that?” asked James. “The Last Days of Pompeii,” was the answer. “That is Bulwer’s, not mine,” replied the mortified novelist. He also tells of a lady who found in a village library what she supposed to be a copy of an English edition of one of James’s novels in two volumes. She read them with much enjoyment, and did not discover until she had finished them, that she had been reading the first volume of one and the second volume of another. With admirable tact and discretion Field told this to James, and says “he winced under it.”

In 1851 he hired a furnished house at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and later he bought property there, making some laudable efforts at farming, Mr. Field says:

“In the meantime he was also industriously pegging away at book-making, although to the casual observer he appeared to be the least occupied man in the place. He never did any literary work after eleven o’clock A. M. until evening. He was not accustomed to put his own hand to paper, when composing, but always employed an amanuensis. At this time he had in his service in that capacity the brother of an Irish baronet, who spoke and wrote English, French, German and Italian, and whom I had procured for him at the modest stipend of five dollars a week. When James was dictating, he always kept a paper of snuff upon the table on which his secretary wrote, and he would stride up and down the room, stopping every few minutes for a fresh supply of the titillating powder. He never looked at the manuscript, or made any corrections except upon proof-sheets.”

During that summer James and Field produced Adrian, finishing it in five weeks. Notwithstanding Field’s assertion that “it was very kindly received by the critics,” it does not appear to have enjoyed any marked success.

In 1852 he was appointed British Consul at Norfolk, Virginia. He was not contented there, as we may see from his letters; but he received many kindnesses, and on the last night he spent in the United States he spoke to Field of the Virginians, as “a warm hearted people.” His health suffered and his spirits also; the yellow fever raged in the city and caused him great trouble and anxiety. While in the United States he wrote Ticonderoga, The Old Dominion, and other novels; his fertile pen was always busy. His latest work was The Cavalier, published in 1859. In 1856 the Consulate was removed to Richmond. At his earnest request he was transferred from Virginia in September, 1858, and was appointed Consul General at Venice, where it was hoped that his health would improve. The war between France and Austria soon broke out, his labors and anxieties were increased and in April, 1860, his illness became serious. On June 9, 1860, he died of an apoplectic stroke, “an utter break up of mind preceding the end” as Lever wrote. He was buried in Venice—some accounts say in the Lido cemetery, but the monument, erected by the English residents in Venice, is in the Protestant portion of the cemetery of St. Michele, which is on an island not far from the Lido. Laurence Hutton, in his Literary Landmarks of Venice, refers to a vague tradition among the older alien residents that he was buried in the Lido, where, Hutton says, there are a few very ancient stones and monuments marking the graves of foreign visitors to Venice, none of them seeming to be of a later date than the middle of the eighteenth century. But Sir Francis Vincent, the last British Ambassador to the Venetian Republic, is buried there. Mr. Hutton adds that the stone in St. Michele is “a tablet blackened by time, broken and hardly decipherable”; but when I saw it in the summer of 1906 it was only slightly discolored, and not broken at all. It showed no evidence of restoration, and was blackened only as much as much as might be expected of a stone forty-five years old in a climate like that of Venice. The epitaph, written by Walter Savage Landor, is absolutely distinct and easily read.

“George Payne Rainford James.

British Consul General in the Adriatic.

Died in Venice, on the 9th day of June, 1860.

His merits as a writer are known wherever the English language is, and as a man they rest on the hearts of many.

A few friends have erected this humble and perishable monument.”

Hutton attempts to give the epitaph in full but makes an unaccountable error in substituting “heads” for “hearts.” It is another illustration of the ill will of the fates that even on his tombstone his name should be inscribed incorrectly. “Rainford” is doubtless the mistake of the Italian who prepared the monument.[^[35]]

Mr. J. A. Hamilton, in the Dictionary of National Biography, says: “An epitaph, in terms of somewhat extravagant eulogy, was written by Walter Savage Landor.” The epitaph, which I copied word for word, scarcely deserves Mr. Hamilton’s censure. Surely there is nothing extravagant about it. I regret that in such a valuable work as the Dictionary, the account of James is so slight, perfunctory, and in many respects inaccurate. It could have been made much better, and it is in marked contrast with most of the biographical sketches included in that admirable compendium.

Mr. Hamilton sums up in a careless and indifferent way the literary career of James. “Flimsy and melodramatic as James’s romances are, they were highly popular. The historical setting is for the most part laboriously accurate, and though the characters are without life, the moral tone is irreproachable; there is a pleasant spice of adventure about the plots, and the style is clear and correct. The writer’s grandiloquence and artificiality are cleverly parodied by Thackeray in ‘Barbazure, by G. P. R. Jeames, Esq., &c.,’ in ‘Novels by Eminent Hands,’ and the conventional sameness of the opening of his novels, ‘so admirable for terseness,’ is effectively burlesqued in ‘The Book of Snobs,’ chap. ii. and xvi.” It is the old story: Thackeray made fun of him, and so—away with him! Yet there was a time when everybody read James and few read Thackeray. I venture to assert that the romances are neither flimsy nor melodramatic, unless Scott’s romances are flimsy and melodramatic. I find no grandiloquence in them.

Probably the best and most authoritative sketch of his life is contained in the preface which he wrote for the collected edition of his novels, published, in twenty-one volumes, in 1844–1849. Of course this includes no account of the last ten years of his career. The number of volumes he gave to the world was enormous, as may be seen from the list of his works compiled from the Dictionary and from Allibone’s laboriously minute record.[^[36]] They tell of his untiring industry; evidently he loved to write for the sake of writing. His books brought him a goodly income, but although he seems to have had a small fortune at one time, he was generally poor; careless about his expenditure; ever ready and willing to give aid to those who needed it, particularly to his literary brethren; a noble, honest Christian gentleman, devoid of selfishness; a good husband and father, simple and direct in his ways, charitable, open-hearted, deserving of the esteem and affection of all who knew him. It was said of him by a writer who deplored “the fatal facility” of the novels, that “there is a soul of true goodness in them—no maudlin affectation of virtue, but a manly rectitude of aim which they derive directly from the heart of the writer. His enthusiastic nature is visibly impressed upon his productions. They are full of his own frank and generous impulses—impulses so honorable to him in private life. Out of his books, there is no man more sincerely beloved. Had he not even been a distinguished author, his active sympathy in the cause of letters would have secured to him the attachment and respect of his contemporaries.”

His activity was by no means limited to the field of prose fiction. In poetry, he produced The Ruined City in 1828; Blanche of Navarre, a five act play, in 1839, and Camaralzaman, a “fairy drama” in three acts, in 1848. My “first edition” of Blanche of Navarre, a pamphlet of ninety-eight pages, with a dedication to Talfourd,—until it came into my hands. After an existence of sixty-six years, unvexed by the paper-knife, and in that “unopened” condition so dear to the heart of a collector—does not disclose any good reason for its creation. The finale of Act III is an example of its “lofty poetic tone”—

“Don John (pointing to the gallery).

We have spectators there! A lady points!

Let us go succour her!

Don Ferdinand (stopping him).

Nay, I beseech!

Most likely ’tis my sister!—Foolish child!

She has maids there enow,—Lo, they are gone!

We’ll close the night with wine.

[The drop scene descends to dumb-show].”

So we might suppose. The hospitable suggestion of Don Ferdinand has a flavor of reckless rioting about it which brings to mind the one time favorite amusement of a Tammany Hall leader—“opening wine.”

It is only fair to let him tell his own story about his literary fecundity. He says:

“Before I close my present task, I may be permitted to say a few words in regard to the observations which are uniformly made upon every author who writes rapidly and often. I will not repeat the frequently noticed fact, that the best writers have generally been the most voluminous; for I must contend that neither the number of an author’s works, nor the rapidity with which they are produced, affords any criterion whatsoever by which to judge of their merit. They may be numerous and excellent, like those of Voltaire, Scott, Dryden, Vega, Boccacio and others; they may be rapidly written, and yet accurate, like the great work of Fénélon, and they may be quite the reverse.*** I may mention, in my own case, a few circumstances which may account for the number and rapidity of my works. In the first place, all the materials for the tales I have written, and for many more than I ever shall write, were collected long before this idea of entering upon a literary career ever crossed my mind. In the next place, I am an early riser, and any one who has that habit must know that it is a grand secret for getting through twice as much as lazier men can perform. Again, I write and read during some portion of every day, except when I am travelling, and even then if possible. I need not point out, that regular application in literary, as well as all other kinds of labour, will effect results which no desultory efforts, however energetic, can obtain. Then, again, the habit of dictating instead of writing with my own hand, which I first attempted at the suggestion of Sir Walter Scott, relieves me of the manual labour which many authors have to undergo, leaves the mind clear and free to act, and affords facilities inconceivable to those who have not tried, or, having tried, have not been able to attain it.”[^[37]]

I am not convinced that the custom of dictating is one which should be observed by an author who aims at the highest excellence.

In the accounts of his life and his work there are many discrepancies and contradictions. For example Mr. Allibone—who is not altogether trustworthy in details—tells us that his first book was A Life of Edward the Black Prince, published in 1822; but the Dictionary of National Biography ascribes that publication to the year 1836, and the Dictionary is undoubtedly right, for he said in 1835 “The Black Prince comes on but slowly,”[^[38]] The Dictionary says that as “historiographer royal”—a sonorous title which must have afforded great pleasure to its bearer—he published in 1839 a History of the United States Boundary Question, but Mr. Allibone insists that it was not his production. I have an autograph letter of James which, I think, warrants the belief that Allibone is wrong. The letter is a good example of his serious epistolary style.

“Fair Oak Lodge, Petersfield

Hants, 4th November, 1837.

My Lord:—

A few months previous to the death of his late Majesty, he was pleased to appoint me Historiographer in ordinary for England into which office I was duly sworn. On the accession of Her Majesty our present Queen, although I was informed that the office did not necessarily lapse on the death of the monarch who conferred it, I applied to Her Majesty through her Lord Chamberlain for her gracious confirmation of the honor her Royal Uncle had conferred upon me. Many months have now elapsed even since Lord Conyngham did me the honor of writing to inform me that the time had not then arrived for Her Majesty to take into consideration that class of offices and I am induced in consequence to apply directly to your Lordship as I understand that your department of the government embraces such matters. I should have waited longer ere I thus intruded upon your valuable time but that I am about to publish a new Historical work of some importance in the title to which must appear whether I am or am not still Historiographer. If I am to understand by the silence which has been maintained upon the subject that it is Her Majesty’s determination to deprive me of the office which her royal uncle conferred I must bow to her gracious pleasure and neither my station in society, my fortune, or my views of what is right require or permit me to say one word to alter such a resolution. Should that determination however not have been formed allow me to submit to your Lordship that to dismiss me from a post to which I was so lately appointed is to cast a stigma of which I am not deserving. If I have ever written anything that is calculated to injure society; if I have ever debased my pen to pander to bad appetites of any kind; if I have ever failed to dedicate its efforts to the promotion of truth, virtue, and honor, not only let the dismissal be made public but the cause of that stigma be assigned. But if on the contrary to have done my best, and that perhaps with more reputation than my writings merit, to promote all that is good and noble; if to have bestowed vast labour, anxious research, valuable time, and many hundreds of pounds for which I can hope no return on such works as the History of Charlemagne, the History of Edward the Black Prince, the History of Chivalry, and my letters to Lord Brougham on the system of Education in the higher German States—if these circumstances afford any claim to honor or distinction, I think in my case they may stand in the way of an act which I cannot yet make up my mind to believe that Her Majesty’s present ministers would advise. I have given up the expectation indeed that a fair share of honors and distinctions—or in fact any share at all—should be bestowed upon literary men in this country, even when a high education, upright conduct, and a fortune not ill employed combine with literary reputation; but I still trust that that which has been given will not be taken away.

I have now to apologize, my Lord—and I feel that an apology is very necessary—for addressing this letter to your private house; but your kindness and courtesy when, as a result of some communications between my friend Sir David Brewster and myself, I addressed you on the state of literature in England have encouraged me to trespass upon you in some manner.

I have the honor to be, my Lord, your Lordship’s most obedient servant

G. P. R. James.”

I have not been able to discover what effect this letter had, but it is evident that the ‘Historical work’ was the pamphlet on the Boundary Question as I do not find a record of any other “historiographical” work to which the language of the letter is applicable.

The Dictionary of National Biography credits James with Memoirs of Celebrated Women (three volumes, 1837), but Allibone says that he had no share in it, further than writing a preface or “something of that kind.” The Dictionary further informs us that “about 1850 he was appointed British Consul for Massachusetts”—an impossible office—and that he was transferred to Norfolk, Virginia, in 1852, becoming Consul General at Venice in 1856. Allibone makes him Consul at Richmond, Virginia, in 1852 and Consul General at Venice in September, 1858. His friend Hall places him at Norfolk in 1852 and in Venice in 1859. Appleton’s Cyclopædia follows Allibone as to dates, but very properly ignores Richmond in favor of Norfolk. The Encyclopædia Britannica says that Irving encouraged him to produce the Life of the Black Prince in 1822 (an evident error), sends him as “Consul to Richmond” in 1852 and transfers him to Venice in September, 1858. The truth is that he went to Norfolk in 1852, to Richmond in 1856, and to Venice in 1858. As we have seen, even the place of his interment is not without uncertainty. These variances in regard to the facts of his life are due to the comparative neglect which has befallen his memory. Perhaps they are not of much importance. Although he had numerous friends and acquaintances, none of them, except Mr. S. C. Hall and Maunsell B. Field, left anything approaching an account of his life, and even Mr. Hall’s reminiscences are meagre and cursory, while Mr. Field’s are largely apocryphal.

He surely possessed the art of making friends. Before his marriage he knew not only Scott and Irving, but Byron, Leigh Hunt, and Walter Savage Landor, his friendship with Hunt and Landor continuing to the end of his life. Probably he never saw Shelley, but he admired greatly the writings of that radical enthusiast. He knew Thackeray, but did not like him; perhaps the parody galled him. He detested the brilliant, showy, shallow Count D’Orsay. His son says that he never heard his father speak of Dickens as if they had met.[^[39]] “He fully acknowledged the power and versatility of Dickens’s works, but there was something in them which did not please him. He had detected, if it is there—suspected, if it is not—the essential vulgarity which this master of pathos and humor is said to have shown those who came in personal contact with him.” He had some acquaintance with Bulwer Lytton. “It is odd” remarks the younger James “but his tone towards this eminent author, who at some points (Richelieu and the historic novels) approached near enough his own line for rivalry, was rather one of compassion. He knew the personal and domestic sorrows of one whom unfriendly critics accused of soulless dandyism; and he seemed to have a sort of friendly feeling for that partially unsuccessful ambition which made the author of books as unlike as Pelham and Pausonias attempt so many things without reaching the highest rank in any.” The Duke of Northumberland, the Duke of Wellington, Charles Lever, Thomas Campbell, and Allan Cunningham, were also friends. In America, he was known and well received by President Pierce, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Charles Sumner, Farragut, Barron, Henry A. Wise, Roger A. Pryor, John Tyler, Winder, General Scott, Edward Everett, Marcy, Caleb Cushing and a host of others. His gentle, modest nature, his cultivated taste, and his frank, pleasant ways seem to have attracted all who came within the circle of his friendship. He had much conversation with Marcy. Each had some idea of sounding the other diplomatically; both took snuff and neither proposed to be sounded. When James asked Marcy something which the latter did not choose to answer, Marcy would ask him for a pinch of snuff, and he readily perceived that this evasion was as good for two as for one.

The late Donald G. Mitchell speaks of him as “an excellent, industrious man, who drove his trade of novel-making—as our engineers drive wells—with steam, and pistons, and borings, and everlasting clatter”, adding that “what he might have done, with a modern typewriter at command, it is painful to imagine. But he gives us the best account I have seen of the personal appearance of James.

“I caught sight of this great necromancer of ‘miniver furs,’ and mantua-making chivalry—in youngish days, in the city of New York—where he was making a little over-ocean escape from the multitudinous work that flowed from him at home; a well-preserved man, of scarce fifty years, stout, erect, gray-haired, and with countenance blooming with mild uses of mild English ale—kindly, unctuous—showing no signs of deep thoughtfulness or of harassing toil. I looked him over, in boyish way, for traces of the court splendor I had gazed upon, under his ministrations, but saw none; nor anything of the ‘manly beauty of features, rendered scarcely less by a deep scar upon the forehead’, nor ‘of the gray cloth doublets slashed with purple;’ a stanch honest, amiable, well-dressed Englishman—that was all.”[^[40]]

Mr. Mitchell surely did not expect to see Mr. James attired in armor, with a scarred face, because he wrote of armed knights, and his remarks certainly appear to be boyish in the extreme. But he atones for them by saying:

“And yet, what delights he had conjured for us! Shall we be ashamed to name them, or to confess it all? Shall the modern show of new flowerets of fiction, and of lilies—forced to the front in January—make us forget utterly the old cinnamon roses, and the homely but fragrant pinks, which once regaled and delighted us, in the April and May of our age?”

Mr. Field says of him: “If he was sometimes a tedious writer, he was always the best story-teller that I ever listened to. He had known almost everybody in his own country, and he never forgot anything. The literary anecdotes alone which I have heard him relate would suffice to fill an ordinary volume. He was a big hearted man, too—tender, merciful, and full of religious sentiment; a good husband, a devoted father, and a fast friend.” Such is the testimony of all his acquaintances who have left any record of their impressions.

It is not my purpose to present any critical study of James or of his works, but only to submit a few of his unpublished letters, in which his easy grace of style and his frank and simple nature are manifest; to give some of the contemporary estimates of him; and to recall to the minds of readers of our own day a literary personality which should not be entirely forgotten.

Among the good friends of James of whom I have spoken was that other novelist, almost as prolific in production, but better remembered by modern readers—Charles Lever. When the author of Charles O’Malley was the editor of the Dublin University Magazine, he wrote to a certain Reverend Edward Johnson, now wholly lost to fame, requesting him to contribute to the magazine and inviting him to visit the editor; but by mistake he addressed the letter to James. “Though he liked the man” says Mr. Fitzpatrick, “he rather pooh-poohed the stereotyped ‘two cavaliers’ of G. P. R. James, who of a fine autumnal day might be seen, etc.”[^[41]] Lever was too kind-hearted to explain the error, and James not only contributed to the magazine but visited Lever at Templeogue. The story “De Lunatico Inquirendo” was supposed to have been written by Lever, who wrote only the preface. “Arrah Neil” was published in the Magazine, a work which has peculiar merit and one character, Captain Barecolt, who is among James’s best people. It is said that James abused McGlashan for having “emasculated his jokes”. “Where be they? as we used to say in the Catechism” was Lever’s comment. One Major Dwyer, referred to in Fitzpatrick’s Life of Lever, says: “Lever would sometimes say that he wanted powder for his magazine. ‘It is doubtful whether James’s contributions’ he said, ‘were James’s powders at all, or merely that inferior substitute which the Pharmacopœia condemns.’” Chamber’s Cyclopædia stated, twenty years before the death of James, that he was in the habit of dictating to minor scribes his thick-coming fancies. Mr. R. H. Horne would have it that he always dictated his novels, but that was a very exaggerated statement. He dictated only at intervals. Major Dwyer tells of a novel composed by James at Baden, that “it was penned by an English artist who resided at Lichtenthal, and also spoke the purest South Devonian, and moreover wrote English nearly as he pronounced it. James’s flowery language thus rendered, was highly amusing; I had an opportunity of reading some pages of copy.”

In spite of his disparaging remarks, Lever was attached to the man himself, and we find the two romance writers together in 1845, at Karlsruhe—where, as Mr. Downey says in his Life of Lever, “G. P. R. James and himself were the cynosure of all eyes”—and later at Baden. Lever dedicated to James his novel Roland Cashel, in 1849—“a Roland for your Oliver, or rather for your Stepmother,” said Lever, for James had dedicated to him the novel with that title in 1846. Soon afterwards, however, they became separated, as James went to the United States where he remained about eight years. One incident connected with the Dublin is worthy of remembrance. In Volume XXVII of the Magazine (1846) appeared some verses beginning “A cloud is on the western sky.” They were said to be “Lines by G. P. R. James” and were prefaced by a note: ‘My dear L——, I send you the song you wished to have. The Americans totally forgot, when they so insolently calculated upon aid from Ireland in a war with England, that their own apple is rotten at the core. A nation with five or six million slaves who would go to war with an equally strong nation with no slaves is a mad people. Yours, G. P. R. James.’ ‘The Cloud,’ (amongst other things not intended to be pleasant to Americans) called upon the dusky millions to ‘shout,’ and the author of the ‘Lines’ declared that Britain was ready to “draw the sword in the sacred cause of liberty.” It was Lever’s joke. Poor James had never heard of the poem until years later, in 1853, an attempt was made to drive him out of Norfolk, Virginia, because of it. “God forgive me” said Lever, “it was my doing.” Lever declared that he had no more notion of James’s ‘powder’ exciting a national animosity than that Holloway’s Ointment could absorb a Swiss glacier.[^[42]] The son says that during the first winter they spent in Norfolk there were no less than eight fires in the house, or in other parts of the block, which James attributed to deliberate attempts to burn him out on account of his supposed abolitionist views.

Lever was Consul at Spezzia when James was in Venice, and they renewed their old intimacy. The younger James says that Lever was a very eccentric genius—a thorough specimen of the wild Irishman. Among his traits was chronic impecuniosity. Another was that he and all his family delighted in out-door life and could do everything athletic. “When he was at Venice he told us he was threatened with a visit from a British war vessel, which it would be his duty to receive in state, and (of course) he had no boat or other means of doing so with proper pomp. ‘But,’ he said, ‘we can take the British flag in our mouth and swim out to meet her, singing Rule Britannia.’”

Notwithstanding the manifestations of hostility by the good people of Norfolk, it may be remembered that when James was transferred to Venice, the Virginian poet, John R. Thompson, addressed to him some farewell verses, published in the Southern Literary Messenger, beginning:

Good bye! they say the time is up—

The “solitary horseman” leaves us,

We’d like to take a “stirrup cup”,

Though much indeed the parting grieves us:

We’d like to hear the glasses clink

Around a board where none was tipsy,

And with a hearty greeting drink

This toast—The Author of the Gipsey!

The same Major Dwyer relates at some length the conversations of the guests at Lever’s home in Ireland. Speaking of a visit of Thackeray about 1842, he says: “James had been living at Brussels previously, and an intimacy had sprung up between Lever and him. Thackeray’s star was then barely peeping over the eastern horizon; Lever’s had attained an altitude that rendered it clearly visible to the uncharmed eye, whilst James’s had already passed its point of culmination, and was in its descending node.” I do not know what the eloquent Major meant by an “uncharmed eye,” but his figures of speech are quite luxuriant. He does not think that Thackeray and James met at Lever’s house, but he tells of a dinner there, where a Captain Siborne, Doctor Anster, and the Major were asked to meet James. It appears that after dinner, James took a very decided lead in the conversation on horsemanship and military tactics. “James” remarks the Major, “was not horsey looking; one would at first sight be inclined to set him down as an exception to the general rule, that ‘all Britons are born riders’; he looked more like a seaman than a soldier.” This is deliciously fatuous—as if a man could not talk well about horses unless he had a horsey look or drive fat oxen unless he himself were fat. It is like the Mitchell prattle about his having no scar and wearing no doublet. In talking about horses and riders, James evidently did not foresee that in the future his name would be so closely associated with “one horseman” or even two, threading romantic gorges. Perhaps it would have been better for his fame, if he had eschewed horsemen. “Why,” continues the Major, “he should have selected two such topics puzzled both Siborne and myself, but I subsequently found that James liked to seize upon and talk categorically about things which other individuals of the company present might be suspected of considering their own peculiar hobbies.” This device for enlivening post-prandial dullness by stirring up solemn and conceited prigs is quite familiar, but it does not seem to have occurred to the Major that the clever novelist was making game of the two military magnates. He tells us further how Siborne declined “to discuss professional matters with a civilian,” and closes his pompous and heavy remarks with this gem of concentrated wisdom: “James, so fond of horseflesh, finished his career as Consul General at Venice where the sight of a horse is never seen.” I suppose that the Major would have considered it more fitting if James had selected some place to die in where ‘the sight of a horse could be seen’ at all times by merely looking out of the window. It is not difficult to imagine the joy with which the nimble-minded James put through their paces the heavy-witted and cumbrous Captain and Major at the pleasant dinner-table of Charles Lever. It reminds me of an occasion when a sincere and simple-minded Briton undertook to engage in single combat with Mark Twain over a statement thrown out by the equally sincere and simple-minded Clemens that the people of the Phillipine Islands had a perfect right to make arson and murder lawful if they considered it proper to incorporate in their constitution a provision to that effect. His powerful arguments did not produce the slightest change in the convictions of Mr. Clemens.

However severely the sapient compilers of Chambers’ Cyclopædia or the critics of our own generation may sneer at the novels—the fiction of the twentieth century being in the estimation of our contemporaries so vastly superior to all that has gone before—it is something to have had the approval of Christopher North, who was not given to bestowing lavish commendation upon the work of mere Englishmen. If you will take from the shelves the Noctes Ambrosianæ, you will find these words:

“North: Mr. Colburn has lately given us two books of a very different character, [from that of some previously mentioned], Richelieu and Darnley—by Mr. James. Richelieu is one of the most spirited, amusing and interesting romances I ever read; characters well drawn—incidents—well managed—story perpetually progressive—catastrophe at once natural and unexpected—moral good, but not goody—and the whole felt, in every chapter, to be the work of a—gentleman.

Shepherd: And what o’Darnley?

North: Read and judge.”[^[43]]

Edgar Allan Poe, who thought himself a critic while he was an original genius absolutely unfitted for just or accurate criticism, said that James was lauded from mere motives of duty, not of inclination—duty erroneously conceived. “His sentiments are found to be pure,” wrote Poe, “his morals unquestionable and pointedly shown forth—his language indisputably correct.” But he calls him an indifferent imitator of Scott, accuses him of having little pretension to genius, and adds that we “seldom stumble across a novel emotion in the solemn tranquillity of his pages.”[^[44]] Elsewhere Poe says: “James’s multitudinous novels seem to be written upon the plan of the songs of the Bard of Schiraz, in which, we are assured by Fadladeen, ‘the same beautiful thought occurs again and again in every possible variety of phrase.’” This is perhaps, a fair comment upon the work of a writer who produced too many books.

Samuel Carter Hall, who knew James well, and who gossips with garrulous freedom about everybody, speaks of him in an admiring way. After observing that very little was known of James’s life, he says: “I knew him and esteemed him as an agreeable and kindly gentleman, somewhat handsome in person, and of very pleasant manners. He had the aspect, and indeed the character, that usually marks a man of sedentary occupations. His work all day long, and often into the night, must have been untiring, for he by no means drew exclusively on his fancy; he must have resorted much to books and have been a great reader, not only of English, but of continental histories; and he travelled a good deal in the countries in which the scenes of his historic fictions were principally laid. His novels have always been popular—they are so now, although many competitors for fame, with higher aims and perhaps loftier genius, have of late years supplied the circulating libraries. It was no light thing to run a race with Sir Walter Scott, and not to be altogether beaten out of the field. His great charm was the interest he created in relating a story, but he had masterly skill in delineating character, and in ‘chivalric essays’ none of his brethren surpassed him.”[^[45]] He gives to James more praise for character-drawing than most of the critics bestow.

Hall quotes from Alison: “There is a constant appeal in his brilliant pages, not only to the pure and generous, but to the elevated and noble sentiments. He is imbued with the very soul of chivalry, and all his stories turn on the final triumph of those who are influenced by such feelings. Not a word or a thought which can give pain to the purest heart ever escapes from his pen.”

The genial journalist, William Jerdan, in his Autobiography, pays a deserved tribute to James. He says:

“Among the warm friendships to which I may allude, there is not one more sincere, more lasting, or more grateful to my feelings, than that which I have the honour and delight to couple with the admired and estimable name of G. P. R. James. I think it was the production of ‘The Ruined City’, for private circulation, which first introduced us to each other; and from that hour (I remember the pleasure I received from his volunteering a trial of his skill occasionally in the ‘Gazette’) I now look back on a quarter of a century upon a close intercourse of minds and hearts without a passing shade to dull its bright and cheering continuity. I need not dwell on those voluminous writings which have placed Mr. James in the foremost rank of our national fictitious literature, nor need I, in his case, illustrate my theme of the uncertainty of literature as a remunerative pursuit—with a private fortune, and the genius which has produced so many admirable works, the author has now fallen back upon a consulate at Norfolk, in America, where, if report speaks truth, he is exposed even to danger in consequence of petty resentment against something he wrote long ago about Slavery!—but, I may say, from nearer and more abundant observation than the world could attain, that the utmost appreciation of his genius must fall short of what is due to his personal worth and nobility of nature. As no author ever excelled him in the purity and rectitude of his publications—every tone of which tends to inspire just moral sentiment, and exalted virtue, and brotherly love, and universal benevolence, and the improvement carrying with it the progress and happiness of his fellow creatures—so no man in private life ever more zealously practiced the precepts which he taught, and was charitable, liberal, and generous, aye, beyond the measure of cold prudence, and without an atom of selfish reserve. To his fellow-labourers on the oft-ungrateful soil of letters, he was ever indulgent and munificent; and were this the fitting time, I could record acts of his performing that would shed a lustre on any character, however celebrated in merited biographical panegyric. I trust I may state, without compromising the privacy of friendly confidence, that I knew him, as he was ever ready to make sacrifices to friendship, sacrifice half a fortune, legally in his possession, to a mere point of honorable, I might say, romantically honourable feeling, and founded indeed on one of those family romances in which we find fact more extraordinary than fiction; and amongst lesser instances of his general sympathies for all who stood in need of succour, I may mention his procuring me the gratification of handing over £75 to the Literary Fund, as the price received from Messrs. Colburn and Bentley for a manuscript entitled “The String of Pearls.””[^[46]]

I have referred to the remark in Chambers’ Cyclopædia about the custom of James to dictate to an amanuensis, a custom he attempted to defend. The writers for this useful work, now rather antiquated, were quite given to the exercise of censorious judgment about authors who did not preserve their popularity. They say of James, however, that he was perhaps the best of the numerous imitators of Scott, and that if he had concentrated his powers on a few congenial subjects or periods of history, and “resorted to the manual labor of penmanship as a drag-chain on the machine, he might have attained to the highest honors of this department of composition. As it is, he has furnished many light, agreeable and picturesque books, none of questionable tendency.” The Cyclopædia breaks into exclamation points when it chronicles the fact that the original works of Mr. James “extend to one hundred and eighty-nine volumes,” and that he edited almost a dozen more. It then quotes from some unnamed critic whom it calls a “lively writer,”[^[47]] and as I am endeavoring to present the contemporary estimates of James, I venture to reproduce the quotation:

“There seems to be no limit to his ingenuity, his faculty of getting up scenes and incidents, dilemmas, artifices, contretemps, battles, skirmishes, disguises, escapes, trials, combats, adventures. He accumulates names, dresses, implements of war and peace, official retinues, and the whole paraphernalia of customs and costumes, with astounding alacrity. He appears to have exhausted every imaginable situation, and to have described every available article of attire on record. What he must have passed through—what triumphs he must have enjoyed—what exigencies he must have experienced—what love he must have suffered—what a grand wardrobe his brain must be! He has made some poetical and dramatic efforts, but this irresistible tendency to pile up circumstantial particulars is fatal to those forms of art which demand intensity of passion. In stately narratives of chivalry and feudal grandeur, precision and reiteration are desirable rather than injurious—as we would have the most perfect accuracy and finish in a picture of ceremonials; and here Mr. James is supreme. One of his court romances is a book of brave sights and heraldic magnificence—it is the next thing to moving at our leisure through some superb and august procession.”

The lively writer has a style which displays the worst faults of the middle nineteenth century, but he is really not far wrong in his conclusions. The Cyclopædia sums up the matter in a sentence which tells the story and signifies that the man wrote too much:

“The sameness of the author’s style and characters is, however, too marked to be pleasing.”

I timidly venture to suggest that the same thing may be true of Kipling and hope that I may not be annihilated by the bolts of Jupiter for such a daring piece of sacrilege. Having gone so far—but I will refrain from mentioning some other makers of novels with regard to whom the same fable might be narrated.

We may easily understand that the accusation of “sameness” is one which is not very serious when preferred against the author of nearly two hundred volumes. As Allibone says, “he who composes a library is not to be judged by the same standard as he who writes but one book.” We must remember that not only Professor Wilson, but Leigh Hunt, about whose taste and discrimination there can be no question, says of him:

“I hail every fresh publication of James, though I half know what he is going to do with his lady, and his gentleman, and his landscape, and his mystery, and his orthodoxy, and his criminal trial. But I am charmed with the new amusement which he brings out of old materials. I look on him as I look on a musician famous for ‘variations.’ I am grateful for his vein of cheerfulness, for his singularly varied and vivid landscapes, for his power of painting women at once lady-like and loving, (a rare talent,) for making lovers to match, at once beautiful and well-bred, and for the solace which all this has afforded me, sometimes over and over again in illness and in convalescence, when I required interest without violence, and entertainment at once animated and mild.”

Allan Cunningham, in his Biographical and Critical History of the Literature of the Last Fifty Years (1833) refers to his excellent taste, extensive knowledge of history, right feeling of the chivalrous, and heroic and ready eye for the picturesque, adding that his proprieties are admirable and his sympathy with whatever is high-souled and noble, deep and impressive. Cunningham was on terms of intimacy with him, as a number of letters from James addressed to him abundantly prove. The Edinburgh Review estimated highly his abilities as a romance writer, declaring that his works were lively and interesting, and animated by a spirit of sound and healthy morality in feeling and of natural deliberation in character which should secure for them a calm popularity which would “last beyond the present day.”

He was not regarded so favorably by the London Athenæum, which said of him: “The first and most obvious contrivance for the attainment of quantity, is, of course, dilution; but this recourse has practically its limit, and Mr. James had reached it long ago. Commonplace in its best day, anything more feeble, vapid—sloppy in fact, (for we know not how to characterize this writer’s style but by some of its own elegancies)—than Mr. James’s manner has become, it were difficult to imagine. Every literary grace has been swamped in the spreading marasmus of his style.”[^[48]]

The bewildered reader of reviews is often at a loss to reconcile the censure of one and the praise of another; and it was not very long before the appearance of this slashing article that the Dublin University Magazine had thus expressed its opinions: “His pen is prolific enough to keep the imagination constantly nourished; and of him, more than of any modern writer, it may be said, that he has improved his style by the mere dint of constant and abundant practice. For, although so agreeable a novelist, it must not be forgotten that he stands infinitely higher as an historian.*** The most fantastic and beautiful coruscations which the skies can exhibit to the eyes of mankind dart as if in play from the huge volumes that roll out from the crater of the volcano.*** The recreation of an enlarged intellect is ever more valuable than the highest efforts of a confined one. Hence we find in the works before us, lightly as they have been thrown off, the traces of study—the footsteps of a powerful and vigorous understanding.”[^[49]] The works were Corse de Léon, The Ancient Régime, and The Jacquerie—none of them as deserving as Richelieu, Henry Masterton, or Mary of Burgundy. James was a member of the Dublin staff and his friend Lever may have inspired the compliments.

One more review may be noticed. Mr. E. P. Whipple, whose criticisms have not become immortal, evidently disapproved of James, and did not hesitate to say so. It is the old charge of sameness and overproduction. Whipple scored James in the North American Review of April, 1844.

“He is a most scientific expositor of the fact that a man may be a maker of books without being a maker of thoughts; that he may be the reputed author of a hundred volumes and flood the market with his literary wares, and yet have very few ideas and principles for his stock in trade. For the last ten years he has been repeating his own repetitions and echoing his own echoes. His first novel was a shot that went through the target, and he has ever since been assiduously firing through the hole.*** When a man has little or nothing to say, he should say it in the smallest space. He should not, at any rate, take up more room than suffices for a creative mind. He should not provoke hostility and petulance by the effrontery of his demands upon time and patience. He should let us off with a few volumes, and gain our gratitude for his benevolence, if not our praise for his talents.”[^[50]]

Whipple’s critiques are far more obsolete than James’s novels; and a good deal of what he says of James is fairly applicable to his own essays. Even Whipple concedes the excellence of Richelieu, notwithstanding the fact that it did not emanate from New England.

Back in the forties, there was a magazine, published in Philadelphia, known as Graham’s American Monthly Magazine, in which the chief American writers of the day, including Poe, Bryant, Cooper, Longfellow, Willis, and Lowell occasionally figured as contributors. It had its page of reviews and in the number of November, 1848, it enlightened its readers with a disquisition on “Vanity Fair”; by W. M. Thackerway (sic), beginning “This is one of the most striking novels of the season.” If Lamb could only have met that reviewer, he surely would have danced about, as on a memorable occasion, singing “diddle, diddle dumpling, my son John” and endeavored to examine the reviewer’s bumps. Graham (November, 1844) was very severe with poor James, in a notice of Arrah Neil. The reviewer says: “In our opinion, there is hardly an instance on record of an author who has contrived to earn an extensive reputation as a writer of works of imagination, with such slender intellectual materials as Mr. James. No one has ever written so many books, purporting to be novels, with so small a stock of heart, brain, and invention. He is continually infringing his own copyright, by reproducing his own novels. Far from being surprised that he has written so much, we are astonished that he has not written more. From his first novel, all the rest can be logically deduced; and the reason that they have not appeared faster, may be found in the fact that he has been economical in the employment of amanuenses.” More of this kind of talk is indulged in without a single word about the book itself or its merits; which proves quite clearly that the reviewer was merely following the path marked out by some other critic, and there is no evidence whatever that he had ever read the work he was reviewing. Thus it is to-day; a parrot-cry of “diffuseness, dilution, re-copying, repetition,”—so easy to proclaim, so difficult to answer, all born of the disposition of newspaper and magazine critics to accept the view which needs no exercise of brains to approve and to announce. It is not without significance that when James was in America, he was a contributor to this same magazine, which had scored him so unmercifully; for example, in the volume for 1851 I find two stories by him—Christian Lacy, a Tale of the Salem Witchcraft, and Justinian and Theodora,—as well as a rather graceful sonnet to Jenny Lind.

James C. Derby mentions the fact that James was a friend of Philip Pendleton Cooke, the Virginian poet, and relates that Thackeray visited James when in the South, but that James “resented the latter’s [Thackeray’s] flings at him as a ‘solitary horseman’, the meaning of which those who have read James’s novels will understand. James once told Cooke of his intention to write his own memoirs—a purpose never fulfilled. Incidentally, he told Cooke a story of Washington Irving, his early adviser, who amiably approved of his earliest essays in literature. It seems that James was in Bordeaux, and after strolling all day, returned to his inn. On his way through a long, dark passage he saw some one in front carrying a candle, a man in black slowly ascending the old-fashioned staircase. On the landing the man stopped, and holding up his candle looked at a cat lying on the window-sill, regarding the gazer with a surprised and frightened expression. The stranger in black looked at the cat for some time mutely and then muttered sadly, ‘Ah, pussy! pussy! If you had seen as much trouble as I have, you would not be surprised at anything.’ After which he went on up the stairs,’ said James, ‘and as I heard that Irving was in Bordeaux, I said to myself: ‘That can be nobody in the world but Irving’, which turned out to be a fact.[^[51]]

Frederick Locker-Lampson visited Walter Savage Landor at Fiesole in the early sixties, and found him reading a Waverly novel. Lampson congratulated the old poet on having so pleasant a companion in his retirement, and Landor, with a winning dignity, replied: “Yes, and there is another novelist whom I equally admire, my old friend [G. P. R.] James.”[^[52]] Locker-Lampson does not seem to have shared Landor’s appreciation of James. He says, later in his memoirs: “It is a law of literature that every generation should be industrious in burying its own, especially novels. What has become of Smollett and Mackenzie—the cockpit of the ‘Thunder’ or the sentimental Harley? Where is the shadowy Mr. G. P. R. James and where is that witty old ghost of the Silver Fork school, Mrs. Gore?*** Yet they all had vogue.”[^[53]] It is odd that almost every one, in speaking of James, recites his numerous initials and bestows upon him the title of “Mr.” which carries with it the suggestion of a sneer.

In my small collection of Gladstone letters I find one addressed to James which shows not only that the statesman liked the books but that he and the author were on terms of some intimacy.

“Whitehall, May 17, ’43.

My dear Sir: I thank you very much for your renewed kindness. The perusal of your last work gave me very great pleasure, most of all (though that is but a very slender testimony in their favour) Evesham and Simon de Montfort, of whom I never had before an adequate conception. It is true I am adopted into the Cabinet, & will I fear be alleged as a proof of its poverty. In point of form I cannot succeed Lord Ripon until the Queen holds a Council.[^[54]] The true and whole secret of the difficulty about Canada corn (and I do not mean that we can wonder at it) is, as I believe, that wheat, without great abundance, is at 46 / a quarter.

I remain, my dear sir,

Yours faithfully & obliged,

W. E. Gladstone.

G. P. R. James, Esq.,

The Shrubbery,

Walmer.

Donald G. Mitchell, describing the little red cottage of Hawthorne, in the Berkshire hills, reminds us that among those who used to come a-visiting the great American romancer, was “G. P. R. James, that kindly master of knights ‘in gay caparison’;” and elsewhere says that at the Cooper Memorial meeting in Metropolitan Hall, on February 25, 1852, where Webster, Bryant and Hawks paid their tribute to the author of the Leatherstocking tales, “Mr. G. P. R. James—then chancing to be a visitor in New York,—lent a little of his rambling heroics to the interest of the occasion.”[^[55]] I have before me the Memorial, printed by Putnam in 1852, containing a full report of the meeting, including the remarks of James, and I do not find anything which may fairly be called “heroics”, rambling or otherwise. The speech was manifestly extemporaneous. He began by expressing his pride in being an Englishman, a romance writer, and a man of the people, and his pleasure in paying an humble tribute to an American romance writer and a man of the people. He praised the addresses of those who preceded him, corrected a trifling error of Bryant’s in regard to a Mr. James, a surgeon, and declared that the proposed statue to Cooper was not merely to a novelist, but to a genius—to truth—to truth, genius and patriotism combined. He closed by urging all present to use every exertion to procure contributions for the purpose of erecting such a statue. To any unprejudiced mind, what James said was appropriate and dignified; well suited to the occasion; wholly natural and unaffected; and compared favorably, to say the least, with the dull and ponderous commonplaces of Daniel Webster who had the chair and who was singularly unfitted to preside over such a meeting. Of Webster’s platitudes, Professor Lounsbury is quite contemptuous, remarking that the distinguished orator “had nothing to say and said it wretchedly.”[^[56]] I believe that the projected statue was never built. James was evidently a favorite dinner-speaker. It is pleasant to know that he spoke at a ‘printer’s banquet’ in New York in the latter part of 1850, and that he paid a well-merited tribute to a man destined to become a distinguished figure in literature. Bayard Taylor, writing to his friend George H. Boker, on January 1, 1851, says: “By the bye, James paid me a very elegant compliment, in his speech at the ‘printer’s banquet’ the other night, referring to me as the best landscape painter in words that he had ever known. This is something from an Englishman.”[^[57]] He always said kind and appreciative words about his fellow-authors, if they were deserving.

Returning to the Hawthorne cottage, Julian Hawthorne gives a brief account of one of the visits of James, who, it appears, was living near by during the summer of 1851. As the narrator was five years old at the time of this visit, his estimate of the visitors must have been founded upon something other than his personal observation. He says:

“James was a commonplace, meritorious person, with much blameless and intelligent conversation, but the only thing that recalls him personally to my memory is the fact of his being associated with a furious thunderstorm.”

He relates how the storm raged and how the door burst open,—his father and he were alone in the cottage—

“and behold! of all persons in the world—to be heralded by such circumstances—G. P. R. James! Not he only, but close upon his heels his entire family, numerous, orthodox, admirable, and infinitely undesirable to two secluded gentlemen without a wife and mother to help them out.*** They dripped on the carpet, they were conventional and courteous; we made conversation between us but whenever the thunder rolled, Mrs. James became ghastly pale. Mr. James explained that this was his birthday, and that they were on a pleasure excursion. He conciliated me by anecdotes of a pet magpie, or raven, who stole spoons. At last the thunderstorm and the G. P. R. Jameses passed off together.[^[58]]

It is not uninteresting to compare this rather patronizing and supercilious narration of a trivial incident with that which is given in his own Journal by the father of this precocious young gentleman of five years; and it is probably the fact that the story was related by the son not from his own memory but from the record of the Journal, reproduced in “Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife,” by Julian Hawthorne.[^[59]] Nathaniel Hawthorne evidently liked James. Under date of July 30, 1851, he says:

“We walked to the village for the mail, and on our way back we met a wagon in which sat Mr. G. P. R. James, his wife and daughter, who had just left their cards at our house. Here ensued a talk, quite pleasant and friendly. He is certainly an excellent man; and his wife is a plain, good, friendly, kind-hearted woman, and his daughter a nice girl. Mr. James spoke of ‘The House of the Seven Gables’ and of ‘Twice-Told Tales,’ and then branched off upon English literature generally.”[^[60]] The acquaintance between the two authors must have been deemed to be of advantage to both, for the supercilious Master Julian takes care to present in full a note of invitation addressed by James to the elder Hawthorne asking the latter ‘with his two young people’ to visit him, saying: “We are going to have a little haymaking after the olden fashion, and a syllabub under the cow; hoping not to be disturbed by any of your grim old Puritans, as were the poor folks of Merrymount. By the way, you do not do yourself justice at all in your preface to the ‘Twice-Told Tales,’—but more on that subject anon.”[^[61]]

Under the date of August 9, 1851, Hawthorne gives his own version of the thunderstorm episode, in marked contrast with the condescending remarks of his hopeful son. It reveals the difference between parent and child.

“The rain was pouring down,” says Hawthorne senior, “and from all the hillsides mists were steaming up, and Monument Mountain seemed to be enveloped as if in the smoke of a great battle. During one of the heaviest showers of the day there was a succession of thundering knocks at the front door. On opening it, there was a young man on the doorstep, and a carriage at the gate, and Mr. James thrusting his head out of the carriage window, and beseeching shelter from the storm! So here was an invasion. Mr. and Mrs. James, their eldest son, their daughter, their little son Charles, their maid-servant, and their coachman;—not that the coachman came in; and as for the maid, she stayed in the hall.[^[62]] Dear me! where was Phoebe in this time of need? All taken aback as I was, I made the best of it. Julian helped me somewhat, but not much. Little Charley is a few months younger than he, and between them they at least furnished subject for remark. Mrs. James, luckily, happened to be very much afraid of thunder and lightning; and as these were loud and sharp, she might be considered hors de combat. The son, who seemed to be about twenty, and the daughter, of seventeen or eighteen, took the part of saying nothing, which I suppose is the English fashion as regards such striplings. So Mr. James was the only one to whom it was necessary to talk, and we got along tolerably well. He said that this was his birthday, and that he was keeping it by a pleasure excursion, and that therefore the rain was a matter of course.[^[63]] We talked of periodicals, English and American, and of the Puritans, about whom we agreed pretty well in our opinions; and Mr. James told how he had recently been thrown out of his wagon, and how the horse ran away with Mrs. James; and we talked about green lizards and red ones. And Mr. James told Julian how, when he was a child, he had twelve owls at the same time; and, at another time, a raven, who used to steal silver spoons and money. He also mentioned a squirrel, and several other pets; and Julian laughed most obstreperously. As to little Charles, he was much interested with Bunny (who had been returned to us from the Tappans, somewhat the worse for wear), and likewise with the rocking-horse, which luckily happened to be in the sitting-room. He examined the horse most critically, and finally got upon his back, but did not show himself quite as good a rider as Julian. Our old boy hardly said a word. Finally the shower passed over, and the invaders passed away; and I do hope that on the next occasion of the kind my wife will be there to see.”[^[64]]

I give the story in full, not only because of its relation to James and his family, but for its revelation of Hawthorne himself; the little touch of parental pride is amusing as well as affecting. What Nathaniel Hawthorne thought of James in those days is far more important than what Julian Hawthorne thinks of him now.

Mr. Charles L. James writes to me:

“Yes, I have read Hawthorne’s account of our visit in a thunderstorm; and what is more, I remember the occurrence. I was little Charley, whom he mentions. I remember not only getting upon Julian’s rocking-horse, but pulling out his tail and being aghast at what I had done, for I did not possess a wooden horse and it had not occurred to me that the tail was movable.”

I am glad that Charles pulled out that tail; perhaps the memory of the outrage inspired the owner of the steed when he wrote his little story.

Longfellow regarded James with a degree of kindness and esteem quite comparable to that with which Hawthorne looked upon him. In his Journal for September 17, 1850, he says, after mentioning several visitors: “Then Fields, with G. P. R. James, the novelist, and his son. He is a sturdy man, fluent and rapid, and looking quite capable of fifty more novels.”[^[65]] Later, on November 17, he says: “James, the novelist, came out to dinner with Sumner. He is a manly, middle-aged man, tirant sur le grison, as Lafontaine has it, with a gray mustache; very frank, off-hand, and agreeable. In politics he is a Tory, and very conservative.”[^[66]] James certainly had no reason to complain of his reception by the best of our own literary men of that day.

It is an evidence of the fact that James was admired and his ability appreciated by other authors, that he was suspected by no less a person than William Harrison Ainsworth of being the writer of Jane Eyre. I have before me an autograph letter from Ainsworth to James (November 14, 1849), in which he says: “Anything I can do for you at any time you know you may command, and I shall only be too happy in the opportunity of making kindly mention in the N. M. M. of your Dark Scenes of History. The times are not propitious to us veterans and literature generally has within the last two years suffered a tremendous depreciation.*** Do you know I took it into my head that you were the author of ‘Jane Eyre,’ but I have altered my opinions since I read a portion of ‘Shirley.’ Currer Bell, whoever he or she may be, has certainly got some of your ‘trick’ *** but ‘Shirley’ has again perplexed me.”

Robert Louis Stevenson had a modified fondness for James, which is expressed in a letter written by him from Saranac, February, 1888, to E. L. Burlingame. He says:

“Will you send me (from the library) some of the works of my dear old G. P. R. James? With the following especially I desire to make or to renew acquaintance: The Songster, The Gipsey, The Convict, The Stepmother, The Gentleman of the Old School, The Robber. Excusez du peu. This sudden return to an ancient favourite hangs upon an accident. The Franklin County Library contains two works of his, The Cavalier and Morley Ernstein. I read the first with indescribable amusement—it was worse than I had feared, and yet somehow engaging; the second (to my surprise) was better than I had dared to hope; a good, honest, dull, interesting tale, with a genuine old-fashioned talent in the invention when not strained, and a genuine old-fashioned feeling for the English language. This experience awoke appetite, and you see I have taken steps to stay it.

R. L. S.”

I have a number of holograph letters of James, some of which show his pleasant ways and attractive playfulness. They constitute the raison d’ étre of this commentary and so I will not apologize for giving them almost in full. He speaks for himself far better than I can speak for him. He was surely not a Siborne or a Major Dwyer. To my mind these letters reveal the man, and they tell of an honest, genial man who was able to write.

He writes to C. W. H. Ranken, at Bristol, thus:

Rennes, 16 January, 1826.

Rankeno amico carissimo:

That unfortunate Gentleman upon whose back all the evils of this world have been laid from time immemorial, I mean the Devil, has certainly (to give him his due) been tormenting my poor friend and schoolfellow pretty handsomely. What with your cough in the first place and your abscess in the second you have been quite a martyr, but remember the martyrs always reach heaven at last and I doubt not that your sufferings will soon be over and that in the little Paradise you have planned for yourself some five or six miles from London (rather a cockney distance by the by) you will enjoy the happiness of the blest with those you love best. I think I shall make the same compact with you that I have made with Becknell namely that in after years when time has laid his heavy hand upon us all and when you are happy in your children and your children’s children you will still give the crusty old Bachelor a place at your fireside and your Sophia shall furnish me with strong green tea and I will take my pinch of snuff and tell you Graddam’s tales to amuse the little ones or recount the wonderful things I have seen in my travels or growl at the degeneracy of the world and praise the good old days when I was young and gay and did many a wondrous deed for “Ladye love and pride of Chivalrie” and you shall forgive many a cross word and ill tempered remark for old friendship’s sake and say “He was not always so but this world’s sorrows have soured his temper, poor old Man.”

You tell me to continue my history of Bretagne, but in sooth I know not where I left off. Memory, that lazy slut, has forgot to mend her pocket which has had a hole in it for some time and the consequence is that, of all I give her to keep for me, the dross alone remains and the better part is dropped by the wayside. But I am not at all in the mood to give any descriptions. I am philosophical and therefore will tell you a story.

In that mighty empire which exceeds all others as much in wisdom as it does in size—in the time of Fo Whang, who was the six hundredth emperor of the ninety-seventh dynasty which has sat on the throne of Cathay, there lived a philosopher whose doctrine was such that every Chinese from the mandarin who enjoys the light of the celestial presence to the waterman who paddles his Junk in the river of Canton became proselytes.

Every one knows that every Chinese from generation to generation is in manners, customs, dress, and appearance so precisely what his father was before him that a certain Mandarin who had thought proper to fall into a trance for a century or so, waking from his sleep and entering his paternal mansion, found his great grandson, who was at dinner, so strikingly like himself that he was struck dumb with astonishment. There were the same wide thin eye-brows, there were the same beautiful black eyes no bigger than peas, there was the same delicate tea-colored complexion. He wore the same silk his ancestor had worn and the same chopsticks carried his food to his mouth. The Great Grandson instantly recognized his predecessor, but the resuscitated Mandarin, forgetting the lapse of years, mistook his descendant for his own grandfather and each casting themselves on their belly wriggled towards each other with all symptoms of respect. Such being the laudable reverence of this people for all customs sanctified by time, it may be well supposed that that doctrine was magnificent which could take a Chinese by the ear, and such indeed was the doctrine of the Philosopher, namely, that wisdom is folly and folly is wisdom. Which he proved thus: “The end of wisdom” said the Philosopher, “is to be happy. And the fewer are our wants the fewer can be our disappointments and consequently the happier we are. The fool has fewer wants than the wise man and the ignorant less wishes than the learned, and therefore the fool being the happiest is the wisest and the wise man is but a fool.” Now the wise men (even in China) being lamentably in the minority the Philosopher had all the voices for himself. Now there was a young Man named To-hi, who never pretended to be a wise man but was nevertheless not a fool, and going to the Philosopher he said to him—“Father, I cannot help thinking that your doctrine means more than it appears to mean and I think I have found its explication.” “Speak freely, my Son” replied the Philosopher, “and tell me what you suppose it to be.” “I imagine,” said To-hi, “that you wish to inculcate that Men seek for wisdom above their power and destroy their happiness by examining too near the objects which produce it. For I remark that all that is beautiful in nature as well as in life is little better than a delusion which to be enjoyed must be seen from a distance. When I look at the hills of Tartary, they seem from here grand and soft and blue and changing all sorts of colors from the reflection of the Sun, but when I approach them I find nothing but heaps of barren rocks and frightful deserts. If we regard the finest skin with a magnifying glass, it is like coarsest cloth of Surat and the sunset that we admire for its soft splendor to the nations on the edge of the horizon is but the glare of midday. Thus then we ought to enjoy whatever the world offers us without searching for faults and be as happy as we can without seeking to be too wise. Is not this what you meant?” “My Son,” replied the Philosopher “like many other Philosophers I did not well know what I meant and you, like many other commentators, have given an explanation which the author never intended.”

Rennes, first of Feby.

As you will see, my Dear Ranken, this letter has been written half a century but I have been wandering about the country and forgot to finish it before I went. Long before this however I hope you are fundamentally cured and prepared to set up on your own bottom. Doubtless you will find a vast fund of nonsense in the former part of this ’pistle but if it serves to give you a minute’s amusement it will answer the object of

Yours sincerely

G. P. R. James.

Everybody seems to have written affectionately to Charles Ollier, the publisher—Lamb, Hunt, Keats, Shelley, and a host of others. His son, Edmund, ‘beheld Charles Lamb with infantile eyes and sat in poor Mary Lamb’s lap.’[^[67]] James writes to the elder Ollier, from the Chateau du Buisson, Garumbourg, près Evreux, on August 7, 1829:

“My dear Mr. Ollier.

I take advantage of a friend’s departure for London, to write to you though I have nothing to say. I have done so much of my new book as I permit myself to do per diem and having nothing else to do my vile cacoethes scribendi prompts me to indite this epistle to your manifest trouble and annoyance. My father informs me you have been ill and calls your complaint ‘nothing but Dis-pep-sia.’ I hope and trust however that you have no such long word in your stomach, but if you have, nothing can be so good for it as crossing the water and visiting a friend in France. One of my visitors lately brought me over about twenty newspapers and also the information that my unfortunate Adra had never made her appearance. Incontinent, I fell into one of my accustomed fits of passion which was greatly increased by finding that in none of the twenty journals was any advertisement or mention whatever of Richelieu which together with the news that about four and twenty people had asked for Richelieu and could not get it in England, Scotland or Ireland, made me write instantly to Mr. Bentley a very flaming letter about printing Adra &c. &c. &c. I had written to Mr. Colburn sometime ago without his doing me the honor to answer me, and therefore I write not there again. I have since received an answer from Mr. R. Bentley and all has gone right. But I am most profanely ignorant of all news and therefore will beg you to answer me the following Qys. if you can.

Has Richelieu been reviewed in the New Monthly? Has it ever been advertised? Does the sale proceed as successfully as when I left London? Will you see that its first success does not make Mr. Colburn relax in his efforts in its favor? Will you manage the reviewing of Adra and take care that it be sent to and noticed by as many publications as possible? Will you see that the list of persons to whom I desired it to be sent and which I left in Burlington street be attended to? Will you let me know whether there be anything in which I can in any way serve or pleasure you? I am sincere and ever yours.

G. P. R. James.

This letter dated at Maxpoffle, near Melrose, Roxburghshire, 14th June 1832, is addressed to Allan Cunningham.

My Dear Sir:

When you were in this country last year, I told you not to forget me; and you promised that you would not; yet I doubt not that when you see the signature to this, memory will have much ado to call up the person who writes. Nevertheless I cannot forbear—even at the distance of time which has since elapsed, and the distance of space which intervenes—from telling you how much delighted I have been with your Maid of Elnar. I have not seen the whole; but various passages in various reviews, have shown me so much surpassing beauty, that I do not wait even till I have been delighted with the whole, to tell you how great has been the pleasure I have felt from a part.

I do not know very well how or why, but I have been lately sickening of poetry; and though once as great a dreamer as ever felt the sweet music of imagination in his heart of hearts, within the last four or five years I have found it all flat, stale, and unprofitable; and began to fancy myself a devout adorer of dull prose. I thank you then for showing me that there is still such a thing as poetry; and it would not at all surprise me to feel myself—after reading the Maid of Elnar through—taking the top of the wave, and going over every poet again from Chaucer to Byron. Can you tell me what it is that causes such a strange revolution in tastes? I declare for the last five years since the Byron mania was upon me, I have looked upon poetry as the most sappy, senseless misapplication of good words, that ever the whimsical folly of the universal fool, mankind, devised. A spark or two of the old faggot was rekindled in my heart about six weeks ago, by hearing a sonnet of Wordsworth’s read aloud; and that I believe induced me to read the extracts from your book; and now I am all ablaze. What I like in the various scattered passages of the Maid of Elnar, would be endless to tell without writing a review; but there is something throughout the whole which has enchanted me—a mingling of the fine spirit of old chivalry, with the sweet home feeling of calm happy nature that is something newer than even Spenser. As Oliver Cromwell used to say, I would say something—Ay verily—but I won’t for fear you should think me exaggerating and therefore I will bid you farewell. It is natural of course for me to hate you; for every author is bound to detest any other person who writes what is good. I would therefore fain pay you that compliment, but your book will not let me; and I must beg you to believe me

Ever yours most truly

G. P. R. James.

I send this to your Bookseller, because I do not know where else to send it; and I pay it, because many a good wholesome letter which has been addressed to the care of mine, has never reached me for want of that precaution on the part of my correspondents. Before the letter reaches you, I shall have got and read the whole book; and by heaven, if the rest does not come up to the extracts, I shall either lampoon you or your critics.

Another letter to Cunningham follows:

Maxpoffle Near Melrose Roxburghshire

17th May 1833.

My Dear Friend,

To show you how little the fault that you notice is attributable to myself, I have only to tell you that I could not get a copy of Mary of Burgundy till three days after you had received it and my sister in law writes to Mrs. James, by the post that brought your letter, that although she had ordered the book through her own bookseller, she has not yet been able to get it, while friends of hers have obtained it at the circulating libraries. Not having lived in London for many years, I am quite unacquainted with all the ins and outs of these affairs and do not even know who is the Editor of the Athenæum; but I think it somewhat hard measure on his part to make an author pay for the sins of his Bookseller and very different indeed from the usual liberal spirit that I have seen in his paper.

However, I never courted a Journalist in my life and although I know that I have suffered greatly on this account, yet I shall pursue the same plan; and only by endeavoring to make my works better than they have been, force all honest writers to give them their due share whatever it may be. At the same time I will endeavour as far as in me lies to prevent any such instances of neglect as those of which you complain taking place for the future, especially in regard to a paper which deserves so well of the public. Having done so, whatever be the result the Editor must “tak his wull o’t, as the cat did o’ the haggis.” I never reply to criticism unless it be very absurd which is not likely to be the case with his; so let him “pour on, I will endure.”

In regard to the String of Pearls I not only begged a copy to be sent to you before any one else; I wrote you a long letter to be sent with it; but this is only one out of the many shameful pieces of negligence which Mr. Bentley has shown in my affairs.

I trust that the Editor of the Athenæum got a copy of Mary of Burgundy independent of that sent to you for I wish it clearly to be understood that I send you my leather and prunella, as a man for whom I have a high admiration and esteem, and not at all as a critic. When you get them, review them yourself, let others review, praise, abuse them, or let others abuse them as you find need; but still receive them as a mark of regard from me; and be sure that nothing you can say of them will diminish that regard. Whenever I have any one of them for which I wish a little lenity I will write you a note with it and tax your friendship upon the occasion; but still exculpate me in your own generous mind and plead my exculpation to others, of all intriguing to gain undue celebrity for my works or of dabbling with literary coteries. I give in to my bookseller a list of my friends—amongst whom your name stands high and I leave all the rest to him. For the String of Pearls I was anxious both because it was given to a charity and because I was afraid the Publisher might lose by it; but this as far as I can remember is the only book for which I ever asked a review.

Thanks however, many thanks, for your critique in the Athenæum which is calculated to do my book much good and is much more favorable than it deserves. Of your light censure I will speak to you when we meet which I am happy to say will be soon—at least I trust soon. On the twenty-eighth we leave this place for London on our way to Germany and Italy. My liver and stomach have become so deranged of late that I find it necessary to put myself under the hands of a physician whose prescription is an agreeable one. “Take the waters of Ems for two seasons and spend the intermediate time in traveling through Italy.” This plan I am about to pursue, and in our way we shall spend a month in London when I will find you out.

The country round us is lovely at present. After a cold lingering spring, summer has set in, in all its radiance and the world has burst at once into green beauty. You cannot fancy how lovely the Cheviots looked yesterday evening, as Mrs. James and I rode over the shoulder of the Eildons. The sky was full of the broken fragments of a past thunder storm and the lights and shadows were soft, superb and dreamlike. I know I may rave about beautiful scenery to you without fear or compunction for the Maid of Elnar made me know that you love it as well as

My Dear Allan,

Ever yours truly,

G. P. R. James.

P. S.—I have not yet got your last volume but if it be as good as its predecessors you will have no occasion to whip your Genius.

He writes again to Cunningham:

10 July, 1835.

1 Lloyds Place, Blackheath.

My Dear Friend:

A thousand thanks for your kind letter and all the kind things it contains. I am glad that you like my friend the Gipsey, because your approval is worth much and though I think it tolerable myself, yet I have attributed a great part of its success to the name. In answer to the question you put, I do not think he was drowned; but I do not know with certainty. I have told all I do know and farther this deponent sayeth not. I have long been thinking of writing to you to tell you that the name of Chaucer appears in the Scroop and Grosvenor roll in the year 1386 but all that I dare say you know. The best sketch of the real events of Chaucer’s life is certainly that in Sir H. Nicholas’ comments on that roll, Vol. II., page 404, wherein he probably states all that can be learned with certainty of his life and proceedings. I tell you all this, although I dare say you are already acquainted with it because you asked me if I found any thing concerning our poet to let you know. The Black Prince comes on but slowly. So much examination and research is necessary that it is a most laborious and very expensive work. It has already cost me in journeys, transcriptions, books, MSS., &c., many hundred pounds without at all calculating my individual labour and do you know, my dear Allan, what I expect as my reward. Clear loss; and two or three reviews written by ignorant blockheads upon a subject they do not understand, for the purpose of damning a work which throws some new light upon English History. I am very much out of spirits in regard to historical literature and though I would willingly devote my time and even my money to elucidate the dark points of our own history yet encouragement from the public is small and from the Government does not exist, so that I lay down the pen in despair of ever seeing English history any thing but what it is—a farrago of falsehoods and hypotheses covered over with the tinsel of specious reasoning from wrong data. And so you tell Lord Melbourne when you see him. But to speak of a personage, you are more likely to see namely Mr. Chantry. There is a bust which I wish him very much to see and wish you would take a look at it first as I have not seen the original myself. I have a cast of it given me by my Banker at Florence, to whom the original belongs, and if the head be equal to the cast it is the most beautiful antique I have ever seen. It is to be seen at Mr. Brown’s in University Street, Gower Street marble works. Ask to see the antique head belonging to Mr. Johnstone and write me but three lines to tell me what you think of it. He paid, I believe, two hundred pounds for it and would take I believe three or four. If it be as I think, it (pedestal and all) is worth double.

Yours ever with best Compliments to your family

G. P. R. James

Excuse a scrawl but I am not very well.

1 Lloyds Place, Blackheath

5th Decr 1835

My Dear Allan,—I have sent you a book and have ten times the pleasure in sending you one now that ever I had, because I hear you have detached yourself from all reviews. Heaven be praised therefor; for now you can sit down quietly by your own ingle nook and pick out all that is good—if there be any—in my One in a Thousand and palate it all, without the prospect, the damning prospect, of a broad sheet and small print before your eyes, and without wracking your honest brain to find out any small glimmerings of wit and wisdom in your friend’s book in order to set it forth as fairly as may be to the carping world.

By the way, I thought you were honest and true; and yet you have deceived me wofully. You promised to come down to Blackheath and you have not appeared. I have been writing night and day or I should have presented myself to call you to account. Will you come down even yet, and take a family dinner with me? Any Sunday at five you will be sure to find me but if you come on another day, let me have a day’s notice by post, lest I be engaged, which would be a great disappointment to

Yours ever truly,

G. P. R. James

He always wrote frankly and freely to Cunningham. This letter deals with Attila.

The Cottage, Great Marlow, Bucks,

15th April 1837

My Dear Allan,

Many thanks for your letter and kind words upon Attila. I do believe that he is a good fellow, at all events he is very successful in society and though there are not as you well know twenty people in London who know who Attila was, he is as well received, I understand, as if he had the entrée. Conjectures as to who Attila was are various in the well informed circles of the Metropolis, and ever since the book was advertised two principal opinions have prevailed, some people maintaining that He, Attila, was Platoff; others asserting that he was a Lady, first cousin to Boru the Backswoodsman, and the heroine of a romance by Chateaubriand. This may look like a joke, but I can assure you, it is a fact and that out of one hundred people of the highest rank in Europe you will not find five who know who Attila was; setting aside the groveling animals who, as the Duke of Somerset says, addict themselves to Literature.

I am very sorry to hear you say that these well informed and enlightened times have not done justice to your romances. I’ll tell you one great fault they have, which is probably that which prevents the world from liking them as much as it should do: they have too much poetry in them, Allan, one and all from Michael Scott to Lord Roldan. But you must not expect to succeed in all walks of art. You are a lyric poet and a biographer; how can you expect that the critics would ever let you come near romances. No, no; they feel it their bounden duty to smother all such efforts of your genius and they fulfil that duty with laudable zeal. Did you see how the Athenæum attempted to dribble its small beer venom upon Attila. If you have not, read that sweet and gramatical (sic) article, when you will find that because a man has succeeded in one style of writing he cannot succeed in another, and apply the critics dictum to yourself. One half of this world is made up of idiocy, insanity, humbug, and peculation, and the other half (very nearly) of envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness.

Yours ever truly

G. P. R. James

This letter is directed to “Charles Ollier, Esq., Richard Bentley, Esq., New Burlington street, London.”

Fair Oak Lodge, Petersfield,

Hants, 25th December, 1837.

My Dear Ollier:

Mr. Bentley I think usually gives me six copies of a work such as Louis XIV. I have already had one copy of the two first volumes for the Duke of Sussex, and you will very much oblige me by having the copies sent to the following persons with my compliments written in the front leaf and dated Fair Oak Lodge, Petersfield. Lord John Russell, Wilton Crescent; S. M. Phillipps, Esq., Home Office; The Marquis Conyngham, Dudley House, Park Lane; The Lady Polwarth, 9 John Street, Berkeley Square; and also one to G. P. R. James, Fair Oak Lodge, which will make the six copies. I must also have another copy sent to my friend Seymour as soon as you can, addressed as follows: “Sir G. Hamilton Seymour, G. C. H. Brussels, In the care of the Under Secretary of State F. O. Downing Street.” For this last I will pay as soon as you let me know what is the price. Mr. Bentley charges me for the copy; I should like it to be accompanied by a copy of Henry Masterton, the small edition of which by the [way] I have not received any copies and should like some. Pray let me know what Mr. B. charges me for Louis per copy as there are several other friends to whom I should like to give it, but as Sancho would say I must not stretch my feet beyond the length of my sheet.

Yours ever,

G. P. R. James.

P. S. I am anxious to get on with the two last volumes, but I suppose it is the merry season which prevents my having any proofs as yet.

A letter to Alaric Watts refers to the Boundary Question pamphlet:

Fair Oak Lodge, Petersfield, Hants,

9th April, 1839.

My Dear Watts,

I write you ten lines in the greatest bustle that ever man was in to tell you that the death of poor Sir Charles Paget turns me out of my house. This is not of necessity indeed, for I have a lease of it for some time yet unexpired, but Lady Paget sent to ask if I would let her come in again and I felt not in my heart to refuse the widow under such circumstances. I go before the first of May, but I do sincerely wish that between this and then I may have the pleasure of seeing you here. I think that you will believe me to be a sincere man; a tolerably bitter enemy as long as I think there is cause for enmity, a very pertinacious friend when I do like. From this place we go to London, or rather to Brompton, Mrs. James’s sister who is in town for the winter, having lent her her house there, for a short time. It is called the Hermitage and is nearly opposite Trevor Square, which perhaps you may know. Do not suffer yourself or Mrs. Watts to fancy that it will put us to any inconvenience to receive you here if you can manage it, as I assure you it will not. I sell all my horses by auction on the 25th and you could help to bid them up. After we quit the Hermitage, we have not the slightest idea where we shall go but there at least I trust to see you if you cannot leave your weighty employments ere then. I was delighted with your parthian shots, which were exquisitely truly aimed and though the arrows were not poisoned by your hand, the corruption of the flesh in which they have stuck, depend upon it, will produce gangrene. You were made for a reviewer: only you are honest. How was it else that I escaped even when we did not fully understand each other?

I have told the booksellers to send you a little pamphlet on the American Boundary question. It is merely a brief and unpretending summary of the early history of that bone of contention, only worth your looking into as a saving of time.

Pray let me hear from you a few words and believe me with Mrs. James’s and my own best Compliments to Mrs. Watts.

Yours ever

G. P. R. James

P. S. I am making a little collection of my works in their new edition for Mrs. Watts’s book-case and I send Richelieu with this. It is odd Bulwer should have just published a play under the same title when the third edition of mine had been announced for months. I have not seen his, but I should like to compare the two.

Alaric A. Watts Esqre

Crane Court

Fleet Street

2 Verulam Place Hastings

10th January 1840

My Dear Allan,

It is very grievous to me to hear that you have been suffering and it would be as grievous to hear the how if I were not quite sure that at your age and with temperance in all things such as yours, the enemy—if so we can venture to call him—will pass away and leave you, perhaps more useful, but not less comfortable for many a long year. Within my own recollection this has happened to many that I still know in health and vigor but while any vestige remains of the disease it always leaves a despondency as its footprint which makes us look upon the attack as worse than it really has been. Though a successful man, I know—I am sure,—you have been an anxious man; and there is nothing has so great a tendency to produce all kind of nervous affections as anxiety. I trust however that you have now no cause for any kind of anxiety but that regarding your health, and that it will soon regain its tone. Pray my good friend take exercise, not of a violent or fatiguing nature, but frequent and tranquilly, and remember that anything which hurries the circulation is very detrimental. You will also find everything that sits heavy or cold upon the stomach also bad for you; I know, for I have seen much mischief done by even a small quantity of the cold sorts of fruit. It gives me great pleasure to hear you like my books. You are one of those who can understand and appreciate the plan which I have laid down for myself in writing them. If I chose to hazard thoughts and speculations that might do evil, to run a tilt at virtue and honor, to sport with good feelings and to arouse bad ones, the field being far wider, the materials more ample, I might perhaps be more brilliant and witty, but I would rather build a greek temple or a gothic church than the palace of Versailles with all its frog’s statues and marbles. If the books give you entertainment, you are soon likely to have another for there is one now in the press called the “King’s Highway” but which is not quite so Jack Sheppardish as the name implies. With our best regards to all yours believe me ever

Yours truly

G. P. R. James

Allan Cunningham Esqre

Belgrave Place

Pimlico

I do not know to whom this letter was written.

Hotel de L’Europe, Brussels,

30th July, ’40.

My Dear Sir,

The grief and anxiety I have suffered have brought upon me an intermittent fever and various concomitant evils amongst which has been an affection of the face and eyes. Had this not been the case I should have written to you ere I left England, although it has cost me a great effort to write to any one. I am now a good deal better and will immediately correct the proofs I have received; but for the future will you tell Mr. Shaw to send the proofs in as large a mass as possible, addressed as follows and given in to the French diligence office, à Monsieur G. P. James chez M: C. A. Fries, Heidelberg en Basle, aux soins de Messrs. Eschenauer Cie, Strasburg, Via Paris, Pressé.

This is a somewhat long address, but if it be not followed and the proofs be sent by Rotterdam I shall never get one half of them till two or three years after, for such was the case with many proofs of Edwd. the Black Prince.

Any letter for me you had better direct at once to me “aux soins de Sir G. Hamilton Seymour, G. C. H. Brussels.” When I am a little better I will write you a longer letter telling you all our movements and also what progress I have made in my plan for stopping continental piracy; in which if you will give me your assistance and influence I do not despair of succeeding although the Government will do nothing. I have already made some way for I can talk without using my eyes.

Yours ever faithfully

G. P. R. James.

This letter was written to McGlashan, in Lever’s care, at Brussels:

The Shrubbery, Walmer,

2nd August, 41.

My Dear Sir,—

I did not write to you as I had full occupation for every minute and of a kind that could not be neglected. The same will be the case for the next three weeks, as I am just concluding a new work which I can of course lay aside for no other undertaking till it is finished. It will give me very great pleasure to see you here on your way back from Brussels and we can talk over the whole of my plan but as to having even one number completed that is quite out of the question as in order to accomplish it I should be obliged to lay aside a work which had reached the beginning of the last volume before you made up your mind and to do so would be highly disadvantageous to both books. I can tell you quite sufficient however regarding the first two numbers to answer your views as to illustrations.

Pray give my best wishes to Dr. Lever and tell him that we are all going on well; though for the last fortnight I have had no small anxiety upon my shoulders regarding Mrs. James and the baby.

Believe me to be

Dear Sir

Yours faithfully

G. P. R. James.

On May 17, 1842, he wrote to Mr. Bretton:

“*** I am very glad you were pleased with what I said at the Literary Fund dinner. I could have said a great deal more upon the same subject and opened my views for the benefit of the arts in this country, including literature of course, as one of the noblest branches of art—but the hour was so late that I made my speech as short as possible and yet perhaps it was too long.*** I think if I can bring the great body of literary men to act with me, especially the much neglected and highly deserving writers for the daily and weekly press, I shall be enabled to open a new prospect for literature. Should you have any oportunity (sic) of hinting that such are my wishes and hopes, pray do: for this is no transient idea, but a fixed and long meditated purpose which, however inadequate may be my own powers to carry it out, may produce great things by the aid of more powerful minds than that of

Yours very faithfully G. P. R. James.

The name of the person to whom the following letter was written is not given:

The Oaks nr. Walmer Kent

22nd Augt. 1844

Sir:

I have been either absent from home or unwell since your letter arrived or I should have answered it sooner. I do not exactly understand the sort of use you desire to make of the Life of Edward the Black Prince written by myself. Of course I can have no possible objection to your making as long quotations from it as you like, or to your grounding your own statements upon those which it contains which I think you may rely upon with full confidence; but if it was your purpose to make the projected Work a mere sort of Abridgement of mine, I am sorry to say I cannot give you the permission you desire, however much I might personally wish to do so, as Messrs. Longman published a Second Edition of it not long ago, a part of which remains unsold and I could not venture, of course to interfere with their sale. They could not of course object to any quotations you might think fit to make or any reasonable use of the facts stated, as I cannot but think that each historian has a full right to employ the information collected by all his predecessors.

I have the honor to be,

Sir

Your most obedt. Servant

G. P. R. James

The Shrubbery Walmer Kent

1st June 1847

My Dear Worthington,

I received your letter yesterday and would have answered it immediately; but we are in the midst of an election business here. I am not a candidate; and, disgusted with public men, had resolved not to take any part on behalf of others; but I have been led on and when once in the business go on, as you know, heart and hand.

Let me hear a little more about the Ecclesiastical History Society. I am a churchman you know, but far from Puseyitical and I should not like to be mixed up with any legends except such as Ehrenstein or any Saints except St. Mary le bonne.

I am glad to hear that you have moved your dwelling; for Pancras was so completely out of my beat that it was impossible for me to get there when in town. Indeed during my visits to that famed city of London I always put myself in mind of an American orator’s description of himself when he said “I am a right down regler Steam Engine, I go slick off right ahead and never stop till I get to the tarnation back of nothing at all.”

I shall be delighted to see you and Mr. Christmas here any time you can come and will with a great deal of pleasure board and educate you but as to lodging you I am unable for what with babies, nurses, and one thing or another I can hardly lodge myself. I do not propose to be in London for some days or I should rather say weeks, as I was there very lately.

As to Marylebone, any body may propose me for any where and I will be the representative of any body of men always provided nevertheless that I do not spend a penny and maintain my own principles to the end of the chapter. I am not yet inscribable in the dictionnaire des Girouettes; but I trust soon to be for it seems to me that the Jim Crow system is the only one that succeeds in England.

Believe me with best regards to all your household

Yours truly

G. P. R. James

In a letter dated April 1, 1849, and addressed to Mr. Davison, he says:

“I understand you have got a potato. Can you spare half of it, for we have not that. But to speak seriously, which is not my wont, Mrs. James has heard from Mrs. H. that on your farm there are some capital praties, and as we have been languishing for some of the jewels for the last month without being able to get anything edible or digestible, if this rumor of your riches is correct, will you spare a sack or two to a poor man in want, and what will be the cost of the same, delivered in Farnham safe, sound and in good condition—wind and weather permitting. The truth is I have no horse to send for them; and neither cow nor calf have learned to draw yet. I have had no time to teach them, or to buy a horse either. I wish any one else had half my work and I half of theirs—I’d take it and give a premium.”

How busy he was after his arrival in America may be seen from a letter dated October 27, 1850:

“I fear that it would be quite impossible for me to rewrite the first four numbers of the tale you speak of. Applications for lectures have come in so rapidly that I have not one single evening vacant and the evening would be the only time which I could devote to such a purpose as all my mornings must be given up to the fulfilment of my engagements with England and to traveling from place to place. You may easily imagine how much I am occupied when I tell you that during the whole month I am about to stay in Boston, there is not one night which has not its lecture fixed there or at some place in the neighborhood. The delay in London however, of which I had not heard till I received your letters is favorable, as it will enable me to get the proofs over in good time. The four parts are in type, I understand, and I have written over two thumping letters to the printers scolding them for not sending the proof as they are bound by contract to do. One of these letters was posted three weeks ago, so that we may expect the proofs in a week or ten days. In regard to the name, it is certainly curious that one name should have been taken three times but I do not see how it is possible for me to alter it now when it is announced in London. I was not at all aware that any work had before appeared under a similar title, but you could head it James’s story without a name in the Magazine, but if any other title is given it must be by yourselves and not by

“Yours faithfully,

“G. P. R. James.”

Soon after his arrival in America he appears to have become involved in some trouble with publishers. He writes from New York on October 24, 1850, to Ollier:

*** “Send no more sheets to Mr. Law till you hear from me again. My eyes have been opened since my arrival here. Four times the sum now paid can be obtained from Messrs. Harper, and negotiations are going on with them in which they must not have the advantage of having the sheets. You shall not lose by any new arrangement—of that you may trust to the word of one who has I think never failed you.”

He adds, in a postscript: “Tell him [Mr. Newby] I have been shamefully imposed upon by false statements of the sale here and if I had taken his advice I should have been some hundreds of pounds richer.”

On October 5, 1851, he writes from Stockbridge to Ollier:

“I have not written to you earlier because I wanted to find the treaty with Russia in regard to Copyright, and also to see the head of a great German house here in America so as to put you in the way of negotiating for the sale of my next book in Germany. But I have been too lame to leave my own house for anything but a morning drive. I am so far better that I can now walk out for a mile or two, but my right hand and arm remain very painful. However, I think I shall be able to go to New York in ten days and will write to you from that place.*** I am anxious to dedicate the first book I write to my own satisfaction, to Lord Charles Clinton. He is one of the noblest-minded men I ever met with—all truth and honor and straightforwardness. If you see him will you ask him for me whether he has any objection. The Fate is highly popular here—considered the best book I ever wrote—by the critics at least. The whole of the first chapter was read in the Supreme Court the other day before Chief Justice Shaw to prove what was the state of England in the reign of James II. So says the ‘N. Y. Evening Post’ and I suppose it is true. I wish I had you here with me to see the splendor of an American autumn in the most lovely scene. The landscape is all on fire with the coloring of the foliage and yet so harmoniously blended are the tints, from the brightest crimson to the deep green of the pines that the effect is that of a continuous sunset. Mountains, forests, lakes, streams are all in a glow round.”

A letter to Ollier, written at Stockbridge on March 22, 1852, deals with some financial matters and then proceeds:

“I am glad to hear what you say of Revenge—though the title is not one I would myself have chosen, there being a tale of that name in the book of the Passions. I think it is a good book, better in conception than in execution perhaps. Your comparison of Richardson and Johnson with myself and you will not hold. You are scantily remunerated for much trouble. Johnson had done nothing that I can remember for Richardson. As to Richardson’s parsimony towards the great, good man, you explain it all in one word. The former was rich. Do you remember the fine poem of Gaffer Grey—Holcrofft’s I believe—

‘The poor man alone,

To the poor man’s moan,

Of his morsel a morsel will give Gaffer Grey.’

“But this rule is not without splendid exceptions, of which I will one day give you an instance, which I think will touch you much. At present I am writing in great haste in the grey of the morning with snow all around me, the thermometer at 18, and my hand nearly frozen. Verily, we have here to pay for the hot summer and gorgeous autumn in the cold silver coinage of winter.”

Another letter of his written from Winchester, Virginia, November 6, 1853, to Ollier, has some interest. He writes thus:

“My Dear Ollier: Long before the arrival of your kind letter, which reached me only two days ago, I had directed Messrs. Harper to send me a revise of the first page of Ticonderoga, in order to transmit it to you for the correction of errors which had crept into the Ms. through the stupidity of the drunken beast who wrote it under my dictation. Harpers have never sent the revise, but I think it better to write at once in order to have one correction and one alteration made, which must be effected even at the cost of a cancel of the page—which of course I will pay for. The very first sentence should have inverted commas before it. These have been omitted in the copy left here, as well as the words ‘so he wrote’ or something tantamount, inserted at the end of the first clause of that sentence.***

I cannot feel that an appointment of any small value, to the dearest and most unhealthy city in the United States (with the exception of New Orleans) is altogether what I had a right to hope for or expect. You must recollect that I never asked for the consulate of Virginia, where there is neither society for my family, resources or companionship for myself, nor education to be procured for my little boy—where I am surrounded by swamps and marsh miasma, eaten up by mosquitoes and black flies, and baked under an atmosphere of molten brass, with the thermometer in the shade at 103—where every article of first necessity, with the exception of meat, is sixty per cent. dearer than in London—where the only literature is the ledger, and the arts only illustrated in the slave market.

I hesitated for weeks ere I accepted; and only did so at length upon the assurances given that this was to be a step to something better, and upon the conviction that I was killing myself by excessive literary labors. Forgive me for speaking somewhat bitterly; but I feel I have not been well used. You have known me more than thirty years, and during that time I do not think you ever before heard a complaint issue from my lips. I am not a habitual grumbler; but ‘the galled jade will wince.’

I am very grateful to Scott for his kind efforts, and perhaps they may be successful; for Lord Clarendon, who is I believe a perfect gentleman himself, when he comes to consider the society in which I have been accustomed to move, my character, my habits of thought, and the sort of place which Norfolk is—if he knows anything about it—must see that I am not in my proper position there. He has no cause of enmity or ill will towards me, and my worst enemy could not wish me a more unpleasant position. If I thought that I was serving my country there better than I could elsewhere, I would remain without asking for a change; but the exact reverse is the case. The slave dealers have got up a sort of outcry against me—I believe because under Lord Clarendon’s own orders I have successfully prosecuted several cases of kidnapping negroes from the West Indies—and the consequence is that not a fortnight passes but an attempt is made to burn my house down. The respectable inhabitants of Norfolk are indignant at this treatment of a stranger, and the authorities have offered a reward of three hundred dollars for the apprehension of the offenders; but nothing has proved successful. This outcry is altogether unjust and unreasonable; for I have been perfectly silent upon the question of slavery since I have been here, judging that I had no business to meddle with the institutions of a foreign country in any way. But I will not suffer any men, when I can prevent or punish it, to reduce to slavery British subjects without chastisement.

You will be sorry to hear that this last year in Norfolk has been very injurious to my health; and I am just now recovering from a sharp attack of the fever and ague peculiar to this climate. It seized me just as I set out for the West—the great, the extraordinary West. Quinine had no effect upon it, but I learned a remedy in Wisconsin which has cured the disease entirely though I am still very weak.***

He seems to have been tormented by ill health during all his period of residence at Norfolk. He writes to Ollier:

British Consulate, Norfolk, Virginia,

7th April, 1855.

My dear Ollier:—It has been impossible for me to write to you and it is now only possible for me to write a few lines as I have already had to do more than my tormented and feeble hands could well accomplish. For 10 weeks I was nailed to my chair with rheumatic gout in knees, feet, hips, hands, shoulder. For some time I could only sign my dispatches with my left hand and to some letters put my mark. Happily my feet, knees, &c., are well, but I cannot get the enemy out of my hands and arms. My shoulder is Sebastapol and will not yield.

Another letter, also in my possession, I have caused to be printed elsewhere. It is addressed to Ollier, and was written from Farnham, Surrey, on July 26, 1848.

My dear Ollier: I do not suppose that I shall be in town for a few days, and I think in the meantime it would be better to send me down the sheets with any observations you may have to make. I shall be very happy to cut, carve, alter and amend to the best of my ability. The ‘sum’ can only be described as ‘Heaven, Hell and Earth’, or if you like it better, ‘upstairs, downstairs, in my lady’s chamber.’ But I suppose neither of these descriptions would be very attractive and therefore perhaps you had better put ‘The Sky, the hall of Eblis, South Asia’. When it maketh its appearance you had better for your own sake take care of the reviewing; for I cannot help thinking that with the critics at least, my name attached to it is likely to do it more harm than good, unless friendly hands undertake the reviewing. The literary world always puts me in mind of the account which naturalists give of the birds called Puffs and Rees which alight in great bodies upon high downs and then each bird forms a little circle in which he runs round and round. As long as each continues this healthful exercise on the spot he has first chosen, all goes on quietly; but the moment any one ventures out of his own circle, all the rest fall upon him and very often a general battle ensues. I wish you could do anything for my book Gowrie or the King’s Plot. I had a good deal of money embarked in it.

Yours faithfully,

G. P. R. James.

My letter of latest date indicates the time when he was transferred to Richmond.

British Consulate, Norfolk, Va.

3 May, 1856.

My Dear Mr. Kennedy: *** Lord Clarendon has ordered me to make every preparation for moving the Consulate of Virginia up to Richmond but not to do so until he has nominated a Vice Consul for Norfolk. He also wishes me to send him a detailed report regarding the late epidemic here and what between house hunting, office hunting, and trying to run down those foxes called rumors into their holes and to draw truth up from the bottom of her well in a place where people are as fanatical upon contagion and non-contagion as if they were articles of faith, I have had no peace of my life. My book I would have sent you but I could not get a copy worth sending. It has found favor in the South and is powerfully abused in the North, both which circumstances tend to increase the sale so that it has been wonderfully well read.***

I am sorry I did not think of taking notes of all the winning conversations at Berkeley. We might have made out together some few from the Noctes Berkelianae.

Yours ever,

G. P. R. James.

I was interested not long ago in a remark of the accomplished literary reviewer of the Providence Journal about reading for boys. He said: “As a matter of fact, there is plenty of good, healthy reading for boys if parents and teachers would do more to bring it to their attention. To say nothing of Scott—whom some degenerate youngsters in these days profess to find stupid—there are Ainsworth, G. P. R. James, Mayne Reid and hosts of others who can tell stories of adventure that any healthy minded boy will enjoy.” I know well the sound and refined judgments of my Providence friend,—who castigated me once for my opinion that Cowper was not much read in these times—but I do not understand how he can imagine a boy of the twentieth century condescending to read Ainsworth or James. First and foremost, the novels are too long. The conventional three volumes demanded by the English public are revolting to the minds of the modern boys who want their fiction condensed and flavored with tabasco sauce. The Providence critic and I know—or think we know—what they ought to read, what would be good for their intellectual digestion; but we might as well offer them pre-digested tablets in lieu of chocolate creams. The young person will not now subsist on a diet of Ainsworth or of James. The long-spun dialogue would bore him. He calls for something more piquant; revels in slang; wants “sensation” and plenty of it, compressed in a small compass. As for the parents, they do not know much better themselves. The man of Providence well says: “The trouble is, as was pointed out in these columns recently in discussing the reading of girls, that the home atmosphere is all against any intelligent selection of books.” The prevalent antagonism to all that is called “old-fashioned” is not limited to the young people, and the novels of James are, in comparison with the novels of to-day as old-fashioned as are the plays of Massinger in comparison with those of Bernard Shaw.

James has been compared to Dumas, and there are many things in common between the two authors—their voluminous publications, their bent towards the historical, and their use of an amanuensis. A critic, not very well disposed towards James, says in regard to this comparison, “both had a certain gift of separating from the picturesque parts of history what could without difficulty be worked up into picturesque fiction, and both were possessed of a ready pen. Here, however, the likeness ends. Of purely literary talent, James had little. His plots are poor, his descriptions weak, his dialogue often below even a fair average, and he was deplorably prone to repeat himself.”[^[68]] This harsh judgment appears to me to be far too severe. His descriptions are not weak, and he surely had an advantage over Dumas in the matter of decency and morality.

But the most ardent admirers of this hard-working and conscientious toiler in the fields of literature must own that in all his multitudinous pages he has not given to the world a single character which has endured in the popular mind, and the Podsnap virtue of having written no word which could bring a blush to the cheek of the young person, cannot remedy this flaw in his title. Writers who rival him in productiveness but who are in respects inferior to him, have nevertheless secured a more permanent place in the hall of fame, because they have been able to give to some of their personages a real and distinctive life. Leather-Stocking and Long Tom Coffin shine forth from the many wearisome chapters of Fenimore Cooper, Count Fosco and Captain Wragge from the ephemeral volumes of Wilkie Collins, and Mrs. Proudie from the placid chronicles of Anthony Trollope, but they have no kinsmen in the works of James. Even in the historical stories no individual stands forth like Louis XI. in Quentin Durward or Rienzi in Bulwer’s stirring tale. Nor has he left to posterity any brilliant tour de force like the “Dick Turpin’s Ride” of Harrison Ainsworth.

Whatever may be said of the diffuseness and sameness of the stories, of their want of definite plan, their lack of strength in the development of the characters who throng their pages, and the evidence they afford of hasty composition, it must be admitted that they are clean and dignified in tone and that they display a wonderful acquaintance with history as well as a faithful and conscientious use of materials gathered with infinite pains and laborious research. These qualities, however, are not those which ensure literary immortality; and while it is possible that the best of the books may find from time to time readers incited to peruse them by a certain curiosity, and while the lovers of good stories may enjoy them, it is not likely that they will ever rank with the novels of Scott, of Thackeray, of Dickens, or even of Marryat and Lever, although they may occupy a place on the shelves of our libraries by the side of the old romances of the period of Amadis de Gaul or the forgotten tales of the younger Crébillon.

APPENDIX
A LIST OF THE WORKS OF G. P. R. JAMES

It is difficult to give an accurate list of James’s books with the dates of their publication. The one given by Allibone is the most complete, but it is not always correct. The catalogue of the British Museum enumerates sixty-seven novels. The following does not include merely edited works or those prepared in collaboration with others, with a few exceptions. Those marked with an asterisk are reprinted in the collected edition of 1844–1849. I was much helped not only in correcting the Allibone list, but in the preparation of the sketch of James, by the late G. H. Sass of Charleston, S. C., who was probably better informed about the subject than any one else in this country.

Life of Edward the Black Prince: 2 vols.: 1822. [Some accounts give 1836: See ante, page [136].]

The Ruined City: a poem.

Richelieu: 3 vols.: 1829.

[*Darnley]: 3 vols.: 1830.

[*Del’Orme]: 3 vols.: 1830.

[*Philip Augustus]: 3 vols.: 1831.

Memoirs of Great Commanders: 3 vols.: 1832.

[*Henry Masterton]: 3 vols.: 1832.

History of Charlemagne. 1832.

[*Mary of Burgundy]: 3 vols.: 1833.

[*Delaware]: 3 vols.: 1833: (reprinted under title of “Thirty Years Since,” 1848).

[*John Marston Hall]: 3 vols.: 1834: (reprinted under title of “The Little Ball o’ Fire,” 1847).

[*One in a Thousand]: 3 vols.: 1835.

[*The Gipsey]: 3 vols.: 1835.

Educational Institutions of Germany: 1836.

Lives of the Most Eminent Foreign Statesman: 5 vols.: 4 by James, 1836, [1832?] 1838.

Attila: 3 vols.: 1837.

Memoirs of Celebrated Women: 3 vols. (?) 1837.

[*The Robber]: 3 vols.: 1838.

Book of the Passions: 1838.

History of Louis XIV. 4 vols.: 1838.

[*The Huguenot]: 3 vols.: 1838.

Blanche of Navarre: a play: 1839.

Charles Tyrrell: 2 vols.: 1839.

[*The Gentleman of the Old School]: 3 vols.: 1839.

[*Henry of Guise]: 3 vols.: 1839.

History of the United States Boundary Question: 1839.

[*The King’s Highway]: 3 vols.: 1840.

The Man at Arms: 3 vols.: 1840.

Rose d’Albret: 3 vols.: 1840.

The Jacquerie: 3 vols.: 1841.

The Vernon Letters: 3 vols.: (edited). 1841.

[*Castleneau; or the Ancient Régime]: 3 vols.: 1841.

[*The Brigand; or Corse de Léon]: 3 vols.: 1841.

Corn Laws.

History of Richard Cœur de Lion: 4 vols.: 1841–42.

Commissioner; or De Lunatico Inquirendo: 1842.

[*Morley Ernstein]: 3 vols.: 1842.

Eva St. Clair, and Other Tales: 2 vols.: 1843.

The False Heir: 3 vols.: 1843.

[*Forest Days]: 3 vols.: 1843.

History of Chivalry: 1843.

[*Arabella Stuart]: 3 vols.: 1843.

[*Agincourt]: 3 vols.: 1844.

Arrah Neil: 3 vols.: 1845.

The Smuggler: 3 vols.: 1845.

Heidelberg: 3 vols.: 1846.

The Stepmother: 3 vols.: 1846.

Whim and its Consequences: 3 vols.: 1847.

Margaret Graham: 2 vols.: 1847.

The Last of the Fairies: 1847.

The Castle of Ehrenstein: 3 vols.: 1847.

The Woodman: 3 vols.: 1847.

The Convict: 3 vols.: 1847.

Life of Henry IV. of France: 3 vols.: 1847.

Russell: 3 vols.: 1847.

Sir Theodore Broughton: 3 vols.: 1847.

Beauchamp: 3 vols.: 1848.

Carmazalaman; a Fairy Drama: 1848.

The Fight of the Fiddlers: 1848.

Forgery; or Best Intentions: 3 vols.: 1848.

[*Gowrie; or the King’s Plot]: 1848.

Dark Scenes of History: 3 vols.: 1849.

John Jones’ Tales from English History: 2 vols.: 1849.

A String of Pearls: 2 vols.: 1849. [His first written book; published 1833 (?); Allibone assigns its publication to 1849].

Ireland’s “David Rizzio”: 1849: (edited).

Heathfield’s “Means of Relief from Taxation”: 1849: (edited).

Henry Smeaton: 3 vols.: 1850.

The Fate: 3 vols.: 1851.

Revenge: (sometimes called A Story Without a Name): 3 vols.: 1851.

Pequinillo: 3 vols.: 1852.

Adrian; or the Clouds of the Mind: (jointly with M. B. Field): 2 vols.: 1852.

Agnes Sorel: 3 vols.: 1853.

Ticonderoga; or the Black Eagle: 3 vols.: 1854.

Prince Life: 1855.

The Old Dominion; or the Southampton Massacre: 3 vols.: 1856.

Lord Montagu’s Page: 1858.

The Cavalier: (Bernard March?): 1859.

Adra; or the Peruvians: a poem: (circa, 1829).

The City of the Silent: a poem.

The Desultory Man: 3 vols.

Life of Vicissitudes.

My Aunt Pontypool: 3 vols.

The Old Oak Chest: 3 vols.

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[1]. Trevelyan’s Life of Macaulay, I, 93.

[2]. Tennyson: E. L. Cary, 19.

[3]. A Great Punch Editor, London, 1907.

[4]. My Study Windows, 337.

[5]. See a review in The Literary Collector, September, 1905.

[6]. See Temple Bar Edition, iii, 51–52.

[7]. Blackwood, April, 1827.

[8]. Sala’s Life and Adventures (1896), 83.

[9]. Axon’s Memoir, xxiii: The World, March 28, 1878.

[10]. Forster’s Dickens, i. 141.

[11]. Life of Lady Blessington, iii. 226, 227.

[12]. Idem., iii. 224.

[13]. January 3, 1840: Letters, Am. Edition, 1870, ii. p. 218.

[14]. Forster’s Life of Dickens, I, 118.

[15]. Life of Cruikshank (1882), i, 48–49.

[16]. Dictionary of National Biography, Cruikshank.

[17]. Vol. I, 211.

[18]. See introduction to Biographical Edition of Thackeray, IV. 19.

[19]. British Artists from Hogarth to Turner, ii, 59.

[20]. Vol. ii, 321–322.

[21]. Dict. Nat. Biog., i, 198.

[22]. Autobiography, iv, 390–393.

[23]. As a matter of curiosity, I examined the twenty-one novels composing the “Revised Edition” of 1844–1849 to ascertain just how many introduced the horseman or horsemen in the first chapter. Seven disclose them; in eight they are absent; in four, the horsemen are “a party”; in two, they appear in the second chapter, the first being merely introductory.

[24]. Brander Matthews: Aspects of Fiction, 153.

[25]. They are said to have caused the death of Oliver Goldsmith, and pamphlets were published on the subject. Foster’s Oliver Goldsmith, II. 461–463.

[26]. Boswell (Geo. Birkbeck Hill’s Edition), I. 183.

[27]. Id., III. 442.

[28]. Memories: by M. B. Field p. 188—Harper’s, 1874.

[29]. Allibone gives the date of publication as 1849; but it must have been published in some form prior to May 17, 1833. See post, page [184].

[30]. Works Vol. I. “The Gipsey,” vii.

[31]. Dictionary of National Biography, xxix, 209–210.

[32]. Fitzpatrick’s Life of Lever, II. 21.

[33]. This is all according to Field, and may be taken for what it is worth.

[34]. Memoirs, 191–195.

[35]. It is said, but on rather dubious authority, that he was sometimes called “George Prince Regent James,” and that many believed it to be his real name.

[36]. See Appendix.

[37]. Works, Vol. I. xiv.

[38]. Letter to Cunningham, post, page—.

[39]. Letter of C. L. James.

[40]. English Lands, Letters and Kings, 284.

[41]. Life of Lever, II. 21.

[42]. Fitzpatrick’s Life of Lever II. 418.

[43]. Noctes Ambrosianæ, II. 370—Blackwood Edition, 1887.

[44]. Marginalia, Black’s Edition—III. 393.

[45]. Hall’s Book of Memories, 263.

[46]. Jerdan’s Autobiography, iv 210.

[47]. It was R. H. Horne. A New Spirit of the Age (1844) p. 136.

[48]. London Athenæum, April 11, 1846.

[49]. Dublin University Magazine, March, 1842.

[50]. Essays and Reviews, ii, 116, 137.

[51]. Derby’s Fifty Years Among Authors, etc. 405.

[52]. My Confidences, 161.

[53]. My Confidences, 533, 534.

[54]. Mr. Gladstone succeeded Lord Ripon as President of the Board of Trade and took his seat in the Cabinet on May 19, 1843.

[55]. American Lands and Letters, II. 252.

[56]. Life of Cooper, 268.

[57]. Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor, I, 203.

[58]. Hawthorne and his Circle, 33, 34.

[59]. Vol. I, 422–423.

[60]. Hawthorne and his Wife, I. 415.

[61]. Id. 397, 398.

[62]. A little bit snobbish for a Hawthorne, is it not?

[63]. Observe how Mr. Julian Hawthorne wholly omits the point of the observation about the pleasure excursion.

[64]. Life of Hawthorne and his Wife, I. 422–424.

[65]. Life of H. W. Longfellow, by Stephen Longfellow, II. 177.

[66]. Id., 182.

[67]. Charles Ollier, 1788–1859.

[68]. Encyclopædia Britannica, XIII. 561 (Ninth Edition).

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