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]]