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It is not my purpose to present any critical study of James or of his works, but only to submit a few of his unpublished letters, in which his easy grace of style and his frank and simple nature are manifest; to give some of the contemporary estimates of him; and to recall to the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: