Crackanthorpe commenced his literary career as the editor, with W. H. Wilkins, of The Albemarle, a monthly review started in January, 1892, with a splendid supplement lithograph.
Wreckage, the younger writer’s first volume, appeared in 1893, and contains seven studies of very unequal merit. Its French inspiration as well as its French emulation is at once apparent, for in place of a foreword is the simple, all-sufficing French quotation as a keynote of the type of work displayed: ‘Que le roman ait cette religion que le siècle passé appelait de ce large et vaste nom: “Humanité”;—il lui suffit de cette conscience; son droit est là.’ The youth of the writer (he was only twenty-eight) must be remembered when discussing the inequality of these studies in passion, for all hinge on the old eternal theme. The last three are perhaps more finished work than the first four, and this is a pity from the point of view of the reader. Profiles, indeed, the longest, is also in some respects the worst-conceived attempt. It is crude and immature in conception and projection. A young officer, in love with Lily Maguire, is deceived by her for a very Emily Brontë-like figure of a bold, bad, handsome man. The girl becomes a disreputable member of the prostitute class, and Maurice, like the young fool he is, wishes to redeem her. But Lily, whom the sensuous, romantic life has taught nothing, could never, she thinks, marry a man she did not care for, although she would sell herself to the first Tom, Dick, or Harry. A Conflict of Egoisms concerns two people who have wasted their lives and then utterly destroy themselves by marrying one another, for they were too selfish to live even by themselves. The Struggle for Life is a Maupassant[14]-conceived, but ineffectively told story of a wife betrayed by her husband, who sells herself for half-a-crown if she can go home in an hour. Embers is much more effectively told, and here at last we begin to realise Crackanthorpe is getting at the back of his characters. The same applies to that able gambling story, When Greek meets Greek, while in A Dead Woman we have Crackanthorpe at last in his full stride. Rushout the innkeeper, inconsolable for his dead wife, is as real as ‘bony and gaunt’ Jonathan Hays, who was the dead woman’s lover. How the husband discovers the dead woman’s infidelity; how he and Hays were to have fought; and how at last ‘each remembered that she had belonged to the other, and, at that moment, they felt instinctively drawn together,’ is told by a master’s hand with a slow deliberation that is as relentless as life itself. Here the narrative is direct and the delineation of character sharp. These two men with the card-sharper Simon live, while as for the women of the book we wish to forget them, for they have nothing to redeem them except possibly the little French girl from Nice.
[14] Maupassant’s Inconsolables.
Two years later appeared a far more ambitious and maturer volume containing half-a-dozen sentimental studies and half-a-dozen tales of the French villages Crackanthorpe so loved and understood. His method of work becomes more pronounced here, that is to treat an English theme in the French manner, a task which demands more culture than the ruck of the conteurs for the English magazines attain with their facile tears and jackass laughters, their machine-like nonentities and pudibond ineptitudes. Crackanthorpe, indeed, has left no following behind him, and only once later can I recall a volume of short stories that suggests his manner: J. Y. F. Cooke’s tales of the nineties in his Stories of Strange Women.
In this new volume as before, Crackanthorpe devotes himself to the expansion of the sentimental study, the problems of sexual relationships, which are not altogether pleasing to every one, and this may account for his limited appeal. In Wreckage all the women were vile, but here he evidently intends to picture the other side of women in Ella, the wife of the poet Hillier, with its slow Flaubert unrolling of her infinite delusion. In Battledore and Shuttlecock, in Nita, of the old Empire promenade days, he again develops the good side. While in the study of the Love-sick Curate we feel that Ethel is not hard-hearted, but only that the Rev. Burkett is an unutterable idiot. Modern Melodrama is the short, sharp climacteric stab of Maupassant perhaps not over well done. The sentimental studies close with Yew-Trees and Peacocks, which seems rather to have lost its point in the telling. The tales of the Pyrennese villages where Crackanthorpe used to stay are typical productions of the delight of the men of the nineties in their sojourning on the sacred soil of France. The White Maize, Etienne Matton, and Gaston Lalanne’s Child are perhaps not unworthy of the master himself in their simple directness, devoid of all unnecessary padding. With a few phrases, indeed, Crackanthorpe can lay his scene, strip his characters nude before us. How we realise, for instance, Ella lying in bed the night before her mistaken marriage with Hillier. She is there in all the virgin simplicity of the average English country girl:
The window was wide open, and the muslin curtains swaying in the breeze bulged towards her weirdly. She could see the orchard trees bathed in blackness, and above a square of sky, blue-grey, quivering with stifled light, flecked with a disorder of stars that seemed ready to rain upon the earth. After a while, little by little, she distinguished the forms of the trees. Slowly, monstrous, and sleek, the yellow moon was rising.
She was no longer thinking of herself! She had forgotten that to-morrow was her wedding-day: for a moment, quite impersonally, she watched the moonlight stealing through the trees.
Again, Ronald, the youth from the Army Crammer’s, finds his way into the music-hall, where he encounters Nita:
Immediately he entered the theatre, the sudden sight of the scene stopped him, revealed, as it were, through a great gap. The stage blazed white; masses of recumbent girls, bathed in soft tints, swayed to dreamy cadence of muffled violins before the quivering gold-flecked minarets of an Eastern palace. He leaned against the side of the lounge to gaze down across the black belt of heads. The sight bewildered him. By-and-bye, he became conscious of a hum of voices, and a continual movement behind him. Men, for the most part in evening dress, were passing in procession to and fro, some women amongst them, smiling as they twittered mirthlessly; now and then he caught glimpses of others seated before little round tables, vacant, impassive, like waxwork figures, he thought.... He was throbbing with trepidating curiosity, buffeted by irresolution.
With the same exactitude the lonely fells around Scarsdale, where Burkett is parson of the small Cumberland village, arise before us.