The worthiest of his successors is Mr. J. M. Barrie, who has much in common with him, though he displays differences of a very essential kind. Mr. Barrie has no such spiritual obsession as besets his elder. He has the national reverence for sacred things, but it is probably rather habitual and racial than dogmatic. I think his greatest charm lies in the fact that he is at once old and new fashioned. He loves to deal with a bygone form of life, a form of life which he is too young to remember in all its intricacies, whilst he is not too young to have heard of it plenteously at first hand, or to have known many of its exemplars. Few things of so happy a sort can befall a child of imagination as to be born on such a borderland of time. About him is the atmosphere of the new, and dotted every here and there around him are the living mementoes of the old—a dying age, which in a little while will cease to be, and is already out of date and romantic. Steam and electricity and the printing-press, and the universal provider and the cheap clothing ‘emporium,’ have worked strange changes. It was Mr. Barrie’s fortune to begin to look on life when all these changes were not yet wrought; to bring an essentially modern mind to bear on the contemplation of a vanishing and yet visible past, to live with the quaint, yet to be able, by mere force of contrast, to recognise its quaintness, and to be in close and constant and familiar touch with those to whom the disappearing forms of life had been wholly habitual. That the mere environment thus indicated was the lot of hundreds of thousands makes little difference to the especial happiness of the chance, for, as I have said already, we can’t all be persons of genius, and it is only to the man of genius that, the good fortune comes home.
If there is one truth in relation to the craft of fiction of which I am more convinced than another, it is that all the genuine and original observation of which a man is capable is made in very early life. There are two very obvious reasons why this should be so. The fact that they are obvious need not prevent me from stating them here, since I am not writing for those who make a business of knowing such things. In the first place, the mind is at its freshest; and all objects within its scope have a keen-edged interest, which wears away in later life. In the next place, the earliest observations are our own, unmixed with the conclusions and prepossessions of other minds. A child has not learnt the Dickens’ fashion, or the Thackeray fashion, or the Superior Person fashion of surveying particulars and generals. He has not begun to obscure his intelligence by the vicious habit of purposed note-takings for literary uses. He looks at the things which interest him simply, naturally, and with entire absorption. It is true of the most commonplace people that as they grow old their minds turn back to childhood, and they remember the things of half a century ago with more clearness than the affairs of last week. Lord Lytton’s definition of a man of genius was that he preserved the child’s capacity for wonder.
One of the astutest of living critics tells me that he finds a curiously logical characteristic in Mr. Barrie’s humour, but I confess that I am not wholly clear as to his meaning. I find it characteristically Scotch, and perhaps at bottom we mean the same thing. It is often sly, and so conscious in its enjoyment of itself as to be content to remain unseen. Often it lies in a flavour of the mind, as in whole pages of ‘My Lady Nicotine,’ where it is a mere placid, lazy acquiescence in the generally humorous aspect of things. Here the writer finds himself amused, and so may you if you happen to be in the mood. At other times the fun bubbles with pure spontaneity, as in the courtship of ‘Tnowhead’s Bell, which is, I make bold to believe, as good a bit of Scotch rural comedy as we have had for many a day. The comedy is broad, and touches the edge of farce at times, but it is always kept on the hither-side by its droll appreciation of character, and an air of complete gravity in the narrator, who, for any indication he gives to the contrary, might be dealing with the most serious of chronicles.
As I write I have before me a letter of Mr. Barrie’s, written to a fellow-workman, in which he speaks of the ‘almost unbearable pathos’ of an incident in one of the latter’s pages. The phrase seems to fit accurately that chapter in the ‘Window in Thrums’ where Jamie, after his fall in London, returns to his old home, and finds his own people dead and scattered. The story is simple, and the style is severe even to dryness, but every word is like a nail driven home. It would be hard to find in merely modern work a chapter written with a more masterly economy of means, than this. And this economy of means is the most striking characteristic of Mr. Barrie’s literary style. It is as different from the forced economy of poverty as the wordy extravagance of Miss Corelli is different from the exuberance of Shakspeare. It is a reasoned, laborious, and self-chastening art, and within its own limitations it is art at its acme of achievement What it has set itself to do it has done.
These two, then, Dr. George Macdonald and Mr. J. M. Barrie, are the men who worthily carry on, in their separate and distinct fashions, the tradition which Sir Walter established. In a summary like this, where it is understood that at least a loyal effort is being made to recognise and apportion the merits of rival writers, the task of the critic occasionally grows ungrateful. Nothing short of sheer envy can grudge to Mr. Barrie a high meed of praise, but I think that his elder is his better. The younger man’s distinction is very largely due to a fine self-command, a faculty of self-criticism, which in its way cannot easily be overpraised. He has not Stevenson’s exquisite and yet daring appropriateness in the choice of words, but his humour is racier and scarcely less delicate, and in passages of pathos he knows his way straight to the human heart As the invention or discovery of new themes grows day by day less easy—as the bounds of the story-teller’s personal originality are constantly narrowing—the purely literary faculty, the mere craft of authorship in its finer manifestations must of necessity grow more valuable. Mr. Barrie is a captain amongst workmen, and there is little fear that in the final judgment of the public and his peers he will be huddled up with Maclarens and Crocketts, as he sometimes is to-day. But Dr. Mac-donald, though he has not sought for the finenesses of mere literary art with an equal jealousy, has inherited a bigger fortune, and has spent his ownings with a larger hand. He has perhaps narrowed his following by his faithfulness to his own inspiration, but his books are a genuine benefaction to the heart, and no man can read them honestly without drawing from them a spiritual freshness and purity of the rarer sort. There is an old story of a discussion among the students of their time as to the relative merits of Schiller and Goethe, The dispute came to Schiller’s ears, and he laughingly advised the combatants to cease discussion, and to be thankful that they had both. I could take a personal refuge there with all pleasure, but the critical rush to crown the new gods is a new thing, and, without stealing a leaf from the brow of the younger writer, I should like to see a fresher and a brighter crown upon the head of his elder and bigger brother.
X.—THE PROBLEM SEEKERS—SEA CAPTAIN AND LAND CAPTAIN
It is so long a time since Mr. W. H. Mallock published the ‘Romance of the Nineteenth Century’ that the book might now very well be left alone, if it were not for the fact that in a fashion it marked an epoch in the history of English literature. It was, so far as I know, the first example of the School of the Downright Nasty. For half a year it ran in ‘Belgravia’ side by side with a novel of my own, and under those conditions I read as much as I could stand of it. Its main object appears to be to establish the theory that a young woman of refined breeding may be an amateur harlot. The central male figure of the book is a howling bounder, who has a grievance against the universe because he can’t entirely understand it. Within the last two or three years it has occurred to Mr. Mallock to recast the book, and in a preface dated 1893 (I think) he informs the world that on re-reading the story he personally has found portions of it to be offensive. These portions he declares himself to have eliminated, and he now thinks—or thought in 1893—that there is nothing on that score to cavil at. All I remembered of the story was that a certain Colonel Stapleton debauched the mind of the heroine by lending her obscene books with obscene prints attached. This episode is retained, in spite of the work of purification which has been performed; and it may be said that if the original novel were nastier than this deodorised edition of it, it is very much of a wonder how the critical stomach kept it down.
It is a refreshment to turn from this particular problem seeker to the work of a writer like Mrs. Humphry Ward, who, if she invests the questions she handles with more importance than actually belongs to them, is as wholesome and sincere as one could ask. She has read both deeply and widely, she thinks with sanity and clearness, she discerns character, she can create and tell a story, her style is excellently succinct and full, and any book from her pen may safely be guaranteed to fill many charmed and thoughtful hours. She is still a seeker of problems, and shares the faults of her school, inasmuch as she sets herself to the solution of themes which all thoughtful people have solved for themselves at an early age. It would be difficult, perhaps, to find a better and more salutary stimulant for the mind of a very young man or woman than ‘Robert Elsmere,’ to cite but one work of hers, but to the adult intelligence she seems a day behind the fair. She expends something very like genius in establishing a truth which is only doubted by here and there a narrow bigot—that truth being that a man may find himself forced to abandon the bare dogma of religion, and may yet conserve his faith in the Unseen and his spiritual brotherhood with men. ‘Robert Elsmere’ is a very beautiful piece of work, and it is impossible not to respect the ardour which inspires it, and the many literary excellences by which it is distinguished. But, all the same, it leaves upon the mind a sense of some futility. It would be easy to write a story which would prove—if a story can be imagined to prove anything—the precise opposite of the truth so eloquently preached in ‘Robert Elsmere,’ and the tale might be perfectly true to the experience of life. There are men who, parting with dogmatic religion, part with religion altogether, and whose only chance of salvation from themselves lies in the acceptance of a hard and fast creed. It would be easy enough, and true enough, to show such a man assailed by doubt, struggling and succumbing, and then going headlong to the devil. The thing has happened many a time. Mrs. Humphry Ward shows another kind of man, and depicts him most ably. Robert Elsmere is even a better Christian when he has surrendered his creed than he was whilst he held it, for he has reached to a loftier ideal of life, and he dies as a martyr to its duties. But the story has the air of being controversial, and fiction and controversy do not work well together. It is possible to establish any theory, so far as a single instance will do it, when you have the manufacture both of facts and of characters in your own hands. Accept an extreme case. A practised novelist might take in hand the character of a morose and surly fellow who was generous and expansive in his cups. So long as the wretch was sober he might be made hateful; half fill him with whisky, and you gift him with all manner of emotional good qualities. The study might be real enough, but it would prove nothing. The novelist who assails a controversial question begs everything, and the answer to a problem so posed is worthless except as the expression of an individual opinion. It may be urged—and there is force in the contention—that there are many people who are only induced to think of serious themes when they are dressed in the guise of fiction, as there are people who cannot take pills unless they are sugar-coated. Again—as admitted already—a mind in process of formation might be strengthened and broadened by the influence of such a book as ‘Robert Elsmere.’ There are some to whom its apparent trend of thought will appear to be simply damnable. That one may have scant respect for their judgment, and no share at all in their opinion, does not alter the fact that the weapon employed against them is not and cannot be fairly used.
Many years ago, Mr. Clark Russell, whose name is now a household word, was the editor of an ill-fated society journal. I was a contributor to its little-read pages, and I came one day upon an article entitled ‘Pompa Mortis.’ This article was written in such astonishingly good English, so clean, so hardbitten and terse, and yet so graceful, that I could not resist the temptation to ask its author’s name. My editor modestly acknowledged it for his own, and when I told him what I thought of its style he confessed to a close study of Defoe and a great admiration for him. I saw nothing more from his hand until I read ‘The Wreck of the Grosvenor,’ the first of that series of sea stories which has carried Mr. Russell’s name about the world. An armchair voyage with Russell is almost as good as the real thing, and sometimes (as when the perils and distresses of shipwreck are in question) a great deal better. Had any man ever such an eye for the sea before, or such a power of bringing it to the sight of another? Few readers, I fancy, care a copper for his fable, or very much for his characters, except for the mere moment when they move in the page; but his descriptions of sky and sea linger in the mind like things actually seen. They are so sharp, so vivid, so detailed, so true, that a marine painter might work from them. And the really remarkable thing about them is the infinite variety of these seascapes and skyscapes. He seems never to repeat himself. He is various as the seas and skies he paints. One figures his mind as some sort of marvellous picture gallery. He veritably sees things, and he makes the reader see them. And all the strange and curious sea jargon, of which not one landsman in a thousand understands anything—combings and back-stays and dead-eyes, and the rest of it—takes a salt smack of romance in his lips. He can be as technical as he pleases, and the reader takes him on faith, and rollicks along with him, bewildered, possibly, but trusting and happy. And Clark Russell has not only been charming. He has been useful, too, and Foc’sle Jack owes him a debt of gratitude. For though he does not shine as a draughtsman where the subtleties of character are concerned, he knows Jack, who is not much of a metaphysical puzzle, inside and out, and he has brought him home to us as no sea-writer ever tried to do before. Years ago it seemed natural to fancy that he might write himself out, but he goes on with a freshness which looks inexhaustible. If I cannot read him with the old enjoyment it is my misfortune and not his fault. If his latest book had been his first I should have found in it the charm which caught me years ago. But it is in the nature of things that an individual writer like Clark Russell should be his own most dangerous rival.