Life of Frederick Marryat

by David Hannay

Author and publisher told one another “their fact” plainly enough in this case, and one rather wonders what lies hid under the asterisks. In the absence of information as to the proportion in which they respectively shared the profits of the stories written before 1837, one cannot undertake to say whether the unnamed publisher of fiery temper, advanced age, and small stature, received a lion’s share or not. If so, it must have represented a handsome sum, for Marryat was by no means one of the worst treated of authors. Colburn gave him £400 for “Frank Mildmay.” For “Mr. Midshipman Easy” he received £1,400, apparently in a lump sum. “The Pirate” and “The Three Cutters,” published together, brought him in £750. His other books were paid on the same scale, and he certainly did not edit the Metropolitan for nothing. His code of signals, which was not literature (and perhaps on that account only the more lucrative), was an appreciable income to him throughout his life. On the whole, Marryat seems to have found the profession of author sufficiently remunerative. His indignation with his publishers may be safely taken to be mainly a proof that, in common with most writing-men of his generation, he was a firm believer in the creed that authors are an ill-used body. This is no longer quite so orthodox as it was. The wind is rather blowing the other way, and it is becoming the right thing to say that authors have themselves to thank for their ill-luck if they do not earn as much as they ought, and must bear the burden like their fellow-men if they spend more than they earn. This good sense may corrupt into a cant as others have done, but it is good sense. Marryat—who would appear to have made three thousand pounds or so in 1835, for taking “Mr. Midshipman Easy” and the other two stories, with his copyrights and editorship, he can hardly have made less—was in any case not an example of an ill-paid author. If he had to complain of want of money it must have been because he was a gentleman of extravagant habits, with a fatal weakness for bad investments. To be sure, if an author were to be paid according to the pleasure he has given others, and if “the shop” which makes a profit on selling his work had to render some royalty on it for ever and ever, then indeed was Marryat, together with all those whose work is of the widely-read and lasting order, ill rewarded. But insuperable difficulties bar the road to that ideal. Since paper, printing, and advertisements must be provided, the provider of these necessary things must share; since the novelist cannot hawk his own goods in a barrow, he must pay somebody to do it for him; since the world’s copyright laws put a limit on the duration of proprietary right in books, there must come a time when they are at any man’s disposal to reprint. In the long run the balance of profit must needs be in favour of the shop. To be sure, the nation of authors may console itself by reflecting that it has its revenge. There is much on which the shop makes no gain, first or last.

The first of Marryat’s books is one which, for reasons very neatly stated by himself, may stand apart from the others. When he had given it three successors, he thought fit to publish a proclamation on the subject of his work in the Metropolitan, and in that document he described “Frank Mildmay” as fairly as any honest critic could do for him.

“‘The Naval Officer’ was our first attempt, and it having been our first attempt must be offered in extenuation of its many imperfections; it was written hastily, and before it was complete we were appointed to a ship. We cared much about our ship and little about our book. The first was diligently taken charge of by ourselves; the second was left in the hands of others, to get on how it could. Like most bantlings put out to nurse, it did not get on very well. As we happen to be in the communicative vein, it may be as well to remark that being written in the autobiographical style, it was asserted by good-natured friends, and believed in general, that it was a history of the author’s own life. Now, without pretending to have been better than we should have been in our earlier days, we do most solemnly assure the public that, had we run the career of vice of the hero of ‘The Naval Officer,’ at all events, we should have had sufficient sense of shame not to have avowed it. Except the hero and the heroine, and those parts of the work which supply the slight plot of it as a novel, the work in itself is materially true, especially in the narrative of sea adventure, most of which did (to the best of our recollection) occur to the author.… The ‘confounded licking’ we received for our first attempt in the critical notices is probably well known to the reader—at all events we have not forgotten it. Now, with some, this severe castigation of their first offence would have had the effect of their never offending again; but we felt that our punishment was rather too severe; it produced indignation instead of contrition, and we determined to write again in spite of all the critics in the universe: and in the due course of nine months we produced ‘The King’s Own.’ In ‘The Naval Officer’ we had sowed all our wild oats, we had paid off those who had ill-treated us, and we had no further personality to indulge in.”

From which, even if internal evidence were not enough to prove it, we learn that, between the paying off of the Tees and the commissioning of the Ariadne, Marryat decided to have a general jail delivery of his old naval enemies, and that the result was “Frank Mildmay; or, The Naval Officer.” It cannot be said that the book is better than its origin. If Marryat had kept the promise he made in this proclamation of his to the readers of the Metropolitan—if he had re-written this so-called novel, he might, had he taken the right course, have made it one of the best of his works. He had only to make it an autobiography without disguise, to put in the good as well as the evil of his experience, to take care to explain everything to his readers, as he could well have done, and he would have given English literature a thing altogether unique—a naval memoir. We are not rich in memoirs, at least, not in good ones. The English hand is unhappy at that work. A man has only to turn to Ludlow, or Sir Philip Warwick, to see how lamentably little Englishmen of parts who lived through the most wonderful things could contrive to bring away with them—how little at least of the life, the colour, the dramatic swing of it all. Of the few we can show, which are not unfit to stand with the Frenchmen, Clarendon, Pepys, Colley Cibber, Evelyn (and four or five others), none were of the sea. “Cochrane’s Autobiography” maybe quoted against me, but even this, good as it is in places, is drowned in angry denunciations of human wickedness, and demonstrations that this or the other thing ought to have been done by official backsliders, so that what Cochrane did himself is almost crowded out. Besides, it is only a fragment, and then reste à savoir s’il n’est pas mort. It has not lived. One may, and must, use it for the history of the man and the time, but who reads it for its intrinsic literary merit? The French seamen have the better of us there. The memoirs of Forbin, of Duguay-Trouin, and even the recently published journal of a much less famous man, Jean Doublet, are capital reading. Marryat might, if he had so pleased, have done a book which would have been to the memoirs of Forbin what the memoirs of Clarendon are to the memoirs of Sully, to adopt the formula dear to Lord Macaulay. He might have done what Sir Walter Scott praised Basil Hall for attempting—have given in autobiographical form a picture of sea life, which would have been interesting, not only to those who already love the subject, but to all who love good reading. He did not so choose. He carried out his mission in another form, and “Frank Mildmay” remained as it first appeared.

That the book was so much of an autobiography was a misfortune for Marryat. He might protest as much as he pleased that he was not Frank Mildmay, and had not run a career of vice, but the impression left by the book was and is disagreeable. Why should a man attribute his own adventures to a tiger? Now, Frank Mildmay is a tiger—a very insolent, callous, young cub. It shows Marryat to have been very inexperienced indeed that he should have made such a mistake. He must have known that the adventures would be recognized. The naval world is a small one, and an exclusive. Naval officers live together by choice on shore as they do by necessity at sea. Everything written about the profession is talked over, and interpreted, when interpretation is needed. Every incident in “Frank Mildmay” was no doubt recognized at once; and when it was found that the things that had happened to the hero of the story were the adventures of the author, it is not to be wondered at that the two were thought to be also identical in character. Marryat, in fact, committed with himself the very error of judgment into which Dickens was led with Leigh Hunt, when he made Harold Skimpole a rascal, in order to prove that he was not a caricature of his friend. But there is something more than inexperience and error of judgment about “The Naval Officer.” Marryat can hardly have seen what a bad fellow he had drawn. Frank Mildmay has not only those “sins of the devil,” which may be worse, but are more dignified, than the sins of men—he errs not only by “pride and rebellion,” but he is a mean scamp; and I am afraid that Marryat did not see it. He was as blind to the faults of his bantling as Smollett was to the ruffianism of Roderick Random, or Fielding to the very vulgar inferiority of Tom Jones. Criticism seems to have opened his eyes, and little as he liked the lesson, he took the warning; but it was only for a time. Unfortunately he fell back on it. Percival Keene is just such another—a very low fellow, with a kind of wild boar courage. It would appear that Marryat did not see some things as plainly as one could wish he had done. It is unnecessary to insist on the faults of construction in a book which belonged to an altogether bastard genre. What merits it had—and they were sufficient to give promise of a brilliant novelist—were to be repeated in other books much more pleasant, and much more capable of repaying examination.

The other nine books which Marryat published in these seven years were “wholly fictitious in characters, in plot, and in events,” to quote his own words. In fact, they were stories, and what truth there is in them was not crudely taken from memory, but adapted and fitted into its place. The essential accuracy of the picture they give of sea life has never been questioned, at least it has never been challenged on serious grounds. It is undoubtedly the case that critics of a certain well-known stamp have been known to complain that no such series of adventures as these stories contain were ever known to occur, and that the daily life of a midshipman is not so amusing as Mr. Easy’s, nor so varied as Peter Simple’s. A criticism which only amounts to this—that the stories are stories, and not log-books, need hardly be seriously answered. Sailors read them, and always have read them. They are as popular in the American Naval School as they have been among English boys. To the skill with which the stories were built, less justice has been done. It has always, as it were, been taken for granted that Marryat owed everything to his experience as a seaman, and that, except in so far as he had seen things which other men had not seen, he was not of the race of novelists whose work lives. Now this is heresy. In truth, the sea life owes more to Marryat than he to the sea. No one meets Mr. Easy, or Terence O’Brien, or Mr. Chucks, or Mr. Vanslyperken in this commonplace world. He meets something out of which they may be made. Unquestionably his experience was of inestimable value to Marryat—as all exceptional experience is to all novelists. At the very beginning of his career he was complimented by Washington Irving on his good luck. “You have a glorious field before you, and one in which you cannot have many competitors, as so very few unite the author to the sailor.” No doubt it was Marryat’s happiness that he had so good a Sparta to cultivate—but, after all, the result was primarily due to the skill of the cultivator. Speaking as one who has a full share of the good English taste for reading about the things of the sea, I am inclined to maintain that few kinds of books are more tedious than sea stories which ask to be read and enjoyed simply because they are sea stories. Battle, and storm, and shipwreck may be poured out on you, and yet leave you cold. These things by themselves in fiction are capable of being as tiresome as the once prevalent detective, or now popular religious disputations. To compare the stock sea story with the great books of travel—with Dampier, or with Anson’s Voyage, or with Basil Ringrose—would be unfair. We do not need to compare the best of one kind with the worst of another. But they will not stand reading even with Captain Hacke’s dingy little compilation, or with the long winded journal of Woodes Rogers. The reality of the latter is some compensation for their undoubted dulness. At least in reading them one knows that one is looking at a strange old life told by the men who lived it. When taken by a workman and badly used, the adventures these actual adventurers passed through and recorded become merely badly used material. A painter was once shown the scrawlings of a youthful prodigy who had been covering paper with pictures of ships and sailors. He was asked whether these works did not show a genius for art. “No,” said the judicious artist, “the boy has been reading sea stories, and his head is full of them. He draws because he likes the things, not because he loves drawing.” The verdict stated a great critical truth—and, however unpleasant it may be to prodigies to learn that taste and faculty are not identical, and that they must rely on their power of interpreting their subject, and not on the subject itself, it is the case, nevertheless.

Now with Marryat the faculty was always equal to the fusing and managing of the materials. In “Japhet,” where he does not touch the sea at all, he has yet contrived to impart life and interest to his puppets and their doings. It may stand by “Con Cregan” in the long list of stories which began with “Guzman de Alfarache,” and includes “Moll Flanders” and “Peregrine Pickle.” In this case Marryat’s best knowledge was not available and he had to rely on his power of re-using well-worn materials. Where his experience and his ability combined, he attained to a very considerable degree of narrative skill. Whether he had trained himself by early reading or not (and indeed there is nothing to show that he was a reader), he had early command of a very admirable narrative style. It might be plausibly maintained that this was a heritage among seamen. There is nothing in English literature at once more simple, more manly, more perfectly adequate to its purpose than the language of Dampier. In Marryat’s own time this power had not been lost by English seamen. The navy may have been a rough school, but there was nothing in its training which made men unable to use the pen, and use it well. As an example of flowing, and also perfectly unaffected, description, the account of the battle of the Nile, given by Captain Miller, of the Theseus, is without fault. It deserves a place of honour in every collection of English letters. The beauty of Collingwood’s letters is acknowledged even by those who have thought fit to carp at his character. Marryat brought this style to his literary work, and kept it unchanged to the end. It is a style in which there is no straining. Marryat never had recourse, as his contemporary, Michael Scott, was wont, to capital letters, italics, and broken lines when he wished to impress his readers. He never appears even to have been particularly anxious to impress. When a wreck or a battle comes in his way, it is told as Captain Miller might have told it. Therefore it has its effect, and convinces you, as the narrative of the battle of the Nile does, that the thing described had been seen, had been lived through. The most famous of his passages—the club-hauling of the Diomede, the fight with the Russian frigate in “Mr. Midshipman Easy”—the destruction of the French liner at the end of “The King’s Own”—are too long for quotation; but in “Peter Simple” there is one which is of not unmanageable length, and which shows the qualities of his writing at their best. It is the account of the hurricane which threw Peter on the coast of St. Pierre:—

“In half an hour I shoved off with the boats. It was now quite dark, and I pulled towards the harbour of St. Pierre. The heat was excessive and unaccountable; not the slightest breath of wind moved in the heavens, or below; no clouds to be seen, and the stars were obscured by a sort of mist: there appeared a total stagnation in the elements. The men in the boats pulled off their jackets, for after a few moments’ pulling, they could bear them no longer. As we pulled in, the atmosphere became more opaque, and the darkness more intense. We supposed ourselves to be at the mouth of the harbour, but could see nothing, not three yards ahead of the boat. Swinburne, who always went with me, was steering the boat, and I observed to him the unusual appearance of the night.

“‘I’ve been watching it, sir,’ replied Swinburne, ‘and I tell you, Mr. Simple, that if we only knew how to find the brig, I would advise you to get on board of her immediately. She’ll want all her hands this night, or I’m much mistaken.’

“‘Why do you say so?’ replied I.