Some eminent Victorians: Personal recollections in the world of art and letters

by J. Comyns Carr

Mr. Weyman was at that time only on the threshold of his reputation as a novelist, and I remember that my sister—who was reading for me some of the many proffered contributions to the Magazine—most strongly urged me very carefully to consider the claims of The House of the Wolf.

A swift perusal of the story left me in no doubt as to its merits, and its warm acceptance at the hands of the readers of the Magazine amply confirmed my judgment; and yet it is strange, as illustrating how widely divergent opinions may be on matters of taste, that the story, on nearing its conclusion, was submitted to the publishers’ reader, with the idea of its being issued by them in book form, and that his unfavourable judgment left Messrs. Macmillan with no alternative but to decline the volume.

Needless to say, it was quickly accepted on my recommendation in another quarter, but by the break in our association which this incident occasioned, it chanced that I saw little of Mr. Weyman for some years to come. It was only when I had terminated my connection with the Magazine, and when I was occupied in the management of the Comedy Theatre, that a play was submitted to me by the foremost literary agent of the time, who said that he would not disclose the author’s name until its claims had been considered, but that he might mention that he was one of the most popular novelists of the day.

I was quite unconscious that I had seen the play before, and with this strong recommendation I gave it the most careful attention, and wrote to the agent a long letter setting forth what I considered to be its defects from the point of view of the stage. As I felt bound to decline the play, I did not feel justified in making further inquiry as to its authorship, and it was not until long afterwards that I had a visit from Mr. Weyman, who produced from his pocket two letters which, he said, he thought I should be interested to see. They were my own two letters, written at widely different dates, upon this very play, and it was certainly, as he pointed out, a curious testimony to the constancy of my judgment that they absolutely agreed in opinion, and were in some instances almost identical in phrase.

Strange and amusing experiences sometimes come to editors, especially to an editor of an illustrated magazine. I remember that Mr. Walter Crane had designed some very beautiful decorative work enshrining some poems of his own, and in several of the pages nude figures had been introduced, but treated in so ideal and imaginative a spirit that it seemed impossible they could provoke a protest even from an early Puritan; and yet immediately after their publication I received a letter of passionate rebuke from a reader of the Magazine dwelling in the suburbs, who with scathing criticism, obviously inspired by the loftiest moral indignation, recommended me, if I wished to study my own vile form, to look in the glass, and not, by giving such indecent pictures to the world, to pollute the purity of the reader’s home.

The letter, I think, was dated from the Old Kent Road, and the only pleasure I could draw from it rested on the fact that my Magazine was entertained in so unsuspected a quarter.

But it was not only from the humble homes of virtue that such criticism proceeded. While Hugh Conway’s story, The Family Affair, was running through the pages of the English Illustrated, I one day received a letter from the wife of an eminent judge, who told me that she could no longer permit the Magazine to lie upon her table, where it might at any time be read by her unmarried daughters.

It had been part of the author’s scheme that, during the initial stages of the story, some doubt should remain in the reader’s mind as to the legitimacy of a foundling child whom the heroine had taken under her care, and it was this suspended uncertainty which had so sorely troubled the soul of the judge’s wife.

She felt confident, as she was good enough to assure me, that the doubt would be cleared up in the end, and that the cause of morality and decorum would be ultimately vindicated, but she found it nevertheless intolerable that the innocent minds of her daughters should be haunted, even for a season, by so questionable a problem.

I never realised till I occupied the editorial chair how many people there are whose insanity takes a Shakespearian form. There was, I think, never a week passed without the reception of one or more articles intended to elucidate the authorship of the plays; and although the readers were by no means in entire agreement in ascribing them to Bacon, they were absolutely unanimous in the belief that the claims of Shakespeare were wholly and ludicrously inadmissible.