Whyte-Melville, the sportsman, is a figure of dignity and inspiration; Whyte-Melville, the social novelist, is Ouida in breeches. That the breeches are of perfect cut may not disguise the conventional swagger of the legs they cover. The ways trodden by this author in his search for character and incident are the exclusive ways of Victorian landlordism. Their pavements are thronged with fair ladies and brave gentlemen, while in the roadway crowd the lower orders—some mildly criminal, some a little comic, but the majority joyous in their privilege to serve the brilliant purpose of their betters. The antics of these humble creatures are watched with kindly patronage by those to whom wealth and pleasure are a normal birthright. Conversing among themselves, heartily but with elegance, the Guardsmen and squirelings of the fashionable clubs find time to exchange gracious greeting with their poorer neighbours, whose uncouth speech strikes quaintly pleasant on their cultured ears. An instruction is given; half a sovereign changes hands; a cap is dutifully touched. God willed that of His creatures some be rich and others poor; let the former bear themselves honourably and remember (when not otherwise engaged) the duties of their station; let the latter be happy in the lot to which Providence has called them.
But genial condescension to his dependants is not the only or even the main business of the Whyte-Melville gentleman. His life has two absorbing interests—horses and ladies. To a point these interests merge. With identical expertise he takes the points of a fine girl and of a blood mare. The former in her drawing-room, the latter in her stable, await in gleaming beauty his appreciative caress. At their point of ultimate usefulness, however, femininity and horseflesh part company. The latter is the hero's ally, the former his quarry in the chase; and while his adventures on horseback are told with the zest and knowledge of real authority, his exploits in lady-killing have the tedious unreality of a tale only half imagined and not a quarter lived.
It is for the falseness of his emotional writing that Whyte-Melville challenges comparison with Ouida. And, the comparison made, one is bound to concede victory to the latter. Both deal in the passions of the nobly born; but while the woman has at least the courage of bad taste, the man, fettered by good form, achieves no taste at all. Whyte-Melville's novels, like Hamlet, are full of quotations. He is the father of novelette; the wellspring of cliché. His lovely ladies are not women nor his gallants men: they are the dummies of suburban melodrama, exquisitely gowned, faultlessly tailored, mouthing the phrases of drawing-room passionates, but, even as dummies, failing to achieve that semblance of gilded sin that is their only purpose.
Nevertheless, despite their ineptitude, the books of Whyte-Melville compel a curious and obscure respect. Respect for what it were hard to say, for his written word is his own deadliest accuser. Sentences might be chosen almost at random from the novels of social life that would prove his possession of every fault possible to a novelist and to a writer of prose. And yet, through the screen of their fatuity, one has glimpses of the personality of the author himself—a personality at which one may make mock, but only with affection. This country gentleman turned novelist was an upright, guileless creature, hard riding, generous hearted, as unconscious of his innate snobbery as of his natural modesty, conventional because unaware of any world or school of thought beyond the narrow limits of his own. His pictures of England are as dull and as unreal as the pretty garden scenes in water-colour produced by county ladies to this day; but both the painter of these lifeless pictures and the comfortable amateurs responsible for horrid views of moorland and herbaceous border command a sort of wistful admiration. There is something so clean and easy and contented in the mentality from which these books and drawings spring that, if only it were not so stupid, so impenetrable to variety of idea, its passing might well be looked on with regret. Whyte-Melville's qualities, like those of the type he represents, are more obscure than his defects. The class of country gentleman to which he personally belonged is rapidly disappearing; when it is gone we shall wonder a little perplexedly why we miss it. It was so easy to ridicule, so pathetically a target for mockery and persecution. In our greater wisdom we have shot it to pieces, riddling its obtuse selfishness, its bland complacency, with the bullets of reforming zeal. But something fine will have perished with it, something indefinable but leaving a sense of gap, to remind us that destruction is never quite the discriminating triumph that iconoclasts claim for it in advance.
This, then, is one contemporary view of Whyte-Melville's novels, whose only demonstrable virtue is their sportsmanship. One may quote from Market Harborough, from Riding Recollections, even from the social stories, passages of speed and exhilaration, passages of unaffected wisdom and perception, descriptive of the hunting that, next to honour, he loved best of all that life could offer. In opposition may be printed page after page of stilted rhetoric, mawkish humour, the falsest of sentiment, the most wanton elaboration of noun and adjective. But after all quotation is done and a balance struck, there will still remain the elusive quality that gave character to the class from which the author came, an essence of breeding and tradition that no phrasing can crystallize, that vanishes in the moment of its expression. For this spiritual quality Whyte-Melville is admirable; for his literary faults he is unreadable. Such, in a nutshell, is the judgment of one reader who cannot excuse a book stupidity and pretentiousness for the sake of isolated passages of hunting lore, but seeks to appreciate in the character of a social generation that is fading fast, a distinction that to all seeming will fade with it.
There are, however, readers of other kinds, and for their sake and because among our grandmothers and our aunts the stories of Whyte-Melville were avidly admired, a summary classification of his books shall be attempted.
He began as a writer of autobiographies, of the part-fashionable, part-sporting, part-knockabout kind, the tradition of which came down from the eighteenth century, through Frederick Marryat, to a dozen writers of the hard-drinking, riotous forties. Digby Grand (1853) and Tilbury Nogo (1854) are essentially novels of this type, while in Kate Coventry (1856) the author merely adapts the recipe to the needs of a girl heroine. The Interpreter (1858) strikes a note of its own, for the scenes in the Crimea and in Turkey were drawn from the writer's experience and give a convincing picture of the period and its happenings. Apart from them, however, the book is an ordinary first-person record of the social wanderings of a young Englishman of family.
Between the second and the third of the books above mentioned had appeared General Bounce (1855), a transitional novel, not wholly apart from those that preceded it, but halfway to a place among the stories of contemporary love-making and sport, of which the author was to produce a lengthy list. These novels of English society contain much of the most repellent of Whyte-Melville's work, although many have refreshing interludes of hunting and scenes on the racecourse or in the stable that will endear them to specialists in the genre, if they cannot reconcile others to the artificial tedium of the love stories and the clumsy contriving of the plots. Here are the titles of the social novels:
General Bounce (1855),
Good for Nothing (1861),