"John Ridd, the elder, churchwarden, and overseer, being a great admirer of learning, and well able to write his name, sent me, his only son, to be schooled at Tiverton, in the County of Devon. For the chief boast of that ancient town (next to its woolen staple) is a worthy grammar-school, the largest in the west of England, founded and handsomely endowed in the year 1604 by Master Peter Blundell, of that same place, clothier."
From this institution young Blackmore proceeded to Exeter College, Oxford, where he laid the foundations of his English style by taking high rank in the classics. Like many potential poets and novelists, he studied law, and was called to the bar in 1852. But he cared little for the dusty purlieus of the Middle Temple, and not at all for city life: his father was a country parson, as it is the fashion for English fathers of men of letters to be, and the young man loved the peace and quiet of rural scenery. He finally made a home at Teddington, in Middlesex, and devoted himself to the avocation of fruit-growing. On this subject he became an authority, and his articles on gardening were widely read. Here he died in January, 1900.
His death was mourned by many thousand persons who never saw him, and who knew nothing about his life. The public always loves the makers of its favourite books; but in the case of Mr. Blackmore, every reader of his masterpiece felt a peculiarly intimate relation with the man who wrote it. The story is so full of the milk of human kindness, its hero and heroine are so irresistibly attractive, and it radiates so wholesome and romantic a charm, that one cannot read it without feeling on the best possible terms with the author—as if both were intimate friends of long standing. For Lorna Doone is a book we think we have always been reading; we can hardly recall the time when it had not become a part of our literary experience; just as it takes an effort to remember that there were days and years when we were not even aware of the existence of persons who are now indissolubly close. They have since become so necessary that we imagine life before we knew them must really have been more barren than it seemed.
Like many successful novelists, Mr. Blackmore began his literary career by the publication of verse, several volumes of poems appearing from his pen during the years 1854-1860. Although he never entirely abandoned verse composition, which it was only too apparent that he wrote with his left hand, the coolness with which his Muse was received may have been a cause of his attempting the quite different art of the novel. It is pleasant to remember, however, that in these early years he translated Vergil's Georgics; combining his threefold love of the classics, of poetry, and of gardening. Of how much practical agricultural value he found the Mantuan bard, we shall never know.
Contrary to a common supposition, Lorna Doone was not his first story. He launched two ventures before his masterpiece—Clara Vaughan in 1864, and Cradock Nowell in 1866. These won no applause, and have not emerged from the congenial oblivion in which they speedily foundered. After these false starts, the great book came out in 1869, with no blare of publisher's trumpet, with scanty notice from the critics, and with no notice of any kind from the public. In the preface to the twentieth edition, and his various prefaces are well worth reading, the author remarked:—
"What a lucky maid you are, my Lorna! When first you came from the Western Moors nobody cared to look at you; the 'leaders of the public taste' led none of it to make test of you. Having struggled to the light of day, through obstruction and repulses, for a year and a half you shivered in a cold corner, without a sun-ray. Your native land disdained your voice, and America answered, 'No child of mine'; knowing how small your value was, you were glad to get your fare paid to any distant colony."
The Saturday Review for 5 November, 1870, uttered a few patronising words of praise. The book was called "a work of real excellence," but the reviewer timidly added, "We do not pretend to rank it with the acknowledged masterpieces of fiction." On the whole, there is good ground for gratitude that the public was so slow to see the "real excellence" of Lorna. A sudden blaze of popularity is sometimes so fierce as to consume its cause. Let us spend a few moments in devout meditation, while we recall the ashes of "the book of the year." The gradual dawn of Lorna's fame has assured her of a long and fair day.
Possibly one of the reasons why this great romance made so small an impression was because it appeared at an unpropitious time. The sower sowed the seed; but the thorns of Reade and Trollope sprang up and choked them. These two novelists were in full action; and they kept the public busy. Realism was strong in the market; people did not know then, as we do now, that The Cloister and the Hearth was worth all the rest of Charles Reade put together. Had Lorna Doone appeared toward the end of the century, when the Romantic Revival was in full swing, it would have received a royal welcome. But how many would have recognised its superiority to the tinsel stuff of those recent days, full of galvanised knights and stuffed chatelaines? For Lorna belongs to a class of fiction with which we were flooded in the nineties, though, compared with the ordinary representative of its kind, it is as a star to a glow-worm. Readers then enjoyed impossible characters, whose talk was mainly of "gramercy" and similar curiosities, for they had the opportunity to "revel in the glamour of a bogus antiquity." But an abundance of counterfeits does not lower the value of the real metal; and Lorna is a genuine coin struck from the mint of historical romance. In the original preface its author modestly said:—
"This work is called a 'romance,' because the incidents, characters, time, and scenery are alike romantic. And in shaping this old tale, the writer neither dares, nor desires, to claim for it the dignity or cumber it with the difficulty of an historic novel."
In warmth and colour, in correct visualisation, and in successful imitation of the prose of a bygone day (which no one has ever perfectly accomplished), it ranks not very far below the greatest of all English historical romances, Henry Esmond.