To the sympathetic reader it was evident from the first that Mr. Moore was not greatly enamoured of his work for its own sake, and that he chose his themes, not because of any imperative attraction they had for him, but simply and purely for the use to which he could put them. His choice of subject has always been the result of a deliberate search for the effective. The mental process which gave rise to "A Mummer"s Wife"
is easily traceable. The domestic life of the cla.s.s of people he made up his mind to treat was as little known to him as to almost anybody, but if properly handled it was pretty sure to make good copy. He must know it first, however, and so he set himself to learn it. This is the Zola method, but it is that method with a difference. The great French master started with an inspired and inspiring scheme, his idea being no less than to paint the society of an epoch from top to base, to present in a series of books, the writing of which should fill his literary lifetime, a completed portraiture of the whole people of his land and day. In the course of such a labour as he had courageously appointed for himself, many lines of special inquiry were necessarily indicated, but the details for which he searched were all employed with an artistic remorselessness in the building of that one great scheme of his, and each successive book which left his hands was like one more nail driven home and clinched for the support of his argument. Mr. Moore, as those who are honoured by his personal acquaintance know better than those who only read his books, resents with some warmth the obvious parallel which has been drawn between Zola and himself; but he is a copyist of Zola"s method for all that, and but for Zola"s influence would never have been heard of on his own present lines. In the writing of the "Mummers Wife"
the first obvious impulse came from Zola, It should be the writer"s business to discover a section of English life not hitherto exploited--it should be his business to explore it with a minute thoroughness--and it should, further, be his business to depict it as he found it. To be thoroughly painstaking in inquiry, and without fear in the exposition of facts discovered, were the aims before the writer. But Mr. Moore forgot, as was inevitable in the circ.u.mstances, that no desire for knowledge of things human is of real value without sympathy. He followed the fortunes of a theatrical company touring in the provinces, and though it is true enough that people who know that kind of life find trivial errors here and there, it has to be admitted that on the whole he gave a true and characteristic picture of the outside life of such a community. How a certain cla.s.s of theatrical people dress and talk, what their work is, and what their outer ways are like, he has discovered with infinite painstaking; but the fact remains that it is the work of an outsider. He has never once got under the skin of any one of his people, and this is true, because he was impelled to write about them, not because they were human, and therefore endowed with all human characteristics of hatefulness, and lovableness, and quaintness, and humour, and vanity, and jealousy, but because he saw good copy in them.
He neither loves nor hates, nor, indeed, except for his own sake, is for a. second even faintly interested. He is there to make a book, and these people offer excellent material for a book. He is astonishingly industrious, and his minuteness is without end, but he never warms to his subject. His aim, in short, is one of total artistic selfishness.
It is very likely that he would accept this statement of his standpoint, and would justify it as the only standpoint of an artist. But it is answerable for the fact that his pages are sterile of laughter and tears, of sympathy and of pity.
In "A Modern Lover" and "A Drama in Muslin" we find him dealing with a life he knows. He is no longer on ground wholly foreign to him, and it is no longer necessary that he should grope from one uncertain standing place to another, verifying himself by the dark lantern of his note-book as he goes. He moves with a more natural ease, views things with a larger and more comprehensive eye, and has at least that outside sympathy with his people which comes of community of taste and knowledge, and of familiarity with a social _milieu_.
In "Esther Waters" the earlier characteristics break out again, and break out with greater force than ever. What he calls--with one of those tumbles into foreign idiom which occasionally mark his pages--"the fever of the gamble" has never been truly diagnosed in English fiction, and the theme is undeniably fertile. He knows absolutely nothing about the manifestations of the disorder, to begin with; but that is of no consequence, for the world is open to observation; and the note-book, the inquiring mind, and the sleuthhound patience are all as available as ever. Then a combination occurs to him. Servantgalism awaits; its painter. The life is picturesque from a certain point of view: it impinges more or less on the lives of all of us, and n.o.body has. .h.i.therto thought it worth while to search into its mysteries, and to tell us what it is really like. He knows nothing at all about this either, but he will make inquiries. He does make inquiries, and they result in a picture which is, on the whole, a piece of surprising accuracy. But still all the fire is for the work. The subject is sought for, the details are gathered, the workman"s patience and labour are truly conscientious--at times they excite admiration and surprise--but the net result is lifeless. In the way of waxwork--it would be hard to find anything more effective than the people in "Esther Waters." They are clothed with an exact.i.tude of detail which would do credit to Madame Tussaud"s exhibition in its latest development. They are carefully modelled and coloured and posed. They are capital waxwork, and if the author had only cared a little bit about them, they might have even that mystic touch of life which thrills us in the finer sorts of fiction. It is eternally true that the wounded is the wounding heart, and the mere descriptive and a.n.a.lytical method not only misses the natural human movement, but it is untrue in its results. Vivisection teaches something, no doubt, but it does not bring a knowledge of the natural animal. To get that knowledge you had better live with him a little, and even love him a little, and teach him to love you. All the scientific inquiry in the world is not worth--in art--one touch of affectionate understanding.
Esther Waters is to go to a lying-in hospital, and thither goes her author before her, bent on what he can picturesquely set down about her surroundings. Her husband is to go to a hospital for consumption.
Thither goes the author, and sets down things seen and heard with the wooden, conscientious precision of a bailiff"s clerk. The conception of things inquired into seems never to move him to interest, though one is forced to believe that once, at least, he has narrowly escaped the contagion of a great scene. Esther"s illegitimate child is born, and the mother, who has temporarily left him for his own sake, to accept a position as wet-nurse, is inspired by a hungry maternal longing, which drags her irresistibly from warmth and comfort to a poverty whose bitterness has but a single solace--the joy of satisfied motherly love.
There are writers who have not a hundredth part of Mr. Moore"s industry who would have moved the reader deeply with such a scene. But, if Mr.
Moore feels at all, he is ashamed to show it. This mother-hunger is apparently just as affecting a thing to him as the position of the chest of drawers between the two windows--a fact made note of, and, therefore, to be chronicled. Either the writer is content coldly to survey this rage of pa.s.sion, or he would have us believe he is so; and in either case he misses the mark of the artist, which is, after all, to show such things as he deals with as they truly are, and to seize upon their inwardness. We do not ask for a slavering flux of sentiment, or an acrobat"s display in gesticulation. But, from a gentleman whose corns when trodden on are probably as painful as his neighbours", we are content with something less than a G.o.dlike indifference to the emotions of humanity. Let us suppose, charitably, that this is no more than a pretence, and that Mr. Moore is neither at heart so callous nor in vanity so far removed from mere emotional interests as he would seem.
The most patient of investigators in strange regions will make slips sometimes. Mr. Moore, for instance, investigating the racing stable, treats us to a view of a horse whose legs are tightly bandaged from his knees to his forelocks, and his vulgarest peasants and servants say "that is he," or "if it be." One characteristic of the common speech of our country he has caught with accuracy, though it can scarcely be said that it needed much observation to secure it. The very objectionable word "b.l.o.o.d.y," as it is used by the vulgar, is Mr. Moore"s "standby"
in "Esther Waters," It is very likely that it takes a sort of daring to introduce the word freely into a work of fiction, but the courage does not seem very much more respectable than the word.
VIII.--MR. S. R. CROCKETT--IAN MACLAREN
When I undertook the writing of this series, Mr. S. R. Crockett, except for his "Mad Sir Uchtred of the Hills," was unknown to me by actual reading. My opinion of that story was not a high one. I thought it, and on a second reading still think it, feebly pretentious. But for some reason or another Mr. Crockett"s name has been buzzed about in such a prodigality of praise that it came natural to believe and hope that later work from his pen had shown a quality which the first little _brochure_ had not revealed, and that the world had found in him a genuine addition to its regiment of literary workmen. The curiosity with which a section of the newspaper press has been inspired as to Mr. Crockett"s personal whereabouts, as to his comings and goings, his engagements for the future, and his prices "per thousand words," would have seemed to indicate that in him we had discovered a person of considerably more than the average height.
The result of a completer perusal of his writings is not merely destructive of this hope. It is positively stunning and bewildering.
Mr. Crockett is not only not a great man, but a rather futile very small one. The unblushing effrontery of those gentlemen of the press who have set _him_ on a level with Sir Walter is the most mournful and most contemptible thing in a.s.sociation with the poorer sort of criticism which has been encountered of late years.
It is no part of an honest critic"s business to be personally offensive.
It is no part of his function to find a pleasure in giving pain. But it is a part of his business, which is not to be escaped, to do his fearless best to tell the truth, and the truth about Mr. Crockett and the press is not to be told without giving deep offence, to him and it.
Fortunately, the press is a very wide corporation indeed, and if there are venal people employed upon it, there are at least as many scrupulously honourable; and if there are stupid people who can be carried by a cry, there are men of all grades of brilliant ability, ranging from genius to talent To put the matter in plain English will offend neither honesty nor ability, and to give offence to venality or incompetence is not an act of peculiar daring.
In plain English, then, it is not a matter of opinion as to whether Mr.
Crockett is worthy of the stilted encomium which has mopped and mowed about him. It is not a matter of opinion as to whether Mr. Crockett has or has not rivalled Sir Walter. It is a matter of absolute fact, about which no two men who are even moderately competent to judge can dispute for a second. The newspaper press, or a very considerable section of it, has conspired to set Mr. Crockett upon an eminence so removed from his fitness for it that he is made ridiculous by the mere fact of being perched there. When Robert Louis Stevenson suffered from the hysteria of praise, the natural feeling was to save an exquisite artist from the excusable exaltations of enthusiasm. When the genuine art and real fun and touching pathos of Mr. J. M. Barrie hurried his admirers into uncritical ecstasy, one"s only fear was lest the popular taste should take an undeserved revenge in coldness and neglect. To say in the first flush of affection and enjoyment that "A Window in Thrums" is as good as Sir Walter, or that "The Master of Ballantrae" is better, is not to exercise the faculty of a critic; but it is not monstrous or absurd. It is the expression of a momentary happy ebullience, a natural e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n of grat.i.tude for a beautiful gift. It is only when the judgment comes to be persisted in that we find any element of danger in it. It is only when gravely and strenuously repeated, as in Stevenson"s case, that it is to be resented, and then mainly on the ground that it does harm to the object of it. But in the case now under review the conditions are not the same. Poor Stevenson, whose early death is still a poignant grief was indubitably a man of genius. Settle the question of stature how you may, there is no denying the species to which such a writer belongs. Mr. Barrie _has_ genius--which is a slightly different thing.
But Mr. Crockett in the great rank of letters is "as just and mere a serving-man as any born of woman," and there has been as much banging of the paragraphic drum concerning him, and as a.s.sured a proclamation of his mastership, as if every high quality of genius were recognisable in him at a glance. If I knew of any unmistakable and tangible reason for all this I would not hesitate to name it, but I am not in the secret, and I have no right to guess. There are some sort of strings somewhere, and somebody pulls them. So much is evident on the face of things.
Who work the contemptible _fantoccini_ who gesticulate to the Ephesian hubbub of "greatness" I neither know nor care, but it is simply out of credence that their motions are spontaneous.
_Expede Herculem_. I will take a solitary story from Mr. Crockett"s "Stickit Minister."
It is called "The Courtship of Allan Fairley," The tale is of a young minister of the peasant cla.s.s, whose parents through much privation have kept their son at college. He is elected to a living in an aristocratic parish, and takes his old peasant mother to keep house for him. Some of his more polished parishioners object to the old lady"s presence at the manse, and they have the rather astonishing impertinence to propose that the son shall send her away. He refuses, and shows his visitors the door. These are the bare lines of the story so far as we are concerned with it.
Think how Dr. Macdonald or J. M. Barrie would have handled this! The humour of either would have danced round the cra.s.s obtuseness of the deputation and the mingled wrath and amus.e.m.e.nt of the minister. The story bristles with opportunity for the presentation of human contrast.
The chances are all there, and a story-teller of anything like genuine faculty could not have failed to see and to utilise some of them. Mr.
Crockett misses every conceivable point of his own tale, and with a majestic clumsiness drags in the one thing which could possibly make it offensive. The minister has nothing to fear from his visitors, for it is expressly stated that he has a majority of three hundred and sixty-five in his spiritual const.i.tuency of four hundred and thirty-five. But Mr.
Crockett"s point is that he was a hero for refusing to kick his own mother out of doors. He makes Mr. Allan Fairley tell his own tale, and the end of this portion of it runs thus:
"He got no further; he wadna hae gotten as far if for a moment I had jaloosed his drift I got on my feet I could hardly keep my hands off them, minister as I was, but I said: "Gentlemen, you are aware of what you ask me to do? You ask me to turn out of the house the mither that bore me, the mither that learnt me "The Lord"s my Shepherd," the mither that wore her fingers near the bone that I might gang to the college, that selled her bit plenishin" that my manse micht be furnished! Ye ask me to show her to the door--I"ll show you to the door!"--an" to the door they gaed!" "Weel done! That was my ain Allan!" cried I."
Was there ever a piece of sentiment cheaper, falser, more tawdry?
Who applauds a man for not turning his old mother out of doors at the impertinent request of a meddling n.o.body? Look at the stormy small capitals of this oatmeal hero, who is supposed to electrify us by the mere fact of his not being an incredible a.s.s and scoundrel! Does any sober person think for a moment that a man of genius could have made this revolting blunder? It is beyond comparison the densest bit of stupidity in dealing with the emotions I have encountered anywhere.
Anybody but Mr. Crockett can see where the point of the story lies. It lies in the cool impertinence and heartlessness of his visitors. To put the emphasis on the rejection of their proposal--to make a point of _that_--is to insult the reader. Of course it was rejected. How should it possibly, by any stretch of poltroonery and baseness, be otherwise?
_Ex pede Herculem_. This bedrummed and betrumpeted man of genius cannot read the A B _ab_ of the human emotions. "Here!" says the subtle tempter, "I"ll give you twopence if you"ll put your baby on the fire!"
The G.o.d-like hero thunders: "No! He is my flesh and blood. He is the sacred trust of Heaven. He is innocent, he is helpless. I"ll show you to the door!" Oh! what emotions stir within the heart when a master"s hand awakes a chord like this!
There is, of course, a certain angry pleasure in this necessary work; but it does not endure, and it is followed rapidly by a reaction of pain and pity. But we have a right to ask--we have a right to insist--that undeserved reputations shall not be manufactured for us by any clique.
We have a right to protest when the offence is open and flagrant. Let it be said, if it be not too late to say it, that Mr. Crockett, if left alone by his indiscreet admirers, or only puffed within the limits of the reasonable, might have been regarded as an honest workman as times go, when everybody, more or less, writes fiction.
If his pages had come before me as the work of an unknown man, seeking his proper place in the paper republic, it is certain that I could have found some honest and agreeable things to say about him. But, unfortunately, he, more than any other writer of his day, has been signalled out for those uncostly extravagances of praise which are fast discrediting us in our own eyes, and are making what should be the art of criticism a mockery, and something of a shame. In what I have written I have dealt less with his work than with the false estimate of it which, for a year or two, has been thrust upon the public by a certain band of writers who are either hopelessly incompetent to a.s.sess our labours or incurably dishonest, It is very possible indeed that Mr.
Crockett is wholly undeserving of censure in this regard, that he has not in any way asked or aided the manufacture of this balloon of a reputation in which he has been floated to such heights. Apart from the pretensions of his _claque_, there is no earthly reason why a critic should hold him up to ridicule. It is not he who is ridiculous, but at its best his position is respectable, and he holds his place (like the mob of us who write for a living) for the moment only. To pretend that he is a man of genius, to talk about him in the same breath with Sir Walter Scott, to chronicle his comings and his goings as if he were the embodiment of a new revelation, is to provoke a natural and just resentment The more plainly that resentment is expressed--the more it is seen that a false adulation is the seed of an open contempt--the less likely writers of middling faculty will be to encourage a bloated estimate of themselves.
[Since the above was written and printed Mr. Crockett has published his story of "Lads" Love," the final chapter of which is so good that in reading it I experienced a twinge of regret for the onslaught I had made. But after all it is not the author who is attacked in what goes before, and if, in the fray with the critics, he is, incidentally, as it were, somewhat roughly handled, the over-enthusiasm of his professional admirers must bear the blame. There is much prentice work in "Lads" Love," some strenuously enforced emotion, which is not genuine, and a congenital misunderstanding of the essential difference between tedium and humour; but if the whole of Mr. Crockett"s work had reached its level, the protest against his reviewers would have stood in need of modification.]
Mr. Ian Maclaren, though he is distinctly an imitator, and may be said to owe his literary existence to Mr. J. M. Barrie, is both artistic and sympathetic. His work conveys to the reader the impression of an encounter with Barrie in a dream. The keen edges of the original are blurred and partly lost, but the author of "Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush" has many excellent qualities, and if he had had the good fortune or the initiative to be first in the field, his work would have been almost wholly charming. As it is, he still shows much faculty of intuition and of heart, and his work is all sympathetically honest His emotions are genuine, and this in the creation of emotional fiction is the first essential to success. Here is another case where the hysteric overpraise of the critics has done a capable workman a serious injustice, and but for it a candid reviewer could have no temptation towards blame. His inspiration is from the outside, but that is the harshest word that can honestly be spoken, and in days when literature has become a trade such a judgment is not severe.
IX.--DR. MACDONALD AND MR. J. M. BARRIE
When one calls to mind the rapid and extensive popularity achieved by the latest school of Scottish dialect writers, one is tempted to wonder a little at the comparative neglect which has befallen a real master of that _genre_, who is still living and writing, and who began his work within the memory of the middle-aged. With the single exception of "A Window in Thrums," none of the new books of this school are worthy to be compared with "David Elginbrod," or "Alec Forbes of Howglen," or "Robert Falconer." Yet not one of them has failed to find a greater vogue or to bring to its author a more swelling reputation than Dr. Mac-donald achieved. Perhaps the reasons for these facts are not far to seek. To begin at the beginning, Sir Walter, who created the Scottish character novel, had made, in other fields, a reputation quite unparalleled in the history of fiction before he took broadly to the use of Scottish rural idiom, and the depiction of Scottish character in its peculiarly local aspects. The magic of his name compelled attention, and his genius gave a cla.s.sic flavour to dialects until then regarded as barbarous and ugly.
The flame of Burns had already eaten all grossness out of the rudest rusticities, and in the s.p.a.ce of twenty years at most the Auld Braid Scots wore the dignity of a language and was decorated with all the honours of a literature. But this, in spite of the transcendent genius of the two men to whom northern literature owes its greatest debt, brought about very little more than a local interest and a local pride.
Scott was accepted in spite of the idiom which he sometimes employed, and not because of it, and one can only laugh at the fancy presented to the mind by the picture of an English or a foreign reader who for the first time found himself confronted by Mrs. Bartlemy Saddletree"s query to her maid: "What gart ye busk your c.o.c.kernony that gait?" To this hour, indeed, there are thousands of Scott"s admirers for whom the question might just as well be framed in Sanscrit.
In Sir Walters own day and generation he had one considerable imitator in Galt, whose "Andrew Wylie of that Ilk" and "The Entail" can still afford pleasure to the reader. Then for a time the fiction of Scottish character went moribund. The prose Muse of the North was silent, or spoke in ineffectual accents. After a long interregnum came George Macdonald, unconsciously paving the way for the mob of northern gentlemen who now write with ease. He brought to his task an unusual fervour, a more than common scholarship, a more than common richness, purity, and flexibility in style, a truly poetic endowment of imagination, and a truly human endowment of sympathy, intuition, and insight. It would be absurd to say that he failed, but it is certain that he scarcely received a t.i.the either of the praise or the pudding which have fallen to the share of Mr. S. R. Crockett, for example, who is no more to be compared with him than I to Hercules. Such readers as were competent to judge of him ranked him high, but, south of the Tweed, such readers were few and far between, for he employed the idiomatic Scotch in which he chose to work with a remorseless accuracy, and in this way set up for himself a barrier against the average Englishman.
His genius, charming as it was, was not of that tremendous and compulsive sort which lays a hand on every man, and makes the breaking down of such a barrier an essential to intellectual happiness. There was a tacit admission that he was, in his measure, a great man, but that the average reader could afford to let him alone. And then, things were very different with the press. The northern part of this island, though active in press life, had nothing like its influence of to-day. To-day the press of Great Britain swarms with Scotchmen, and the "boom" which has lately filled heaven and earth with respect to the achievements of the new Scotch school has given ample and even curious evidence of that fact. The spoils to the victor, by all means. We folk from over the border are a warlike and a self-approving race, with a strong family instinct, and a pa.s.sionate love for the things which pertain to our own part of the world. If Scotchmen had been as numerous amongst pressmen as they are to-day, and as certain of their power, they would have boomed Dr. Macdonald beyond a doubt. Such recognition as he received came mainly from them. But if only the present critical conditions had existed in his early day, with what garlands would he have been wreathed, what sacrifices would have been made before him!
Apart from that rugged inaccessibility of dialect (to the merely English reader) which so often marks Dr. Macdonald"s work, there is in the main theme of his best books a reason why he should not be widely popular. The one issue in which he is most pa.s.sionately interested is theological. He has been to many a Moses in the speculative desert, leading to a land of promise. He has preached with a tender and persuasive fire the divine freedom of the soul, and its essential oneness with the Fatherhood of G.o.d. He has expended many beautiful faculties on this work, and his influence in the broadening and deepening of religious thought in Scotland is not to be denied. But his insistence on this great theme has naturally scared away the empty-headed and the shallow-hearted, and many also of the careless clever. There must be somewhere a fund of sincerity and of reason in the reader to whom he appeals. There is a public which is prepared to encounter thought, which can be genuinely stirred by a high intellectual pa.s.sion, which is athirst indeed for that highest and best enjoyment, but it is numerically small, and the writer who deals mainly with spiritual problems, and who, in doing so, is reticent and reverent, can scarcely hope to draw the mob at his wheels. In each of his three best books, Dr. Macdonald has traced the growth of a soul towards freedom.
His conception of freedom is a reasoned but absolute submission to a Divine Will; a sense of absorption in the manifest intent of a guiding Power which is wholly loving and wholly wise. To all who are able to read him he is exquisitely interesting and delightful, and to some he appeals with the authority of a prophet and divinely-appointed guide.
Along with this experience of abiding faith in him goes a dash of mysticism, of pantheism. He is essentially a poet, and had he chosen to expend more labour upon his verse he might have risen to high rank on that side. But with him the thing to be said has seemed vastly more important than the way of saying it, and he has, perhaps rightly, disdained to be laborious in the mere texture of his verse. It is rational to argue that if the poetic, inspiration is not vital enough to find an immediate expression it is not true enough to make it worth while to remould and recast it. It would seem--judging by results--that Dr. Macdonald"s conception of a lyric is of something wholly spontaneous. Be this as it may, the poetic cast of his mind is revealed in his prose with greater freedom and a completer charm than in his verse. The best of him is the atmosphere he carries. It is not possible to read his books and not to know him for a brave, sincere, and loyal man, large both in heart and brain, and they purify and tone the mind in just such fashion as the air of mountain, moor, or sea purifies and tones the body.
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 d.i.c.kens" 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 pa.s.sages 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 G.o.ds 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.