This episode is retained, in spite of the work of purification which has been performed; and it may be said that if the original novel were nastier than this deodorised edition of it, it is very much of a wonder how the critical stomach kept it down.
It is a refreshment to turn from this particular problem seeker to the work of a writer like Mrs. Humphry Ward, who, if she invests the questions she handles with more importance than actually belongs to them, is as wholesome and sincere as one could ask. She has read both deeply and widely, she thinks with sanity and clearness, she discerns character, she can create and tell a story, her style is excellently succinct and full, and any book from her pen may safely be guaranteed to fill many charmed and thoughtful hours. She is still a seeker of problems, and shares the faults of her school, inasmuch as she sets herself to the solution of themes which all thoughtful people have solved for themselves at an early age. It would be difficult, perhaps, to find a better and more salutary stimulant for the mind of a very young man or woman than "Robert Elsmere," to cite but one work of hers, but to the adult intelligence she seems a day behind the fair. She expends something very like genius in establishing a truth which is only doubted by here and there a narrow bigot--that truth being that a man may find himself forced to abandon the bare dogma of religion, and may yet conserve his faith in the Unseen and his spiritual brotherhood with men. "Robert Elsmere" is a very beautiful piece of work, and it is impossible not to respect the ardour which inspires it, and the many literary excellences by which it is distinguished. But, all the same, it leaves upon the mind a sense of some futility. It would be easy to write a story which would prove--if a story can be imagined to prove anything--the precise opposite of the truth so eloquently preached in "Robert Elsmere," and the tale might be perfectly true to the experience of life. There are men who, parting with dogmatic religion, part with religion altogether, and whose only chance of salvation from themselves lies in the acceptance of a hard and fast creed. It would be easy enough, and true enough, to show such a man a.s.sailed by doubt, struggling and succ.u.mbing, and then going headlong to the devil. The thing has happened many a time. Mrs. Humphry Ward shows another kind of man, and depicts him most ably. Robert Elsmere is even a better Christian when he has surrendered his creed than he was whilst he held it, for he has reached to a loftier ideal of life, and he dies as a martyr to its duties. But the story has the air of being controversial, and fiction and controversy do not work well together. It is possible to establish any theory, so far as a single instance will do it, when you have the manufacture both of facts and of characters in your own hands.
Accept an extreme case. A practised novelist might take in hand the character of a morose and surly fellow who was generous and expansive in his cups. So long as the wretch was sober he might be made hateful; half fill him with whisky, and you gift him with all manner of emotional good qualities. The study might be real enough, but it would prove nothing.
The novelist who a.s.sails a controversial question begs everything, and the answer to a problem so posed is worthless except as the expression of an individual opinion. It may be urged--and there is force in the contention--that there are many people who are only induced to think of serious themes when they are dressed in the guise of fiction, as there are people who cannot take pills unless they are sugar-coated. Again--as admitted already--a mind in process of formation might be strengthened and broadened by the influence of such a book as "Robert Elsmere." There are some to whom its apparent trend of thought will appear to be simply d.a.m.nable. That one may have scant respect for their judgment, and no share at all in their opinion, does not alter the fact that the weapon employed against them is not and cannot be fairly used.
Many years ago, Mr. Clark Russell, whose name is now a household word, was the editor of an ill-fated society journal. I was a contributor to its little-read pages, and I came one day upon an article ent.i.tled "Pompa Mortis." This article was written in such astonishingly good English, so clean, so hardbitten and terse, and yet so graceful, that I could not resist the temptation to ask its author"s name. My editor modestly acknowledged it for his own, and when I told him what I thought of its style he confessed to a close study of Defoe and a great admiration for him. I saw nothing more from his hand until I read "The Wreck of the Grosvenor," the first of that series of sea stories which has carried Mr. Russell"s name about the world. An armchair voyage with Russell is almost as good as the real thing, and sometimes (as when the perils and distresses of shipwreck are in question) a great deal better.
Had any man ever such an eye for the sea before, or such a power of bringing it to the sight of another? Few readers, I fancy, care a copper for his fable, or very much for his characters, except for the mere moment when they move in the page; but his descriptions of sky and sea linger in the mind like things actually seen. They are so sharp, so vivid, so detailed, so true, that a marine painter might work from them.
And the really remarkable thing about them is the infinite variety of these seascapes and skyscapes. He seems never to repeat himself. He is various as the seas and skies he paints. One figures his mind as some sort of marvellous picture gallery. He veritably sees things, and he makes the reader see them. And all the strange and curious sea jargon, of which not one landsman in a thousand understands anything--combings and back-stays and dead-eyes, and the rest of it--takes a salt smack of romance in his lips. He can be as technical as he pleases, and the reader takes him on faith, and rollicks along with him, bewildered, possibly, but trusting and happy. And Clark Russell has not only been charming. He has been useful, too, and Foc"sle Jack owes him a debt of grat.i.tude. For though he does not shine as a draughtsman where the subtleties of character are concerned, he knows Jack, who is not much of a metaphysical puzzle, inside and out, and he has brought him home to us as no sea-writer ever tried to do before. Years ago it seemed natural to fancy that he might write himself out, but he goes on with a freshness which looks inexhaustible. If I cannot read him with the old enjoyment it is my misfortune and not his fault. If his latest book had been his first I should have found in it the charm which caught me years ago.
But it is in the nature of things that an individual writer like Clark Russell should be his own most dangerous rival.
Clark Russell is captain on his own deck, whether he sail a coffin or a princely Indiaman of the old time. Sir Walter Besant is lord of his own East End, and of that innocent seraglio of delightful and eccentric young ladies to which he has been adding for years past Sir Walter Besant is chiefly remarkable as an example of what may be done by a steadfast cheerfulness in style. His creed has always been that fiction is a recreative art, and we have no better sample of a manly and stout-hearted optimist than he. He is optimistic of set purpose, and sometimes his cheerfulness costs him a struggle, for he is tender-hearted and clear-sighted, and he is the Columbus of "the great joyless city" of the East. He has had a double aim--to keep his work recreative and to make it useful. In one respect he has been curiously happy, for he once dreamt aloud a beautiful dream, and has lived to find it a reality. It was his own bright hope which built the People"s Palace, and a man might rest on that with ample satisfaction.
He has given us many well-studied types of character, but he excels in the portraiture of the manly young man and the lovable young woman.
In this regard I find him at his apogee with Phyllis Fleming and Jack Dunquerque, who are both frankly alive and charming. He is good, too, at the portraiture of a humbug, and finds a humorous delight in him, very much as d.i.c.kens did. There is more than a touch of d.i.c.kens in his method, and in his way of seeing people, and, most of all, in the warm-hearted cheer he keeps.
It is outside the purpose of this series to dwell on anything but the literary value of the works of the people dealt with; but little apology, after all, is needed for a side-glance at the work which Sir Walter Besant has done for men of letters. He has worked hard at the vexed and difficult question of copyright; he has founded an Authors"
Club and an authors" newspaper; and he has devoted with marked unselfishness much valuable time and effort to the general well-being of the craft. He has stood out stoutly for the State recognition of authorship, and in his own person he has received it. _Esprit de corps_ is a capital thing in its way. Whether it is well to have too much of it in a body of men who hold the power of the Press largely in their own hands, whilst at the same time publicity is the breath of their nostrils, is perhaps an open question. But of Sir Walter Besant"s single-mindedness in this voluntary work there is no shadow of doubt.
Remembering his popularity with the public, and the price he can command for his work, it is evident that he has expended in the pursuit of his ideal time which would have been worth some thousands of pounds to him.
He has striven in all ways to do honour to letters, and the esteem in which he is held is a just payment for high purpose and unselfish labour.
XI.--MISS MARIE CORELLI
In an article intended for this series and set under this lady"s name (an article now suppressed, and therefore to be re-written), I fell into an error which appears to have been shared by several of the critics who dealt with what was then the latest of her books, "The Sorrows of Satan," I a.s.sumed Miss Corelli to have drawn her own portrait, as she sees things, in the character of "Mavis Clare." This belief has been expressed--so it turns out--by other people, and I learn that Miss Corelli has authoritatively denied it "She objects very strongly," so says an inspired defender, "to a notion which was started by one of the most distinguished of her interviewers, and absolutely denies the a.s.sertion that she described herself as "Mavis Clare" in "The Sorrows of Satan."" Miss Corelli, of course, knows the truth about this matter, and n.o.body else can possibly know it, but it is at least permissible to examine the evidence which led many separate people to the same false conclusion. "Mavis Clare" and Marie Corelli own the same initials, and until the fact that this was a mere fortuitous chance was made clear by Miss Corelli herself it seemed natural to suppose that an ident.i.ty was coyly hinted at. "Mavis Clare" is a novelist, and so is Miss Corelli.
"Mavis Clare" is _mignonne_ and fair, "is pretty, and knows how to dress besides," is a "most independent creature, too; quite indifferent to opinions," All these things, as we learn from many sources, are true of Miss Corelli also. It is said of Miss Corelli herself that "dauntless courage, a clear head, and a tremendous power of working hard without hurting herself have helped her to make a successful use of her great gift. She is not afraid of anything. She "insists on herself," and is unique," It is to be noted that all this is said by Miss Corelli of "Mavis Clare," Miss Corelli is at war with the reviewers. So is "Mavis Clare," Miss Corelli"s books circulate by the thousand. So do "Mavis Clare"s." "Mavis Clare" is utterly indifferent to outside opinion. So is Miss Corelli. In point of fact, if anybody thought Miss Corelli a woman of astonishing genius, and wrote an honest account of her, he would describe her precisely as Miss Corelli has described "Mavis Clare."
There is, in fact, a point up to which "Mavis Clare" and Miss Corelli are not to be separated. There are a score of things in any description of the one which are indubitably true of the other. But when Miss Corelli writes of "Mavis Clare" in such terms as are now to be quoted we begin to see that she is and must be indignant at the supposition that she is still writing of herself: "She is too popular to need reviews. Besides, a large number of the critics--the "log-rollers"
especially--are mad against her for her success, and the public know it.
Clearness of thought, brilliancy of style, beauty of diction--all these are hers, united to consummate ease of expression and artistic skill.
The potent, resistless, unpurchasable quality of Genius. She wrote what she had to say with a gracious charm, freedom, and innate consciousness of strength. She won fame without the aid of money, and was crowned so brightly and visibly before the world that she was beyond criticism."
But is it not just within the bounds of possibility that Miss Corelli began with some idea of depicting herself, and, discarding that idea, took too little care to obliterate resemblances? Even here she trenches too closely upon the truth to escape the calumnious supposition that she is writing of herself. She _is_ too popular to need reviews. She is at war with the critics, and she has induced a very large portion of the public to believe that "a number of the critics--the "log-rollers"
especially--are mad against her for her success."
Were I, the present writer, to invent a fictional character, to give him for the initials of his name the letters D. C. M., to describe him as awkward and burly, with an untidy head of grey hair, to make him a novelist, a Bohemian and a wanderer, and then to paint him as a man of genius and an astonishing fine fellow, I should expect to be told that I had been guilty of a grave insolence. If I could honestly say that the resemblances had never struck me, and that the egregious vanity of the picture was a wholly imaginary thing, I should, of course, desire to be believed, and I should, of course, deserve to be believed. But I should encounter doubt, and I should not be disposed to wonder at it. If I were annoyed with anybody I should be annoyed with myself for having given such a handle to the world"s ill-nature.
Accepting Miss Corelli"s disclaimer, one is still forced to the conclusion that she has fallen into a serious indiscretion.
In "The Murder of Delicia" we are made acquainted with another lady-writer who enjoys all the popularity of Miss Corelli and of "Mavis Clare," who has the genius and the eyes and the stature and the hair of both. "As a writer she stood quite apart from the rank and file of modern fictionists." "The public responded to her voice, and clamoured for her work, and as a natural result of this, all ambitious and aspiring publishers were her very humble suppliants. Whatsoever munificent and glittering terms are dreamed of by authors in their wildest conceptions of a literary El Dorado were hers to command; and yet she was neither vain nor greedy." One thanks G.o.d piously that yet she was neither vain nor greedy; but one can"t keep the mouth from watering. Ah! those wildest conceptions of a literary El Dorado!
"Delicia" gets 8,000L. for a book. May it be delicately hinted that this sum is only approached in the receipts of one living lady-writer, and that the lady-writer"s name is ------? Wild horses shall not drag this pen further.
Miss Corelli complains, in a preface to this recent work, that "every little halfpenny ragam.u.f.fin of the press that can get a newspaper corner in which to hide himself for the convenience of throwing stones," pelts every "brilliant woman" with the word "uns.e.xed." Honestly, I don"t remember the reproach being hurled at Mrs. Browning, or George Eliot, or Mrs. Cowden Clarke, or Charlotte Bronte, or Maria Edgeworth, or Mrs.
Hemans. Miss Corelli tells us that the woman who is "well-nigh stripped to man"s gaze every night," and who "drinks too much wine and brandy,"
is not subjected to this reproach, whilst if another woman "prefers to keep her woman"s modesty, and execute some great work of art which shall be as good or even better than anything man can accomplish, she will be dubbed "uns.e.xed" instantly," Where has Miss Corelli found the society of which these amazing things are true? Does anybody else know it?
And where are the better works of art from woman"s hand than man can accomplish? "Aurora Leigh" and the Portuguese Sonnets are at the top of feminine achievement, and Shakespeare is not dethroned. And here is a pearl of common sense: "To put it bluntly and plainly, a great majority of the men of the present day want women to keep them," This is Miss Corelli in her own person in her preface, and, "to put it bluntly and plainly," the statement is not true, or approximately true, or within shouting distance of the truth. And what of the "persons of high distinction who always find something curiously degrading in paying their tradesmen"? Are they commoner than persons of high distinction who meet their bills? Are they as common? Miss Corelli sweeps the board. She is angry because some people will not take her seriously, but whilst her pages are charged with this kind of matter, she cannot fairly blame anybody but herself. She burns to be a social reformer. It would be unjust to deny her ardour. But when she tells the tale of a penniless n.o.bleman who lives on his wife"s money and breaks her heart, and a.s.sures us that "there are thousands of such cases every day," she undoes her own sermon by one rampant phrase of nonsense There are such men, more"s the pity, and they are the social satirist"s honest game There have been foolish people who thought that women uns.e.xed themselves by doing artistic work, but they died many years ago, for the most part. There are men who want to marry rich women, and live lazy lives, but they are not "a great majority." Miss Corelli knows these things, of course, for they are patent to the world; but she allows zeal to run away with judgment. The rules for satire are the rules for Irish stew. You mustn"t _empty_ the pepper-castor, and the pot should be kept at a gentle bubble only. There is reason in the profitable denunciation of a wicked world, as well as in the roasting of eggs.
But Miss Corelli has. .h.i.t the public hard, and it is the self-imposed task of the present writer to find out, as far as in him lies, why and how she has done this. Miss Corelli"s force is hysteric, but it is sometimes very real. A self-approving hysteria can do fine things under given conditions. It has been the motive power in some work which the world has rightly accepted as great. In the execution of certain forms of emotional art it is a positive essential. Much genuine poetry has been produced under its influence. It is a sort of spiritual wind, which, rushing through the harp-strings of the soul, may make an extraordinary music. But the sounds produced depend not upon the impulse conveyed to the instrument, but on the quality and condition of the instrument itself. Without the impulse a large and various mind may lie quiescent. With the impulse a small and disordered spirit may make a very considerable sound. In the very loftiest flights of genius we discern a sort of glorious dementia. All readers have found it in the last splendid verse of "Adonas." It proclaims itself in Keats in the wild _navete_ of the inquiry, "Muse of my native land, am I inspired?"
The faculty of the very greatest among the great lies in the existence of this inrush of emotion, in strict subordination to the intellectual powers. To be without it precludes greatness; to be wholly subject to its influence is to be insane. Miss Corelli experiences the inrush of emotion in great force, but, unfortunately for her work, and for herself, the sense of power which it inspires is not co-ordinate with the strength of intellect which is essential to its control.
Miss Corelli has ventured freely into the domain of spiritual things, and has dealt, with more daring than knowledge, with esoteric mysteries.
The great reading public knows little of these matters, because, as a rule, they have been expressed by writers whose works are too abstruse to catch the popular ear. It is only when they are handled by writers of imaginative fiction that they become popularly known at all. In "The Sorrows of Satan" Miss Corelli has earned a reputation for originality by advancing a theory which is older than many of the hills. It has been for ages a rooted religious belief, but it is wholly in conflict with the theological ideas which are taught in our churches and chapels, and has, therefore, a startling air of strangeness to the average church and chapel-goer.
The theory is thus expressed in Mr. C. G. Harrison"s lectures on "The Transcendental Universe": "It is generally supposed that Satan is the enemy of spirituality in man; that he delights in his degradation, and views with diabolical satisfaction the development of his lower nature and all its evil consequences. The wide, and almost universal, prevalence of this mediaeval superst.i.tion only makes it all the more necessary to protest against it as a grotesque error.... It would probably be much nearer the truth to say that the degradation and suffering of mankind, for which the adversary of G.o.d is responsible, so far from affording him any satisfaction, afflict him with a sense of failure and deepen his despair of ultimate victory."
This is, of course, the root idea of "The Sorrows of Satan," and if the theme had been handled with reserve and dignity a very n.o.ble book indeed might without doubt have been built upon it. But Miss Corelli has not had the power to confine herself within the limits of the severe and lofty conception of the old Theosophists. Her sorrowful Satan grows first melodramatic and then absurd. The notion that the great sad adversary of Almighty Goodness is settled in a modern London hotel, with a private cook of his own, and a privately engaged bath of his own, carries the reader away from the original conception to the burlesque--vulgar and flagrant--of the mystery-plays of the Middle Ages; and the devotion of supernatural power to the preparations for a suburban garden-party is purely ludicrous. Miss Corelli has seized the Theosophic thought, which in itself is far n.o.bler and more poetic than the Miltonic, but she has not been strong enough to use it. She has fallen under the weight of her chosen theme, and the result is that her demoniac hero is at one time presented as a majestic and suffering spirit, and at another as a mere Merry Andrew.
The curious and instructive part of all this is that, if Miss Corelli had been gifted with any power of self-criticism, her ardour would have been damped, and any work she might have done would have suffered proportionately. Her work has. .h.i.t the public hard, and it has done so because, of its kind, her inspiration has been genuine. The wind does not blow through the strings of a well-ordered instrument, but _it blows_, and however grotesque the sound produced may sometimes be, it is of a sort which is not to be produced by any mere mechanism of the mind.
To the critical ear the tunes played in "Wormwood" and "The Sorrows of Satan" are not, and cannot be, agreeable. The writer, to speak in plain English, and without the obscurity of symbols, is the owner of genius on the emotional side, and is not the owner of genius, or anything approaching to it, even from afar, on the intellectual side. The result of this disproportion between impulse and power is, to the critical mind, disastrous; but it does not so make itself felt with the ordinary reader. It is rather an unusual thing with him to come into contact with a real force in books. He has not read or thought enough to know that the ideas offered to him with such transcendental pomp are old and commonplace. It is enough for him to feel that the writer understands herself to be a personage.
She succeeds in imposing herself upon the public because she has first been convinced of her own authority. Her inward conviction of the authority of her own message and her own power to deliver it is the one qualification which makes her different from the mob of writing ladies. Even when she deals with purely social themes the same air of overwhelming earnestness sits upon her brow. In a little trifle published in the November of 1896, and ent.i.tled "Jane," she goes to work with a quite prophetic ardour to tell a story almost identical with that related in a sc.r.a.p of Thackeray"s "c.o.x"s Diary." The reader may find the tale in the second chapter of that brief work, where it is headed "First Rout." Thackeray tells his version of it with a sense of fun and humour.
Miss Corelli tells hers with the voice and manner of a Boanerges..
Nothing is to be done without the divine afflatus, and plenty of it.
The temperamental difference between the satirist and the scold is well ill.u.s.trated by a large handling and a little handling of the same theme.
The point upon which it seems worth while to insist is this: That the ma.s.s of the reading public is always ready to submit itself to the influence of sincerity. It does not seem much to matter what inner characteristics the sincerity may have. In the case now under a.n.a.lysis the quality seems to resolve itself into pure self-confidence. Miss Corelli"s method of capturing the public mind is not a trick which anybody else might copy. It is the result of a real, though perilous, gift of nature--a gift which she possesses in something of a superlative degree. n.o.body could pretend to such a gift and succeed by virtue of the pretence. Miss Corelli is, at least, quite serious in the belief that she is a woman of genius. She is only very faintly touched with doubt when she thinks that the people who are laughing at her are writhing with envy. She speaks, therefore, with precisely that air of authority to which she would have a right if her ideas with regard to her own mental power were based on solid fact.
So far we arrive at little more than the long-established truth that the unthinking portion of the public is not only longing for a moral guide, but is ready to accept anybody who is conscious of authority. It would be well if we could leave Miss Corelli here, but something remains to be said which is not altogether pleasant to say. In "The Sorrows of Satan"
many pages are devoted to the bitter (and merited) abuse of certain female writers who deal coa.r.s.ely with the s.e.xual problem. But Miss Corelli appears to think that she may be as frankly disagreeable as she pleases so long as she is conscious of a moral purpose. Whatever she may feel, and whatever estimable purposes may guide her, she has published many things which run side by side with her denunciation of her sister writers, and are as offensive as anything to be found in the work of any living woman. Take as a solitary example the following pa.s.sage:
"I soon found that Lucio did not intend to marry, and I concluded that he preferred to be the lover of many women, instead of the husband of one. I did not love him any the less for this; I only resolved that I would at least be one of those who were happy enough to share his pa.s.sion. I married the man Tempest, feeling that, like many women I knew, I should, when safely wedded, have greater liberty of action. I was aware that most modern men prefer an amour with a married woman to any other kind of _liaison_, and I thought Lucio would have readily yielded to the plan I had preconceived."
I do not know of any pa.s.sage in any of the works so savagely a.s.saulted by Miss Corelli which goes beyond this; and I think it the more, and not the less, objectionable, because the lady who wrote it can see so very plainly how sinful her offence is when it is committed by other people.
XII.--THE AMERICANS
I suppose it will not be disputed that the glory of a nation"s literature lies in the fact that it is national--that it reflects truly the spirit and the life of the people with whom it is concerned, by whom it is written, and to whom it belongs. It will not be denied either that this final splendour has not yet descended on the literature of America.
The happy and tonic optimism of Emerson is a gift which could hardly have been bestowed upon any man in an old country. It belongs to a land and a time of boundless aspiration and of untired youth, and in virtue of this possession Emerson is amongst the most characteristically American of Americans. In the walks of fiction, with which alone we have to deal in these pages, the Americans have been distinctively English in spirit and in method (until within recent years), even when they have dealt with themes chosen from their own surroundings. There is nowhere in the world, and never was until now, and possibly never again will be, such another field for the born student of human nature as is afforded by the United States at this time. The world has never seen such an intimate mixture of racial elements as may be found there. A glance at the Newspaper Directory shows the variety and extent of the foreign elements which, though in rapid process of absorption, are as yet undigested. Hundreds on hundreds on hundreds of journals minister to the daily and weekly needs of Germans, Frenchmen, Italians, Norwegians, Swedes, Russians, Hungarians. There are Polish newspapers, and Armenian, and Hebrew, and Erse and Gaelic. Sleepy old Spain is rubbing shoulders with the eager and energetic races of Maine and New York and Ma.s.sachusetts. The negro element is everywhere, and the Chinese add a flavour of their own to the _olla podrida_. So far no American writers of fiction have seen America in the large. Bits of it have been presented with an admirable art; but as yet the continent awaits its d.i.c.kens, its Balzac, its Shakespeare, or its Zola.
Mr. Bret Harte has made California his own, but it is not the California of to-day. "Gone is that camp, and wasted all its fire," but the old life lives in some of its pages still, and will find students for a long time to come. He has given us three, perhaps, of the best short stories in the world, and a man who has done so much has a right to grat.i.tude and goodwill. Possibly there never was a writer who gave the world all the essentials personal to his art so early, and yet so long survived in the race for popularity. Bret Harte"s first book was something like a revelation. In workmanship he reminds the reader of d.i.c.kens, but his surroundings were wholly novel, and as delightful as they were strange.
He bewitched the whole reading world with "The Luck of Roaring Camp,"
and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," and ever since those days he has gone on with a tireless vivacity, telling the same stories over and over again, showing us the same scenes and the same people with an apparent unconsciousness of the fact of repet.i.tion which is truly astonishing.
The roads of dusty red and the scented pine groves come back in story after story, and Colonel Starbottle and Jack Folinsbee look like immortals. The vagabond with the melodious voice who did something virtuous and went away warbling into the night is alive in new as in old pages, in defiance of fatigue. Preternaturally murderous gamblers with a Quixotic eye to the point of honour, saintly blackguards with superhuman splendours of affection and loyalty revealed in the final paragraph of their history, go on and on in his pages with changeless aspect. The oddest mixture of staleness and of freshness is to be found there. Since he first delighted us he has scarcely troubled himself once to find a new story, or a new type of character, or a new field for his descriptive powers. He took the Spanish mission into his stock-in-trade, and he has since made that as hackneyed as the rest. And yet there remains this peculiarity about him--his latest stories, are pretty nearly as good as his first. It would seem as if his interest had not flagged, as if the early impressions which impelled him to write were still clear and urgent in his mind. He is amongst the most singular of modern literary phenomena. The zest with which he has told the same tale for so many years sets him apart. It is as if until the age, say, of thirty he had been gifted with a brilliant faculty of observation, and had then suddenly ceased to observe at all. There seems to have come a time when his musical box would hold no more tunes, and ever since then he has gone on repeating the old ones. The oddness is not so much in the repet.i.tion as in the air of enjoyment and spontaneity worn by the grinder. He at least is not fatigued, and to readers who live from hand to mouth, and have no memories, there is no reason why he should ever grow fatiguing.
Mr. Henry James is a gentleman who has taken a little more culture than is good for the fibre of his character. He is certainly a man of many attainments and of very considerable native faculty, but he staggers under the weight of his own excellences. The weakness is common enough in itself, but it is not common in combination with such powers as Mr.
James possesses. He is vastly the superior of the common run of men, but he makes his own knowledge of that fact too clear. It is a little difficult to see why so worshipful a person should take the trouble to write at all, but it is open to the reader to conjecture that he would not be at so much pains unless he were pushed by a compulsory sense of his own high merits. He feels that it would be a shame if such a man should be wasted. I cannot say that I have ever received; from him any supreme enlightenment as to the workings of that complex organ, the human heart, but I understand quite definitely that Mr. James knows all about it, and could show many things if he were only interested enough to make an effort He is the apostle of a well-bred boredom. He knows all about society, and _bric-a-brac_, and pictures, and music, and natural landscape, and foreign cities, and if he could feel a spice of interest in any earthly thing he could be charming. But his listless, easy air--of gentlemanly-giftedness fatigued--provokes and bores. He is like a man who suppresses a yawn to tell a story. He is a blend of genuine power and native priggery, and his faults are the more annoying because of the virtues they obscure and spoil. He is big enough to know better.
It is likely enough that to Mr. James the fact of having been bred in the United States has proved a disadvantage. To the robuster type of man of letters, to the d.i.c.kens or Kipling kind of man, it would be impossible to wish better luck than to be born into that bubbling pot-full of things. But Mr. James"s over-accentuated refinement of mind has received the very impetus of which it stood least in need. He has grown into a humorous disdain of vulgar emotions, partly because he found them so rich about him. The figures which Bret Harte sees through a haze of romance are to him essentially coa.r.s.e. The thought of Mr.
James in a.s.sociation with Tennessee and Partner over a board supplied with hog, flapjack and forty-rod awakes a bewildering pity in the mind.
An hour of Colonel Starbottle would soil him for a week. He is not made for such contact. It is both curious and instructive to notice how the too-cultured sensitiveness of a man of genius has blinded him to the greatest truth in the human life about him. Born into the one country where romance is still a constant factor in the lives of men, he conceives romance to be dead. With stories worthy of a great writer"s handling transacting themselves on every hand, he is the first elucidator of the principle that a story-teller"s business is to have no story. The vision of the sheet which was let down from Heaven to Peter was seen in vain so far as he is concerned, but the story of that dream holds an eternal truth for the real artist. Mr. James is not the only man whose best-nursed and most valued part has proved to be destructive With a little more strength he might have kept all his delicacies, and have been a man to thank G.o.d for. As it is, he is the victim of an intellectual foppery.
Mr. W. D. Howells has something in common with Mr. James, but he is of stronger stuff--not less essentially a gentleman, as his books reveal him, but more essentially a man. He has a sterling courage, and has never been afraid of his own opinions. His declaration that "all the stories have been told" is one of the keys to his method as a novelist A work of fiction is something which enables him to show the impingement of character on character, with modifying effects of environment and circ.u.mstance. His style is clean and sober, and his method is invariably dignified. He has deliberately allowed his critical prepossessions to exclude him from all chance of greatness, but within his self-set limits he moves with a certain serene mastery, and his detail is finely accurate.
Miss Mary Wilkins, who is a very much younger writer than any of the three here dealt with, reminds an English reader both of George Eliot and Miss Mitford. "Pembroke" is the best and completest of her books. So far as pure literary charm goes it would be difficult to amend her work, but the suggestion of character conveyed is surely too acidulated. Such a set of stubborn, self-willed, and uncomfortable people as are gathered together in these pages could hardly have lived in any single village in any quarter of the world. They are drawn with an air of truth which is not easy to resist, but if they are really as accurately studied as they seem to be Pembroke must be a place to fly from. It is conceivable that the members of such a congregation might be less intolerable to each other than they seem to the foreign outsider, but the ameliorating effects of usage must needs be strong indeed to make them fit to live with. For the most part they are represented as well-meaning folk; but they are exasperatingly individual, all over sore corners, eager to be injured at their tenderest points, and implacable to the person who hurts them. In Pembroke a soreness of egotism afflicts everybody. Every creature in the book is over-sensitive to slight and misunderstanding, and every creature is clumsy and careless in the infliction of pain. It is a study in self-centred egotism. People who have an opportunity of knowing village life in the Eastern States proclaim the book a masterpiece of observation.