Chapter 5

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 class 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 circumstances, 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 class 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 nobody has hitherto 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 exactitude 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 analytical 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 passion, 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 godlike 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 ‘bloody,’ 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 association 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 ejaculation of gratitude 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 assured 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 class, 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 crass obtuseness of the deputation and the mingled wrath and amusement 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 constituency 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 nobody? 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 ass 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 god-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 assess 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