Part 36

The explanation of her extraordinary fecundity was a rare original equipment, an imperturbability of courage, health and brain, to which was added the fortune or the merit of her having had to tune her instrument at the earliest age. That instrument was essentially a Scotch one; her stream flowed long and full without losing its primary colour. To say that she was organised highly for literature would be to make too light of too many hazards and conditions; but few writers of our time have been so organised for liberal, for—one may almost put it—heroic production. One of the interesting things in big persons is that they leave us plenty of questions, if only about themselves; and precisely one of those that Mrs. Oliphant suggests is the wonder and mystery of a love of letters that could be so great without ever, on a single occasion even, being greater. It was of course not a matter of mere love; it was a part of her volume and abundance that she understood life itself in a fine freehanded manner and, I imagine, seldom refused to risk a push at a subject, however it might have given pause, that would help to turn her wide wheel. She worked largely from obligation—to meet the necessities and charges and pleasures and sorrows of which she had a plentiful share. She showed in it all a sort of sedentary dash—an acceptance of the day’s task and an abstention from the plaintive note from which I confess I could never withhold my admiration.

Her capacity for labour was infinite—for labour of the only sort that, with the fine strain of old Scotch pride and belated letterless toryism that was in her, she regarded as respectable. She had small patience with new-fangled attitudes or with a finical conscience. What was good enough for Sir Walter was good enough for her, and I make no doubt that her shrewd unfiltered easy flow, fed after all by an immensity of reading as well as of observation and humour, would have been good enough for Sir Walter. If this had been the case with her abounding history, biography and criticism, it would have been still more the case with her uncontrolled flood of fiction. She was really a great _improvisatrice_, a night-working spinner of long, loose, vivid yarns, numberless, pauseless, admirable, repeatedly, for their full, pleasant, reckless rustle over depths and difficulties—admirable indeed, in any case of Scotch elements, for many a close engagement with these. She showed in no literary relation more acuteness than in the relation—so profitable a one as it has always been—to the inexhaustible little country which has given so much, yet has ever so much more to give, and all the romance and reality of which she had at the end of her pen. Her Scotch folk have a wealth of life, and I think no Scotch talk in fiction less of a strain to the patience of the profane. It may be less austerely veracious than some—but these are esoteric matters.

Reading since her death “Kirsteen”—one of the hundred, but published in her latest period and much admired by some judges—I was, though beguiled, not too much beguiled to be struck afresh with that elusive fact on which I just touched, the mixture in the whole thing. Such a product as “Kirsteen” has life—is full of life, but the critic is infinitely baffled. It may of course be said to him that he has nothing to do with compositions of this order—with such wares altogether as Mrs. Oliphant dealt in. But he can accept that retort only with a renunciation of some of his liveliest anxieties. Let him take some early day for getting behind, as it were, the complexion of a talent that could care to handle a thing to the tune of so many pages and yet not care more to “do” it. There is a fascination in the mere spectacle of so serene an instinct for the middle way, so visible a conviction that to reflect is to be lost.

Mrs. Oliphant was never lost, but she too often saved herself at the expense of her subject. I have no space to insist, but so much of the essence of the situation in “Kirsteen” strikes me as missed, dropped out without a thought, that the wonder is all the greater of the fact that in spite of it the book does in a manner scramble over its course and throw up a fresh strong air. This was certainly the most that the author would have pretended, and from her scorn of precautions springs a gleam of impertinence quite in place in her sharp and handsome physiognomy, that of a person whose eggs are not all in one basket, nor all her imagination in service at once. There is scant enough question of “art” in the matter, but there is a friendly way for us to feel about so much cleverness, courage and humanity. We meet the case in wishing that the timid talents were a little more like her and the bold ones a little less.

THE END

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Mis-spelled words and printer errors have been fixed. Inconsistency in hyphenation has been retained.