Part 7

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 assumed 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 assertion that she described herself as “Mavis Clare” in “The Sorrows of Satan.”’ Miss Corelli, of course, knows the truth about this matter, and nobody 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 identity 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 God 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 ragamuffin 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 ‘unsexed.’ Honestly, I don’t remember the reproach being hurled at Mrs. Browning, or George Eliot, or Mrs. Cowden Clarke, or Charlotte Brontë, 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 “unsexed” 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 nobleman who lives on his wife’s money and breaks her heart, and assures 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 unsexed 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 hit 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 ‘Adonaïs.’ It proclaims itself in Keats in the wild naïveté 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 superstition 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 God 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 noble 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 nobler 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 hit 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 entitled ‘Jane,’ she goes to work with a quite prophetic ardour to tell a story almost identical with that related in a scrap of Thackeray’s ‘Cox’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 illustrated 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 mass 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 analysis 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. Nobody 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 coarsely with the sexual 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 passage:

‘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 passion. 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 passage in any of the works so savagely assaulted 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 Massachusetts. 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 Dickens, 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 gratitude 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 Dickens, 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 repetition 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 repetition 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-à-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 Dickens 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 coarse. The thought of Mr. James in association 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 God 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 circumstance. 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.

Bret Harte, studying a form of life now extinct, which once (with certain allowances made for the romantic tendency) flourished in the West; Mr. Howells, taking micro-graphic studies of present-day life in the great centre of American culture; Mr. James, with a clever, weary persiflage skimming the face of society in refined cosmopolitan circles; and Miss Wilkins, observing the bitter humours of the Eastern yokel, are none of them distinctively American either in feeling or expression. Mr. Samuel L. Clemens--otherwise Mark Twain--stands in striking contrast to them all. He is not an artist in the sense in which the others are artists, but he is beyond compare the most distinct and individual of contemporary American writers. He started as a mere professional fun-maker, and he has not done with fun-making even yet, but he has developed in the course of years into a rough and ready philosopher, and he has written two books which are in their own way unique. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are the two best boys in the whole wide range of fiction, the most natural, genuine, and convincing. They belong to their own soil, and could have been born and bred nowhere else, but they are no truer locally than universally. Mark Twain can be eloquent when the fancy takes him, but the medium he employs is the simplest and plainest American English. He thinks like an American, feels like an American, is American blood and bones, heart and head. He is not the exponent of culture, but more than any man of his own day, excepting Walt Whitman, he expresses the sterling, fearless, manly side of a great democracy. Taking it in the main, it is admirable, and even lovable, as he displays it. It has no reverence for things which in themselves are not reverend, and since its point of view is not one from which all things are visible it seems occasionally overbold and crude; but the creed it expresses is manly, and clean, and wholesome, and the man who lives by it is a man to be admired. The point of view may be higher in course of time, and the observer’s horizon widened. The limitations of the mind which adopts the present standpoint may be found in ‘A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur.’ Apart from its ethics, the book is a mistake, for a jest which could have been elaborated to tedium in a score of pages is stretched to spread through a bulky volume, and snaps into pieces under that tension.

The great war of North and South has been answerable for more fiction than any other campaign of any age, and it has quite recently furnished reason for the novel, ‘The Red Badge of Courage,’ by Mr. Stephen Crane, which is out of counting the truest picture of the sort the world has seen. It seemed at first impossible to believe that it had been written by any but a veteran. It turns out that the author is quite a young man, and that he gathered everything by reading and by hearsay. Here again the method is national and characteristic. After all these years of natural submission to British influence American writers are growing racy of their own soil.

XIII.--THE YOUNG ROMANCERS

In the combined spelling and reading book which was in use in schools more than forty years ago there was printed a story to the following effect:--Certain Arabs had lost a camel, and in the course of their wanderings in search of him they met a dervish, whom they questioned. The dervish answered by offering questions on his own side. ‘Was your camel lame in one foot?’ he began. ‘Yes,’ said the owners. ‘Was he blind in one eye?’ he continued. ‘Yes,’ said the owners again. ‘Had he lost a front tooth?’ ‘Yes,’ ‘Was he laden with corn on one side and with honey on the other?’ ‘Yes, yes, yes. This is our camel. Where have you seen him?’ The dervish answered: ‘I have never seen him.’ The Arabs, not without apparent reason, suspected the dervish of playing with them, and were about to chastise him, when the holy man asked for a hearing. Having secured it, he explained. He had seen the track of the camel. He had known the animal to be lame of one foot because that foot left a slighter impression than the others upon the dust of the road. He had argued it blind of one eye because it had cropped the herbage on one side of the road alone. He knew it to have lost a tooth because of the gap left in the centre of its bite. Bees and flies argued honey on one side of the beast, and ants carrying wheat grains argued wheat on the other. The name of this observant and synthetic-minded dervish was not Sherlock Holmes, but he had the method of that famous detective, and in a sense anticipated the plots of all the stories which Dr. Conan Doyle has so effectively related of him. Possibly the best stories in the world which depend for their interest on this kind of induction are Edgar Allan Poe’s. ‘The Gold Bug,’ ‘The Murder in the Rue Morgue,’ and ‘The Stolen Letter’ have not been surpassed or even equalled by any later writer; but Dr. Doyle comes in an excellent second, and if he has not actually rivalled Poe in the construction and development of any single story, he has run him close even there, and has beaten him in the sustained ingenuity of continuous invention; The story of ‘The Speckled Band’ has a flavour almost as gruesome and terrible as Poe’s ‘Black Cat,’ and an unusual faculty for dramatic narrative is displayed throughout the whole clever series. The Sherlock Holmes stories are far, indeed, from being Dr. Doyle’s best work, but it is to them that he mainly owes his popularity. They took the imaginative side of the general reader, and their popular properties are likely to keep them before the public mind for a long while to come. To estimate Dr. Doyle’s position as a writer one has to meet him in ‘The Refugees,’ in ‘The White Company,’ and in ‘Rodney Stone.’ In each of these there is evident a sound and painstaking method of research, as well as a power of dramatic invention; and in combination with these is a style of unaffected manliness, simplicity, and strength, which is at once satisfactory to the student and attractive to the mass of people who are content to be pleased by such qualities without knowing or asking why. The labour bestowed on ‘The White Company’ may very well be compared to that expended by Charles Reade on ‘The Cloister and the H earth.’ It covers a far less extent of ground than that monumental romance, and it has not (and does not aim at) its universality of mood, but the same desire of accuracy, the same order of scholarship, the same industry, the same sense of scrupulous honour in matters of ascertainable fact, are to be noted, and being noted, are worthy of unstinted admiration. It is, perhaps, an open question as to whether Dr. Doyle, in his latest book, has not run a little ahead of the time at which a story on such a theme could be written with entire safety. ‘Rodney Stone’ is a story of the prize-ring, and of the gambling, hard-drinking, and somewhat brutalised days in which that institution flourished There are many of us (I have made public confession half a score of times) who regret the abolition of the ring, on grounds of public policy. We argue that man is a fighting animal, and that in the days of the ring there was a recognised code of rules which regulated his conduct at times when the combative instinct was not to be restrained. We observe that our commonalty now use the knife in quarrel, and we regret the death of that rough principle of honour which once imposed itself upon the worst of rowdies. But there is little doubt that the feeling of the community at large is overwhelmingly against us, and it is for this reason that I am dubious as to the success of Dr. Doyle’s last literary venture. The makings of romance are in the story, and are well used. There are episodes of excellent excitement in it; notable amongst these being the race on the Godstone Road, which is done with a swing and passion not easy to overpraise. In the narrative of the fight and of the incidents which preceded it the feeling of the time is admirably preserved, and the interest of the reader is held at an unyielding tension. But the prize-ring is a little too near as yet to offer unimpeachable matter for romance; and people who can read of the bloodthirsty Umslopogaas and his semi-comic holocausts with an unshaken stomach, or feel a placid historic pleasure in the chronicles of Nero’s eccentricities, will find ‘Rodney Stone’ objectionable because it chronicles a ‘knuckle fight,’ and because a ‘knuckle fight’ is still occasionally brought off in London, and more occasionally suppressed by the police.