Part 8

But a more serious criticism awaits Dr. Conan Doyle’s last work. It is offered respectfully, and with every admiration for the high qualities already noticed. In the re-embodiment of a bygone age in fiction, three separate and special faculties are to be exercised. The first is the faculty for research, which must expend its energy not merely on the theme in hand, but on the age at large. The second is the imaginative and sympathetic faculty, which alone can make the dry bones of social history live again. The third is the faculty of self-repression, the power to cast away all which, however laboriously acquired, is dramatically unessential. Two of these powers belong in generous measure to Dr. Conan Doyle. The third, which is as necessary to complete success, he has not yet displayed. In ‘Rodney Stone’ an attempt has been made to cover up this shortcoming, in the form in which the story has been cast, and in the very choice of its title. But when the book comes to be read it is not the tale of Rodney Stone (who is a mere outsider privileged to narrate), but of his fashionable uncle’s combat with Sir Lothian Hume, with the ring in which their separate champions appear as a battle ground. Many pages are crowded with people who are named in passing and forgotten. They have no influence on the narrative, and no place in it. Their presence assuredly displays a knowledge of the time and its chronicles, but they are just so many obstacles to the clear run of the story, and no more. This is the chief fault to be found with the book, but it is a grave fault, and the writer, if he is to take the place which his powers and his industry alike join in claiming for him, must learn to cast ‘as rubbish to the void’ many a painfully acquired bit of knowledge. To be an antiquary is one thing, and to be an antiquarian romancer is another. Dr. Doyle has aimed at being both one and the other in the same pages. A true analogy may be taken from the stage, where the supernumeraries are not allowed to obscure the leading lady and gentleman at any moment of action.

Mr. Stanley Weyman, who is not Dr. Doyle’s equal in other matters, is in this sole respect his master. He keeps his hero on the scene, and his action in full swing. He gives no indication of a profound or studious knowledge of his time, but he knows it fairly well. Mr. Doyle’s method is at bottom the truer, when once the detailed labour is hidden, but when it bares its own machinery it loses most of its gain. Mr. Weyman tells a rattling story in rattling fashion. His is the good old style of easy-going romance, where courage and adventure never fail. He has chosen the realm of D’Artagnan and Aramis, of Porthos and Athos, and he has plenty of vivacity, and can invent brilliantly on the lines on which the brave Dumas invented long before him. He is a cheerful and inspiriting echo. He cannot wind the mighty horn the elders sounded, but he can imitate it fairly from a distance. It is only when that crass reviewer comes along to tell us that the old original hunter of romance is back again that his music gives us anything but pleasure. For my own part, I hope he may flourish long, and give us stories as good as ‘A Gentleman of France’ as often as he can. My ‘Bravo!’ shall be as ready as any man’s and as hearty. Why--to change the simile used just now--when a man is resting his legs in a comfortable auberge, and drinking the honest light wine of the country (which doesn’t pretend to be better than it is), should the asinine enthusiast come to spoil his enjoyment by swearing that he sits in the enchanted palace of Sir Walter, and has before him the mighty wine Sir Walter bottled? The enthusiast provokes to wrath. It’s a very good duberge--it’s a capital, comfortable house of call, and we should like to sit there often. And the wine--we found no fault with the wine. It’s an honest tap, and a wholesome and a palatable, and here’s the landlord’s health in it. But the magic vintage? Rubbish!

Mr. Anthony Hope has been so lucky as to please the public in two styles. In the one genre he has displayed an undoubted capacity, marred here and there to some tastes by a not very defined seeming of superciliousness, and in the other he has taken us into the most agreeable regions of unrestrained romance in which English readers have had leave to wander this many a day. He has caught the very tone of simple-hearted sincerity in which his later stories demand to be told. As an example of the adaptation of literary method to the exigencies of narrative it would not be easy to light on anything better. It is a little surprising that the trivial story and the trivial style of ‘Mr. De Witt’s Widow’ should have come from the hand which gave us the histories of the Princess Osra, and created the Kingdom of Ruritania. The one kind of work is clever, and smart, and knowingly--rather pretentiously--man-of-the-worldish. The other is large and simple, sweet and credulous. Mr. Hope, from his latest pages, has breathed on a tired and jaded time the breath of a pure and harmless fancy, and has earned its thanks for that benefaction.

It has been seen that the art of fiction as practised at this hour includes almost all known forms of romance, and that no school may be said to have its own way to the exclusion of another. It has been seen, too, that though this is not a day of pre-eminent greatness, we can boast an astonishing industry and fertility. The output of literary work has never been so large, nor has the average of excellence ever been so equal or so high. It has been demonstrated--it is being demonstrated in new instances two or three times a year--that literary talent is not at all the uncommon and half-miraculous thing it was once supposed to be.

Genius is as rare as ever, and is likely to continue so, but talent multiplies its appearances in full accordance with economic rules. No age ever submitted so constantly as ours to be amused or soothed by the romancer’s art. The permission has opened the door to a great number of capable, industrious, and workmanlike men and women, who have learnt their business of amusement well. To the vast majority of us literature is as much a trade as any of the accepted businesses of Holborn or Cheapside, and, apart from a lingering sentimentalism, there is no reason why the fact should not be owned. There is no shame in honest craftwork done for hire, and when the work is so excellent as at least a score of living English writers can make it, we have a right to take Some pride in it But with this day’s newspaper before me I learn that Mr. ------, who is the thin mimic of a fine imitator, has surpassed his last ‘masterpiece,’ and that a lady of name to me unknown has ‘rivalled’ his masterpiece, and that a gentleman to me unknown has produced a book which must necessarily be a ‘classic.’ A masterpiece is a rare thing, and words have a definite meaning. We call ‘Vanity Fair’ and ‘Esmond’ masterpieces, when we desire to be enthusiastic. We call ‘David Copperfield’ a masterpiece, and we find plenty of people to dispute the judgment. A masterpiece is the master work of a master hand. It must needs be a rare thing. It is not for the dignity of our work that it should be greeted by that sort of hysteric hiccoughing against which these pages have protested. It is a shameless insult to letters at large when the hysteria is bought and paid for, as does sometimes happen, and not less insulting when the gentleman who grinds the axe is fee’d in kind by the other gentleman who rolls the log.

And now, what is done is done, and I leave my task with some misgiving. If here and there I have given pain, I have not written a word in malice. The pleasantest part of my work has lain in the fact that with every desire to be honest I have so often been compelled to praise.

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