VIII.--MR. S. R. CROCKETT--IAN MACLAREN
When I undertook the writing of this series, Mr. S. R. Crockett, exceptfor his 'Mad Sir Uchtred of the Hills,' was unknown to me by actualreading. My opinion of that story was not a high one. I thought it, andon a second reading still think it, feebly pretentious. But for somereason or another Mr. Crockett's name has been buzzed about in sucha prodigality of praise that it came natural to believe and hope thatlater work from his pen had shown a quality which the first little_brochure_ had not revealed, and that the world had found in him agenuine addition to its regiment of literary workmen. The curiositywith which a section of the newspaper press has been inspired as toMr. Crockett's personal whereabouts, as to his comings and goings, hisengagements for the future, and his prices 'per thousand words,' wouldhave seemed to indicate that in him we had discovered a person ofconsiderably more than the average height.
The result of a completer perusal of his writings is not merelydestructive of this hope. It is positively stunning and bewildering.Mr. Crockett is not only not a great man, but a rather futile very smallone. The unblushing effrontery of those gentlemen of the press whohave set _him_ on a level with Sir Walter is the most mournful and mostcontemptible thing in association with the poorer sort of criticismwhich 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. Butit is a part of his business, which is not to be escaped, to do hisfearless best to tell the truth, and the truth about Mr. Crockett andthe press is not to be told without giving deep offence, to him and it.Fortunately, the press is a very wide corporation indeed, and ifthere are venal people employed upon it, there are at least as manyscrupulously honourable; and if there are stupid people who can becarried by a cry, there are men of all grades of brilliant ability,ranging from genius to talent To put the matter in plain English willoffend neither honesty nor ability, and to give offence to venality orincompetence 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 mowedabout him. It is not a matter of opinion as to whether Mr. Crockett hasor has not rivalled Sir Walter. It is a matter of absolute fact, aboutwhich no two men who are even moderately competent to judge can disputefor a second. The newspaper press, or a very considerable section of it,has conspired to set Mr. Crockett upon an eminence so removed from hisfitness for it that he is made ridiculous by the mere fact of beingperched there. When Robert Louis Stevenson suffered from the hysteriaof praise, the natural feeling was to save an exquisite artist from theexcusable exaltations of enthusiasm. When the genuine art and realfun and touching pathos of Mr. J. M. Barrie hurried his admirers intouncritical ecstasy, one's only fear was lest the popular taste shouldtake an undeserved revenge in coldness and neglect. To say in the firstflush of affection and enjoyment that 'A Window in Thrums' is as goodas Sir Walter, or that 'The Master of Ballantrae' is better, is not toexercise the faculty of a critic; but it is not monstrous or absurd. Itis the expression of a momentary happy ebullience, a natural ejaculationof gratitude for a beautiful gift. It is only when the judgment comesto be persisted in that we find any element of danger in it. It is onlywhen gravely and strenuously repeated, as in Stevenson's case, that itis to be resented, and then mainly on the ground that it does harm tothe object of it. But in the case now under review the conditions arenot the same. Poor Stevenson, whose early death is still a poignantgrief was indubitably a man of genius. Settle the question of staturehow you may, there is no denying the species to which such a writerbelongs. Mr. Barrie _has_ genius--which is a slightly different thing.But Mr. Crockett in the great rank of letters is 'as just and mere aserving-man as any born of woman,' and there has been as much bangingof the paragraphic drum concerning him, and as assured a proclamation ofhis mastership, as if every high quality of genius were recognisable inhim at a glance. If I knew of any unmistakable and tangible reason forall 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 Ephesianhubbub of 'greatness' I neither know nor care, but it is simply out ofcredence 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 youngminister of the peasant class, whose parents through much privation havekept their son at college. He is elected to a living in an aristocraticparish, and takes his old peasant mother to keep house for him. Some ofhis more polished parishioners object to the old lady's presence at themanse, and they have the rather astonishing impertinence to proposethat the son shall send her away. He refuses, and shows his visitors thedoor. These are the bare lines of the story so far as we are concernedwith it.
Think how Dr. Macdonald or J. M. Barrie would have handled this! Thehumour of either would have danced round the crass obtuseness of thedeputation and the mingled wrath and amusement of the minister. Thestory bristles with opportunity for the presentation of human contrast.The chances are all there, and a story-teller of anything like genuinefaculty could not have failed to see and to utilise some of them. Mr.Crockett misses every conceivable point of his own tale, and with amajestic clumsiness drags in the one thing which could possibly make itoffensive. The minister has nothing to fear from his visitors, for it isexpressly stated that he has a majority of three hundred and sixty-fivein 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 ownmother out of doors. He makes Mr. Allan Fairley tell his own tale, andthe end of this portion of it runs thus:
'He got no further; he wadna hae gotten as far if for a moment I hadjaloosed his drift I got on my feet I could hardly keep my hands offthem, minister as I was, but I said: "Gentlemen, you are aware of whatyou ask me to do? You ask me to turn out of the house the mither thatbore me, the mither that learnt me 'The Lord's my Shepherd,' the mitherthat 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 askme to show her to the door--I'll show you to the door!"--an' to the doorthey 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 theimpertinent request of a meddling nobody? Look at the stormy smallcapitals of this oatmeal hero, who is supposed to electrify us by themere fact of his not being an incredible ass and scoundrel! Does anysober person think for a moment that a man of genius could have madethis revolting blunder? It is beyond comparison the densest bit ofstupidity in dealing with the emotions I have encountered anywhere.Anybody but Mr. Crockett can see where the point of the story lies. Itlies in the cool impertinence and heartlessness of his visitors. Toput 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 shouldit possibly, by any stretch of poltroonery and baseness, be otherwise?
_Ex pede Herculem_. This bedrummed and betrumpeted man of geniuscannot read the A B _ab_ of the human emotions. 'Here!' says the subtletempter, '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 thesacred trust of Heaven. He is innocent, he is helpless. I'll show you tothe door!' Oh! what emotions stir within the heart when a master's handawakes 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 painand pity. But we have a right to ask--we have a right to insist--thatundeserved reputations shall not be manufactured for us by any clique.We have a right to protest when the offence is open and flagrant. Letit be said, if it be not too late to say it
, that Mr. Crockett, if leftalone by his indiscreet admirers, or only puffed within the limits ofthe reasonable, might have been regarded as an honest workman as timesgo, when everybody, more or less, writes fiction.
If his pages had come before me as the work of an unknown man, seekinghis proper place in the paper republic, it is certain that I couldhave found some honest and agreeable things to say about him. But,unfortunately, he, more than any other writer of his day, has beensignalled out for those uncostly extravagances of praise which are fastdiscrediting us in our own eyes, and are making what should be the artof criticism a mockery, and something of a shame. In what I have writtenI have dealt less with his work than with the false estimate of itwhich, for a year or two, has been thrust upon the public by a certainband of writers who are either hopelessly incompetent to assess ourlabours or incurably dishonest, It is very possible indeed that Mr.Crockett is wholly undeserving of censure in this regard, that he hasnot in any way asked or aided the manufacture of this balloon of areputation in which he has been floated to such heights. Apart from thepretensions of his _claque_, there is no earthly reason why a criticshould hold him up to ridicule. It is not he who is ridiculous, but atits best his position is respectable, and he holds his place (like themob of us who write for a living) for the moment only. To pretend thathe is a man of genius, to talk about him in the same breath with SirWalter Scott, to chronicle his comings and his goings as if he werethe embodiment of a new revelation, is to provoke a natural and justresentment The more plainly that resentment is expressed--the more itis seen that a false adulation is the seed of an open contempt--theless likely writers of middling faculty will be to encourage a bloatedestimate 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 saidto owe his literary existence to Mr. J. M. Barrie, is both artisticand sympathetic. His work conveys to the reader the impression of anencounter with Barrie in a dream. The keen edges of the original areblurred and partly lost, but the author of 'Beside the Bonnie BrierBush' has many excellent qualities, and if he had had the good fortuneor the initiative to be first in the field, his work would have beenalmost wholly charming. As it is, he still shows much faculty ofintuition and of heart, and his work is all sympathetically honest Hisemotions are genuine, and this in the creation of emotional fiction isthe first essential to success. Here is another case where thehysteric overpraise of the critics has done a capable workman a seriousinjustice, and but for it a candid reviewer could have no temptationtowards blame. His inspiration is from the outside, but that is theharshest word that can honestly be spoken, and in days when literaturehas become a trade such a judgment is not severe.
My Contemporaries In Fiction Page 8
