Some of the reasons for this obscurity lie on the surface.
In the first place there was too much to tell. The Captain began his life as a midshipman in Lord Cochrane’s ship the Impérieuse in the year 1806. He was then aged fourteen. And here are a few extracts from a private log that he kept in July, 1808, when he was sixteen: —
24th. Taking guns from the batteries.
25th. Burning bridges and dismantling batteries to impede the French.
August 1st. Taking the brass guns from the batteries.
15th. Took a French despatch boat off Cette.
18th. Took and destroyed a signal post.
19th. Blew up a signal post.
So it goes on. Every other day he was cutting out a brig, taking a tower, engaging gunboats, seizing prize ships or being chased by the French. In the first three years of his life at sea he had been in fifty fights; times out of number he jumped into the sea and rescued a drowning man. Once much against his will, for he could swim like a fish, he was rescued by an old bumboat woman who could also swim like a fish. Later he engaged with so much success in the Burmese War that he was allowed to bear a Burmese gilt war-boat on his arms. Clearly if the extracts from the private log had been expanded it would have swollen to a row of volumes; but how was the private log to be expanded by a lady who had presumably never burnt a bridge, dismantled a battery, or blown out a Frenchman’s brains in her life? Very wisely she had recourse to Marshall’s Naval Biography and to the Gazette. “Gazette details”, she remarked, “are proverbially dry, but they are trustworthy.” Therefore the public life is dealt with dryly, if trustworthily.
The private life however remained; and the private life, if we may judge from the names of the friends he had and the money he spent and the quarrels he waged, was as violent and various in its way as the other. But here again reticence prevailed. It was partly that his daughter delayed; almost twenty-four years had passed before she wrote and friends were dead and letters destroyed; and it was partly that she was his daughter, imbued with filial reverence and with the belief also that “a biographer has no business to meddle with any facts below the surface.” The famous statesman Sir R P therefore is Sir R
P ; and Mrs. S is Mrs. S. It is only now and then, almost by accident, that we are startled by a sudden groan— “I have had my swing, tried and tasted everything, and I find that it is vanity”; “I have been in a peck of troubles — domestic, agricultural, legal and pecuniary”; or just for a moment we are allowed to glance at a scene, “You reposing on the sofa, C sitting by you and I on the footstool” which “is constantly recurring to my memory as a picture” and has crept into one of the letters. But, as the Captain adds, “It has all vanished like ‘ air, thin air’.” It has all, or almost all, vanished; and if posterity wants to know about the Captain it must read his books.
That the public still wishes to read his books is proved by the fact that the best known of them, Peter Simple and Jacob Faithful, were reprinted a few years ago in a handsome big edition, with introductions by Professor Saintsbury and Mr. Michael Sadleir. And the books are quite capable of being read, though nobody is going to pretend that they are among the masterpieces. They have not struck out any immortal scene or character; they are far from marking an epoch in the history of the novel. The critic with an eye for pedigree can trace the influence of Defoe, Fielding, and Smollett naturally asserting itself in their straightforward pages. It may well be that we are drawn to them for reasons that seem far enough from literature. The sun on the cornfield; the gull following the plough; the simple speech of country people leaning over gates, breeds the desire to cast the skin of a century and revert to those simpler days. But no living writer, try though he may, can bring the past back again, because no living writer can bring back the ordinary day. He sees it through a glass, sentimentally, romantically; it is either too pretty or too brutal; it lacks ordinariness. But the world of 1806 was to Captain Marryat what the world of 1935 is to us at this moment, a middling sort of a place, where there is nothing particular to stare at in the street or to listen to in the language. So to Captain Marryat there was nothing out of the way in a sailor with a pigtail or in a bumboat woman volleying hoarse English. Therefore the world of 1806 is real to us and ordinary, yet sharp-edged and peculiar. And when the delight of looking at a day that was the ordinary day a century ago is exhausted, we are kept reading by the fact that our critical faculties enjoy whetting themselves upon a book which is not among the classics. When the artist’s imagination is working at high pressure it leaves very little trace of his effort; we have to go gingerly on tip-toe among the invisible joins and complete marriages that take place in those high regions. Here it is easier going. Here in these cruder books we get closer to the art of fiction; we see the bones and the muscles and the arteries clearly marked. It is a good exercise in criticism to follow a sound craftsman, not marvellously but sufficiently endowed at his work. And as we read Peter Simple and Jacob Faithful there can be no doubt that Captain Marryat had in embryo at least most of the gifts that go to make a master. Do we think of him as a mere storyteller for boys? Here is a passage which shows that he could use language with the suggestiveness of a poet; though to get the full effect, as always in fiction, it must be read up to through the emotions of the characters. Jacob is alone after his father’s death on the Thames lighter at dawn: — from the various chimneys, all broke upon me by degrees; and I was recalled to the sense that I was in a busy world, and had my own task to perform.
Then if we want a proof that the Captain, for all his sturdiness, had that verbal sensibility which at the touch of a congenial thought lets fly a rocket, here we have a discourse on a nose.
It was not an aquiline nose, nor was it an aquiline nose reversed. It was not a nose snubbed at the extremity, gross, heavy, or carbuncled, or fluting. In all its magnitude of proportions it was an intellectual nose. It was thin, horny, transparent, and sonorous. Its snuffle was consequential, and its sneeze oracular. The very sight of it was impressive; its sound when blown in school hours was ominous.
Such was the nose that Jacob saw looming over him when he woke from his fever to hear the Dominie breathing those strange words, “Earth, lay light upon the lighter-boy — the lotus, the water-lily, that hath been cast on shore to die.” And for pages at a time he writes that terse springy prose which is the natural speech of a school of writers trained to the business of moving a large company briskly from one incident to another over the solid earth. Further, he can create a world; he has the power to set us in the midst of ships and men and sea and sky all vivid, credible, authentic, as we are made suddenly aware when Peter quotes a letter from home and the other side of the scene appears; the solid land, England, the England of Jane Austen, with its parsonages, its country houses, its young women staying at home, its young men gone to sea; and for a moment the two worlds, that are so opposite and yet so closely allied, come together. But perhaps the Captain’s greatest gift was his power of drawing character. His pages are full of marked faces. There is Captain Kearney, the magnificent liar; and Captain Horton, who lay in bed all day long; and Mr. Chucks, and Mrs. Trotter who cadges eleven pairs of cotton stockings — they are all drawn vigorously, decisively, from the living face, just as the Captain’s pen, we are told, used to dash off” caricatures upon a sheet of notepaper.
With all these qualities, then, what was there stunted in his equipment? Why does the attention slip and the eye merely register printed words? One reason, of course, is that there are no heights in this level world. Violent and agitated as it is, as full of fights and escapes as Captain Marryat’s private log, yet there comes a sense of monotony; the same emotion is repeated; we never feel that we are approaching anything; the end is never a consummation. Again, emphatic and trenchant as his characters are, not one of them rounds and fills to his full size, because some of the elements that go to make character are lacking. A chance sentence suggests why this should be so. “After this we had a conversat
ion of two hours; but what lovers say is very silly, except to themselves, and the reader need not be troubled with it.” The intenser emotions of the human race are kept out. Love is banished; and when love is banished, other valuable emotions that are allied to her are apt to go too. Humour has to have a dash of passion in it; death has to have something that makes us ponder. But here there is a kind of bright hardness. Though he has a curious love of what is physically disgusting — the face of a child nibbled by fish, a woman’s body bloated with gin — he is sexually not so much chaste as prudish, and his morality has the glib slickness of a schoolmaster preaching down to small boys. In short, after a fine burst of pleasure there comes a time when the spell that Captain Marryat lays upon us wears thin, and we see through the veil of fiction facts — facts, it is true, that are interesting in themselves; facts about yawls and jolly boats and how boats going into action are “fitted to pull with grummets upon iron thole pins”; but their interest is another kind of interest, and as much out of harmony with imagination as a bedroom cupboard is with the dream of someone waking from sleep.
Often in a shallow book, when we wake, we wake to nothing at all; but here when we wake, we wake to the presence of a personage — a retired naval officer with an active mind and a caustic tongue, who as he trundles his wife and family across the Continent in the year 1835 is forced to give expression to his opinions in a diary. Sick though he was of story-writing and bored by a literary life— “If I were not rather in want of money,” he tells his mother, “I certainly would not write any more” — he must express his mind somehow; and his mind was a courageous mind, an unconventional mind. The Press-gang, he thought an abomination. Why, he asked, do English philanthropists bother about slaves in Africa when English children are working seventeen hours a day in factories? The Game Laws are, in his opinion, a source of much misery to the poor; the law of primogeniture should be altered, and there is something to be said for the Roman Catholic religion. Every kind of topic — politics, science, religion, history — comes into view, but only for a fleeting glance. Whether the diary form was to blame or the jolting of a stage coach, or whether lack of book learning and a youth spent in cutting out brigs is a bad training for the reflective powers, the Captain’s mind, as he remarked when he stopped for two hours and had a look at it, “is like a kaleidoscope.” But no, he added with just self-analysis, it was not like a kaleidoscope; “for the patterns of kaleidoscopes are regular, and there is very little regularity in my brain, at all events.” He hops from thing to thing. Now he rattles off the history of Liège; next moment he discourses upon reason and instinct; then he considers what degree of pain is inflicted upon fish by taking them with the hook; and then, taking a walk through the streets, it strikes him how very seldom you now meet with a name beginning with X. “Rest!” he exclaims with reason; “no, the wheels of a carriage may rest, even the body for a time may rest, but the mind will not.” And so, in an excess of restlessness, he is off to America.
Nor do we catch sight of him again — for the six volumes in which he recorded his opinion of America, though they got him into trouble with the inhabitants, now throw light upon nothing in particular — until his daughter, having shut up her Dictionaries and Gazettes, bethinks her of a few “vague remembrances”. They are only trifles, she admits, and put together in a very random way, but still she remembers him very vividly. He was five foot ten and weighed fourteen stone, she remembers; he had a deep dimple in his chin, and one of his eyebrows was higher than the other, so that he always wore a look of inquiry. Indeed, he was a very restless man. He would break into his brother’s room and wake him in the middle of the night to suggest that they should start at once to Austria and buy a château in Hungary and make their fortunes. But, alas! he never did make his fortune, she recalls. What with his building at Langham, and the great decoy which he had made on his best grazing land, and other extravagances not easy for a daughter to specify, he left little wealth behind him. He had to keep hard at his writing. He wrote his books sitting at a table in the dining-room, from which he could see the lawn and his favourite bull Ben Brace grazing there. And he wrote so small a hand that the copyist had to stick a pin in to mark the place. Also he was wonderfully neat in his dress, and would have nothing but white china on his breakfast table, and kept sixteen clocks and liked to hear them all strike at once. His children called him “Baby”, though he was a man of violent passions, dangerous to thwart, and often “very grave” at home.
“These trifles put on paper look sadly insignificant,” she concludes. Yet as she rambles on they do in their butterfly way bring back the summer morning and the dying Captain after all his voyages stretched on the mattress in the boudoir room dictating those last words to his daughter about love and roses. “The more fancifully they were tied together, the better he liked it,” she says. Indeed, after his death a bunch of pinks and roses was “found pressed between his body and the mattress”.
Ruskin
WHAT did our fathers of the nineteenth century do to deserve so much scolding? That is a question which we find ourselves asking sometimes as we dip here and there into the long row of volumes which bear the names of Garlyle and Ruskin. And if we also dip into the lives of those great men we shall find evidence that our fathers were a good deal responsible for the tone which their teachers adopted towards them. There can be no doubt that they liked their great men to be isolated from the rest of the world. Genius was nearly as antisocial and demanded almost as drastic a separation from the ordinary works and duties of mankind as insanity. Accordingly, the great man of that age had much temptation to withdraw to his pinnacle and become a prophet, denouncing a generation from whose normal activities he was secluded. When Carlyle expressed his readiness to work somewhere in a public office, no such place was found for him, and for the rest of his life he was left to grind out book after book with a bitter consciousness within him that such was not the most venerable of lives. All the worship that was offered could not sweeten what wiser treatment might have entirely blotted out. Ruskin started from the opposite pole as far as circumstances were concerned, but he too drifted into the same isolation, and he leaves us convinced that of the two, his was the sadder life.
Yet if all the fairies had conspired together at his birth to protect this man of genius and foster him to the utmost, what more could they have done? He had wealth and comfort and opportunity from the very first. While he was still a boy his genius was recognized, and he had only to publish his first book to become one of the most famous men of the day at the age of twenty-four. But the fairies after all did not give him the gifts he wanted. If one had seen Ruskin about the year 1869, according to Professor Norton, “you would tell me that you had never seen so sad a man, never one whose nature seemed to have been so sensitized to pain by the experience of life.” This surpassing gift of eloquence, in the first place, brought him far more of evil than of good. Still, after sixty years or so, the style in which page after page of Modern Painters is written takes our breath away. We find ourselves marvelling at the words, as if all the fountains of the English language had been set playing in the sunlight for our pleasure, but it seems scarcely fitting to ask what meaning they have for us. After a time, falling into a passion with this indolent pleasure-loving temper in his readers, Ruskin checked his fountains, and curbed his speech to the very spirited, free, and almost colloquial English in which Fors Clavigera and Praeterita are written. In these changes, and in the restless play of his mind upon one subject after another, there is something, we scarcely know how to define it, of the wealthy and cultivated amateur, full of fire and generosity and brilliance, who would give all he possesses of wealth and brilliance to be taken seriously, but who is fated to remain for ever an outsider. As we read these outbursts of rather petulant eloquence, we find ourselves remembering the sheltered and luxurious life, and even when we are very ignorant of the subject, the tremendous arrogance and self confidence seem to result not from knowledge, but from a t
ossing and splendid impatience of spirit which is not to be broken into the drudgery of learning. We remember how for years after most men are forced to match themselves with the real world “he was living in a world of his own”, to quote Professor Norton again, and losing the chance of gaining that experience with practical life, that self-control, and that development of reason which he more than most men required. If we reflect, too, that from his childhood, when he stood up among the cushions and preached, “People be good,” the passion of his life was to teach and reform, it is easy to understand how terribly and, as it must have seemed sometimes, how futilely “he hurt himself against life and the world”.
But we do him much wrong if we take him merely as a prophet — a proceeding that is rather forced upon one by his followers, and forget to read his books. For if anyone is able to make his readers feel that he is alive, wrong headed, intemperate, interesting, and lovable, that writer is Ruskin. His eagerness about everything in the world is perhaps as valuable as the concentration which in another sphere produced the works of Darwin, or the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It may be that, if we submitted his works on art to a modern art critic, or his works on economy to a modern economist, we should find that there is very little in them which is accepted by the present generation. Even an unprofessional reader, who picks up Modern Painters attracted very much by the bright patches of eloquence, is fairly startled by some of the statements concerning art and morality which are laid down with the usual air of infallibility and the usual array of polysyllables. Nor is it easy for one reading industriously in the six volumes of Fors Clavigera to find out precisely how it is that we are to save ourselves, though it is plain enough that we are all damned. Nevertheless, though his aesthetics may be wrong and his economics amateurish, you have to reckon with a force which is not to be suppressed by a whole pyramid of faults. That is why perhaps people in his lifetime got into the habit of calling him Master. He was possessed by a spirit of enthusiasm which compels those who are without it either to attack or to applaud; but beneath its influence they cannot remain merely passive. Even now the straight free lashing of Fors Clavigera seems to descend far too often for our comfort upon the skin of our own backs.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 454
