MR. JAMES'S WORKS.*
Bernard Marsh is a posthumous novel, and as it will be the last of that apparently interminable series the works of Mr. G. P. R. James, it may be worth while to inquire for a moment why the series was ever produced. It is the fashion to condemn Mr. James's novels very summarily as the mere rubbish of cir- culating libraries, stuff fit only for boys in their teens, altogether below discussion or dissection. Summary criticism is, however, seldom true, and the facts still remain to be explained that Mr. James produced some thirty novels with unexampled rapidity, that they all sold well enough to tempt the publishers to keep on issuing them, that they have been reprinted in every kind of cheap style, that they have been pirated in America till we have seen a newspaper edition, and that one or two of them threaten to be as familiar to the next generation as they have been to this. Works absolutely without merit rarely sell rapidly at a shilling, and though a life of thirty years is not an immortality, still the infinite majority of books do not live thirty years. How does it happen that tales condemned by all critics have sold continuously and pretty rapidly for so long? Simply, we believe, because they meet a strong popular taste which few novelists attempt to satisfy,—the liking for a "tale "in the old sense of the word, a narrative which requires little attention and no thought, but goes pleasantly on as if it were a chapter out of some garrulous historian. That is what Mr. James's stories do. It chanced to the writer once to do what probably no other living man ever did except Mr. James himself, to read, when sick and bookless abroad, the entire series. He quitted them with a feeling of regret that they were not twice as many, that he should not be any more kept so pleasantly at once from sleep and think- ing. They were full to nausea of all the faults which the
trained critic hates, of characters repeated time after time, des- criptions loaded down with words, " morals " forced on the reader with impertinent obtrusiveness. But they were pleasant reading nevertheless. The excessive flow of words, a flow wholly unequalled except in Fenimore Cooper's later novels, is not verbosity but rather garrulity, the talk not of an empty- headed man but of a man accustomed to take too much time, to
tell his story in detail, to recount, as English peasants still do if they have any adventures to relate. Take, for example, the "Gentleman of the Old School." A village schoolmaster telling
that series of adventures from memory to his children and the villagers would, we conceive, tell them very much as Mr. James has done, boring a London man to death, but not boring his audience, and there are moods in which the educated man likes to be talked to garrulously. The stories, it is said, are all alike, and doubtless the author's range of conception was limited, though his lazy trick of beginning half a dozen novels in pre- cisely the same way has exaggerated the truth. But it is not more limited than the range of most biographers who are com- pelled to confine tqemselves to the few persons with whom their heroes came in contact. Mr. James, as a rule, creates on a system. In each story there is a good and chivalric knight, with a good and chivalric friend, a good but not chivalric follower, and a timidly-good lady-love, who are all tormented by a group of the same kind without the goodness. They are not very in- teresting characters any of them, but still as one reads they seem to do very much what they are expected to do, and watch- ing an adventure is interesting even when one does not know why the adventurers act as they are visibly doing. It is not silly to take an interest in a history say of the conquest of some South American province, though Spaniards and Indians, con- quistadores and priests, are all alike beyond analysis. The reader saes the difficulties in the way, and wants to know how they were overcome, and what happened when they were overcome, and how all that struggling ended ; and if the
historian tells him a little lengthily, why so much the better. That is the secret of the readableness, such as it is, of Mr. James's novels. The people are not interesting at all,— with the single exception of Philip Augustus there is not a real character in the entire mass,—but still they are human beings visibly, and they are struggling to get out of very perceptible
difficulties, and the reader watches them, as a weary man will watch dogs chasing a oat, with no special excitement, but still a regret when the game leaves off. One does not want always to he thrilled. Mr. James never made the mistake of modern novelists of incident, that of forcing the reader to consider the probabilities of the tale he is reading. He is always probable, or rather he leaves the impression that the scenes he depicts occurred, and
that the fault in describing them lies exclusively with the narrator. They are little histories, not novels, and excite just the same kind and degree of emotion. When we read how William the Silent was set upon by assassins, and how he killed
one, and• outrode two, and bribed the fourth, we are interested, though we have no idea of his feelings, or their feelings, and no conception of the way in which their separate idiosyncrasies are working. And so we are interested in De Coucy's conduct at the battle of Bovines. He is, it may be, a stupid
person in armour, but still he is visible there, laying about him, and spurring, and hitting, and being hit, and if we saw any
stupid person in armour doing all that we should keep on look- ing very intently. Mr. James does not create this impression of reality as a man of genius would, but as a mediocre historian would, does not give you a dozen touches which fire the imagina- tion to create for itself, but is horribly prolix, and tells you all about the armour and the horse, and the way the horse was spurred, and how it curvetted, and how two knights charged to- gether, and hit each other instead of De Coucy, and how the footmen interfered andwere killed, and so by garrulous laborious- ness does in the end enable you to see. Here is a passage from the only old novel of Mr. James we have at hand, "Sir Theodore Broughton." Reginald Lisle sees before him two ladies with a rough man riding behind them :
"'I am near some gentleman's park,' he thought ; those are the two ladies of the house ; that is a servant riding back from an errand.' For some short time he persisted in this view; for the horseman rode on at no very quick pace after the ladies, nor did they seem to hurry their pace at all. In a moment after, however, Reginald Lisle put his hand down to his saddle-bow, and into a holster that hung there—the cause of which proceeding was that he perceived the horseman do something very much of the same kind. The next moment the man passed the two ladies, wheeled his beast right before them, and evidently brought them to a halt. At the same time a sound, not exactly a scream, for it was not loud enough, but rather an exclamation of surprise and fear, reached the ear of Reginald Lisle and his spurs were in the horse's sides in a moment. On the beast went like lightning. The pistol was out of the holster; and, throwing down the rein, the young gentleman crammed down the ramrod tightly, to make sure that the hall had not slipped during a long day's ride. By this time, although it was a soft and sandy road, the sound of his- horse's feet was heard by the two ladies, one of whom was evidently bestowing her purse upon the gentleman before her. The horseman, whose face was turned that way, must have become conscious, some moments before, that he was not the only mounted man upon the road ; but, to say the truth, he seemed to trouble himself very little about it, and made no movement whatever indicative of an intention of abandoning his object.'" Nothing can be less like the work of a man of genius than that description, but if an average person were relating an actual incident he had seen he would tell it just that way, mentioning the utterly unimporant incidents we have italicized, and his audience would listen and would like to know how that matter ended. That is, we believe, the whole secret of Mr. James's popularity. He is not a good novelist, still less a great novelist, has no claim to be considered great in any capacity whatever, but he is a good teller of tales, and good tellers of tales are excessively scarce. We do not know one at this mornent who is writing, for the author of ‘• Digby Grand," who belongs to the same class, uses other and higher powers which Mr. James did not possess.
The next one who appears will probably be very successful, for there is a place to be filled, a want of some raconteur who can amuse peop'e without attempting to keep them quite so fully awake. Nobody will consciously try to do it, for it is not a very noble function; but we think we could guarantee such a man a larger sale than the author—say of books like the " Goldsworthys " —will ever attain. He must, however, avoid the fault which will ultimately send Mr. James to the dealers in old paper. He must not write so much twaddle that it cannot be skipped. The habit was always strong in Mr. James, but latterly it grew on him till in his posthumous work "Barnard Marsh" it has become in- tolerable. There are chapters filled with this sort of thing :-
"What a wonderful and bleased thing is night, when nature with- draws the stimulus poured upon the brain through the little channel of the eye, and all the cares and, fatigues of the past day, like sour nurses, who have been cross with the wayward child till it was weary, turn kind and compassionate at last, and rock the mind to sleep ! The blanket of the dark,' Shakespeare calls it, and contrasts it with Heaven. Now, doubtless there is many a wicked thing done behind the blanket ; but I see not why the misuse of any of Heaven's best gifts by man and man's passions should take away from the value of that gift. The best boon that ever was conveyed can be abused ; and we have no one to thank for the evil but ourselves. When God created the evil and the good, He permitted the evil, but ordained the good, and left man to choose between them. Shall we presume to blame God for what He permitted ? Shall we repine that He left us free agents ? Shall we justify ourselves by thinking that he did not bind us while He created us, but left us to choose for ourselves ? Let us rather deplore the weakness which we have engendered and encouraged in our own hearts, repent of each evil that has brought others in its train, and thank Him, who has given us blessings we deserved not, freedom which we have ourselves abused, a thousand guides into the right path to whose voice we would not listen, and yet has called us home even at the last, if we will but obey the voice of Him who sent us forth. Little children, listen unto me, and let not all the mercies of the Lord be given in vain."
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