ROBERT SMITH SIIRTEES.
Robert Smith Surtees (Creator of Jorrocks), 1803-1864. By Himself and E. D. Ouming. (Blackwood. 158. net.) Ibr the large embrace of Victorian humanitarianism there is tto be found the figure of one John Jorrocks, Master of Fox 'Hounds, member of the Right Worshipful Company of 'Grocers, a massive dispenser of rugged jollity, Pickwickian before his time, a belated and diminished Falstaff. His exploits are the favourite reading of many thousand good 'British subjects who perhaps would otherwise not read at .all. In Heartbreak House Mr. Bernard Shaw tells us : "There are only two classes in good society in England : the equestrian classes and the neurotic classes," and the return to Whyte 'Melville and Robert Surtees may be symptomatic of a split in the modern camp. Surtees was an inferior Dickens,
quieter in humour, more restrained in caricature, less loaded with pathos, brighter in colour and more monotonous in texture. He neither provided nor pretended to provide plot.
His humours are boldly Jonsonian, and Sir Moses Mainchance, Sir Harry Scattercash and Captain Miserrimus Doleful are of a lineage too ancient to be questioned. Thackeray, it is said, envied his power of characterization. Dickens, it is believed by the pundits, borrowed from Jorrocks to make
Pickwick. His Ask Mamma christened a Polka, and con- tributors to the Meld were asked at the beginning of each season not to quote the sayings of the Master. Fame of this kind is a queer hybrid, and we have a wrong picture of Surtees if we think him to be anything like Leech's drawings!
For the first time we are at close quarters with this tall, serious, neat, taciturn and abstemious squire, in face much like Wordsworth who was once likened to a horse. He moved in a London in which Count D'Orsay set the fashion of walking abroad on Sunday ; in a forgotten, exclusive Brighton where, in a bad winter, "visitors were thrown entirely on the town resources." He hunted, and founded the New Sporting Magazine. On his estate in Durham he turned to local politics and fanning, made speeches on the Drainage Act, proposed, seconded and supported candidates for Parliament, stood in 1837 for Gateshead and withdrew before the poll, wrote to the Times concerning workhouses, harried the Poor Law Officers, and regretted the encroach- ments of the railway. He read widely and carefully, had many friends, knew Thackeray and Leech, met Scott and the skeleton of the murderer Burke. Like Victor Hugo, he wrote standing at a desk conveniently placed on a table, and scarce interrupted his labours to refocillate his spirits with the food and drink he described so richly in his Handley Cross and Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tours. In his last days, his nerve gone, he ceased to follow the hounds, but patiently carried his lean body and unfaded enthusiasm through the quiet lanes, trusting his instinct and his steady white cob to take him near to the hounds.
His humour, like his person, was precise and dandified, and save in his head-aching descriptions of the chase, carefully detached. Fox-hunting, according to Jorrocks, is "the image of war without its guilt, and only five-and-twenty per cent. of its danger." For Surtees it was a pure sport, beside which "prize-fighting, bull-baiting and cock-fighting were low and demoralizing pursuits" to which he would give no countenance. His descriptions move too quickly to gather thought. He wrote for those who found it difficult to visualize from print, who need pictures to aid the imagina- tion, and who cry" Give us horses, horses, nothing but horses ! " and will not be put off even by the pugs and goats of Landseer. He was, in fiction, a great lover of set pieces, of hunt balls and hunt suppers, of riot and rout that he managed to perfec- tion. It seems no idle coincidence, but a colour of the age, that both Dickens and Surtees found illustrators of the quality of Phiz and Leech to aid the swift flicker of their caricature, and to dominate our visual imagery of Jorrocks and Micawber. Abel Snorem, "like a tired dog looking where to lie down" ; Dennis O'Brian, "like a capering lighthouse " ; Captain Doleful's horse going " hup and down like a yard and 'alf of pump water " ; and Captain Doleful, Master of Cere- monies, "grinning like an elderly ape," may no longer be novelties, but together with Mrs. Jorrocks, " looking like a full- blown peony," may well be the originals of many a worn cliché; and "Excuse haste and a bad pen, as the pig said when he ran away from the butcher," is no worse than the very best of Wellerisms.
This is a bad book, with much new and welcome biographical and autobiographical material. It contains no criticism and
no index, but it reminds us that Surtees -was no mean pur- veyor of character, incident, colour and costume. As a writer on hunting he has none of the durable preciseness that
is found in Peter Beckford, or dignifies the technical descrip- tions by John Nyren and Neville Cardus of cricket, or by Luigi Riccoboni of the old Italian comedians. Technical writing is rarely literature, . and only in his paragraphs from some life history of a knacker's yard does he approach the summit. Never was there such a collection of horse carica- tures outside of the mounts of the Canterbury Pilgrims in the Ellesmere MS., and even there no such animal as the "long, lean, hidebound, ewe-necked, one-eyed, roan Rosinante, down of a hip, collar-marked, and crupper-marked. with
conspicuous splints on each leg, and desperately broken- kneed" mount of Captain Doleful. In these touches of caricature and in his pictures of riot and movement .Surtees survives. It should be the death-bed task of some of our mare ancient critics to cull an anthology from the Victorian cemetery, to be read aloud at Victorian tea-
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