WILLIAM BLACK.* SIR WEMYSS REID is an expert—one might almost

say a veteran—in the work of writing judicious biography, and as William Black was to him an intimate friend in a sense and to an extent that neither Mr. Forster, Lord Houghton, nor Lord Playfair can be said to have been, he has written his new book with enthusiasm as well as with discretion. He has made one mistake, however; this volume is at least a hundred pages too long. There were no startling events in Black's life. It now appears that when he was a young journalist in Glasgow he fell in love with an actress, but the incident seems to have had no permanent effect upon character or career beyond inducing him to exchange the place of his birth for what his biographer rather conventionally terms " the great city." He had the usual ups and downs of a struggling man, and the death of his first wife was a severe blow to him. He was, however, saved by circumstances, resolution, and thrift from that intensity of struggle for existence which, while it may be a good moral discipline, is "extremely likely," as Mr. Morley puts it in the case of Vauvenargues, to "wear away a very priceless kind of delicacy in a man's estimate of human relations and their import." " He never," says Sir Wemyss, "had to pass through any period of severe and sordid struggle as a man of letters. From the time when, still a mere boy, he threw up his modest post in Birchin Lane and trusted wholly to his pen for a livelihood, he never failed to make a sufficient in- come." Besides, Black was an extremely reserved man even for a Scotsman, and as a consequence his letters have none of the personal charm or autobiographical value of Stevenson's. Such letters of his as are here given are either essentially business notes, or effervescences of mild club fun, or sheer extrava- gances like the " Dear Wretch" letters to his friend Miss Mary Anderson, the eminent actress. Sir Wemyss's book would have been none the worse, but a good deal the smaller, had the majority of these been left out. As a set-off to this pardonable weakness in a biography must be placed its lucidity and fairness. Sir Wemyss tells a story admirably; he has nothing unpleasant to say of Black's critics or rivals ; and if he places his friend's literary achievement on too high a level, he exhibits with perfect clearness what in the " philo- sophic" slang of the day is termed the " evolution" of that " perfection of a limited man " which Black at the height of his reputation—when . A Princess of Thule was published— undoubtedly became.

• WIWI= Bieck, Noodist : a Biography. By Wemyss Reid. London: Cassell and CO. ; and Sampson Low, Marston, and Co. no. 6do

William Black was born on November 15th, 1841, and had just completed his fifty-seventh year when he died of a somewhat mysterious but painful nervous malady on December 10th, 1898. His life, therefore, though not much shorter than Dickens's and longer than Thackeray's, was not long as lives, even of literary men, now run. Yet when one thinks of his limited natural endowments, and of his imperfect preparation for the career of the novelist, it must be allowed that he succeeded in getting a really surprising amount of good work into it. Black, to compare him only with modern Scottish novelists, most, if not all, of whom were his contemporaries, did not command the style of Stevenson ; he had not the humour of Mr. Barrie, or the Balzacian insight of the author of The House with the Green Shutters. At his very beat he seems an inspired special correspondent, creating characters as he goes through life, rather than a man of genius through whom

characters speak. Yet it is not improbable that his greatest efforts—certainly A Daughter of Seth, perhaps A Princess of Thule—will live along with The Master of

Ballantrae and A Window in Thrums, and that mainly in virtue of their fundamental reality. Possibly Black would have been a better artist, and probably his writing would have had more of the air of distinction, had he in his boyhood secured a thorough education for a profession instead, of groping without method after culture; he evidently thought that his nature would have developed to more purpose but for the theological gloom of his youthful environment. Sir Wemyss Reid says rather curiously of his friend's first effort in fiction, James Merle, written when he was still a lad in Glasgow :—

"Black was anxious to forget the book, I fancy, in later years, not because he had any reason to be ashamed of it as a literary production, but because it recalled to him and laid bare to the eyes of the world the atmosphere in which much of his early life was spent. The heaven that lies about us in our infancy was in the case of Black, as in that of so many other Scots youth of his time, a heaven too deeply tinctured with a sombre creed to furnish congenial or sympathetic memories to a man who, in the process of mental evolution, had advanced to another and a. more liberal plane of thought from that on which he started. This, I take it, accounted for the curious dislike which Black evinced in his later years to any mention of his first novel."

Sir Wemyss's deductions, however, should be taken along with a statement of Black's own on another novel which he desired should be forgotten :— " 'Love or Marriage' has been out of print for many years. I dropped it not on account of any views it propounded, or any social problems' it touched (so far as I can remember, it did neither the one nor the other), but simply because it was an im- mature and unsatisfactory production. It is not the only one of my early novels which I have refused to reprint in any cheap edition. May a kindly Mother Earth quietly bury the originals away out of sight—turning them to dust as rapidly as possible ! "

There is no reason to believe that Black was, or had occasion to be, ashamed of his early days or of his relatives. His early training enabled him, in the first place, to concentrate his mind on any piece of work on which he was engaged, and in the second, to see his way through life; nor should it be forgotten that "the strong hand of Calvinistic purity" held its grip not only upon his own character, but upon his characters in fiction,—a fact which more than any other explains their popularity When, after experimenting as a clerk—to the last

he wrote a good clerkly hand—he drifted into journalism, and from journalism into novel-writing, Scottish steadiness and shrewdness kept him always hard at work, and invariably in touch with real life. He studied closely the people, mostly to all appearance of the comfortable middle class, with whom he consorted in the various districts of London, such as Clapham and Denmark Hill, in which he lived, and in Brighton, and set them in surroundings, chiefly in his favourite Highlands, which he studied no less carefully. It is not so much the artist as the ouvrier—to adopt M. Zola's mercilessly honest description of himself—that is revealed in Sir Wemysa Reid's description of Black's method of work :—

"The novels were generally begun on the return to Brighton in the early autumn, and with one or two short stories each took about a year to write. He worked on alternate days, taking long walks of twenty miles or more over the Downs or along the coast on non- writing days. In these days he used to "think out' to the smallest details the next chapter of the story, committing it almost textually to memory. Sometimes for months he would have some portion ready in his mind to put on paper, and great was his relief when he was at last able to write it down in its proper place in the book For his backgrounds he made

very minute and definite notes in little note-books which he used to carry about for that purpose. In these note-books he described fully every detail of light and shade, colouring and foliage, in any scene that ho wished to describe, thus making word pictures of the place he wished to write about."

We are assured, however, that Black never thrust mere photo- graphs of actual persons into even his best stories :— " It is not improbable that the theme of 'A Daughter of Beth' may have occurred to him from an incident which really happened, the visit of a young lady, Irish by birth, but a resident in Paris, to some friends in Scotland. This young lady was a friend of Black's, and there is no doubt she told him of some of the amusing incongruities between herself, fresh from Paris and its ways of living, and the unsophisticated Scottish household in which she was temporarily resident. This incident may have been the germ of A Daughter of Beth,' but in any case the treatment of the subject was Black's and Black's alone, whilst Coquette was absolutely a creature of his own imagination. Here and there, it is true, some traits in her character may have been drawn from some woman whom he had actually met; for in his silent way he was always studying the people whom he encountered in real life, and making mental notes of anything about them that struck him as being distinctive or characteristic. But no one can claim to have acted as a model for Coquette."

Black had his reward. His heroes, and above all his heroines, being based on several models, were akin to so many of his readers that they sought to control his plots, and protested against certain of his " endings " with an intensity which, as revealed in letters, recalls a similar solicitude on the part of Richardson's adorers. Mr. Swinburne, according to tradition, went on his knees to induce him to spare poor Madcap Violet. While on his death-bed Black received the following letter :— " This is my letter of thanks for the great pleasure you have given me. For six weeks I have been in bed. On my bed have been in this time from one to three of your books. I read until weary, then dream—and read again. I thank you for the yacht- ing cruises where I have gone with you. I thank you for the pleasant acquaintance you have given me with most delightful people whom, but for you, I should never have known. I thank you for helping me through these weary weeks. I thank God for sending you into this world."

When Black's short struggle in London was over—after he became connected with the Daily News, contracted his second happy marriage with Miss Eva Wharton Simpson, who survives him, and the success in 1871 of A Daughter of Beth proved that he had another string to his bow besides journalism—his life flowed peacefully on. It seems to have consisted chiefly of hard work in Brighton, visits to London, and yachting and fishing excursions to the Highlands. Ulti- mately his literary work was confined almost exclusively to fiction, although, by the way, Sir Wemyss Reid seems, so far as we have observed, to have ignored or forgotten the fact that his friend contributed a volume on Goldsmith to the " English Men of Letters " series, edited by Mr. John Morley. Although he did not affect asceticism, and as life became easier with him believed more and more with Arnold in what " adds to the agreeableness of life," he was kind and helpful. One of his earlier journalistic friends was an Irishman, William Barry, who figures as " Willie Fitzgerald" in Shandon Bells. When Barry was struck down by an illness which proved fatal, Black did his work for him, but declined to take his stipend. He did even more :- " More than once, when going to visit Barry at his lodgings at Brixton, I have encountered Black on his way to the same place, dressed with his usual care and neatness,—a frock-coated figure more suited to Piccadilly on a summer afternoon than to the unfashionable southern suburb ; and always he carried with him regardless of appearances some gift for the dying man,—now a hare dangling in dangerous proximity to the smartly-cut coat, and now a basin of jelly or soup, which somehow or other harmonised still less with his general appearance than the hare did. The world never saw this side of Black's character, never guessed at its existence."

Black reasoned himself—being a Scotsman he could do so without much difficulty—into stoicism long before his death, and appears to have read Marcus Aurelius assiduously. Before the end he practically withdrew from the society even of his friends. It is thus that his biographer tells of his last interview with him :- " In the month of August, on going into the Reform Club one day for luncheon, I was surprised to see him in his old seat at the familiar table. He had not occupied it for several years, and since he had last been there, James Payn, who always used to sit in the chair next to Black's, had died. I welcomed with joy his return to the old place, but quickly the shattered state of his health forced itself upon my notice. Since I had seen him last, he seemed to have become almost an old man. The dark brown hair iTe-i i—rnerl to grey; the nervous energy which had once

distinguished him in all his acts and sayings was gone ; his voice had lost its old resonance, and his speech was weak and slow. It was a pathetic sight By and by he shook hands with me, and went away apparently exhausted by the exertion of conversation. That was the last visit he paid to the Reform Club, in which he had been for so many years a prominent figure; his last appearance in London, which he had entered first as an unknown youth, and where he had risen so high in fame ; and the last time I ever saw him."