BOOKS.
THE BRITISH TAR IN FACT AND FICTION.* WE suppose that there is no one in the world more learned in sea literature than Commander C. N. Robinson. He quotes from a bewilderingly rich field—of a large number of the works he mentions we confess never to have heard—and be is an ardent and expert collector of naval prints. This book, indeed, grew round the prints, but not in that makeshift sense in which a narrative is sometimes cut to the measure of the illustrations. In this case the text became inevitable because the illustrations struck fire in the author's mind. Similarly Mr. John Leyland, the editor of the Army and Navy Gazette, was "happily inspired to propose two introductory chapters," in which he has described the place of the sea officer and the seaman in naval history and literature. These two chapters, "The Influence of Personality" and "The
* The British Tar In Foot and 'Fiction. DJ/Chariot; Napior Robinson, Coin. • mender RN. With Introductory Chapters by John Leyland. Illustrated. London Harper and Brothers. [Its. net.]
Makers of Victoiy," are a very valuable contribution to British naval essays. Altogether, this industrious and erudite book is one which cannot possibly be omitted from any nautical library.
How difficult it is for Englishmen to get at the real character and the inner life of the Navy ! Even in their own generation they are genuinely distracted by doubts whether the Navy is well administered, contented, efficient, and so on, although these matters are the subject of daily information and discussion in the newspapers. With the Army it is different; soldiers live in our midst; Londoners see them drilling in Wellington Barracks, 'trooping 'the colour in the Parade, or marching through the streets. But sailors live in compact and isolated communities, and one man sees the life in a ship and the manceuvres of a fleet for every hundred who go inside military camps and watch the field-days of the Army. Perhaps Englishmen put the Army before the Navy when the two Services are mentioned together in conversation for a reason other than euphony. The common phrases and technical terms which sailors use all have a strange ring to the ordinary man's ear as of things romantic and exotic. Novelists play with them—seldom with success, unless they themselves have been sailors—but the words and names remain a vague, if agreeable, background. Every healthy British boy has been fascinated by topgallant sails, royals, and studding sails without probably understanding precisely what they are. When naval officers in the Boer War, as Captain Robinson reminds us, ordered the soldiers to haul the naval guns "handsomely," they pulled all the harder instead of moderately, as the word means. It is extra- ordinarily difficult, then, for writers and artists who are not sailors to give us a true idea of what the sailor's life is. And the sailors themselves have not helped us as much as they might have done. We suspect that they have allowed them- selves, with an ingenuousness which was not discreditable, to believe that the view taken of sea life from the outside was somehow true. Or, if they did not believe that, they thought it Was a literary obligation to fall into line with the pre- possessions 'of those who would do them the honour of reading their books, and were therefore in a material degree their clients. Be that as it may, the most popular writers of the sea—Defoe, Smollett, Marryat, and so on—have put more of insurgeecy, rollicksomeness, or social gallantry into their stories than were probably ever characteristic of the normal lives of seamen. Although Defoe, Smollett, and Marryat all understood that of which they wrote, knowledge is not always a restraint. Lever (to make a comparison) was an Irish- man, and knew Irish life as well as any man ; yet his novels are a delirious exaggeration of Irish character. 'They are excellent fun though, and that is why he continued to write them,—at least until he thought he had given the public enough of caricature, and changed his style into something incredibly non-Leverian. If a reader who bad beard nothing of the sea (or were unable to apply such correctives as are available for the lay, mind) took his impressions of the Navy from the stories, plays, and pictures summarised or repro- duced in Captain Robinson's book, he would conclude that sailors used to spend most of their lives in violent alternations between making and losing money and in the gallant siege of women. "A wife in every poll" is written all over this collection of prints. The tar is for ever "departing" from or "returning" to his sweetheart, or capturing human "prizes," "frigates," and so forth in other lands, and pouring forth gold in carousals. This is, or wee, true in its way no doubt—the sailor
who returns after long periods of danger and invisibility on the seas has a different social value and perspective from all other men—but when it is put forward as the whole truth it ceases to
be true at all. Captain' Robinson's own experience corrects it automatically, of course; but here he is not defining- and explaining in any detail; he only marshals the evielence of
nautical writers and artists as to what the tar has been in our history. He must take the evidence as he finds it, and he has searched for it and arranged it in a manner beyond reproach.
It is significant of what we have been saying that the songs of Dibdin—the very things for the sailor of tradition—were never sung much in the Navy. It has sometimes been declared that they were not sung at all; but Captain Robinson produces the testimony of contemporary seamen • to show that this is an overstatement.
So far as it enters into the scheme of his book to do so,
Captain Robinson does, we think, confirm . the view that old age differed from ours, and which to the age itself can literature has given us a rather unreal picture of the seaman, have appeared of small moment. The student of the history however telling and romantic. Thus he writes. of Defoe:— of thought goes deeper, but he, again, deals with the evolution ,,But it is, nevertheless, disappointing to find that the writer, who of all others in those days could have delineated the men which we call temperament. A true reconstruction involves who walked the quarter-deck and worked on the forecastles of the work of all three,—the exact knowledge, the sense of lei hips of war, was content with the description of unimaginative pictureeque detail, the insight into curious souls. In Mrs. Piratical transactions. No man had ever a greater power of epparent fidelity of description than Defoe. Ile realised things Henry Cust's remarkable book we have an attempt at such a to himself as permanent conceptions, to be examined, estimated, construction. Let us be clear as to what she has done. She has and measured, as with the logical consistency of fact and the taken four old German chronicles of adventnrous gentlemen accuracy of existent things. His 'Journal of the Plague Year' during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,—gentlemen who and 'Memoirs of a Cavalier' were written with such intimate
verisimilitude that they imposed upon men who knew the circum-
covered all Western Europe in their peregrinations. These stances, and recognised the truth of local description, as repro- centuries saw the Renaissance, the Reformation and the senting actual narratives of fad. Defoe separates himself, as it Counter-Reformation, the foundation of modern science were, from the ostensible author, even to the literary artifice of and the shaping of modern politics. But the four throwing a little doubt at times upon that author's accuracy. Such a writer might well have given us the real seaman, officer gentlemen were not leaders in any movement. They and lower-deck mariner, of his day, but Defoe's mind was were plain people going about their business of fighting, commonly turned away from the influences of authority." or making love, or raising loans with no eye to the Again, in his tribute to the genius of Smollett Captain grave ferments which were changing the world. We see Robinson is forced to say of his characters that "they are something of these ferments, indeed, but it is through the caricatures, almost every one of them." Only Marryat eyes of men who never sought or required an explanation of remains for consideration among the greatest nautical writers them. Hence we recapture the point of view of the age, for who had themselves been at sea, and of him Captain Robinson this point of -view is always that of the rank-and-file, not of nays :— the leaders. The Reformation and the Renaissance were " Marryat as a man must not be judged by Marryat as an consciously in the minds of very few people. The average author, in the pages of The Naval 'Officer.; or, Scenes and man might run up against them, but he did not realise what Adventures in the Life of Prank Mildmay.' He had witnessed they meant. He thought of them only as a whimsy in Church mutiny and was aware of its forms ; he knew there were tyrannical captains and weak captains, and he held them up as government or a vagary in taste to which he might or might examples in his dark pictures of cruelty and failure. He forgot not have leanings. Mrs. Cost's four narratiVes show us the that he might misinterpret to the uninstructed reader the Navy heart of the gentlemen of the later Middle Ages as few that bad among its captains many gallant and honourable gentle- historical novels we ever read have done. Her achievement men, like Cochrane himself, and the men who were Nelson's ' band of brothers.' In his later books he was in a happier is in its essentials brilliant fiction. She has expounded and mood, and on his behalf it must be remembered that he had annotated her originals with remarkable learning, but the himself suffered in his younger days. It was unfortunate, never- result is not history, but romance. She is in the position theless, that he made fiction a vehicle for his revenge upon those of a novelist who, after careful study of every authority, who had persecuted him. As a narrative, 'Frank Mildmay ' is visibly autobiographical, and Marryat did himself a wrong, because, protest as he might that he was not the rather un- them on the quest of adventure. It is quite immaterial that Pleasant person whom he had made his hero, it was impossible every adventure really took place ; that concerns the historian, for his contemporaries to distinguish him from that character. not the reader. The point is that the narratives are art. He had chosen deliberately to perpetuate the darker side of naval
life, making it more brutal than it was, instead of describing, as
he did later on, its honest gaiety and cleanly virtue." own way, and her way is that of good fiction. That is to say, Where so much writing about the sea has been at one, or she shows us with full realism the hearts and deeds of her more than one, remove from reality we might expect that it people, but in the showing gives us a modern. staudpoink—a had gone particularly astray in such familiar stories as those view-ground from which we can see the medley of adventures about women who joined the Navy disguised as men. But under the conditions of artistic presentation. We are inclined there we should be wrong. Captain Robinson says :— to call the book the best historical novel Which has appeared. "There are many instances in naval history which are well for many years. authenticated of females who went, to sea as sailors, and some of The four gentlemen were knights, but not knights-errant them not only made excellent .seamen—if the expression may be There was nothing of a crusade in their enterprises. The Permitted—but exhibited courage and gallantry in battle with Bohemian Lev was in quest of useful alliances for his brother- their country's enemies. Two well-known instances are those of modern times, is unquestionable."
and the most uninstructed reader will be able to perceiie what
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