I

By HERBERT EVELYN CAMPBELL.

FIRST met Charles Marriott in 1901. Our acquaintance began when I first wrote to him about one of his short stories.

Subsequently I had a talk with him, that seems to me now to embody all that might be written or said about the simple life; for he had then arrived at a crisis in his career, and, fortified by the receipt of a small legacy, he had been enabled to make new and wise plans for the future, to burn his boats, and to start in sober earnest upon the noble adventure of literature.

His was a simple plan: he saw his way clear at last to leave his irksome calling, and he would meantime go and make his home in Cornwall, and write for his living.

The admirable results of his brave determination are before us in a fine list of novels, every one of which, I will venture to say, is of some distinction, and has contributed to the pleasure and permanent good of the world. I would ask you to read and analyse these books, and see whether the true standard of literature has not been upheld in all of them. You will find that they represent a remarkable output of sustained strength for a man not yet forty, and you will also see that our novelist is improving as he gets older, always maintaining the high ideal of style, taste, and wholesome interest.

'The Column" is the book by which Mr. Marriott first

made his reputation. I do not wish to examine "The Column" in detail, but I may say that I have always regarded this book more as a brilliant series of sketches than a finished production. I constantly retain the sense of the lovely, pure companionship of Johnnie Bargister and Daphne Hastings. That Daphne should marry the impostor Waring and pass through the sea-waves to the other world, leaving Johnnie, the good true man, to find salvation in his sculptor's art, is just as true as a Greek tragedy. In this finale there is the classic cleansing of souls by means of pity and terror. One looks for and desires a lofty ending, and we do not get it in our own way. But we feel that the author strikes the true note of real. human life, which is always crowded with disappointment, anomalies, and puzzling tragedies. What struck me in "The Column " many years ago was a remarkable compelling quality which made me long to read it again; and this is perhaps the most genuine compliment that a book can pay itself. Since then I have often re-read the simple and beautiful story, and though I still find some faults in it possibly a few things that are too clever or too obscure yet I have taken Johnnie Bargister and Daphne, Miss Williams, "the Mother of the Parish," and Cathcart, the sculptor, into my heart of hearts, and I continue to tramp the world with them as people of my own acquaintance, whom I am proud to know.

I say nothing of other characters in this book with whom I am not so much in sympathy, but they are for the most part very powerfully drawn, for Mr. Marriott knows people pretty well, reads them through and through, with a cold eye and a detached sentiment, and he can most quickly appraise people of the right sort and the wrong

sort.

With him human nature is the chief point of interest. He has a gift of good-natured satire, which is forcible more by implication than direct touch. He has insight and sympathy: he admires the finest qualities appropriate

to each sex. He knows the influences of sun and moon and stars, and earth and sea and river, and plants and flowers and trees, upon men and women. He appreciates the delicate influences of atmosphere and colour, and realises to the full the spiritual forces which really carry on the world.

In his second book, "Love with Honour "-which contains a good deal of rather Borrovian adventure and humour-the culminating interest leaves us with the satisfaction of an honourable and large act of renunciation by both hero and heroine. One of the characters in this volume sticks in my mind, the old art worker dwelling in the country with his sister, who sometimes turns for mental and spiritual refreshment to the various fine old bits of stained glass of rare colour which he keeps in a drawer.

"The House on the Sands" was perhaps less generally liked than the two first books. It expounded certain shades of politics and economics which many readers probably found dry and uninteresting, but this book,which really contains the working out of more than one rather unusual story-presents some well-drawn studies of life and nature, and has a definite and tangible value in the world of letters.

In "Genevra," an interesting story, with the scene again laid principally in Cornwall, there is a fine character. This is Uter Penrose, an old man of seventy, who has been Genevra's tutor. Genevra has made a considerable reputation by her published poems, and on one occasion Uter says to her "Remember this, Jenny, literature, prose, or poetry, stands or falls by the verb and the noun. They are the ribs and the bones of it; adjectives are the clothing-the plum flesh if you will-pretty enough, but not proof against time. It's by the bones you know the shape of a thing

It is a fine passage, and I have only taken these few

F

words from it in order to illustrate the originality of Mr. Marriott's ideas and the clarity of his diction.

We now come to "Mrs. Alemere's Elopement." This comedy, which includes the tragedy of the death of Mrs. Alemere, gives us the case of a lady with a rather brutal yet "decent chap" sort of husband. He is a wealthy brewer, who one day, when their differences culminate in a violent scene, strikes her, whereupon a chivalrous youth, named Dick, helps her to run away, and, in fact, accompanies her in her flight, although the elopement is a quite innocent one. Dick bears the brand of the divorce proceedings, despite the fact that he is conscious of having done no other wrong than that of countenancing and abetting an absurd and stupid flight. But just as he is prepared to marry the lady, she marries somebody else, who has turned up from abroad—an individual who is a delightful specimen of the clever unbeliever cad of the present day. The various characters in this book are drawn with much skill and humour.

"The Lapse of Vivien Eady" is a favourite of mine. It is not a worse lapse than the breaking off of an engagement with a prig of a schoolmaster, and it is his fault. Hugh Stott, the stronger man, is a gentleman and a good fellow, and the virtues of the sportsman of the right kind are well brought out in this breezy book.

"The Remnant" (1907) preceded "The Wondrous Wife," published later in the year, and contains some details of Cornish mining in its interesting story, and a powerful study of a beautiful cruel woman.

For the volume of collected short stories, "Women and the West," I have nothing but the most unstinted praise. In particular I mention one only of these delightful tales, the first in the book.

It is a racy account of an Englishman who returns to his native village, having made a fortune in America. He is resolved to square up certain claims of conscience, and he finds a state of things "romantic," as he says. He

enquires for himself, hears and sees for himself, and having sized up everything from a British as well as from an American point of view, he returns to the West, leaving romance and a generous donation behind him. But this, and all the other stories are so well told! Not a word out of place -and the interest always growing as the tale unfolds.

Of this book "Ouida" (Miss de la Ramée), a truehearted woman of genius, who has so recently passed away, wrote to the author in most encouraging terms.

When Ouida compared the author with no less a master of the short story than Guy de Maupassant, she did not exaggerate, for it is in this form of fiction that Mr. Marriott particularly shines.

The most recent of his longer works, "The Wondrous Wife" (1907) is by many considered his most important, and, I think, with good reason. The end of the book shows us the heroine as a thoroughly virtuous and selfsacrificing woman devoted to a husband doomed to an incurable disease a man who had certainly treated her badly. This story of a woman exposed to a seemingly overpowering temptation, and manifesting strength to withstand it, is well told. But the book contains many interesting characters most cunningly portrayed, including the Jesuit Father.

At the outset of his literary career, the author told me that he proposed to put all his energies into writing about the present age, as he saw and realised it, leaving the romantic reconstruction of past periods, and the probabilities of development in the future, to other writers. And it is surely the period in which a man lives, and conjugates the verbs "To Be, To Do, and To Suffer," that offers the best field and the best chances for honest workers. It is the study of practical life and experience the real existence tempered by the ideal, the holding up of the mirror to the face of his present days, that can always gain for a man the distinction of the approval of posterity.