[from Hall Caine My Story]

CHAPTER V
R. D. BLACKMORE

ONE of the kindest things said about my first novel at the moment of its publication was that it smelt of the peat, which was the distinguishing odour of " Lorna Doone"; and this coupling of my first work of fiction with Blackmore's masterpiece quickly led to a personal friendship with one of the least known but most fascinating personalities of my time.

Whether Blackmore wrote in the first instance to me, or I to him, I cannot now recall ; but among his earliest letters I find one which says

" Your publishers have kindly sent me a copy of ' The Shadow of a Crime,' and I am reading it carefully. Your style does not permit any skipping. No work that does so is of much value. So far as I can yet judge, the book is full of power and true imagination. To the critical gift I have no claim; but I seem to myself to know when I come across genuine matter. And you have also that respect for yourself and your readers which is a sane quâ non for the achievement of great work. However, I will not show my own deficiency in that quality by offering premature remarks."

But Blackmore could be a frank critic as well as a generous appreciator, and a day or two later than the date of this letter he wrote again in terms of much more limited praise.

I would not write again," he says, " until I had read your book through, which I have now done with great care. My opinion is of very little value ; but so far as I can distinctly form one it is as follows : There is any amount of vigour and power and some real pathos (which is of course a part of power), also there are many other merits, strong English style, great knowledge of character, keen observation and much originality.

" But I think you will improve upon this book vastly as experience grows. The incidents appear to me to be huddled, without sense of proportion now and then, and there is much strain upon credulity. But I am loth to find fault, knowing I am not a skilled workman myself."

After the publication of my second and third novels, Blackmore was no less generous and no less kindly.

" It has always seemed to me," he said, "that your turn of mind and power of creation are specially dramatic and that you will write if once you take to that form a very grand and moving play. There is no one who can do that now, so far at least as I can judge, and I shall be proud if I live long enough to see you achieve it.

" But for novel-writing, you have not yet (according to my small judgment) the sense of proportion and variety which are needful for pleasant work. I have read with great care your latest book and have admired and been stirred by it. But to my mind (which is not at all a critic one) there is not the sliding and the quiet shifting and the sense of pause which are perhaps only the mechanical parts of great work but help to lift it. I cannot exactly express my meaning and I have no science to second it ; and I know that I cannot do the thing itself and never attempt it consciously."

There was always encouragement as well as counsel in Blackmore's excellent letters, and little glimpses into his own life and character that were always interesting and sometimes beautiful.

" I conclude that you have left the Isle of Man," he wrote, " and hope you are working at a book, quocunque jeceris stabil. Any work of yours will now command a larger circle than the critics; to whom, like myself, you owe little. If the matter were of more interest I would print the first notices of ' Lorna Doone,' which they are now quoting as a standard. I have them somewhere and a damp bed they are to smother a shy guest in. But you know well enough how these men fumble the keys of an open door."

I met Blackmore first in the earliest days of our acquaintance. He came to the gate of his garden at Teddington to meet me on my alighting from the train. An elderly man, of more than the middle height and full proportions, with a clear-cut face, clean shaven, except for a tuft of grey hair down the cheek in the manner of fifty years ago. He wore a straw hat with a wide brim, and gave generally the impression of a comfortable old Quaker. His eyes were neither large nor brilliant, and gave no hint of having looked on the burning bush. The expression was calm, and there was a solid strength in face, figure, and bearing. I should have said he was then a man in good health, on fairly good terms with life, and that he had certainly slept o' nights.

That day our talk was not literary. He had a large garden, which he thought he cultivated for profit, although it had always involved him in a steadily increasing loss. His wife, who was lately dead, used to say that but for the "profits" of his work in the garden they might live in ease and content. But Blackmore knew what he was doing. He loved his garden, he loved his trees, above all he loved his pears; and literature can have had no rewards so dear to him as his annual deficit on his seventeen acres. We walked over them for several hours, and he talked of his fruit and flowers with as much tenderness as if they had been human beings. God had given him no other children, and he was then, I think, quite alone. Somewhat later his affectionate young niece came to take charge of the place his wife had left vacant, and the lonely man became less lonely; but it was well for him always that he had his garden to love and care for.

His occupations as a market-gardener gave him a good deal of amusement. He was full of stories of his experiences with his men, with the carters who took his fruit to Covent Garden, and with the people he bought his seeds and manure from. The general effect of these stories was that he knew he was often cheated, and that he enjoyed the simplicity of the means employed to hoodwink him. One story, I remember, was of a Carter who dropped into the trap of the boy in the legend who rendered his master an account beginning, "A shilling's worth of eggseighteen pence." The fellow worked for Blackmore for many years at a workman's wages, and while his master lost on an average five hundred pounds a year on growing fruit, his gardener built a row of cottages on selling it. The whirlwind came, however, one Saturday night, when the man had the ill-luck to return home from market drunk, and the money in his purse showed a surplus of several pounds over his account. Another of Blackmore's stories was of buying manure from a farmer, who knew nothing of his celebrity outside the business of market-gardening.

"How much a ton?" asked Blackmore. "Well," said the farmer, "I'm charging the gentlemen seven-and-six, but you shall have it for five."

Blackmore's house stood in the middle of his garden, and was a plain square structure of the simplest kind. He had built it himself, and it expressed his own character in the absence of every unnecessary ornament. No house could be less like the literary man's home, which usually gathers about it signs and symbols of its class. Comparatively few books, and those chiefly classical, such as one might find in the house of a schoolmaster or the library of a monastery, with a fair sprinkling of treatises on horticulture. Novels there were, but mainly presentation copies of the works of friends, with here and there a series of Dickens and Thackeray.

His workroom was, I think, also his bedroom, an upstairs room of medium size, whereof the most notable feature was a multitudinous collection of meerschaum pipes of varying size and degree of rosy colour. He was a great smoker, and loved to have his huge pipes about him. There were few photographs except those of Sir Richard Owen and certain other friends of earlier years. One thing only would have betrayed the fact that this was the home of Blackmore. On the drawing-room table there was a large album devoted exclusively to the portraits of girls called Lorna, after his beloved heroine of that name. A lovely collection of sweet faces which he could not help being proud of, for he was god-father to a vast family of beautiful children.

The fifteen years following my first visit to Teddington ripened our friendship to the closest intimacy. He had few friends among literary people, and except for Thomas Hardy, of whom he had seen little in later years, he had hardly a personal acquaintance of his own class. My visits to Blackmore were not as frequent as they would have been but for the distance which separated our homes; but our correspondence was almost constant, and I have many of his charming letters. They are among the best P` letters I have ever received, bright, humorous, full of pretty phrases, with extraordinary power of condensed expression, rhythmical in style and generous in tone.

Strange as it may seem to say so, Blackmore was not naturally a story-teller, and his success in fiction is only another proof (of which George Eliot's case is, I think, the most notable example) that it is possible to write great novels without being by natural gift a story-teller at all. One `` knows the story-teller the moment he speaks, just as one recognises the humorist the instant he enters the room ; and Blackmore's conversation, though greatly interesting, had never the vivacity, the surprise, and the grip of the talk of the man who is born with the faculty for telling a story. It was, therefore, not surprising to hear him say he became a novelist by pressure of circumstances.

I think he told me that after leaving the university he was for a while a tutor, and then entered the chambers of a conveyancer named Warner, and was called to the Bar. But no practice came to him, and he began to writeon classical subjects first, by the choice of his mind, for he was an excellent Greek scholar. Nobody wanted his scholarship, however, and he began to ask himself what the public really did want. His first attempts at popularity were in the way of the drama, and he wrote on a Scandinavian subject a play which was never produced. It had a powerful dramatic incident and some excellent dialogue, but no motive and no structure. Failing to interest the actors, he went next to the public direct with an essay in fiction. Here his success was better, although not quick, and culminated in the great triumph of " Lorna Doone."

Not being naturally a story-teller, though a splendid recorder of stories, he invented very little, and depended largely on fact and memory. I think he told me that for almost everything he had written he had the authority of some original. John Ridd had his counterpart in life, and Blackmore's old father, a clergyman of the old type, had served his son for a model several times. I think Lorna herself came more directly out of the heart of her creator, and I see Blackmore's own nature in many of his children, both male and female ; but he did not greatly trust himself in the invention of incident, and the wings of his imagination always kept close to the ground. Hence, no doubt, the vivid reality of his narrative, and hence also the slowness of his pace.

Perhaps the thing that struck one first in Blackmore was his impatience of the great fame of " Lorna Doone." In all soberness he would have one believe that the success of that book, beginning nearly a year after its publication, was due to a blunder on the part of the public that, coming at the moment of the marriage of the Princess Louise, the story had something to do with the Marchioness of Lorne. And then his joy at the vast welcome given to his offspring was always a little marred by vexation that the public made a favourite of Lorna to the disadvantage of all her younger sisters.

Blackmore was not philosophical in his impatience of Lorna's pre-eminence in public favour. He did not make allowance for the natural limitations of the public. The author who has won the great love of a section of the people for one story or one character must never hope and never desire to oust that love in favour of another story or character. He must go, if he can, to another section of the people and turn up fallow ground. If he cannot do that, he is wiser to be silent, for it is not enough that his later books should be as good as his earlier ones of the same kind in order to win the same favour-they must be a hundredfold better. Hence the repeated cry that authors fail of their former strength, when they are usually only beating at the same door. Blackmore suffered more than any author of the time from this cuckoo-cry that he had written one book only, while in truth he had written half-adozen that were enough to make the reputations of as many lesser men.

It is true, however, that towards the end his higher quality failed him. No wonder it was so, for his bodily health was failing him also, and with it some faculties of mind, memory above all. One day I found him making, on the flyleaf of his manuscript book, a list of the characters of a new novel, with particulars of their ages and the colour of their eyes and hair. Another day he was writing the third version of a short Christmas story-which he set no store by beyond the fee it was to bring him, and that was eaten up by the time he had spent on it.

It was pitiful, but then there was that beloved garden to keep going, and another spur less easy to talk about-the desire not to be entirely overlooked in the race of life, or to be written about as if one were already dead. Blackmore knew that his generation was forgetting him as a living man, and the thought must have hurt; but it never rankled. He saw younger men arise, and he was too strong, too generous, too much of a man to grudge them the places they won for themselves. He had had his own day, and on the whole the world had been good to him, and life had been worth living. So let others have their turn and God bless them !

Blackmore's health had been failing him for years. First a strange half-paralysis of one hand, then occasional internal pain, then pain every day and every hour. A change to the South Coast, to Wales, and then back to Teddington, but no sensible improvement. Some trouble of the colon at last that was sure to kill him. His letters were always cheerful ; but he was not buoying himself up with any false hopes. The end was coming; it was only a question of soon or late. I saw him last in the early autumn. The full proportions were gone, and he was only the shadow of the man I had known first. The old workroom-bedroom was his sick-room now, and medicine-bottles filled every corner of the shelves not occupied by the big pipes. His pain was constant, and he was always taking drugs to relieve it, but his cheerfulness continued. Of course all work was at an end ; but in the long hours of the sleepless nights he was still reading. The series of Dickens was standing him in good stead.

" He is the only one I can read now," he said. I was going to Rome for the winter, and we both knew that that was the last we were to see of each other. In the best way I could I tried to tell him how much his friendship had been to me; how it had strengthened and stimulated me ; and then to say, with what delicacy I could, that it must be a splendid thing after all to look back on a long life without a stain ; and on having produced several works of high quality ; and on leaving one novel behind that would surely be ranked with the best twelve of the century.

He listened to me with the simplicity of his sincere nature, and seemed to take comfort from what I said. A few weeks later I received a letter from him saying that he was now forbidden to see anybody, and was an exile for the short remainder of his life. He bade me good-bye, and returning to what I had said, he wrote a few tender and touching words about myself, and the life that might be before me. It is my own fault if I am not the better as long as I live for having come so close to one of the truest hearts and finest intellects of the age.