James Payn

( Originally Published 1912 )

ONLY the other day I was amused by a paragraph, the writer of which, searching for a figure to illustrate something dead — very dead — satisfied himself with "as dead as yesterday's novel." In the flood of modern fiction, little — minnow or herring — survives, and what is good is often swamped by what is merely new.

Thirty years ago James Payn was one of the "best sellers," as the word goes. His novels reappeared, after the first three-volume edition for the circulating libraries had worn itself out, in cloth at six shillings, and still later in those old-fashioned picture boards at two shillings or half a crown, which made a gaudy and eye-catching display on every railway book-stall in England.

In every colony and in America they were familiar. One of them, "Lost Sir Massingbird," had an extraordinary vogue, which put him on a footing not far behind that of Wilkie Collins and Miss Braddon. It had been issued serially in a weekly, and had gladdened the publisher's heart by doing what every publisher hopes for whenever a manuscript is accepted — hopes for, not with confidence, but with misgivings that experience too often corroborates. It sent the circulation of that periodical up by leaps and bounds, by thousands of copies. The missing baronet eluded the reader provokingly until the author in his d้nouement chose to reveal him.

It established Payn commercially in the trade as a money maker, the only kind of author publishers welcome: it charmed the young Duke of Albany, and frequently thereafter Payn became a guest at Claremont. But he was more than a knitter of plots. He had a fluid and limpid style, akin to that of Mr. Howells, as airily natural, if less subtle, and, instead of the gravity of Wilkie Collins, who was as ponderous as a judge on the bench, he had an abounding and permeating humour which was always peeping out and slyly laughing round the corner. Perhaps he laughed in his sleeve at his own melodrama, though he resented all criticism that imputed a lack of painstaking in his work.

Humour was his strongest point, and it was lambent humour, expressed in happy turns of thought and unexpected inversions, over which one chuckled rather than guffawed, as one does over Stockton's stories.

An example of this humour is an account he gave me of a paper he edited while he was a cadet at Woolwich, ostensibly for his fellow students, but really for his own pleasure, in making known those early writings of his which had no chance elsewhere. He had one chum named Raymond, who could draw; another named Jones, who could write like print; and a third named Barker, who had a taste for finance.

Payn provided the literary part, which Raymond illustrated, and Jones made as many copies as were needed. The circulation of the paper was left to Barker, who fixed the price at sixpence a copy. Their school-fellows did not appreciate the venture, but Barker was the treasurer of the school and held in trust for the scholars a certain fund out of which he had to give them two shillings weekly for pocket-money. Seeing that they would not buy the paper willingly, he calmly deducted sixpence from each allowance, and gave a copy of the paper to make up for it.

"The 'masses' never know what is good for them," Payn said, in referring to this, "and our school-fellows were no exception to the rule; they called Barker a Jew, and, so to speak, 'murmured against Moses.' He was tall and strong, and fought at least half a dozen pitched battles for the maintenance of his objects. I think he persuaded himself, like Charles I, that he was really in the right, and set down their opposition to mere 'impatience of taxation,' but in the end they were one too many for him, and, indeed, much more than one. He fell fighting, no doubt, in the sacred cause of literature, but also for his own sixpences, for we, the workers, never saw one penny of them."

What of "Lost Sir Massingbird" now? At the book sellers' you may ask in vain for it, or for any of the seventy-five or eighty novels he wrote, and the easiest way to find it would be to uproot a dog-eared, brownish, smelly and bethumbed copy from the shelf of some suburban or provincial library, whose readers, when unable to get the newest novel, quietly and without complaint divert themselves and are happy with forsaken books for which elsewhere there is "no call."

Payn himself was more interesting than any of his novels, and more of a "character" than any of his fictitious personages, though he was, in his virtues and in his defects, only a typical Englishman of his class — one of those who value above all things what is sensible and what is sincere. Patient and generous with other faults and impositions, he was militant against humbug in every shape, and it was the only thing of which he was suspicious and against which he was bitter. I write of him as a friend and as an admirer, but I fear I must confess that he discredited some things for no better reason than his inability to understand or appreciate them. He discredited every form of the occult, the esoteric, the aesthetic, and the mystical. And in that was he not sufficiently like thousands of his country-men to justify us in speaking of him as a type?

As a publisher's reader he rejected "John Inglesant," and never recanted his opinion of it, though he was hard hit by its immediate acceptance and success through another house. I shrink from saying how many conventional things he did not care for.

Educated at Eton, Woolwich, and Cambridge, he hated Greek and never acquired a foreign language, not even a tourist's French or Italian, as Sir Leslie Stephen has said. Nor is he alone among Englishmen there, if we are candid. I repeat that there are thousands of others like him: Herbert Spencer did not swallow all the classics, ancient or modern, and disparaged Homer, Plato, Dante, Hegel, and Goethe. A smaller man than the philosopher, Payn resembled him in courage and frankness, and probably he did not overestimate the number of people who admire books they do not read and praise pictures they do not understand.

He did not thunder anathemas, like a Lawrence Boy-thorn, against the things he challenged and opposed. He spoke of them rather with a plaintive amazement at their existence, and protested rather than denounced. At the end of his charge his pale and mild face had the troubled look of one who sees error only to grieve over it. He was never boisterous, though he had a ringing laugh. One day, at the Reform Club, that laugh disturbed a testy member, who said in a voice loud enough to carry, as he meant it should, " That man has a mouth like a gorilla's." Payn heard it, and instantly flung over his shoulder the retort, "Yes, but I never could swallow you."

Those of us who have the dubious blessing of an imagination nearly always anticipate a meeting with the people we have heard of or known only through correspondence, and, as I have already said, out of the slenderest material, boldly draw imaginary portraits of them which are curiously and fantastically wide of the mark.

I remember dining at the House of Commons one night one of many nights with that most genial of hosts, Justin M'Carthy, and being introduced to a tall, smiling, hesitating man, who seemed embarrassed by an inexplicable shyness. His smile had a womanly softness.

From his appearance it was possible to surmise a sort of amiable ineffectiveness. I gasped and doubted my ears when I caught his name. It was Charles Stewart Parnell. I had always pictured him as stern, immutable, forbidding, dark in colouring, and rigid in feature. That was the impression that all his photographs gave, orbit has, was in all cases, photographs do tot preserve or convey complexions or the full value of expressaons.

I am inclined to believe, however, that the real Parnell was little different in character from what he seemed to be in that glimpse I had of him in the House. His lieutenant and abettor in the stormy days and nights of obstruction, F. Hugh O'Donnell, has sance declared that seeing statesman which popular legend and party calculation combined to invent. Long after his death, Lord Morley has admitted that Parnell never possessed a shred of constructive ability . . . His distinction, his Anglo-Irish lineage, connected with some of the best patriotic tradations, had all pointed him out to the undistinguished leaders of the vast hosts of national discontent, who, without prestige themselves, all the more eagerly desared a figure-head who should possess that quality at least. Parnell's family pride and personal vanity did the rest. He was literally incapable of rejecting the tinsel crown, even on the terms of the Land League. I knew that with all his weakness and all his shuttang fast the eyes to hideous facts, Parnell loathed his Land League surroundings. His contempt for his members of Parliament passed the limits of common courtesy, and far exceeded the limits of common prudence."

It is M'Carthy who tells of a man who, longing to meet Herbert Spencer, sat next to him through a long dinner without recognizing him.

"I thought I was to meet Spencer," he murmured to his host.

"Haven't you met him? This is Herbert Spencer." This this quiet man at his elbow, whose diffidence had made conversation impossible !

"Yes, I am Herbert Spencer," the philosopher admitted, in the deprecatory voice of a culprit.

Of course I made a guess at Payn when he invited me to visit him at Folkestone, where, one summer in the early eighties, he was sharing a villa near the Lees with Sir John Robinson, then manager of the Daily News, who was one of the most devoted and intimate of his friends. He was by my inference to be a dashing, flaring, sounding, facetaous person, on the evidence of a string of humorous stories he had gathered together under the appropriate head of "In High Spirits." I had heard something of his escapades in the days when he was a cadet at Woolwich — of how, stranded in Lon-don after a holiday, he had raised the money necessary to take him and a friend back to the Academy by playing the part of a street preacher and passing his hat among the crowd at the end of the service.

After leaving Woolwich he had been to Cambridge with the intention of preparing for the Church — a facile change of course taken without any change of heart or stability of purpose. His natural bent toward literature reasserted its claim, and it was fostered, cautiously and temperately, by a friend and neighbour of his father's who lived at Swallowfield, near Maidenhead. This was Mary Russell Mitford, of "Our Village." She objected to his making a professon of it, and recommended it as an avocation, not as a vocation. He lent me a bundle of her letters to him, all written in a microscopic hand, more crabbed than his own became in later life, when it resembled nothing more than the tracks of a fly escaping from an inkpot. I have dozens of letters of his which to this day are partly undeciphered. Not only was Miss Mitford's writing small and angular, but after filling all sides of the sheet with the closest lines, she economized further by running postscripts edgewise all along the margins and even on the flaps of the envelopes.

Miss Mitford's advice, by the way, is as good for any literary aspirant now as it was for Payn when it was given, sixty or seventy years ago, and it was re๋choed long afterward, in verification of her wisdom, by his own words: " There is no pursuit so doubtful, so full of risks, so subject to despondency, so open to despair itself. Oh, my young friend, with 'a turn for literature,' think twice or thrice before committing yourself to it, or you may bitterly repent, to find yourself where that 'turn' may take you! The literary calling is an exceptional one, and even at the best you will have trials and troubles of which you dream not, and to which no other calling is exposed."

Through her he made literary acquaintances. She introduced him to Harriet Martineau, and Harriet Martineau, in turn, introduced him (among others) to De Quincey. At luncheon with De Quincey, he was asked what wine he would take, and he was about to pour out a glass of what looked like port from a decanter near him, when the "opium-eater's" daughter whispered, "Not that." That was laudanum, and Payn saw De Quincey himself drink glass after glass of it.

My guess at his appearance before our first meeting proved to be wide of the mark. The door of the cab that met me at the station was opened by one who had all the marks of a scholarly country parson or a schoolmaster — a pale, studious, almost ascetic face, with thin side-whiskers, spectacled eyes, and a quiet, entreating sort of manner. And his clothes were in keeping with the rest — a jacket suit of rough black woollen cloth, topped by a wide-brimmed, soft felt clerical hat. His appearance, however, was deceptive. He was neither ascetic nor bookish, and his pallor came from the ill-health that even then had settled upon him in the form of gout and deafness. His spirits were invincible. He made light of his sufferings, as, for instance, when, speaking of his deafness, he said that while it shut out some pleasant sounds, it also protected him from many bores. He loved a good story, and had many good stories to tell. It was almost impossible to bring up any subject that he would not discuss with whimsical humour, and his point of view, always original and independent, was untrammelled by any sense of deference to the opinion of the majority.

One day the three of us drove over to Canterbury, and with much persuasion Sir John and I induced him to go with us to the cathedral. While the verger showed us the sights, and we became absorbed in them, Payn dragged behind. We stood at the foot of the steps worn deep by the pilgrims to Becket's shrine. He was sighing with fatigue and heedless of the verger's reproving eye. Then we heard him whisper, "How I'd like to sit on a tomb and smoke a pipe!"

After the visit to Folkestone I was seldom in London, during the rest of his life, without seeing him, either at his home in Warrington Crescent, with his devoted wife and girls — one of whom married Mr. Buckle, the editor of the Times — or at his office in Waterloo Place. He was then editor of the Cornhill Magazine, and his room was more like a pleasant study than a place of business. A fire glowed in the grate even on warm days, and in the afternoons the fragrance of tea sometimes mingled with that of tobacco. He lived by the clock. His forenoons were given to editorial work; then came luncheon at the Reform Club, and an invariable game of whist — the same players, day after day, year in, year out; another hour or so at the office, and a cab to Warrington Crescent.

One day an unannounced caller, who had managed to evade the porter down stairs, opened Payn's door. His hair was long, and his clothes were shabby and untidy.

He had a roll of papers in his hand. Payn, surmising a poet and an epic several thousand lines long, looked up. "Well, sir?"

"I've brought you something about sarcoma and carcinoma."

"We are overcrowded with poetry — couldn't accept another line, not if it were by Milton."

"Poetry!" the caller flashed. "Do you know any-thing about sarcoma and carcinoma?"

"Italian lovers, aren't they? "said Payn imperturbably.