Wilkie Collins, Sir Walter Besant, And Ian Maclaren

( Originally Published 1912 )

AGAIN in memory I call at Gloucester Place to see Wilkie Collins in his little house, a cheerful, rotund, business-like man of a height disproportionate to his ample girth. Already advanced in years, he had the briskness of middle age, and the freshness of youth in his complexion. His luxuriant beard was like spun silver, and had he worn a long medieval cloak and peered out of it below its cowl, he would have made the traditional Faust as that character appears before Mephistopheles transforms him. Notwithstanding his matter-of-fact speech with its occasional cockneyisms of phrase and pronunciation; notwithstanding his well-tailored and modern apparel, as modish as that of any city man; there was a suggestion of the pictorial necromancer about him, which grew as one listened to him, and instead of the prints, of which he was a connoisseur, against the walls, one almost expected to find the apparatus of an alchemist.

He spoke of having visions and extraordinary dreams, not with any apprehension of mental disorder, nor as revealing anything abnormal, but without visible consciousness of the bewilderment he was producing in the listener. I suppose that as he proceeded he must have seen the question in my face, for as he turned to show me a valuable print he had picked up at half a crown in the neighbourhood of Leicester Square, and described with excellent mimicry the transaction between himself and the old woman who sold it, he offered me a brief explanation, "Coffee. I drink too much of it."

He was writing for us a few stories based on circumstantial evidence, and he frankly exhibited to me the books of remarkable trials which he was using as material. Let not any literary aspirant in the imitative age think from this that he can do the same thing; that old trials in sheepskin volumes will relieve him of the labour of invention and imagination; that ready-made plots are to be bought in Chancery Lane or the Strand at a few shillings apiece. Stevenson's "sedulous ape" is a part often played in the vanity of youth, but it leads to sad eye-openings. Unskilled and inexperienced hands may boil all the ingredients of an epicurean broth without being able to extract from them the savour of the cook's secret, incommunicable by formula. The trials are accessible to all, but all attempts to transmute them, as Wilkie Collins did, into little dramas enacted by human beings in natural surroundings, are sure to be futile, and the discouraged novice will learn that what seems so easy depends after all on the possession and exercise of that creative imagination which the books. do not supply.

I also met Sir Walter Besant occasionally; an ardent, brisk, neat little man of fresh complexion, who puffed and panted about the world at high pressure and with wonderful vigour, spending himself, his money, and his enthusiasm in the two causes which obsessed him — the interests of the author as against those of the publisher, and the Atlantic Union, that hospitable society which he founded to bring about a better understanding and attachment between people of the mother-country and those of the colonies and of America, not through politics or printed propaganda, but through social and intellectual intercourse. The kindness of the English members of that society to visitors coming without any personal introduction is expressed in many ways. The dons of Oxford and Cambridge give teas and show their antiquities and the sacred nooks of their colleges; bishops and deans open the doors of their palaces and houses and serve as vergers in exhibiting their abbeys and cathedrals; the owners of historic mansions suspend their rules and allow invasions of their memory-haunted quietude, and the Royal Courts of Justice and the Houses of Parliament grant special privileges. But far as the hospitality goes, it stops short of the open-hearted, open-handed intimacy and unreserve that Besant dreamed of. Could he have had his way hotels and lodging houses must have gone out of business. Each American as he landed at Liverpool, Southampton, or Plymouth would have been met at the foot of the gang-plank by an English kinsman (related by marriage — Adam and Eve — as Charles Mathews used to say), who would at once invite him to his home to stay as long as he pleased as a guest of honour and bosom friend. Dukes and earls were not to be excluded as hosts from this (for the American) fascinating project of entertainment, nor were humbler people, like those of the law, the church and his own profession to be considered unworthy ministrants in the stupendous and prolonged love-feast, which would heal all old sores, expunge the slanders of American history, and prove to the visitor that the Englishman, despite preconceived and hostile opinions of him was, after all, a pretty good sort of fellow.

Such was Besant's vision, and he talked of it with a rising temperature and excitedly — talked by the hour, talked till he glowed, talked till he was breathless, for-getting that both he and his listeners had other things to think of and to do, and that instead of milk and honey all the listeners could see was an iridescent mirage of pools and palms where actually lay the inhospitable desert of thirsty and shadeless sands.

Detached from the phantoms and deflated he came to earth a bustling man, sure-footed and astute enough, shrewd but strong in principle, exacting but fair and aggressive in enthusiasms.

I must throw away a taking title for a play, a novel, or a series of articles, in speaking of John Watson (Ian Maclaren), the author of "The Bonnie Brier Bush," "Kate Carnegie," and other stories of Scottish life. I would call him "The Man Who Looked Like Himself." I believe that the people to whom it would apply are few, and that those of ability, genius, and individuality differ extraordinarily from what one infers of them. Let a man be much above the average, and within as without, he is inscrutable and inexplicable.

To this John Watson was an exception. He "looked like himself." There could be no mistake about him. His qualities were all visible in his person. I should say that his predominant trait was a phenomenal transparency of character which was never afraid or ashamed of itself.

As he appeared he was, one of the sanest and most normal of men, essentially wholesome and reasonable, utterly unaffected and without vagaries; neither subtle nor eccentric, but of the kind whose conduct in any given circumstances could be predicted to accord with the sober judgment of the wisest of his fellow men. I do not imply by this complaisance of character or the conscious or unconscious plasticity which, out of sheer amiability or politic adjustability, follows the line of least resistance. He could be angry, disputatious, and stubborn — Highland blood was in his veins — but never unfair, irrational, or bigoted. The impression he made was of physical and intellectual equipoise; of a sound constitution, carefully preserved, and of an outlook that contemplated and measured spiritual perfection in its relation to human limitations and deserts. Health glowed in him; he was great at golf, great in stature, clear-skinned and keen-eyed, a big, vigorous, rugged man, with a plain, earnest face in which seriousness and humour interplayed. His voice was rather strident, and rose like the skirl of his native bag-pipes, but his talk was fascinating; he made the listeners laugh without laughing himself. In the quietest way he dramatized any trifling incident that amused him.

Once, when I was lunching with him at his house in Liverpool and he was preparing to resign from the Sefton Park Church, he speculated as to how he might be estimated after his departure. In an instant the table and those around it vanished, and we were listening to two elders with whispering voices discussing a retiring minister.

"A good man, a verra good man," one of them was saying.

"Ay, he was that. There'll be nobody to deny it. But awm thinking weel, no, I'll no say it."

"Awm thinking the same masel'. Was he no a bit off in his sermons lately, did ye say?"

" Weel, perhaps."

"And no so keen as he used to be."

"Fuir man!"

"Ay, he did his best, nae doot."

"Ye minded him in the Sabbath school? Strange, verra strange hoo the attendance dropped. I canna account for it. What'll you be thinking? "

"I've heard creeticism, ay, severe creeticism; no that I agree with it, or disagree with it. Mackenzie was telling me we'll be lucky to be rid of him, and Campbell that he was ruining the kirk."

"Ay, and Ferguson was saying — but I'll no speak ill of him."

"Fuir man!"

"Awm thinking it's for the best he will be going." "Maybe. The new man's fine another John Knox, Mackenzie was saying."

One could hear their undertones, as they damned with faint praise and condemned by innuendo; one saw them in their decent blacks, askance, timorous, insinuating. I wish I could repeat the dialogue in the Scot's vernacular, as Watson spoke it, with a humorous, familiar mastery that Robert Louis Stevenson himself could not excel: no other dialect is so vividly expressive, so irresistible in appeal. His features hardly moved, nor had he recourse to gestures. He did not act the little scene, but seemed to visualize it to us by hypnotic suggestion as he sat there and conjured us into it.

In the same way he described a "heresy hunt" of the kind that shakes Scotland to its foundations. He described the stir it makes in the silence of the hills and the recesses of moor and lochs. Every tongue in the land is loosened by it; the taciturn break their habit and become voluble. Two shepherds in adjoining pastures who have been estranged for years in sullen enmity draw together once more to argue it; and in less than a fortnight the Duke of Argyll — not the present duke, but his father — "is out with a pamphlet." The late duke, a tireless controversialist, was always out with pamphlets, and that detail in this case, as inevitable as rain at all seasons and heatherbloom in autumn, was indispensable to the picture, which no elaboration or expansion could have made more complete.

Afterward, in his library, we talked of men, women, books, and theatres. His views were generous, his tastes catholic. Learned as he was in theology, he did not despise the lighter pleasures and interests of the world. He could enjoy a glass of wine, a big cigar, a new novel.

"I am not boasting or exaggerating," he said, "but I can usually get all I want out of a novel in three hours. I have been reading one, however, to which I have given three weeks, and I am going to read it again. Guess which it is."

I had been enchanted by Hewlett's "Richard Yea and Nay," and offered it as a solution.

"Pretty close, but not it. It is 'The Queen's Quair'," he replied, naming Hewlett's later story, which has Mary Queen of Scots as the principal figure.

"I don't take as authentic Hewlett's interpretation of her, but it is amazingly ingenious and daring, a satisfying picture to the imagination, though not historically true."

Modest he was, and yet hypersensitive to any reflection on the fidelity of his own drawing of Scottish character. I ventured to say that in my opinion his pictures of life in Drumtochty were too idyllic, and that they would have been stronger if he had not excluded the grimmer strain which, without being as prevalent as in "The House with the Green Shutters," does not hide itself in the people themselves. He would not have it so; he was out of his chair at once, storming me with instances to the contrary. It was plain that he took himself for a realist, he who in these amiable little stories milked the cow of human kindness until it tottered.

When he was in New York on a preaching and lecturing tour, I invited him to luncheon at one of the gayest uptown restaurants. I, and David A. Munro, who had been a classmate of his at Edinburgh University, called for him at the old Everett House, and he came down stairs to go with us in a fancy tweed suit and a scarlet scarf. I suppose there was not another man in the city that day who looked so little like a cleric as he did.

We boarded a car and put him into the only vacant seat, while we, case-hardened, hung by straps and bent over him, laughing and talking. We were absorbed in ourselves until the shrillest voice I ever heard said : "If you want to lean on anybody, lean on your friend. Ain't he big enough ? " Unconscious of transgression, we were shocked, and stared into one another's faces. The voice was that of an untidy, waspish woman seated next to Watson. "Did you speak to us?" I asked, abashed.

It repeated the remonstrance even more sharply: "If you want to lean on anybody, lean on your big friend here."

I or Munro had unconsciously touched her chaste and poignant knees. She sniffed at our profuse and humble apologies, as we meekly straightened ourselves, and we had not recovered from our shame and mortification when she, arrived at her destination, flounced out of the car, withering us with a final poisoned arrow from her eye.

Watson's face filled with amazement. "I couldn't have believed it," he panted. "Why, I have always supposed the Americans to be the politest people in the world"; and over his cigar after luncheon he gave us an instance to justify that opinion.

"As I was coming over in the Teutonic, I sat down in the library one afternoon, when the ship was rolling and pitching a good deal, to write some letters. Almost immediately a diffident looking young man dropped into a chair by the desk, and fixed his eyes on me. An hour or more passed, and he was still there, returning my occasional and discouraging glances at him with a foolish, ingratiating smile. I was inclined to be annoyed. I had a suspicion that he was a reader of my books, perhaps an admirer-- God only knows why I have admirers — or an autograph-hunter. He could wait. They are always with us, like the poor. But at last he rose, swept the air with the cap in his hand, and spoke:

"'Excuse me, Doctor Watson; I'm real sorry to disturb you, but I thought you'd like to know that just as soon as you left her, Mrs. Watson fell down the companion, way stairs, and I guess she hurt herself pretty badly. The surgeon's with her now.'

"After I had found out that she was only a little bruised, and had time to reflect on that young man's conduct, it seemed so considerate, sympathetic, and delicate, that I said to myself only an American could have been capable of it. Never mind that drop of vinegar. Americans are the politest people in the world."