FOUR FAMOUS NOVELISTS.

Press, Volume XLV, Issue 7140, 30 August 1888, Page 3

FOUR FAMOUS NOVELISTS.

The most interesting paper in the June number of Harper's Magazine is decidedly Mr R. RBowker's on London as a Literary Centre,- in/which he deals with the novelists who either live in or near London, and also those who live in the country but who come up to town for part of the season, and whose faces are well known in the various literary clubs. Mr Bowker chats in a pleasant gossiping way about the writers whose , works are familiar to most English-speaking people, and as it will probably interest, our. readers to know .something about the life of the men whose books they have been reading with pleasure for years, we reprint the following descriptions of four of the most famous novelists of the day, R. D. Blackmore. David Christie Murray, H. Rider Haggard, and George Meredith. R. D, Blackmore lives a from London, in the valley of the Upper Thames, where, behind a great brick wall, he surrounds himself with fruit trees and flowers, and pursues the vocation of literature and the avocation of market-garden-ing. It fc a lovely place In blossoming spring, for he has the same power over plants as over words. Nature is loyal to her lover. Here he lives a retiring life, little known to his neighbours, and when he wants amusement goes afishing. Fame doesn't trouble him here. When I first went- to call upon him I asked the people of the railway station the way to the house of Mr Blackmore, the , author, but no one knew. Suddenly, with a gleam of intelligence, someone exclaimed, " Perhaps'tis the fruit man he means ! —follow along the wall to the gate, sir," and in fact ifc-ivas.hlß! wall which faced the station. Indeed few know this gray, rugged, seafaring-looking man, withal kindly and. gentle—rather one of the fine old fellows of his delightful " Springhaven" than the conventional author-aa the father of " Lorna Doone. , ' He'declines to ta"fce the same view as-the public of this child of hie, and in support of. his view that this is not book, grimly enjoys recounting the early history of this now " lucky maid." " When first you came from the western moors *' —so he apostrophises her in that twentieth edition in which she "shines with. adornment, as a female should"—" nobody cared to look at you ; for a year and- a half you shivered in the cold <:onier, without a eun-ray; your na€«;| 4and disdained yoa)c voice, and America answered, ' No child of mine.'" But' a cfertaln far«ve man, ,, Mr Sampson Low, the younger, feaid, " She shall have another chance," and just then the marriage of the Princess Louise with the Marquis of Lorije happened, by the similarity of name, to bring the public hearing—and who could i-ead without delight ? It is now the idyl and idol of Devon, and a classic in English* fiction to all time; but, perhaps, to loyal Devon author, Its best compliment has been the homely one that f, Lorna Doone, to a Devonshire man, is-as good as clotted cream almost" Mr Blackniore, now somewhat past etety, is of Devonshire family, though of Berkshire birth, and the whole of his boyhood was spent in Devon. ~ He graduated' at Exeter College, Oxford, and studied law at the Middle Temple, practising conveyancing at the start. But he soon forswore law for letters, printing several volumes of poetry and a translation of the first two of Virgil's Georgics—under a tttje, "-The Farm and Fruit of Old," which' suggested the connection of the two sides of his life—before he published hiff flreirnavel, "Clara Vau'ghan," written in 1832; but not printed, until 1864.. Mr Blackmore does not encourage talk about his manner of work, preferring to let the results speak. I may only say that he cares mostly for his trees and plants by-day, pleasantly insisting that these are the real things, and when he comes; to hie writing of an evening, Iβ careful and painstaking to the last degree, sometimes com • pleting no. more than a paragraph at a sitting. "I- sefc to," he wrote a friend while.at.work on "Mary Anerley," "at night [whW even vines go : to'sleep (but ctow faster than-by sunlight) and when .only the wicked weod-Touse walks] to rewhich means, witHine, tojVinnow and .hprowand" pestle and pepper every particle of,, sentence.", This carefulness tells' sOmetimels tothe confusion of critics, for, the Pall Mall reviewer of " SpriaghaVen,? who urged that Nelson could- not have, used certain words put into" his* mouth by Mr-Biackmore, might, with equal research-, have found them in ■published letters of the great admiral. David Christie Murray.though moist of his novel writing has be'en done at Roche, fort,-in the Belgian Ardennes,- 1 where he lived for five years.' comes now and again back to Lcmdon, and there makes his club , borne among the Savages, and his work;room in the paved.splitucie of Rape's linn. He is a pleasant-faced, pleasant-voiced man of about forty, with a touch of Scotch lock and accent, though bred in Staffordshire—of goodly build and quietly hearty, manner—who has come ' to his work through abundant experience. His father was a Scotchman domiciled in the English midlands, shrewd and keen, whq appears as the Scotch stationer in "Rainbow Goia," in one of the very- few portraits ."Mr 'Murray has permitted himself to- draw from Eeai people. Starting as a teacher of elocution and public reader, Mr Murray soon fpond bis way to journalism on the Birmingham Morning News, under the inspiring fosterage of George Dawson, a great editor and brilliant talker, as witness his bon mot on Disraeli; "His politics are romantic, and his romances are political, and he himself, is a fiction founded on fact." After wide experience learning and " writing up " the manifold industries of the black country, Mr Murray came to London, and wrote for one of the weeklies a paper on " Impecunious Life in London," which was not far from autobiography. Thence he started off on a. tramp trip, meaning to show by personal .experience how,hard the poor law was on upon honest workmen. He sent £10 to a post-office some days ahead, and " walked toward it" withbuta penny in his pocket,

I taking workhoase fare and lin regular course. .Reaching the money, be revelled in civilisation for a day or so, sent on the balance, and walked toward that. In this way he rfea&ieA Hereford, travel-stained, tattered, and unshorn, and had much difficulty in persuading the pazßled waiter at the George that he was a proper candidate for decent treatment, a bath, and the portmanteau awaiting him. The material thus gathered he used for some papers in Mait/air —whereat sundry indignant guardians declared that the journalist who wrote them had been fooled by some vagabond who knew nothing or lied; but. more important, he founded on them his first novel, "A Life's Atonement," and portions of " Joseph's Coat" and "Val Strange!" Hβ saw the Russo-Turkish war as "special" of The Times arid the Scotsmaiu Thereafter he left journalism for fiction, published his first novel in Chambers' in 1879, and made his hit with his second, "Joseph's Coat," in 18S0. His first literary work was, however, poetry, of which he is now maka volume—curiously enough copying out every line of it from memory, since it was widely scattered through periodicals now dropped out of sight. His memory is unique, he thinks he could copy out any one of his works almost exactly, on fair notice, and he frequently amuses himself, on a railway train, reading over one of his own chapters from his memory, finding, as, he puts it with humourous naivete* that they amuse him because he wrote them to suit himself. It is " Aunt Rachel \ I which he likes best. Mr Murray flndsi like most novelists, that the early impressions of childhood are the chief mine of material. His people become real; they act before him as on a stage, of which he is the solitary spectator; if the scene goes wrong, they-rehearse it again for him, it may be a dozen times, till it is right; then he writes it down. He likes to write with eisure, but is capable of the tour de force of the journalist. The thirty-six chapters of "Val Strange" were written in as many consecutive days; but they had a woful sequence, as he himself related in a little story called " Schwartz, a History, , ' published some years afterward. When he was half-way through the book, a halberdier with an axe, dressed in red and black, appeared behind his back, threatening him. He could find no origin for this apparition in his memory or his imagination; it had nothing to do with the personnel of the book. He treated it humourously, saying to it, " You are nothing—the creature of overwork — and presently you will go." But it did not go. It never came in front of him, though he knew its face perfectly well; it was with him from light morning to winter midnight in his work, and through the troubled hours of the night. " My friend, that ivay lies madness," said his doctor, and banished him to green fields and rest absolute for six months. After a month the thins? vanished, and has never returned; though a differen illusion accompanied the finish of other work done under pressure. It is not in ease and joy, gentle reader, that the novelist writes your stories for you. Mr Murray's latest work is one in collaboration with Mr Henry Herman, a dramatist strong in plot and incident, in a story of extraordinary conception, " One Traveller Returns."

Mr, H. Eider Haggard is one of the very few men who have come to the front within the past deeadA, sharing with the late P. J. Fargus (" Hugh Conway") that distinction, and' the success -which awaits fiction of striking incident and vigorous passion—the " sensational novel." Mr Haggard is a Norfollohire man, little past thirty, living during the winter in Kenaington, but really at home in Ditchingham House, Bungay, in his native county. Before he was twenty he -went to Natal with Sir Henry Bulwer a? his secretary, and after the annexation of the Transvaal was appointed Master of the High Court for the pew colony. In this South African service he had some stirring personal adventures, which probably gave direction to' his 'fiction later. He began writing, however, with a book of political history on "Cetewayo and his White Neighbours, ,, published in 1882. His own preference is for work of this solid, matter-of-fact order; but desiring to adopt the profession ' of literature in addition to that of barrister, he learned promptly that this did not meet the market, or afford the physical basis of the literary life, and so addressed himself to liction, hjs own theory of work being, as he once put it in a letter to a friend, that "the more closely you stick to the main facts and salient passions of human nature, with which all the world is familiar, the better It will be for your work; and the more you can contrive t° throw a veil of beauty and romance over the crudities and cruelties of the tragedy of our lives, by so much the more will it be pleasant, acceptable, and perhaps in some degree, instructive to others," Mr Haggard is a hard worker, though writing as well as talking with rapid fluency, and be both gleans and invents the incidents of his stories. Probably the criticisms of plagiarism brought against his earlier books have caused him to be careful to credit the authorities he uses, since his recent story, " Allan Quartermain," is prefacedbjra of ? what maybe called his* prefatory'course of reading. The use or adaptation of actual incident is scarcely to b<» accounted a literary sin, closely different minds may run in invention is illustrated by Mr Besant'e statement that Bice and himself used as a central incident in " When the Ship comes Home " i*;sltuaticn which they afterward found was identically the leading one of so well known a book as Charles Reade'e " Foul Play," though no charge of plagiarism was eyejrbrought against them. Mr Haggard made his first score in his new line of worg with'" Dawn," in 18S2; but it'i was "Kin? Solomon's Mines," published in 1886, which won him. bis vogue, 31,000, copies being sold in, the home country' within the first year, while thirteen competing editions appeared (not fS$ po the: author's profit) in Atnlirica; follow, ing soon after, rivalled the sale &£ its immediate predecessor; and the success of these two recalled attention to his earlier; novels. Mr Haggard still practises law as~ well as writes fiction, and does not proposeto permit his head to be turned by hi* sudden and world-wide success.

"There Is one English not yet fully known by the reading public, but sqrniuch thought of among his select circle; of" readersr that one of then V.'a Judge" of good literature, said to mc once, " There aretvvq novelists whose books, I think, are , sure to be read beyond this generation, and one of these is George Meredith." He is a man now sixty years of age, s close associate in his younger days of the Bosae ttis and their friends — indeed a co. dweller with Dante Rossetti for a time in his Chelsea bouse—but in these years seldtiniTeeen to London, since he lives quietly near Box HiU. He has a singular fasefnation for other men of his craft. His novels are sui generis, a current of bitter experience and strange philosophy runninglihrpugb them, pregnant in thought, but difficult in style. " The Egoist" is a a wonderful vivisection from real life of human self-centrednesa and its results, " The Ordeal of Richard Feveril" is really a clinique in moral education, and "The Tragic Comedians" is built upon the life experiences and fate of the German socialist Lasalle. Mr Meredith was himself partly educated in Germany n which perhaps gave colour to his afterwork ; he was bred to the law, biit preferred to be. come a poet, in which capacity he made his entrance into literature. In poetry or .prose,.both of which he continues to write, he invites the keenest intellectuality of bis reader, and his eager, fine face, bis charm of manner, his brilliant talk, his subtle sympathy, leave a strong impression upon all who come within range of his personality.