2018年04月21日

I knew very well that I neve

Now this might have come straight from another Dampier. There is no attempt to convince you of the force of the hurricane by laborious descriptions of what it looked like. It is shown to be awful by the effect it produces. The sentences go rapidly on Company Formation. Their very simplicity helps to convey the impression of the suddenness and overwhelming fury of the storm. The effect would have been lost if the writer had stopped to talk. The style seems to me to be the perfection of prose, for a tale of adventure—the straightforward, almost colloquial report of one who has gone through it all, carried to its very best—made into literature without being obtrusively literary.

As the style is, so are the stories. A natural tact seems to have told Marryat when he had gone far enough in search of the strange. His heroes lead lives that are possible. He might, if he had chosen, have rivalled Michael Scott’s wondrous pirates. Once, indeed, in “Percival Keene,” he actually did it, but, as a rule, his pirate is a conceivable good-for-nothing rather cowardly blackguard, such as came in the natural course of things to swing at Kingston or at Execution Dock. Even Cain himself, “The Pirate,” is within the bounds of probability as compared with the wondrous Spanish Americans, or astounding Scotch gentlemen of superhuman wickedness Hong Kong Apartments, who flourish in “Tom Cringle’s Log,” and the “Cruise of the Midge.” Neither do incidents of the wilder and more horrific kind appear in Marryat’s books. There[92] is nothing in him, for instance, like that scene of the “Midge in the Hornets’ nest,” which may, by the way, be commended to the attention of critics who think that blood and horror have been recently imported into romance by a generation which is supposed to have been corrupted by the French taste of the decadence. The adventures of Marryat’s heroes might possibly and even probably have befallen an officer of his time.

Of construction, except such as was imposed by an instinctive desire to make the incidents follow one another in some sort of natural sequence, there is little or no sign. When, as in “Peter Simple,” he tries to fit one on to his story, it is no addition to the merits of the book. Who cares a straw for Peter’s wicked uncle, for the changing of the children, or for the unravelling of the very transparent mystery? It is too obvious that Marryat took these things at random from the common fund of the Minerva Press. What he took from nobody was his fun.

After all, it is this fun which is the living element in Marryat’s work. Wit, or humour of the highest class, he cannot be said to have possessed, though he was by no means destitute of the sympathy which is inseparable from all true humour. The sketch of the mate, Martin, in “Midshipman Easy,” is a sufficient defence against the charge of want of feeling, if, indeed, it had ever been made. Many who have had a more visible anxiety to be pathetic than Marryat have failed to draw so touching a figure as this slight outline of the melancholy officer, in whom the disappointments of years have crushed all hope, without hardening or souring him.[93] “No, no,” said the mate, when his acting order as lieutenant was brought him as he lay wounded in his hammock, “r should be made. If it is not confirmed, I may live; but if it is, I am sure to die.” And die he does, because hope deferred has dried up the spring of life within him. In the character of Mr. Chucks kindness and fun are mingled MD Senses. He is respectable in spite of his absurdities, and lovable because of them. In the Dominie in “Jacob Faithful” there is an effort to produce a second Mr. Chucks, but it is not successful. He is too plainly a reminiscence of another Dominie—a fairly well-done copy, but only a copy. For the most part the fun of Marryat belongs to the grotesque order. This, unquestionably, is not the highest. But what is not the highest may yet be genuine, and that Marryat’s fun, as the world has now recognized for half a century, undoubtedly is. His gallery of “figures of fun” is a long one. Peter Simple in the days before Terence O’Brien made a man of him; Jack Easy before he had been converted from a belief in the equality of all men; in a rougher way his father; Mr. Muddle; and, above all, Mr. Chucks, have an intrinsic comic vis. The fun which they make, or which goes on about them, is never mere horse-play. They are not mannikins of the stamp of Smollett’s Pallet, created only to be knocked about, and to make grimaces, but possible, and even probable, human beings—a little distorted, a little exaggerated, put frequently into such positions as are more fit for farce than comedy, but not on that account ceasing to be real.



Posted by Journey of life at 23:00│Comments(0)
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