“… It is hard to speak of him within measure when we consider his devotion to the cause of authors, and the constant good service rendered by him to their material interests. In this he was a valorous, alert, persistent advocate, and it will not be denied by his opponents that he was always urbane, his object being simply to establish a system of fair dealing between the sagacious publishers of books and the inexperienced, often heedless, producers. How unselfishly, with how pure a generosity he gave his valuable time to the previously neglected office of adviser to the more youthful of his profession, may be estimated by a review of his memorable labours in other fields. They were vast and toilsome, yet he never missed an occasion for acting as the young author’s voluntary friend in the least sentimental and most sensible manner. He had no thought of trouble or personal loss where the welfare of his fellow-workers was concerned…”
—Mr. George Meredith, writing of Sir Walter Besant in the Author of July, 1901
An autobiography should be its own justification and its own interpretation. There should be no room for a preface and no need for any intermediary between the writer and the public to whom he has designed to appeal. If it is necessary to add much to an autobiography, the author is made to appear to have suppressed things that he should have said; if any passages are deleted, the portrait of himself which he proposed to draw is rendered incomplete. I have kept these things before me, and in preparing Sir Walter Besant’s autobiography for the press have confined the modifications to the correction of obvious slips, and to the addition of certain passages—mainly quotations from his own worksa—to which references were made in the manuscript. Only a few words are called for, but the circumstances in which Sir Walter Besant’s autobiography is being published require a little explanation. These circumstances account for the slight corrections that have been made, as well as for the obvious incompleteness of his record in certain directions. It has been felt by his widow, by the executors of his will, and by his literary executor, that this, in justice to his memory, should be made clear to the reader.
Sir Walter Besant’s autobiography was written for publication, and no one had any right to withhold the book from the public. Yet although Sir Walter Besant expressly meant his account of his life to be published, death overtook him before he had prepared it for press. Those who were familiar with the man and his literary methods know well what that means; they know that the autobiography is not presented in the form it would have appeared in had it undergone the minute revision to which all his written matter was subjected. His limpid style did not betray the fact that he was a rigorous critic of himself. In the eleventh chapter of the autobiography he explains to all whom it may interest his manner of writing a book. He compares it to the task of an engineer constructing a tunnel, drilling and mining, completing the work behind while thrusting the pick into the work ahead. This autobiography is to some extent an unfinished tunnel. Being an autobiography, the course of the work was clearly indicated to the author, who was able to dispense with a rough draft. But what he should include and what he should omit, what he should treat fully and what he should regard as episodes, had to be considered, and this was certainly not done by Besant in all places with his usual thorough care. If he had followed his invariable plan of composition, he would have made up his mind on many such points only when he came to the actual task of revising. This revision was wont to be done upon his manuscript roughly, and then very fully upon a type-written copy of that manuscript. The manuscript of the autobiography had not been type-written. The written manuscript was fully and freely corrected, and it may be taken for granted that the earlier portions of the work now appear much as they were intended to appear; but the later chapters would certainly have been amplified, and possibly modified in some directions. Such revision cannot be done now by anyone, however sure we may feel that it would have been done by him. If certain passages appear to readers to be unnecessarily sweeping, and especially if those who enjoyed a personal acquaintance with Besant find expressions of opinion in his posthumous memoir which hardly represent the man they knew, I would press that these points may be remembered: that he died leaving the manuscript in what he would have considered an unfinished state; that it was his express desire that it should be published; and that any attempt to modify his work either by addition or subtraction, however honest in its intention to make a more accurate picture, would amount to a dangerous tampering with the original.
The autobiography does Besant scant justice, but, in noting the deficiencies, I do so with no completely unnecessary eulogy, and no equally unnecessary apology. Nor do I attempt to point out places where I believe the author would have made alterations. The revision might have taken the form of some modification of words, or the addition of other matter which would have altered the proportions of the work, and no one can guess which change, if any, would have been made. But it is permissible to say a few prefatory words to guard against false impressions, the creation of which would certainly not have been risked had Besant revised his manuscript as a whole.
Firstly, then, although Sir Walter Besant with much directness, and several times, inveighs against the evangelical tenets which prevailed in his youth, and although he enunciates at the end of his autobiography his religious creed with complete clearness, there is no real connection between his creed and his dislike of evangelical teaching. From a religious point of view his dislike was rather to ritualism. His hatred—for no other word can be used—of the evangelical teaching of his youth was an expression of his delight in life, and had nothing to do with his sacred convictions. He saw the beauty of holiness, but he loathed the doctrine that it was wrong to be happy in this world—the idea that heaven was propitiated by the earthly misery of those who sought to be good. He perceived the stupid, inconsistency and illogicality of those who held that the small section who did as they did would be saved whatever their failings, while all who differed from them about such a minor ethical point as, say, the propriety of play-going, must be irretrievably damned, whatever their virtues. “If a person,” says Overton in The English Church of the Nineteenth Century with regard to the evangelical school, “was enjoying a well-spread feast at Clapham, with all the charms of the conversation of Wilberforce or Milner—which to many people would be infinitely more entertaining than most of the so-called entertainments provided by ‘the world’—he was doing right, and was, so far as outward surroundings went, on the way to heaven. But if he was reading one of Miss Austen’s novels, or at a dance, or a concert, or at a card-table (not necessarily gambling), or seeing one of Goldsmith’s delightful plays acted, he was doing wrong, and, so far as outward surroundings, was in plain words on the way to hell.” Besant was born and bred in touch with these views, and imbibed a horror of their cruelty.
And if an intense dislike of seeing people wantonly made unhappy set him against the tenets of the party in the English Church with which he should have had most affinity, so an equally intense dislike of the mystical set him against ritualism. Sir Walter Besant was a clear-headed man who delighted in thinking out mental and social problems for himself, and detested anything that savoured of the incomprehensible. In more than one of his novels an important situation is the exposure of the vain pretension of one of the characters to extraordinary powers—powers of supernatural achievement, powers of discrimination or criticism of higher and more delicate character than those granted to ordinary mortals. He was ready to allow that we now see only through a glass darkly; but he was not ready to allow that any form of ordination would make one man see further than another, nor to believe that ceremonial might help insight by helping faith. Feeling deeply as he did the mystery of immortality, he resented any assumption on the part of a class of ability to see further into the mystery than other persons. Sir Walter Besant was, it must always be remembered, a scholar—and so successful a scholar that although in his modest record of his achievements he makes light of what he did as a young man, it is quite clear that he was from childhood an intellectual leader. His natural place was at the head. To his intellectual equals, and especially to men of leading in different departments of learning, he was always willing to defer; but to a priesthood basing their right to interpret the Word of God on other than intellectual grounds he could not bring himself to listen. To some this attitude will seem intolerant, and to some it will seem sensible; but to all who knew Sir Walter Besant it will seem the only possible one for him. Perhaps he may appear to speak against priestly authority—or priestly interposition, as he regarded it—with a little acerbity, but such an element was so completely foreign to his sweet and genial nature that we may be sure that its appearance is accidental, and would have been removed if the writer had been spared to think over his words.
In another place in his autobiography Sir Walter Besant’s words are more insistent than they need have been to give a fair representation of his feelings. I refer to his repeated allusions to the shortcomings of a certain class of literary critic. Here again, I am convinced, the appearance of acerbity is out of proportion to the real state of his sentiments. He was not always fairly reviewed, and in particular his antiquarian learning and faithful reproduction, at whatever cost of time or trouble, of local colour often had scant justice done to them. But he will have given a wrong impression of himself—a completely wrong and unworthy impression—if he leads his readers to believe that his attitude towards critics was inspired by wounds to his own literary vanity. To begin with, Besant received always sufficient hearty support in the best quarters to make him feel that it did not hurt him to be belittled here and there; and secondly, he was the least vain of men. No. Besant was hurt and annoyed with a certain class of critics because, as he conceived their duty, they had no proper qualifications to perform it. They were not scholars, and had no business to attempt to stand between the public and the writer; they had no literary or practical experience either to enable them to tell the author what was good, bad, and indifferent in his books, or to help the reader to choose his mental food aright. He scented in the sayings of these ill-equipped judges the savour of charlatanism that always offended him—their pretensions annoyed him as those of the ritualist annoyed him. He believed, and probably more than occasionally with some justice, that the airs of omniscience concealed depths of ignorance; while perhaps he hardly recognised that it is much easier now than it was in his own young days to get a working knowledge of an author without deep reading. In the ’fifties and ’sixties, if a man wanted to know about—for example—Rabelais or Balzac, he would have to read their works. And he would have to read them all, if he had no well-informed friend to guide him in making a selection; otherwise he could come to no judgment that would be worth quoting, or that he would dare to depend upon. Today, thanks to Besant, among other men of letters, there are monographs and exact treatises which deal with all accepted classics, so that it is possible for the critic to speak and write as though his reading had been vastly wider than is the case, and at the same time to be fairly correct. I think Besant hardly realised this fact when he put down the men, who paraded an intimate knowledge where a nodding acquaintance was all that they possessed, as necessarily wrong in what they said.
In his younger days the acquisition of exact knowledge was harder, and perhaps, therefore, more prized. It must be remembered that Sir Walter Besant’s particular friends at college were all men of learning. Christ’s College, Cambridge, during his time was a particularly brilliant establishment. Besant belonged to the reading set, and was brought up in a school of hard work. His knowledge was fought for, and recalling the difficulty that he had experienced in obtaining it, he found it hard to realise that nowadays knowledge is easier to come by. Again, he was impatient of facile criticism because he had an immense opinion of the dignity of letters, and a great pride, as a novelist, in the part that novels had played in the education and development of peoples. He could not believe that it was either sound policy on the part of an editor, or fair play towards a writer, to hand good work by responsible men over to a glib critic, to whom only a few lines could be allotted in which, upon imperfect information, he must express a summary judgment. In behalf both of letters and of fiction he protested against the custom, without perhaps quite appreciating the editorial position in the matter. However, I have no intention of trying to explain away what he has said; I write only to make it clear that his views are expressed in the autobiography in a disproportionate manner. To read him one would think that the iniquity of critics was a subject upon which he was constantly brooding; as a matter of fact, it was a subject in which he took no deeper interest than scores of literary men, while it must be again repeated that what interest he took was in no sense personal. He was jealous for the position and privileges of authors as a whole, and the stress that is laid upon the shortcomings of some of their professional appraisers is due to this. It would not have been so noticeable if the autobiography had been a complete and rounded story. It is not. It is an exposition of the novelist’s life, showing how good a life it is when conscientious work meets with success. Besant elaborated the record of those parts of his life which he conceived to have had a particular influence upon his choice of a career, and upon the position to which he attained in literature. For the rest his tale is made up of somewhat disconnected notes, which serve to show the depth as well as the multiplicity of his interests, but which have not been written by him with strict regard to proportion. It is possible that, if he had lived to complete and revise his work, many of the gaps would have been filled up; but even so, the later chapters would not have contained, I think, the minute personal details of the earlier—those which describe the evolution of the novelist, the character that he meant to portray.
If it had been felt that any critical estimate of Sir Walter Besant’s work would form a fitting introduction to his autobiography, the task would have been committed to someone of his own literary position and weight; and that a critic of this quality may soon speak with no uncertain voice upon the matter I hope sincerely. But it is clear from his own words that he would have preferred that no summing up of his imaginative work should be given hastily. It was a part of his high conception of the novelist’s duties to dislike all attempts at placing novelists above or below one another in some arbitrary hierarchy, and all labelling of them as belonging to this or that school of thought. “It is sufficient,” he would have said for himself, “to read my books—I desire to be judged by them”; while he would not have considered a novelist to have wholly succeeded in his craft if his work required much interpretation, or if many reasons had to be found for its want of popularity. He was aware of the pellucid nature of his productions, he was aware how little they required the assistance of the critic, and how entirely the explanation of the point of view was superfluous. Straightforward characters, set in an accurate environment, often subtly and very often delicately drawn, but about whose significance there never could be a shadow of doubt, tell their own stories in his pages, and while revealing their characteristics complete the narrative. What need of explanation? Well, only this. Sir Walter Besant by practice—painstaking practice, as he informs us—learned to use so facile a pen that his limpid prose, together with his rigorous habits of emendation, resulted in a page that was extremely easy to read, and the pains which it might have cost to write were never really appreciated. Again, the conscientious care with which all his pictures of men and manners were set in a suitable frame, escaped the notice of his critics, because his historical information was utilised without parade. Passages proving a really wonderful familiarity with eighteenth-century habits were often regarded as so much padding to a pretty tale, because his smooth methods made his performance seem obvious. If the tale had been less pretty, more attention would have been paid to the mise-en-scène; the treasures of accurate knowledge, lovingly and laboriously acquired, would have been better appreciated if they had been more forced upon the attention. But that is exactly the sort of thing that Besant would never wittingly provide for. He loved his stories, and to exalt his own learning by laying disproportionate stress upon some minor incident, and by so doing to imperil the symmetry or verisimilitude of his work, would have been abhorrent to him. I trust that some sound judge, a man with learning to appreciate Besant’s scholarly equipment, and with sympathy for the difficulties which the author created for himself by the strict limitations within which he was resolved to abide, will in the near future give us an authoritative note upon Sir Walter Besant’s fiction.
Sir Walter Besant never lived to complete the work which would have established him at once and forever in the public eye as a historian and antiquary—I mean the Survey of London. In the fourteenth chapter of the autobiography, wherein he describes the scope of the vast scheme that he had undertaken, he speaks of the Survey of London as no inconsiderable part of his life-work. As a matter of fact, the task that he laid upon himself was enormous. He proposed with his own pen to write the history of London from the earliest times to the end of the nineteenth century, taking into account the chief historical events in their political and historical bearing. Special sections of the work—scientific education in London, the story of the London stage, the work and position of the Metropolitan hospitals, are three such sections that occur to my mind at once—he proposed to delegate to selected writers; but their contributions would have been welded by him, according to his design, into a symmetrical whole. He did not live to accomplish the task; but he made such headway with it that the whole of the history from his own hand is finished in manuscript, and one volume is in type. He commenced his labours by arranging for perambulations of the whole city in imitation of Strype’s “circuit-walk taken for diversion four or five miles round about,” and as it is six years since these perambulations were done, it follows that today they are in a sense out of date. I say in a sense, for in another sense a history of London is never out of date, just as it can never be up to date. No history of London can do more than mark a stage, from which point other writers will take up the tale. The perambulations in Besant’s Survey are not true of 1901; but if they had been true of 1901 they would not have been true of 1902. To many it will seem fortunate that his perambulations were made a little before the pulling down of ancient buildings that has been necessitated by certain of the recent and comprehensive improvement schemes. They gain thereby in interest for present readers; while the only drawback is that the historian of the future will have to build upon Besant’s structure, beginning at 1897, instead of at the more obvious date of 1901. The year 1901, which saw the commencement of the new century and the death of the Great Queen whose reign forms such a distinct and splendid epoch in our national development, was felt by Sir Walter Besant to be the ideal date up to which to bring his history, but the glory and pleasure of doing this have been denied him. He made however sufficient progress to show how capable he would have been to carry out his colossal design. Let me quote a small passage taken quite at random from the perambulations to show what kind of a book Besant had planned. They are the first sentences in the perambulation of Fulham, the section of the manuscript dealing with Fulham being by the kindness of Messrs. A. & C. Black under my hand:—
“If we enter Fulham at the extreme north-east corner, the point where the Hammersmith Road crosses the District Railway between the Addison Road and West Brompton stations, we find ourselves in the ward numbered one on the Vestry map and known as Baron’s Court. When Faulkner wrote his history of Fulham (1813) this was still a country district, containing only a few scattered houses, along the North End Road. Avonmore Road runs south from the boundary, and in it there is a sorting office of the Post Office. William Street is parallel to it, and has board schools on either side. That on the west was built in 1874, and subsequently added to, that on the east in 1886. Further south, William Street becomes Lisgar Terrace. The North End Road, which is a little further westward, begins at the Hammersmith Road, and for part of its course runs due north and south. In it stands a chapel of the United Methodist Free Church. It is singularly devoid of any pretension to beauty, being a square structure of dingy brick. Further south, just before the North End Road curves round to meet Edith Road, are two old houses on the left hand side. They are known as ‘The Grange,’ and were formerly one building. The southern half is of red brick, surrounded by a high wall, and has a gateway, with tall red brick pillars, surmounted by stone balls. Beyond this we catch a glimpse of a picturesque stable with creepers covering it. Over the wall hangs an acacia tree, and on the top right-hand corner of the house, just above a railed balcony, is an old sundial. The house is now the residence of Sir Edward Burne Jones. Its fellow adjoining has been painted a light stone colour, but shares in the glamour of old age. It is in the style of William III, and in a print published in Richardson’s Correspondence, 1804, the house is shown divided into two, as at present. The red brick half was that occupied by the novelist, who lived here until 1755, when he moved to Parsons Green. Faulkner mentions it as having been ‘lately altered and now occupied as two houses,’ 1813. A little further south Edith Road branches off to the west. At the time of the 1860 edition of Crofton Croker’s Walk from London to Fulham, it was to be ‘let on building lease.’ It is now a street of well-built occupied houses. In it Croker says ‘once stood the house of Cipriani,’ the designer. But there seems to be some doubt as to the exact site of Cipriani’s house, for in Thome’s Environs of London it is stated, ‘In the lane opposite to Edith Road lived Cipriani.’ Cipriani lived in England from 1755 to 1785, and his works were largely engraved by Bartolozzi, who also had a house at North End, and who is mentioned at some length by Faulkner.”
Can we not picture the delight of the antiquarian, the historian, the romancer of the future in the possession of a book containing such information? And it was Besant’s design to treat all London in the same way. The perambulation of Fulham goes on to give brief descriptions of such various things as the Queen’s Club grounds, the Earl’s Court Exhibition, Hurlingham, and Norman (or Normand) House; while considerable space is devoted, of course, to Fulham Palace and Fulham Parish Church. Strype’s circuit-walk about Fulham occupies three columns of the well-known edition, and gives merely an account of the bishop’s palace and the church and its monuments. Besant’s perambulation of Fulham is over twenty times as long, and has records of all sorts of buildings and institutions, Fulham having grown, during the interval between the walks of the two chroniclers, from a beautiful little village to a busy and thickly populated quarter of the world’s capital. The same enormous expansion of material had to be dealt with at every point of the compass; but Besant faced the tremendous difficulties with resolution. Well may he say in his autobiography that he considers his literary work in regard to London no inconsiderable part of his life’s labours. For a less indefatigable man, what he managed to accomplish of the Survey would have sufficed for a lifetime of effort; and all who have regard for Besant’s memory look forward to hearing that arrangements have been made for completing his great design.
A quality of Sir Walter Besant’s autobiography must be touched upon—its modesty. It will only be touched upon, for to thrust praise upon one who shrank so from praise is somewhat of an outrage. The modesty in his autobiography is a fault that he would never have corrected, and throughout his record of his life he studiously underrates himself, hardly at anytime assuming credit for aught but industry. He regards a first-class scholastic career as creditable; his success at Mauritius is barely alluded to, only peeping out in the chance admission that the rectorship of the College was offered to him as the result of a dispute with his chief; his account of his share in the collaboration with James Rice is pointedly advantageous to Rice; his gratitude for the place that he won in literature is untinctured by a trace of vanity or jealousy; he forgets to mention his knighthood, and is silent upon that much coveted honour, election to the Athenæum Club under Rule II as “a person who has attained to a distinguished eminence in literature”; on his own labours of love in behalf of the Society of Authors he has practically nothing to say.
He gives the story of this Society, but leaves out as far as possible his personal share in that story. The self-sacrifice and devotion that he displayed in the conduct of the affairs of “our beloved Society,” as he called the association in one of his addresses, would certainly have been made themes for lengthy notice in any life of Besant undertaken by another writer, and it is right to supplement his autobiography with a few words in this connection. For his attitude towards publisher and author was persistently misrepresented or misunderstood. He was generally accused of a sweeping hatred of publishers, and a short-sighted if generous desire to encourage incompetent writers. The accusations were founded on ignorance. His real attitude was this: having asserted that ordinary business routine, either carried out personally or by an accredited agent, cannot possibly be opposed to the production of matter of the first artistic excellence, he set to work to make clear the principles which should underlie the commercial relations of the author and the publisher. The literary merits of a particular author, the crystal probity of a particular publisher, had nothing to do with the case.
When the earliest business done by the Society of Authors made it clear that the publishing world—like every other trade and profession—contained a few black sheep, Besant declared that customs which allowed them a chance of making a livelihood ought to be discontinued by all publishers. It is difficult to believe that any right-minded judgment could consider such a view to be dictated either by wholesale and sweeping hatred of all publishers, or by a wish to make the path of the incompetent writer smoother. Sir Walter Besant was chairman of the Society of Authors on three separate occasions, his last tenure of office lasting from 1887 to 1892. Until the day of his death the affairs of the Society formed an integral part of his life, and while he was chairman the amount of time that he cheerfully spent upon its business is well-nigh incredible. During four years he went three or four days in the week to the office of the Society, prepared to discuss every imaginable point of difficulty. Nothing was too large for him to go through with, nothing was too small for him to attend to that bore upon the profession of letters. He became accessible to scores of persons who wasted his valuable time simply that he might not lose a chance of hearing a case where he could do good. And he took no credit for the enormous sacrifice of himself and the unceasing call upon his thoughts; on the contrary, if an opportunity occurred, he gave other people the praise.
Mr. Anthony Hope, speaking for the Committee of the Society of Authors, has thus expressed their views:—
“Faith, zeal, courage, self-devotion—these were the great qualities which he brought to his chosen work—the work of developing in men of letters a sense of their brotherhood, of the dignity of their profession, of the duty of maintaining steadfastly its independence and its rights.” What he warred against was, in his own words, ‘the feeling, ridiculous, senseless, and baseless, that it is beneath the dignity of an author to manage his business affairs as a man of business should, with the same regard for equity in his agreement, the same resolution to know what is meant by both sides of an agreement, and the same jealousy as to assigning the administration of his property.’ Against the old bad way—the hand-to-mouth existence, indolence and ignorance parading as the superiority of genius, a slipshod negligence that ended in recrimination and wranglings, he set his own face and armed his comrades, for it was to his comrades in the first instance that his message spoke. Their fate was in their own hands; it was in their power to make justice, knowledge, and common sense prevail in their business arrangements… He said, ‘I can at least plead that I have always placed the cause before any other consideration.’ All our members know one sense in which this was so abundantly true. He placed it before his ease and his leisure; for its sake he endured violent attack, supercilious comment, ill-informed criticism; for it he suffered himself to be represented by many as false to the very thing he loved best of all—the true and highest interests of literature.”
To this fine tribute to Besant’s unselfish zeal in behalf of his craft, no one can desire to add a word; no one can take a word away from it without detracting from its accuracy.
If I repeat myself it is because the purpose of this prefatory note is to make clear the reason of certain limitations in the autobiography which follows. Sir Walter Besant has only designed to describe a working novelist’s career; he expressly says that he is not making confessions, while he is almost silent upon his peaceful and happy private life. The manuscript which he left behind him was written in the last year of his life, when his health had begun to fail; and, even now that the passages which he referred to definitely as requiring insertion have been added, the work is not as he would have let it go forth. He never revised the manuscript as a whole, an important fact, because it was his habit to make considerable corrections in all his written work. Yet it is certain that he intended his autobiography to be published. For my own part, though I am sure that he would have improved the autobiography in certain directions if he could have followed the promptings of second thoughts, I am equally sure that the work as it stands must have a useful, nay a noble influence. A scholar who was never a pedant, a beautiful dreamer who was a practical teacher, a modest and sincere man speaks in its pages, and teaches with conviction a brave scheme of life.
S. SQUIRE SPRIGGE
UNITED UNIVERSITY CLUB