with him, the man-of-war scenes are all alive. Captain Plumpton, and Mr. Markital the first lieutenant, and Edward Templemore the midshipman, are credible. Whenever Marryat has to introduce us to a man-of-war, he could draw on inexhaustible treasure of reminiscences, or of what is for the story-writer's purpose quite as good, of types and incidents which his imagination had made out of incidents supplied by his memory. The naval parts of the Pirate are no doubt variations on what he had recently written in Midshipman Easy, but they are not mere repetitions, and they have the one saving quality of life, which will make even a poorly constructed story readable.
It is impossible to say as much for the captain and crew of the Avenger. Cain is not only not a pirate, but he is not a human being. He is a Byronic or even a Michael Scottish hero—an impossible monster, compounded of one virtue and a thousand crimes. There never was any such person, and even on paper he is not tolerable for more than a paragraph or two without the help of verse. The crew of the Avenger is an inconceivable ship's complement for any pirate. Credulity itself cannot even in early life accept the capture of the Portuguese carrack. Marryat drew on his recollections of the time when he was a midshipman with Cochrane in the Impèrieuse, for the figure of the old steersman, who sticks to his post under the fire of the Avenger. He had seen the mate of a Spanish trading ship behaving in just that way when attacked by boats from the Impèrieuse. When he was asked why he did not surrender, though he was mortally wounded and had no chance of escape, he answered that he was an 'old Christian.' The term, which by the way only means a pure-blooded Spaniard, puzzled Marryat and his shipmates. It is not wonderful that he did not understand its meaning, since in spite of campaigning in Spain, and many visits to Spanish ports, he never learnt to avoid the absurd blunder of putting the title Don before a surname. But if the steersman is drawn from life, so are not either the carrack, which is a fragment of the sixteenth century, out of its place, nor 'Don' Ribiera and his sons, nor the bishop, nor anybody else in that ill-fated ship, nor the stilted, transpontine style of their conversation. Francisco and his bible are no more credible than the carrack and the bishop. Francisco's brother and his love affairs are not more credible, though they are decidedly more tolerable. The daughters of Spanish Governors who carry on flirtations on the sea-shore with the captains of English men-of-war, who are carried off by pirates and rescued in the nick of time, whose papas not only consent to their marriage with the heretical object of their affections but send boxes full of gold doubloons, together with their blessing, are so much better than life that we need not quarrel when invited to meet any number of them. The sea adventures in Marryat are always good, and so are the fights. The storms and wrecks, the rafts and wonderful escapes, the defences of houses, and the escapes of pirates and smugglers from under the very guns of His Majesty's frigates, are as welcome as, and are much more credible than, the lovely daughters of benevolent Spanish governors. Of them there is no want, and for their sake the Pirate can be read; but it is not what Marryat might have made it if he had written it in the spirit in which he was to write Snarley-Yow.
In The Three Cutters Marryat allowed himself to take a little holiday in company with another kind of sea malefactor whom he knew intimately well. He had already played with the smuggler in The King's Own. In this little story he reintroduces us to M'Elvina, somewhat disguised, and in altered circumstances, but essentially the same.
The Three Cutters may be supposed to have been written to fill out the volume containing The Pirate and those twenty engravings from drawings by Clarkson Stanfield, which still make the first edition a desirable possession. This function, whether it was originally designed or not, is very agreeably fulfilled by the history of the Arrow, the Active, and Happy-go-lucky. Although he wrote very few of them, Marryat had a happy hand with a short story. The S. W. and by W. and ¼ W. Wind and Moonshine are very happy examples of the magazine story. The Three Cutters is somewhat longer than either, but the difference in bulk is due less to any greater amount of pure story there is than to the care with which Marryat introduces his three vessels, and sketches their respective starting-places—Plymouth, Portsmouth, and St. Malo. Here again it is to be noted that Marryat is far more at home in the man-of-war than in the smuggler or the yacht. Mr. Appleboy, with his forty-five years' service, and the interesting story which remains untold of the something which took place in '93 or '94, his seventeen daily tumblers of gin-toddy, his mate and his midshipman, is a part, and not an inferior one, of Marryat's inimitable naval gallery. The Happy-go-lucky is perhaps rather a smuggler of the Pays Bleu than of the British Channel, but she is sufficiently in place in a story not intended to be too slavishly faithful to life. Morrison, the sailing-master, with his augury of the blue pigeon, is real, and nothing can be more consistent with human nature than that he should have cursed the bird when he did finally find himself in prison. As for the adventures, they belong to the region of the fantastic, which does not pretend to be anything else. The idea of a yacht which endeavours the capture of a smuggler, and is herself made prize by him, is of course a motive for farce.
The scenes on board the captive yacht are not exactly horse-play. There are too many ladies concerned, and Marryat, in spite of occasional lapses of taste, preferred to write like a gentleman. But if there is no horse-play there is a great deal of what I hope it is permissible to describe as 'lark.' The sour old maid Miss Ossulton, her niece Cecilia, who, if she has not much character, is still a very nice girl, the frisky widow Mrs. Lascelles, make a capital trio. Given a gallant dashing smuggler, who is really a gentleman in disguise, in possession of the yacht, and determined to revenge himself on the owner by taking a little harmless amusement, it follows that lively incidents are to be expected. Marryat did not work the situation out at any length, probably because he felt that the stuff would not bear much handling. If he cut his story short for this reason he was undoubtedly right. It is so difficult as to be quite impossible for the majority of writers to hang just on the border of the outrageously impossible for more than a few pages. While it lasts it is very good fun. The reformation of Pickersgill through the influence of Mrs. Lascelles is quite in Marryat's manner. His heroes, when they need reformation, are commonly brought into the right path by the combined influence of a pretty woman and a round sum of money. Mrs. Lascelles, too, was unquestionably just the woman to marry Pickersgill. Having married an old man to please her parents, and having inherited his money, she had decided both to marry again and to please herself in her second husband. Experience shows that the Mrs. Lascelles of real life not uncommonly fall into the hands of a ruffian or an adventurer. Marryat was not making a study of real life, and he was too fond of his puppets; and besides that would have been another story, which would have been superfluous, considering that Marryat wanted to end this one. So Mrs. Lascelles had her fine dashing seaman, who stood six feet odd in his stockings, and was also a gentleman in disguise. Of course she was happy ever after. One has a haunting suspicion that the story was not only written to fill out the volume, but also to accompany Clarkson Stanfield's three very pretty plates of Plymouth, Portsmouth, and St. Malo. If so, that only proves that when a man is a born storyteller he can write good stories for very humble business reasons.
THE PIRATE
| PAGE | ||
| CHAPTER I | ||
| The Bay of Biscay | 3 | |
| CHAPTER II | ||
| The Bachelor | 11 | |
| CHAPTER III |