In an age hat leads itself with inquisitorial sapience to open courts of criticism the name of Hubert Crackanthorpe remains singularly unkown. A fine and searching essay by Arthur Symons, a note by Richard Le Gallienne, seven citations in Holbrook Jackson’s fin de siecle encyclopedia, as many pages in Bernard Muddiman’s “The Men of the Nineties”, J. M. Kennedy’s “English Literature: 1880–1896” and the tale is soon told. Vincent Starrett, it is true, makes an interesting attempt to bridge the vast gap toward the recognition of Crackanthorpe in his “Buried Cæsars”, but there the honors are evenly divided with Richard Middleton (a strange and unfortunate choice for a bedfellow) with no great critical appraisal of either.
To many Crackanthorpe occurs as a sort of medified “Enoch Soames”, with all the tragedy and none of the exhilirating farce of Max’s famous verbal caricature. Born May 12, 1870, his body was found in October of 1896, a suicide in the Seine, after six weeks of mysterious disappearance. Contemporary newspaper obituaries mention his “morbid lucubrations”, while a notice in “The Critic” for January, 1897, refers to his “literary work of a strange sort”, followed by the inevitable “Who’s Who” assortment of instructive facts. Lionel Johnson alone, in a note in the “Academy” for March 20, 1897, quotes Rossetti in defence against the assertion that his “work makes a goblin of the sun,” and with words that veil his own personal tragedy writes: “The terrible pages are full of an aching poignancy. The straightforward sentences hide an inner appeal. The telling of misery becomes a thing of dreadful beauty and its intensity goes nearer to the heart of the whole dark matter than many a moving sermon. The artist’s abstemiousness in Mr. Crackanthorpe, the refinement of his reticence, never chilled his reader. ‘The pity of it! The pity of it!’ That was the unspoken yet audible burden of his art.”
Crackanthorpe was the author of four books in a literary productiveness that extended for less than five years, yet in that brief boundary of a life of sheer tragedy began (as we now know it) the genuine realist movement in modern fiction. “Wreckage”, the first book, published in 1893, marks a monument to realism of the modern period. Hardy’s “Jude the Obscure” was to come in 1895. George Moore, it may be, had gone a step further in “The Mummer’s Wife” than any one since Trollope, Hardy, Gissing, or Henry James in depicting the sorrows and bypaths of pessimistic impressionism. But if the hand was the hand of Moore, the voice was assuredly the voice of Zola. The sodden sodality of the provincial theatre, the tart yet nebulous taint of viciousness made manifest in the commonplace heroine, are all identities boldly abstracted from the men and women in the series Rougon Macquart. In Zola, at least, we touch life and soil our fingers in boldly touching it. “The Mummer’s Wife” mirrors the real thing only as one would find it in a spectroscope. The emotional actress, so pathetic in her drab negation of the joy that could actually have been hers, suffers and dies in true story-fashion. The whole book is a coroner’s inquest. The process of dying has been a business—no more.
With Crackanthorpe’s “Wreckage” we come to something definitely new. Here are seven stories told in the English idiom, with excellent touches of art. We read in the prefactory quotation: “Que le roman ait cette religion que le siecle passe appelait de ce large et vaste nom: ‘Humanite’;—il lui suffit de cette conscience; son droit est la.” Humanity—that was what Crackanthorpe never forgot. It makes each of the stories in his book the shelter and vindication of pity, with a something underlying, an intelligent tragic sense that De Maupassant, for all his vivid, illusory world, never quite persuaded himself into conveying or projecting.
“Profiles,” the first, is much the longest of the set. It is not, as Mr. Muddiman infers, entirely unsuccessful. Lilly, the heroine, finely manipulated in the transition from her innocent girlishnes to the horror of prostitution, burns violently if with some crudity. The story of the girl whose temperament takes her from average domesticity to a ghastly life in the streets has a force that still drives home. “What had become of her, no one knew and no one cared,” says Crackanthorpe simply at the end. The second, “A Conflict of Egoisms,” really an annihilation of two discordant individualities by marriage, ends first in the spiritual then physical suicide of the hero as an idolatrous offering to his sickeningly sentimental wife. One may find passages that are obviously autobiographical. “As time went on the thought of death began to haunt him till it became a constant obsession,” we read of the hero who is a novelist. “In the daytime, fascinated by it, he would lay down his pen and sit brooding on it; at night, he would lie tossing feverishly from side to side, with the blackness that was awaiting ever before him. And with the sickly light of the early morning, there met him the early relief of having dragged on one day nearer the end.”
“The Struggle for Life” and “Dissolving View,” the first merely ordinary but the second magnificent in its concentrated pathos, are followed by “A Dead Woman,” the story of a volcanic upheaval among the ordinary types of an English countryside. This is Crackanthorpe’s masterpiece. The austere and heroic suffering of a reticent peasant who by chance discovers the betrayer of his dead wife in the person of a life-long friend, a neighboring inn-keeper, is the very essence of tragedy. Rushout, the husband, lifts her photograph from the wall. “He watched the whole scene as it was played before him; she, giving herself with all the gestures and caresses with which he was familiar, till its vividness became almost unbearable. He lifted up the photograph once more. But underneath the faint smile lurked a wealth of smothered corruption; on the half-parted lips he detected the imprint of Jonathan’s kisses.”
“When Greek Meets Greek,” the tale of a faithless wife of a card-sharp at Nice, is melodrama, quick and poignant, but with a method and consideration for the sordid malefaction of the principals that sears in the telling. Duncan Ralston, the lover, is passive but vehement. The woman Pearl is best described in the flickering light “which played about her face” as fragile and “little more than a child.” Simon, her gambler-husband, the peak of the triangle, plays more than an average game of cards. His is a compelling soul, hard and reckless in effrontery, but with something of unusual largess for the possessor of so despicable a vocation. “Embers,” the last story, directs two intensely parallel temperaments that pause, give each their sign of divergent recognition, but in the tragic depository of the writer’s brain never meet.
Crackanthorpe’s second book, “Sentimental Studies,” with the subtitle of an additional “Set of Village Tales,” was published in 1895. The “Village Tales,” which take up only a small portion of the volume, may be briefly dismissed. They contribute, with a gesture of plot and denouement, some slight elaboration to the “Vignettes” of a year later. Unlike the Anglo-Saxon studies in “Wreckage” and totally dissimilar from the “Sentimental Studies,” these miseries of the poverty-stricken peasantry in the hazy, French villages, with their long roads and slim poplars, their peaked roofs and “noisy battering rains,” are inextricably woven to make distinct the overwhelming misfortunes of the inhabitants. “The White Maize,” not more than the hint of a sketch, contains probably the best descriptive writing in the book:
“For eight days and eight nights the ceaseless hiss of rain. During the day-time, neither sky nor sun, nor breath of wind—only the grey veil of mist enshrouding all things. The nights were dark as pitch, and full of the hiss of rain; and from sunset to sunrise the frogs chanted their long, dismal mass.
“On the eighth day of the rain, about six o’clock in the afternoon, I went out. A sickly glimmer of muddy light flickered from the west; a breeze was shaking drops from the trees; the road was powdered with acacia-bloom, lying thick like sodden snow; great pools of yellow water were in possession of the lanes; and new-born streams, bubbling of their own importance, trickled sleek and swollen, across the fields and under the hedges.”
In “The Sentimental Studies,” consisting of three long and two short stories, we find a real advance over the earlier volume. For the first time, if we except “A Dead Woman,” literature begins to creep in. Never altogether absent, the influence of Henry James is made more suggestive and conspicuous in the motivation or mental activities of the characters concerned. They suffer, not so much for the things they do as for the things that of their own diffidence they leave undone. One and all, analysis would find them potential victims of what Crackanthorpe discerningly terms their “trepidating curiosity,” a delicate but aloof spiritual sluggishness that continually fringes the line of complete decision—yet never quite comes up to it.
“A Commonplace Chapter,” really a novelette in two parts, opens the volume. Here we have Crackanthorpe with his favorite motif, the man of genius, in this instance a successful poet, beloved by a beautiful and impulsive young woman. This type of Crackanthorpe’s femininity possesses the power, when occasion calls for it, to leap into instant maturity; adolescence being only temporary and a foil to match the complete sophistication of the male. Hillier Hasleton, the poet, dreams of marriage, “an ideal marriage—a simultaneous satisfaction of intellectual, emotional and physical desires.” Yet over this marrigae, following an association of professed respectability in which the heroine, Ella, remembers “nothing but his goodness and the abandoment of the intoxication of his love”—arises the shadow of another, a certain Mrs. Hendrick, beneath whose smile and gentle voice there lurks “an air of bitterness restrained and refined.” Hillier is drawn body and soul into her toils. So completely does he justify himself in his intrigue, that he finds himself unable to live without her. Swann, a cousin of Hillier’s, enters into the story, and between the alienated wife and this high-spirited relative an attraction is formed that grows insensibly into love. “Swann had become necessary to her, almost the pivot, as it were, of her life; to muse concerning the nature of his feeling towards her, to probe its sentimental aspects, to accept his friendship otherwise than with conscious ease, that was not her way.” Aware of Hillier’s unfaithfulness, Swann approaches him and in a burst of pleading exacts a promise that the poet, who is traditionally weak, will explain the entire matter to his wife. This he does, but not before Swann has secretly bidden her farewell. We are led to believe that ever after this man who had so spurned and cheapened her love would be hers devotedly and alone; we are certain, however, that this woman could never love her husband again. He kisses her as he pleads:
“ “I have been punished, Nellie,’ he began in a broken whisper. ‘Good God! it is hard to bear…… Help me Nellie…… help me to bear it!”
”She unclasped his fingers, and started to stroke them; a little mechanically, as if it were her duty to ease him of his pain.…”
“Battledore and Shuttlecock,” the second long story, with its gentle yet bitter cynicism treats of the eternal cocotte, the refined woman to whom fidelity or infidelity are merely experiences in a life of absorbing futility. Of all Crackanthorpe’s heroines, “Midge” (Nita) Bashford is by far the loveliest. Ronald Thornycroft meets her in a theatre and beside her “he felt himself clumsy and clownish.” He notes her “large-brimmed black velvet hat; the soft duskiness of her skin, which a feather boa caressed; her white, tight-fitting gloves, and the golden bangles on her wrists.” They spend days together, idly and pleasantly chatting in her rooms, walking the streets of the city that ceases to be only a conventional assembly of dreary thoroughfares; the man, on his part, never entirely unconscious of the complete elusiveness, the delightful uncertainty of this mercurial being at his side. She disappears, and her return a few days later elicits the astounding information that only recently had she been separated from her husband, an actor. He had beaten her, she tells him. Her trip to Brighton was with another man, she confesses with a tinge of cruelty: “I suppose I can go where I like, can’t I? I needn’t ask your leave first. Since you’re dead keen on knowing—well, I went because I was hard up.—There!” But she deserts him for good, leaving a note in which he is admonished, “never, never to find out where I’ve gone, and never to come down after me.” He meets her, all unknowingly, twelve years later in a stable-yard at Huntington. “Her husband kept the yard, and she was the mother of three chubby-cheeked girls… She knew him at once, but because of her husband refrained from betraying it. And he just glanced carelessly at her and never recognized her.”
The revival of a love, bygone and forgotten, forms the substance of “In Cumberland.” It fails to keep close in rendering convincingly the sense of appeal in Alec Burkett, who, taken ill in a tiny, unkempt mountain village, “a choppy pool of black slate roofs, wanly a-glimmer in the wet,” meets once again with a former sweetheart, and in the course of events (she had meanwhile married), being passionately urged by Burkett to elope with him, she brings the affair to an untimely end. The close of the story bites like etcher’s acid. “He strode away across the lawn, and as she watched his retreating figure, she felt for him a shallow compassion, not unmingled with contempt.”
“Modern Melodrama” and “Yew-trees and Peacocks” are two short stories that close the “Sentimental Studies”. In the latter we find great verbal beauty and retrospection. “Modern Melodrama” reverts to the naked style of journalism so succinctly used in narrating the stories in “Wreckage.” The two characters, who have been coarsened in a world that makes life adventitious only to those steeled and hardened by it, talk of hell-fire and “wince under the fierce feeling of revolt”—but for all that their fame and fury scarcely suffice to make them live. The mood of a languorous afternoon, with the foliabe turned ever so faintly by Autumn, is in “Yew-trees and Peacocks.” The heroine is delicate and mobile, her lover perhaps a little too vague and courtly. An atmosphere of saddened and mellow placidity colors this tale, which makes the common contention that Crackanthorpe was concerned solely with the trough and gutter of existence a fallacy.
A motto prefixed to “Vignettes” (1896), reads: “The pursuit of experience is the refuge of the unimaginative.” In this slender volume of only sixty-three pages will be found some of the most stimulating and exuberant prose of the Nineties. “In a work like this Crackanthorpe was perfect.” writes J. M. Kennedy. “And if there are beautiful subjects to choose from, there is no special reason why an artist of Crackanthorpe’s qualifications should deliberately choose ugly ones. Even when writing about Naples he does not forget to remind us of the garbage in the Strada del Porto and the squalidness of the Strata del Chiaia.” None the less it is this very insistence on Crackanthorpe’s part to accentuate the occasional misshapen hideousness of the human scene that converts with touches of versimilitude his perfect but ordinary prose, into broad and astonishing writing. Beauty alone he could never altogether disassociate from the element of humanity. “I dreamed of this great, dreamy London of ours,” he writes on returning to England, “of her myriad fleeting moods; of the charm of her portentous provinciality; and I awoke all a-glad and hungering for life.” Movement and the joy of movement there are in even the least of these notes, with the never-failing, ever-shifting, emotional agony that makes them distinct and discoverable as a part of life.
The “Last Studies”, a collection of three long stories, was posthumously published in 1897 with a memorial sonnet by Stopford Brooke and an appreciation by Henry James. “The troubled individual note” of Crackanthorpe, we are told, is a difficult thing to interpret. Of stories of this type, we further read, “it may be an effort preferably pictorial, a portrait of conditions, an attempt to summarize, and compress for purposes of presentation, to ‘render’ even, if possible, for purposes of expression.”
The first, “Anthony Garstin’s Courtship,” is written in complete subjection to a tragic mood. It shows the subtle but resistless antagonism of a dominant, masculine woman who pits herself in all hardihood and contention against a light and flighty creature, the choice of her son. She declares: “T’ hoose be mine, t’ Lord be praised … an’ as long as he spares me, Tony, I’ll not see Rosa Blencarn set foot inside it.” The same sort of solidity makes Anthony at odds with her. This story is faintly reminiscent of “The Return of the Native”; Mrs. Garstin, “stalwart almost despite her years”, derives in strength of purpose, not wickedness, from Heathcliff in “Wuthering Heights”. She would have dominated any person, anywhere.
“Trevor Perkins”, second of hte three, stresses the element of sex. Trevor, who loves a waitress in a bunshop, is typical of his kind. Here again we see how easily and with what deliberation Crackanthorpe can conjure up and clarify a situation at hand.
The last story, “The Turn of the Wheel,” is weak and fine-spun in spite of its inordinate length. It gives us nothing new, but the description of London society is good. The rebellious daughter who worships her father but despises her deserted mother reveals with perhaps too much fidelity the complexities that force themselves into Crackanthorpe’s characters. Yet their lives are lines, pure and severe, like Crackanthorpe’s own, that run with no deviation straight to an end.
The re-discovery of Herman Melville, of Ambrose Bierce and (thanks to Thomas Beer) of Stephen Crane, leads one to hope that not so far in the future will come the recognition of one who wrote not only with consummate courage but who—more than any one else of his time or period—showed unmistakable signs of a superlative talent. “He was one of those who fight well, who fight unselfishly, the knights errant of the idea,” says Arthur Symons.