Lynton and Lynmouth: A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland. John Presland
and racial problems, under one heading, as "dam-furriners." John Ridd is English, therefore he despises what is not English; he is rather stupid, therefore he despises intellect. "She was born next day with more mind than body—the worst thing that can befall a man," he says of his sister Eliza. He is a man, so, at the last stage of self-satisfaction, he despises what is not man—woman. "Now I spoke gently to Lorna, seeing how much she had been tried; and I praised her for her courage, in not having run away, when she was so unable; and my darling was pleased with this. … But you may take this as a general rule, that a woman likes praise from the man she loves, and cannot stop always to balance it." "But he led me aside in the course of the evening, and told me all about it; saying that I knew, as well as he did, that it was not women's business. … Herein I quite agreed with him, because I always think that women, of whatever mind, are best when least they meddle with things that appertain to men." As the matter under discussion was a question of their all having their throats cut by the Doones, and the farm being burnt over their heads, it seems to us to have been, at least in some slight degree, the women's business.
The hero of "Ravenshoe," Charles, is of the same type, though not drawn with the firmness of touch with which Blackmore depicts John Ridd, and which makes him indeed a living personality to us, even if one to quarrel with.
Charles Ravenshoe is of the type which for many years we have striven to present to the contemplation of the outside world as the perfect Englishman. He is a bluff, hearty fellow, without serious vices, without, also, serious virtues; he has, of course, a perfect self-satisfaction, and a deep and unconscious selfishness, tempered by an easy good-nature and a superficial benevolence, of wishing to get on well with everybody, and to see everybody round him comfortable. He is without ideals or spiritual aims, and has a contemptuous tolerance for them, as in the case of his brother Cuthbert, who is deeply religious and desirous of entering a monastery, and yet is held by the temptations of the world, so that his mind is a continual striving and renunciation. Charles's relationship with the lady of his choice may be gauged by the following: "How is Adelaide?" asks his adopted sister. "Adelaide is all that the fondest lover could desire," he answers. Did the Englishmen of the nineteenth century really talk like that about their dearest and most intimate affairs?
And yet here is John Ridd, the accepted lover of Lorna, an honest, clumsy, self-satisfied couple of yards of a man, for whom she has to be properly grateful in a world of villains, and yet, for my part, I can never look upon her marriage with him as other than a mésalliance.
Of course, it must be understood, even by those who most violently disagree with me, that these strictures are passed, not upon Blackmore's novel, but upon the spirit of the age which made John Ridd the hero of such a novel, the spirit which in the dress of "John Bull" has insistently presented our less attractive qualities to the outside world as the true Englishman, and which has been, by the outside world, adopted and disliked; while such admirable traits as sincerity, disinterestedness, and self-criticism, have been neglected by us and ignored by them.
For the novel itself it is difficult to have anything but praise. The admirable sense of locality, and the art with which Blackmore has so identified his persons of fiction with actual places till we no longer disassociate them, but in the church of Oare, or the Doone Valley, or Porlock, or Badgeworthy Water, think and speak of Lorna and John Kidd as if they had had an actual existence; the firm and lively drawing of the lesser characters, the charming pastoral scenes of the life on the Ridds' farm, the really magnificent descriptions of the scenery of Exmoor, and a particular gift of narrative, all place this novel of Blackmore's on a high level in the literature of the nineteenth century. His other novel, of which the scene is laid on this coast, is "The Maid of Sker," less well known and of less artistic weight, but of interest to anyone visiting the country between Barnstaple and Lynton, and containing a particularly vivid account of old Barnstaple Fair.
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