The Captain's Death Bed & Other Essays. Virginia Woolf
it goes on. Every other day he was cutting out a brig, taking a tower, engaging gunboats, seizing prize ships or being chased by the French. In the first three years of his life at sea he had been in fifty fights; times out of number he jumped into the sea and rescued a drowning man. Once much against his will, for he could swim like a fish, he was rescued by an old bumboat woman who could also swim like a fish. Later he engaged with so much success in the Burmese War that he was allowed to bear a Burmese gilt war-boat on his arms. Clearly if the extracts from the private log had been expanded it would have swollen to a row of volumes; but how was the private log to be expanded by a lady who had presumably never burnt a bridge, dismantled a battery, or blown out a Frenchman’s brains in her life? Very wisely she had recourse to Marshall’s Naval Biography and to the Gazette. “Gazette details”, she remarked, “are proverbially dry, but they are trustworthy.” Therefore the public life is dealt with dryly, if trustworthily.
The private life however remained; and the private life, if we may judge from the names of the friends he had and the money he spent and the quarrels he waged, was as violent and various in its way as the other. But here again reticence prevailed. It was partly that his daughter delayed; almost twenty-four years had passed before she wrote and friends were dead and letters destroyed; and it was partly that she was his daughter, imbued with filial reverence and with the belief also that “a biographer has no business to meddle with any facts below the surface.” The famous statesman Sir R P therefore is Sir R P; and Mrs. S is Mrs. S. It is only now and then, almost by accident, that we are startled by a sudden groan—“I have had my swing, tried and tasted everything, and I find that it is vanity”; “I have been in a peck of troubles—domestic, agricultural, legal and pecuniary”; or just for a moment we are allowed to glance at a scene, “You reposing on the sofa, C sitting by you and I on the footstool” which “is constantly recurring to my memory as a picture” and has crept into one of the letters. But, as the Captain adds, “It has all vanished like ‘air, thin air’.” It has all, or almost all, vanished; and if posterity wants to know about the Captain it must read his books.
That the public still wishes to read his books is proved by the fact that the best known of them, Peter Simple and Jacob Faithful, were reprinted a few years ago in a handsome big edition, with introductions by Professor Saintsbury and Mr. Michael Sadleir. And the books are quite capable of being read, though nobody is going to pretend that they are among the masterpieces. They have not struck out any immortal scene or character; they are far from marking an epoch in the history of the novel. The critic with an eye for pedigree can trace the influence of Defoe, Fielding, and Smollett naturally asserting itself in their straightforward pages. It may well be that we are drawn to them for reasons that seem far enough from literature. The sun on the cornfield; the gull following the plough; the simple speech of country people leaning over gates, breeds the desire to cast the skin of a century and revert to those simpler days. But no living writer, try though he may, can bring the past back again, because no living writer can bring back the ordinary day. He sees it through a glass, sentimentally, romantically; it is either too pretty or too brutal; it lacks ordinariness. But the world of 1806 was to Captain Marryat what the world of 1935 is to us at this moment, a middling sort of a place, where there is nothing particular to stare at in the street or to listen to in the language. So to Captain Marryat there was nothing out of the way in a sailor with a pigtail or in a bumboat woman volleying hoarse English. Therefore the world of 1806 is real to us and ordinary, yet sharp-edged and peculiar. And when the delight of looking at a day that was the ordinary day a century ago is exhausted, we are kept reading by the fact that our critical faculties enjoy whetting themselves upon a book which is not among the classics. When the artist’s imagination is working at high pressure it leaves very little trace of his effort; we have to go gingerly on tip-toe among the invisible joins and complete marriages that take place in those high regions. Here it is easier going. Here in these cruder books we get closer to the art of fiction; we see the bones and the muscles and the arteries clearly marked. It is a good exercise in criticism to follow a sound craftsman, not marvellously but sufficiently endowed at his work. And as we read Peter Simple and Jacob Faithful there can be no doubt that Captain Marryat had in embryo at least most of the gifts that go to make a master. Do we think of him as a mere storyteller for boys? Here is a passage which shows that he could use language with the suggestiveness of a poet; though to get the full effect, as always in fiction, it must be read up to through the emotions of the characters. Jacob is alone after his father’s death on the Thames lighter at dawn:—from the various chimneys, all broke upon me by degrees; and I was recalled to the sense that I was in a busy world, and had my own task to perform.
Then if we want a proof that the Captain, for all his sturdiness, had that verbal sensibility which at the touch of a congenial thought lets fly a rocket, here we have a discourse on a nose.
It was not an aquiline nose, nor was it an aquiline nose reversed. It was not a nose snubbed at the extremity, gross, heavy, or carbuncled, or fluting. In all its magnitude of proportions it was an intellectual nose. It was thin, horny, transparent, and sonorous. Its snuffle was consequential, and its sneeze oracular. The very sight of it was impressive; its sound when blown in school hours was ominous.
Such was the nose that Jacob saw looming over him when he woke from his fever to hear the Dominie breathing those strange words, “Earth, lay light upon the lighter-boy—the lotus, the water-lily, that hath been cast on shore to die.” And for pages at a time he writes that terse springy prose which is the natural speech of a school of writers trained to the business of moving a large company briskly from one incident to another over the solid earth. Further, he can create a world; he has the power to set us in the midst of ships and men and sea and sky all vivid, credible, authentic, as we are made suddenly aware when Peter quotes a letter from home and the other side of the scene appears; the solid land, England, the England of Jane Austen, with its parsonages, its country houses, its young women staying at home, its young men gone to sea; and for a moment the two worlds, that are so opposite and yet so closely allied, come together. But perhaps the Captain’s greatest gift was his power of drawing character. His pages are full of marked faces. There is Captain Kearney, the magnificent liar; and Captain Horton, who lay in bed all day long; and Mr. Chucks, and Mrs. Trotter who cadges eleven pairs of cotton stockings—they are all drawn vigorously, decisively, from the living face, just as the Captain’s pen, we are told, used to dash off” caricatures upon a sheet of notepaper.
With all these qualities, then, what was there stunted in his equipment? Why does the attention slip and the eye merely register printed words? One reason, of course, is that there are no heights in this level world. Violent and agitated as it is, as full of fights and escapes as Captain Marryat’s private log, yet there comes a sense of monotony; the same emotion is repeated; we never feel that we are approaching anything; the end is never a consummation. Again, emphatic and trenchant as his characters are, not one of them rounds and fills to his full size, because some of the elements that go to make character are lacking. A chance sentence suggests why this should be so. “After this we had a conversation of two hours; but what lovers say is very silly, except to themselves, and the reader need not be troubled with it.” The intenser emotions of the human race are kept out. Love is banished; and when love is banished, other valuable emotions that are allied to her are apt to go too. Humour has to have a dash of passion in it; death has to have something that makes us ponder. But here there is a kind of bright hardness. Though he has a curious love of what is physically disgusting—the face of a child nibbled by fish, a woman’s body bloated with gin—he is sexually not so much chaste as prudish, and his morality has the glib slickness of a schoolmaster preaching down to small boys. In short, after a fine burst of pleasure there comes a time when the spell that Captain Marryat lays upon us wears thin, and we see through the veil of fiction facts—facts, it is true, that are interesting in themselves; facts about yawls and jolly boats and how boats going into action are “fitted to pull with grummets upon iron thole pins”; but their interest is another kind of interest, and as much out of harmony with imagination as a bedroom cupboard is with the dream of someone waking from sleep.
Often in a shallow book, when we wake, we wake to nothing at all; but here when we wake, we wake to the presence of a personage—a retired naval officer with an active mind and a caustic tongue, who as he trundles his wife and family across the Continent in the year 1835 is