The state of being “rather in want of money” was to be chronic with Marryat, if we are to judge by the amount of writing he did during the remaining nine years of his life. Before very long, indeed, he began to have very serious reason indeed for complaining of straitened means. His father’s fortune, which must have been considerable, had been invested in the West Indies in those golden days at the end of the Great War, when the languor of Spain, and the ruin of San Domingo by the negro revolt, had given the English sugar islands a monopoly of the market for colonial produce. In the forties, however, these happy times had disappeared for ever. Competition and free trade brought down prices, the abolition of slavery stopped production, and the value of West Indian property went down with a run. The Marryat family suffered with the rest of the world. The novelist had resources which were wanting to his brothers; but then this advantage was compensated, as has been said before, by extravagant and speculative habits. In 1839 the pinch was not as yet felt so severely as it was later on. Marryat, immediately upon his return, went over to Paris for his family, which had moved thither from Lausanne during his stay in the States; and, bringing them to England, settled at 8, Duke Street, St. James’s. For some four years he led, as he had hitherto done, a somewhat wandering life. After a brief year in Duke Street, he moved to Wimbledon House; which had belonged to his father, and was still occupied by his mother. A short stay there was succeeded by a brief residence in chambers at 120, Piccadilly, and then by another year or so of occupation of a house in Spanish Place, Manchester Square. In 1843 be broke away from London for good, and established himself at his own house at Langham, in Norfolk.

All this restlessness speaks for itself. Men who possess the faculty of managing their affairs with judgment, or who wish to apply themselves to steady work, do not run in this way from pillar to post. Once again I have to remark that much in Marryat’s life is left to be guessed at. It is as well that it should be so. The indications we possess tell the world all that it is entitled to learn. There is—though the contrary proposition is frequently maintained in these days—no inherent right in the public to be made acquainted with the private affairs of a gentleman simply because he has done it the inestimable service of supplying it with readable books. That Marryat, who has just been found expressing a wish to retire from the “fraternity of authors,” was writing himself blind in these years, is a fact which tells its own tale. Add to this a few indications which Mrs. Ross Church has thought it right to supply—a brief reference to some family misfortune of which the details are not given; a complaint in one of Marryat’s letters that somebody, apparently a relation, had suspected him of a wish to borrow money; and an increasing tone of grief and trouble in all his letters—and we have enough to form a general estimate of his position with. More we probably could not learn, and would have no right to hunt up if we could. That Marryat had a difficulty in making both ends meet; that his expedients did not always succeed; that some of them were, too probably, undignified; that the need for them was, at least partly, due to his own mismanagement, are acknowledged facts. We may, and must, be satisfied with them.

It is also easily to be believed that Marryat would enjoy the hard living, and even hard drinking—artistic, literary, and semi-literary—life of his time. Clarkson Stanfield was an intimate friend. Rogers, who was acquainted with everybody, was an acquaintance. With Dickens and Forster his friendship was of long standing, and seems to have remained unbroken. One of the few, and too generally insignificant, letters to her father printed by Mrs. Ross Church, is an invitation to dinner from Dickens, ending with a pleasing promise to give him some hock which would do him good. He was a guest at those merry children’s parties which Mr. Forster has described. In his quarters in his various London lodgings we are given to understand that there was much and gay hospitality. Friends were profusely entertained in rooms adorned with furs, trophies, Burmese idols, and weapons—all the miscellaneous curios collected by a sailor and traveller during many wandering hours. In Burmah, Marryat had even made a collection of jewels cut from out of the bodies of slain enemies. The Burman who has a gem makes an incision in his leg and hides it there, as our sailors discovered more or less to their profit. Unfortunately the curios and the talk are all scattered and irrecoverable. “It has all vanished like ‘air, thin air’”—as Marryat wrote himself of certain common reminiscences to “a lady for whom, to the time of his death, he retained the highest sentiments of friendship and esteem.” Marryat’s friendships were not all of this enduring kind. “Like most warm-hearted people,” as his daughter puts it, “he was quick to take offence, and no one could have decided, after an absence of six months, with whom he was friends and with whom he was not.” Eager restlessness is the quality which seems to have been most noticed in him by all his friends. It kept him on the move, not only from house to house, but on excursions to Langham or other parts of England.

The toil which circumstances forced upon Marryat must have greatly aided his natural restlessness in wearing out his life. Steady work and hard work are not necessarily synonymous, and Marryat worked very hard by fits and starts. While in America, and amid all the racket of his tour, he had written “The Phantom Ship” which appeared in 1839. The six volumes of his “Diary in America” followed in the same year. That was not off his hands before he was at work on “Poor Jack,” “Masterman Ready,” “The Poacher,” and “Percival Keene,” followed before the end of 1842. Here was an amount of work (six books within five years) which might not be found excessive by the orderly business-like novelist of to-day, but which must have put a severe strain on a man who wrote at irregular times, but when actually at it, wrote furiously. It was a distinct aggravation of the burden that his handwriting was very minute. A man who, having to write a great deal, writes very small, must either be very sure of his eyesight and his nerves, or prepared through ignorance or recklessness to ruin them both. It is, therefore, not to be wondered at that Marryat’s letters between 1839 and 1840 contain references to the state of his health of a constantly more melancholy nature. “I shall,” he wrote to the same lady friend in the first of these years, “be at leisure, I really believe, about the first week in December; but the second portion of ‘America’ has been a very tough job. I am now correcting press (sic) of the third volume, and half of it is done. I hope to be quite finished by the end of the month, and also to have the other work ready for publication on the 1st of January; but what with printers, engravers, stationers, and publishers, I have been much overworked. I have written and read till my eyes have been no bigger than a mole’s, and my sight about as perfect. I have remained sedentary till I have had un accÉs de bile, and have been under the hands of the doctor, and for some days obliged to keep my bed; all owing to want of air and exercise. Now I am quite well again.” Some two years later the news is much worse, and there is no mention of complete recovery. “That you may not think me unkind,” he writes again to the same correspondent, “in refusing your invitation, I must tell you that I am much worse than I have made myself out in my former letters. I fell down as if I had been shot a few days ago, and have been ever since obliged to be very quiet, and am not permitted to drink anything but water, or undergo the least excitement, and you would offer me every description in the shape of beauty, mirth, revelry, and feasting, putting yourself out of the question! No; for my sins—sins in the shape of three volumes chiefly—and heavy sins, too, I must now submit to mortification and penance. I am positively forbidden to write a line, but you may tell William and Dunny that the little book is finished, and will be out at Easter, when they will be able to read it.” Obviously work, and forms of relaxation as wearing as any work, had begun already to ruin a constitution not really robust. Marryat’s tendency to break blood vessels had already crippled him when a lieutenant in the navy, and should have warned him that though he might be muscularly powerful, he had no great reserve of constitutional strength to draw on.

The visit to America makes a break in the character as well as in the continuity of Marryat’s work. He had said all he had to say about the sea life of his own time, and had to turn elsewhere. The “Diary in America” is perhaps a sign that he thought for a moment of rivalling Captain Basil Hall. If he was indeed tempted to do so, the temptation ceased to be difficult to resist after his return to Europe. The toil of travel, and then of writing out his impressions of travel, had been greater than he had expected, and had produced no equivalent result—either in money or reputation. Mrs. Ross Church states that he received for the “Diary,” “on first publishing the manuscript,” £1,600. But, according to the same authority, he had received nearly as much for several of his other books in a lump sum, and they continued to bring him in a yearly harvest, whereas the “Diary” sank at once into the position of a mere book about America. In truth, this kind of writing had been overdone. There was no longer a market for books of the Trollope or even the Martineau order. Everything had been said about the United States which the public wanted to hear for the time. The publishers of the “Diary” must have discovered that, in taking the “Diary,” they had made the mistake not uncommonly committed by the trade, and by theatrical managers, the mistake of overestimating the length of time during which the public will continue to care for the same thing. They, doubtless, told Marryat that the taste for stories was more enduring than the liking for descriptions, abusive, laudatory, or philosophical, of our American cousins. With or without advice of this kind, he returned to stories, and remained steadily faithful to them.

“The Phantom Ship,” written during the American tour, differs materially from all the tales which had preceded it, except “Snarley Yow.” It is a romance with a strong element of diablerie. Possibly because it was not written in a hurry for the press, it shows more signs of care in construction than most of the earlier books. Also, it is an historical romance, and proves that Marryat had worked at the history of the sea-life—not, doubtless, very hard, but still to some purpose. The result makes one regret that he did not find, or seek for, the leisure to dig further, and to avail himself of his discoveries. No great amount of research can have been required to collect the materials for “The Phantom Ship.” Admiral Burney’s “Discoveries in the South Seas” would alone have given Marryat all he wanted for this picture of the old Dutch seamanship. Still he brought with him so much knowledge acquired by actual experience that a little was enough. Had he so pleased he might, with the help of Hakluyt, of Monson, and of Sir Richard Hawkins’ “Voyage,” have given us a picture of the Elizabethan seamen. He might have drawn the “chivalry of the sea,” as Washington Irving asked him to do. A “Westward Ho” he would not have written. We should not have had from him (nor have expected) anything equivalent to the dream of Amyas Leigh, or the exquisite speech at the grave of Salvation Yeo. But what he could have done was what Kingsley could not do, and, with the tact of an artist, did not try to do too much. He might have realized the actual sea life of the time—the ships, the seamen, and the seamanship of the past. It was a work in which only a sailor could have succeeded. The pictorial imagination of Kingsley and the conscientious workmanship of Charles Reade alike fail to give reality to their sea scenes. The first was a great artist, and the second an exceedingly clever man with no contemptible share of the imagination of the historian and biographer—the power of seeing the value of materials, of deducing from the report of a thing done the manner of the doing and the nature of the doer. They both worked hard to realize the sea, and yet, if we compare the cruises of the Rose and the Vengeance, or the fight with the pirates in “Hard Cash,” with the “club-hauling” of the Diomede, there is a perceptible difference. I am not unaware that one may be unconsciously influenced by the knowledge that Marryat was a seaman, to expect, and see more truth in his pictures than in theirs. Remembering that, however, I still think that his sea scenes differ from Kingsley’s, or Reade’s, as the thing seen differs from the thing “got up”—with imagination, with insight, with conscientious industry, no doubt,—but still “got up.”

In this, and in other ways, Marryat did not do all he might have done. “The Phantom Ship,” with “Snarley Yow” which preceded, and the “Privateersman” which followed it, must be taken for what they are worth in place of the possible better. Even so, however, the value of the first of them is considerable. Marryat made a good use of what Leigh Hunt has somewhat hastily decided is the only sea legend. There is no great originality in the incidents. Vanderdecken was made to his hand, and he had German enough—or failing that had translations enough—to supply him with the diablerie. But the materials are well used. The story swings along. Philip Vanderdecken, the Pilot Schriften, the greedy Portuguese governor, and the priests have a distinct vitality. Amine is by far his nearest approach to an acceptable heroine; for indeed it must be confessed that this sailor had an altogether maritime ignorance of women, except bumboat women and the ladies of the Hard. The scenes in which his heroines are on the stage are skip. Amine’s appearances, however, are not skip. She is a very acceptable heroine of melodrama, good of her kind, with a decided character of her own. The Inquisition scenes in which she is the central figure are the highest point Marryat reached in romance. Very good too are the successive appearances of the Phantom Ship, done as was commonly the case with Marryat, simply, without straining, without obvious desire to make you shiver. If the last scene of all trenches on the namby pamby, as I am afraid it does, it is preceded by a very good one indeed. Marryat has indicated the loneliness, the weary waiting, the heart-broken striving of Vanderdecken’s doomed crew, very sufficiently by the futile effort of the poor mate, who would fain persuade the Portuguese to carry the Flying Dutchman’s fatal letters home. That Marryat was content to indicate is not the least of his claims to be considered an artist. He knew by instinct, or deduction, the advantage of coming suddenly on his reader. Too many other story-tellers prepare, and accumulate, and pour forth, the materials of the shower (too commonly of adjectives) which is to cause us the frisson. We see them doing it, and know what is meant, and, human nature being perverse, hold ourselves steady and refuse to shiver. The princess whose husband could not shiver gave him the emotion by turning the cold water and tittlebats down his back when he was expecting no such shock. If he had seen her filling the tub, putting in the little fishes, and coming to tilt it all over him, there would have been no surprise, and, too probably, he would never have known that delightful sensation.

“Poor Jack,” the immediate successor of “The Phantom Ship,” is somewhat closer to “Mr. Midshipman Easy,” but it, too, is something of an historical study, whether it was deliberately designed to be so or not. Greenwich Hospital has become something very different from the retreat for wounded seamen which Marryat knew, and his picture of it, somewhat sketchy as it is, will always have the value of a document. The story one need not stop to analyse at any length. Incidents and characters are of the kind familiar with Marryat—not inferior to the average of the others, but not distinguished from them by any very marked characteristics. One piece of fun it does contain not inferior to his best, the immortal apology of the midshipman who had told the master that he was not fit to carry guts to a bear. The palpable absurdity of the incident is on a par with Mr. Easy’s amazing use of the Articles of War. “The Poacher” and “Percival Keene,” which also belong to these years, both have a flavour of work done only because the author was “rather in want of money.” The first is another venture in the same line as “Japhet.” The second is the least pleasant, take it for all in all, of the books which bear Marryat’s name. It is the only one which had better not be re-read in maturer years by him who has read it as a boy. The fun is forced—of the horse-play practical joking kind—and the serious parts are somewhat spoilt by fustian. The negro pirate captain and his crew are good enough for boyish tragedy, but that is not what we expect from Marryat. Finally, too, there is a disagreeable flavour in the book. The hero is a low fellow—not in a healthy human way even, but in a very mean intriguing fashion, and he plays his part in the meanest possible manner.

The one story of these days which could least be spared from Marryat’s work is “Masterman Ready.” This, the first of his children’s books, is also one of the best, perhaps the very best, thing of its kind in English. It is a child’s story in which there is not one word above the intelligence of the readers it was designed for, one situation or one character they could not grasp, and yet it is distinctly literature. It is didactic, and yet there is no preachment. It is pathetic, and yet it is not mawkish. It ends with a death bed scene which is not an offence. In point of mere cleverness of workmanship it ranks, in my opinion, first among Marryat’s works, and yet it is perfectly simple and unstrained. Marryat was indeed well qualified to write for children. He had loved their company at all times, and had served a long apprenticeship in telling stories to his own. The practice had taught him to avoid the fatal mistake of condescension. An intelligent child, as even so weighty a writer as Guizot has remarked, can understand a great deal more than the duller kind of adult is disposed to allow. It does not like to be effusively addressed as “my little friend,” and made to see that the kind gentleman or lady who speaks is intent on improving its mind. “I can’t be always good,” said Tommy; “I’m very hungry; I want my dinner.” The unsophisticated youthful mind is apt to be equally direct about its literature. It can’t be always imbibing preachment; it becomes languid, and wants to be amused: but it also likes precision of detail, and is eager to learn the why and how of everything. With these two rules to guide him—not to be too obtrusively instructive, and yet to explain every incident as it came, Marryat wrote a model child’s story. Forster was certainly in the right in declaring it to be the most read, and the most willingly re-read, of its class. For its mere cleverness the book can be enjoyed by the oldest of readers who is not too dreadfully in earnest. It was no small feat to have taken so well worn a situation as the shipwreck and the desert island, and to have made out of it a book which may stand next to Defoe’s. The desertion of the Pacific and her passengers by the crew, her wreck, the life on the island, the fight with the savages, and the rescue, are as probable, they follow one another as naturally, as the events in the life of Robinson Crusoe. Marryat had too much tact and knowledge to fall into the extravagances of the “Swiss Family Robinson.” The beasts and plants of the island are not an impossible collection of the flora and fauna of three continents. Then, too, the book contains two of Marryat’s very best characters. Masterman Ready is an ideal old sailor, brave, modest, kind, helpful, able to turn his hand to anything, and to do it well, yet, withal, no mere bundle of abstract virtues, but a most credible human being—such a man as might have been formed by such a life. Very different, but equally good, is Master Tommy Seagrave, the ideal of greedy, naughty boys. Tommy’s ever vigorous appetite and irrepressible passion for making a noise, for meddling with everything, for trying everything, for spoiling everything, are as perfect in their way as the meek heroism of Masterman Ready. At the end, the collision of the two produces very genuine tragedy. Master Tommy was just the boy who would have emptied the water-butt, under pretext of bringing water from the well, and would have accepted the very undeserved praise bestowed on his zeal without the faintest scruple. The consequences of his bad behaviour are absolutely natural and inevitable. That Masterman Ready should have met his death through Master Tommy was an artistic stroke of the highest merit. And Marryat tells it all with a calm detachment which might reduce the average Russian novelist to despair. He is not wroth with Tommy. He accepts him as inevitable, and only describes him with a calm artistic precision, simply as the type of “The Boy.” Then, too, consider the final no-repentance and escape of Tommy. He howled for water and got it, and Masterman Ready died that he might have it. The little wretch never knew what mischief he had done. He sailed away to Sydney with an excellent appetite, and as long as he had enough to eat, and things to break, was no doubt perfectly happy. There is a something colossal in the truth, and the artistic calmness of the whole story.

While Marryat was at work on “The Poacher,” he had a slight literary skirmish—not unworthy of notice as a proof that certain things are unchanging in the literary world. The story appeared in The Era in weekly numbers. One of those remarkable persons, who, in every successive generation, find it necessary to make a protest in favour of the dignity of literature, and whose idea of dignity commonly is that literature can only be good when it appears in a certain way and at a certain price, fell foul of Marryat for choosing this low method of publication. This egregious person wrote in Fraser, and very gratuitously attacked Marryat, in the course of some remarks on Harrison Ainsworth, in the following “slashing” style: “If writing monthly fragments threatened to deteriorate Mr. Ainsworth’s productions, what must be the result of this hebdomadal habit? Captain Marryat, we are sorry to see, has taken to the same line. Both these popular authors may rely on our warning, that they will live to see their laurels fade unless they more carefully cultivate a spirit of self-respect. That which was venial in a miserable starveling of Grub Street is perfectly disgusting in the extravagantly paid novelists of these days—the caressed of generous booksellers. Mr. Ainsworth and Captain Marryat ought to disdain such pitiful peddling. Let them eschew it without delay.”

These were very bitter words, but the only influence they had on Marryat was to provoke him to show that he could do the single-stick style as well as the Fraser men themselves. With less wit, but more good humour than Thackeray, he, too, wrote his Essay on Thunder and Small Beer. He pointed out that there is no necessary connection between the manner of publication and the method of composition of a book, and even made quite respectable fun of Fraser’s pedantry. “In the paragraph,” he says, “which I have quoted there is an implication on your part which I cannot pass over without comment. You appear to set up a standard of precedency and rank in literature, founded upon the rarity or frequency of an author’s appearing before the public, the scale descending from the ‘caressed of generous publishers’ to the ‘starveling of Grub Street’—the former, by your implication, constituting the aristocracy and the latter the profanum vulgus of the quill. Now although it is a fact that the larger and nobler animals of creation produce but slowly, while the lesser, such as rabbits, rats, and mice, are remarkable for their fecundity; I do not think that the comparison will hold good as to the breeding of brains; and to prove it, let us examine—if this argument by implication of yours is good—at what grades upon the scale it would place the writers of the present day.” By applying “this argument by implication” in a rigid fashion, Marryat has no difficulty in showing that “my Lady —— anybody,” who produces one novel a year, is necessarily twice as great a writer as Hook or James who produces two, and twelve times as great as the Fraser man himself, whose production is monthly. The reasoning is burlesquely fallacious, but it was meant to be so. Marryat spoke with more gravity, and more point too, when he urged that he was doing a good work by spreading his story “among the lower classes, who, until lately (and the chief credit of the alteration is due to Mr. Dickens), had hardly an idea of such recreation.”

“In a moral point of view I hold that I am right. We are educating the lower classes; generations have sprung up who can read and write; and may I inquire what it is they have to read, in the way of amusement?—for I speak not of the Bible, which is for private examination. They have scarcely anything but the weekly newspapers, and as they cannot command amusement, they prefer those which create the most excitement; and this I believe to be the cause of the great circulation of The Weekly Despatch, which has but too well succeeded in demoralizing the public, in creating disaffection and ill-will towards the Government, and assisting the nefarious views of demagogues, and chartists. It is certain that men would rather laugh than cry—would rather be amused than rendered gloomy and discontented—would sooner dwell upon the joys and sorrows of others, in a tale of fiction, than brood over their supposed wrongs. If I put good and wholesome food (and, as I trust, sound moral) before the lower classes, they will eventually eschew that which is coarse and disgusting, which is only resorted to because no better is supplied. Our weekly newspapers are at present little better than records of immorality and crime, and the effect which arises from having no other matter to read and comment on, is of serious injury to the morality of the country.… I consider, therefore, that in writing for the amusement and instruction of the poor man, I am doing that which has been but too much neglected—that I am serving my country, and you surely will agree with me that to do so is not infra dig. in the proudest Englishman: and, as a Conservative, you should commend, rather than stigmatise my endeavours in the manner which you have so hastily done.”

The intention and the argument here are better than the style. Marryat was better at narrative than exposition, and could at times be as free with the relative pronouns as that distinguished officer, Captain Rawdon Crawley. The confidence Marryat, in common with most of his contemporaries, reposed in the influence of wholesome amusement was doubtless excessive. It has not been found that when the “poor man” [or other reader for that matter], has a choice of Hercules given him between good literature and bad, he will cleave to the first and reject the last. Also, there is a candid confession of the faith “that there is nothing like leather” in Marryat’s confidence that good weekly stories would soothe the discontent which was seething in England before 1848. But in spite of slips of grammar, optimism, and over-confidence, Marryat’s answer to the priggery in Fraser is a creditable manifesto. To desire to kill the trash of The Weekly Despatch was at least a respectable ambition, and a man has a good right to believe in his causes, and his weapons.