The weakness which proved fatal to Marryat had shown itself while he was still a young lieutenant in the West Indies. He had then been invalided home for rupture of a blood vessel in the lungs, and a military doctor “also certified to his tendency to ‘hÆmoptysis,’ and prophesied that, without great care, ‘the most dangerous and perhaps fatal results’ would be the consequence” of rashness. The danger had passed at that time—had probably been avoided by the use of care—and for many years Marryat had to all appearance been a very robust man. He was of the best possible height and build for strength. He was some five feet ten inches high, with broad deep chest, and his muscular force was exceptionally great. His portrait, as far as it can be judged of from the engraving prefixed to “Frank Mildmay,” gives the impression of a man of boundless energy, open-faced, alert, and keen-eyed. He was black-haired with blue eyes, and his beard grew so thick and so fast that he was compelled to shave twice a day. When he came to Langham, in 1843, his strength was apparently still unbroken, and he might appear sure of long years of health and capacity for work. But it is clear that there was more appearance than reality in his strength. When a man has turned fifty he begins to suffer for the unwisdom of former years. Marryat, unfortunately, had never given himself any quarter. He had spared himself no burden a man can lay upon his strength. He had played and worked to excess, had lived in a whirl of nervous excitement, had spent beyond his means in constitution as well as in purse. If he had not spent his summer while it was May—at least he had run through it far too soon. Langham, which might have given him rest, was only the scene of more nervous excitement, more strenuous work. In 1847 the end began. In August of that year he speaks, in a letter to his sister, of having recently ruptured two blood vessels. The following letter shows that the accident occurred in London, but Marryat returned to Langham, and remained there till the want of medical advice likely to inspire more confidence than a country doctor’s drove him to London again. He remained at his mother’s house at Wimbledon for two months, and from it wrote to Lord Auckland, then at the Admiralty, on December 14th.

I have quoted this melancholy but not altogether unmanly letter at full for the light it throws on Marryat’s last years. It is clear that when the ruin of West Indian property had begun to embarrass him, he had striven to return to active service. The beginning of the letter proves that in the middle of 1847 his nerve was already gone. At last he was no longer able to bear the strain of that passion and determination of which his daughter speaks. When crossed by a First Lord of the Admiralty, with whom he could not give way to an explosion of rage, the effort required to control himself was too much for a man worn in health, and accustomed for many years past to give his feelings unchecked course. The letter may also stand as proof that Marryat’s reputation as a naval officer was dear to him. As to the merits of the dispute there is no evidence to form an opinion. Lord Auckland, in a temperate letter, replied that he had no recollection of what had passed at the time, but that he certainly could have had no intention of wounding so distinguished an officer as Captain Marryat. The letter ended with the agreeable information that a good service pension had been conferred on him. Heat and disappointment on the one side, and perhaps a little dry official formality on the other—a thing which those who deal with Government officials should learn to take for granted—will doubtless account for the trouble.

From this time forward Marryat’s remnant of life was filled with flights in search of health, and with every sorrow. From Wimbledon he went to Hastings, in the vain hope that a milder climate would give him a chance of recovery. For a time he seemed to improve, but it was a mere flicker. Whatever chance of recovery he had was utterly destroyed by the terrible blow which fell on him at the end of the year. His son, Lieutenant Frederick Marryat, was lost in the wreck of the Avenger in the Mediterranean. The Avenger, one of the first steamers in the navy, was steered on a reef between Galita and the mainland, during the night. She was under steam and sail at the time, and struck so heavily that in a very few minutes she was a complete wreck, with the sea breaking over her. Frederick Marryat was below when the vessel struck. In the confusion which followed, he was seen, by one of the few survivors, in the waist of the ship, endeavouring to keep the men steady, and clear away the boats. But the Avenger broke up fast; the funnel and main-mast fell on the group in which Marryat stood, crushing some and hurling others overboard, where they were swept away in the sea that was then running. By one death or the other he perished, and the tragedy broke his father’s heart. The young man had been wild and extravagant—a source of expense and anxiety to his father. He had been a midshipman of the wild type, and as a young lieutenant had been unsettled, eager to get on shore and find some work more agreeable and more lucrative than a naval officer’s. But if he had the faults—or rather let us say the weaknesses—of the seaman, he also had his finer qualities. He was a gallant and good-hearted young fellow. A letter of his father’s, written two years or so before the wreck, speaks of him as turning up from the China station full of life and spirit, lighting up the house at Langham. In his then state of weakness it must have been a killing blow to the father to hear of the son’s death, under circumstances of which no man was better able to appreciate the horror than himself. Marryat bore the blow stoutly, for he too had the “qualities of his defects,” and as he was passionate so was he courageous.

From Hastings, which he naturally felt had done him no good, he moved to Brighton for a month. It seemed for a moment as if the danger was past, and Dickens, among others, wrote to congratulate him on his recovery. But, in truth, the case was a hopeless one. From Brighton he returned to London for the last time to consult with the doctors. When he re-entered the outer room in which several of his family were waiting to hear the result, he had to tell them that he had been condemned. “They say,” he reported, “that in six months I shall be numbered with my forefathers.” He announced the decision, Mrs. Ross Church tells us, with an “undisturbed and half-smiling countenance,” and we can easily believe it, for, leaving his natural bravery out of the question, life can have had no temptation for him if it was to be lived under the constant threat of such a disease as menaced him.

From London Marryat moved to Langham, and there waited for death all through the summer of 1848. It came at last through sheer weakness, and apparently with little or no pain. Ruptures of blood vessels could only be prevented by rigid abstinence from food. He speaks in the last letter he wrote—in at least the last that is printed—of living for days on lemonade till he “was reduced to a little above nothing.” The illness and the remedy were alike fatal, and between the two he was gradually reduced to extinction. During the summer days he lay in the drawing-room of the house at Langham, hearing his daughters read aloud to him, till his growing weakness brought on delirium. To the last he continued to dictate pages of incoherent talk, much as Sir Walter Scott had written mechanically long after his intellect was gone. He loved to have flowers brought him to the end. Finally, after he had long been unconscious between weakness and doses of morphia, he expired in perfect quiet just about dawn on August 9, 1848.

It ought to be unnecessary for me to add much on the character of Captain Marryat. Although our knowledge of him is fragmentary, it is my fault if enough has not been said in these pages to show what sort of man he must have been. It is tolerably clear that he was passionate, ready to think that he did well to be angry, and that anger was its own justification. Passionately eager to enjoy he must have been, and not wise in seeking enjoyment. It must be remembered, however, that he was trained in the navy in a wild time, when men repaid themselves for such hardships as the naval officer of to-day never undergoes, by excesses of which he would be incapable. Then Marryat fell into the literary and semi-literary life of London at a time when it was partly honestly, partly out of mere silly pose, dissipated and Bohemian. His wealth was the means of throwing him among a hard living set. Among them, his friends, doubtless, helped him to get rid of his money inherited and earned. He was the fast and hard living stamp of man whom the Bohemian literary gentlemen professed to admire, and he paid for his genuineness. In such a world the ardent natures wore themselves out, while the poseur and the humbug escaped. But if Marryat wasted his substance and hastened his death by excesses, he seems to have been generous and good to those around him. To his younger children he was kind, and if his wife fell out of his life (she is not mentioned as having been present at Langham), there is nothing to show that it was for reasons discreditable to him, or indeed to either of them. If he was one of those who are mainly their own enemies, at least he did not belong to the worst rank of a very noxious class of persons. That he was a brave man and a good officer beyond question.

As a writer Captain Marryat has never—as I began this little book by saying—been quite fairly treated. There has always been more or less a suspicion that an AthenÆum writer, who described him as a quarter-deck captain who defied critics, and trifled with the public, writing carelessly, and not even good English, taking it for granted that the public was to read just what he chose to write, was stating the facts. He has never been recognized as one of the front rank of English novelists. Macaulay only mentions him as one among several writers on America. Carlyle’s savage “slate” of him is unjust to a degree which can only be palliated by the fact that it was founded on a hasty reading of his books in the evil days after the loss of the manuscript of the French Revolution. At that time everything was looking more spectral to Carlyle than usual. Thackeray was just to him indeed, but Thackeray was exceptionally large-minded and fair. Yet I do not know what reason there is to exclude Marryat from the front rank which would not also exclude some whom we habitually put there. To rank him with Fielding, with Jane Austen, Thackeray or Richardson, would be absurd, but I see no reason why he should not stand with Smollett. He might stand a little below him for “Humphrey Clinker’s” sake, but not very far. Except Sir Walter Scott, no man can be read over a longer period of life. He may be enjoyed at school and for ever afterwards. I doubt whether many boys have delighted in “Tom Jones.” Did anybody, to take the other end of life, ever experience, on coming back to “Peter Simple” or “Mr. Midshipman Easy,” that shock which is produced by a mature re-reading of, say, “Zanoni”? I imagine not. There must be a great vitality, a genuine truth, in the writer who can stand this test, and stand it so long. That Marryat was to some extent a boyish writer is undeniable, and it seems to me to be the secret of his enduring popularity. His books revive in one the exact kind of pleasure one felt in reading them in one’s teens. We may re-read some writers who pleased then, and remember the pleasure, and regret it can be felt no longer. Others one re-reads with ever new pleasure, but they satisfy for reasons not felt in early days. We see more in them and ever more. But with Marryat it is different. He pleases for the same causes always, which is surely as much as to say that he is unique of his kind. More than any other man he made what was written for boys and children literature. He was the best of his class, and that alone entitles him to a high place. After all, a man can do no more than be the best of his order. Whoever is that is surely fairly entitled to be called a Great Writer. Whether that title is to be grudged him or not, he is assuredly the friend of all who read with a simple and healthy taste. No man has given more honest pleasure, more wholesome stimulus to youth; few have given more hearty fun to older readers. If we do not think of him as “great,” a word of which we might indeed be more chary than we are, at least we can think of him as kindly, as sound, as manly—and it is possible to make a stir with one’s pen and be none of those three things.

The End.