Page images
PDF
EPUB

through some three hundred and thirty pages of substantially the same stuff as the above extracts, will do Mr. Crane no injustice. So I will pass from him to a novelist of considerably larger calibre.

For Mr. Arthur Morrison, author of Tales of Mean Streets and A Child of the Jago, undoubtedly carries heavier guns that Mr. Crane. To begin with, he can tell a story, while Mr. Crane can only string together a series of loosely cohering incidents. Many of his characters are vividly and vigorously drawn, while the American writer puts us off for the most part with sketches and shadowy outlines. Mr. Morrison's ruffians and their ruffianism are better discriminated, and though there is plenty of fighting and drinking and general brutality in his last and strongest work-one of the faction fights in which, indeed, is related at quite inordinate length-he understands that the description of these things alone will not suffice to make a satisfactory story even about blackguards. He has outgrown that touching naïveté displayed in the younger writer's obvious belief in the perpetual freshness and charm of mere squalor. He perceives that merely to follow his characters, as Mr. Crane does his, from the drinking-bar to the low music-hall and thence home again, day after day, with interludes of brawling and 'bashing,' and other like recreations, becomes, after a hundred pages or so, a little monotonous, and that the life of the

criminal in his constant struggle with the law, and in perpetual danger from its officers, possesses at least the element of 'sport,' and presents features of variety and interest which that of the mere sot and tavern-brawler cannot possibly offer. Above all, Mr. Morrison wields a certain command of pathos, a power in which Mr. Crane is not only deficient, but of which he does not even appear to know the meaning; and were it not for a certain strange and, in truth, paradoxical defect, of which more hereafter, in his method of employing it, he would at times be capable of moving his readers very powerfully indeed. In a word, the English writer differs from the American by all the difference which divides the trained craftsman from the crude amateur, and he deserves to that extent more serious and detailed criticism.

What, however, has most astonished one of Mr. Morrison's critics fresh from a perusal of A Child of the Jago, is the impression of extraordinary unreality which, taken as a whole, it leaves behind it. To a critic opposed to the theories and methods of so-called realism, this is naturally rather disconcerting. He has probably been girding up his critical loins for the task of showing that the realist has lost sight of art in the perusal and capture of naked Truth, when lo! he finds that even Truth herself appears to have altogether escaped her pursuer. He was preparing himself to detect and expose the aesthetic and artistic

defects of a supposed product of literary photography, when to his amazement he discovers that the photograph, though it seems distinct enough to the gaze which concentrates itself successively on the various parts of the picture, yet fades, when the attempt is made to view it in its entirety, into a mere blur. He comes out from the Jago with the feelings, not, as he had expected, of a man who has just paid a visit to the actual district under the protection of the police, but of one who has just awakened from the dream of a prolonged sojourn in some fairyland of horror. This, to be sure, may be the effect which Mr. Morrison desired to produce: it is certainly not difficult, I think, to show that his methods are distinctly calculated to produce it; but then those methods cannot be exactly the methods which the realist professes to employ, nor that effect the effect at which he is commonly supposed to aim.

What is the Jago? The Jago is a name of Mr. Morrison's own invention, and applied by him to a district which he carefully localises by giving it two real East-End thoroughfares, High Street, Shoreditch, and Bethnal Green Road, as boundaries on two of its sides. He estimates its area as that of a square of two hundred and fifty yards or less,' and describes its population as 'swarming in thousands.' Yet with the exception of the hero's mother, and a single family besides, it appears to contain no one adult person

among all these thousands who is not actually or potentially either a thief, or a prostitute, or a 'fence,' or a professional mendicant, or the female decoy of drunken libertines for the purpose of robbery with murderous violence. In the opening chapter of the book, the wife of Billy Leary brings in a victim to the 'cosh,'-an iron rod with a knob at the end, which the craftsman carried in his coat-sleeve, 'waiting about dark staircase corners till his wife (married or not) brought in a well-drunken stranger, when with a sudden blow behind the head the stranger was happily coshed, and whatever was found on him as he lay insensible was the profit of the transaction.' And we are told that there were legends of surprising ingatherings achieved by wives of especial diligence: one of a woman who had brought to the cosh some six-and-twenty on a night of public rejoicing.' Mrs. Leary's stranger was happily coshed,' and afterwards thrown out into the street. As thus:

[ocr errors]

'In a little while something large and dark was pushed forth from the door opening near Jago Row, which Billy Leary's spouse had entered. The thing rolled over and lay tumbled on the pavement for a time unmoved. It might have been yet another wouldbe sleeper, but for its stillness. Just such a thing it seemed belike to two that lifted their heads and peered from a few yards off till they rose on hands and knees and crept to where it lay: Jago rats both. A man it was, with a thick smear across his face and about his head, the source of the dark trickle that sought the gutter dreamily over the broken flags. The drab stuff of his pockets peeped out here and there in a crumpled bunch, and his

waistcoat gaped where the watch-guard had been. Clearly here was an uncommonly remunerative cosh-a cosh so good that the boots had been neglected and remained on the man's feet. These the kneeling two unlaced deftly, and rising, prize in hand, vanished in the deeper shadow of Jago Row.'

This, be it observed, is not a crime of rare occurrence, and the work of a limited class of criminals. You are invited to believe that it is a regular industry of the Jago practised semper, ubique, et ab omnibus, throughout the whole district, at all times, and by every one who has the means of practising it with success. Lack of such means is the only limit to it. 'S'elp me!' says one of the characters, referring to Mrs. Leary, I'd carry the cosh meself if I'd a woman like 'er.'

After this one ought not, perhaps, to be surprised at the fight between the Ranns and the Learys, related with all the circumstantiality of the scrimmage between Molly Seagrim and her enemies in the churchyard, though in a grim, smileless fashion, contrasting comically enough with Fielding's most humorous burlesque of a Homeric battlepiece. But it lasts for twenty mortal pages, until indeed we get a little tired of the prowess of Sally Green in biting her female adversaries, and tearing out their hair, and are almost glad when Nora Walsh brings the fight to a close by breaking a bottle on the kerb, and stabbing Sally about the face with the jagged points. The two clans subsequently fraternize, and,

« PreviousContinue »