THE RECLUSE
In an age hat leads itself with inquisitorial sapience to open courts of criticism the name of Hubert Crackanthorpe remains singularly unkown. A fine and searching essay by Arthur Symons, a note by Richard Le Gallienne, seven citations in Holbrook Jackson’s fin de siecle encyclopedia, as many pages in Bernard Muddiman’s “The Men of the Nineties”, J. M. Kennedy’s “English Literature: 1880–1896” and the tale is soon told. Vincent Starrett, it is true, makes an interesting attempt to bridge the vast gap toward the recognition of Crackanthorpe in his “Buried Cæsars”, but there the honors are evenly divided with Richard Middleton (a strange and unfortunate choice for a bedfellow) with no great critical appraisal of either.
To many Crackanthorpe occurs as a sort of medified “Enoch Soames”, with all the tragedy and none of the exhilirating farce of Max’s famous verbal caricature. Born May 12, 1870, his body was found in October of 1896, a suicide in the Seine, after six weeks of mysterious disappearance. Contemporary newspaper obituaries mention his “morbid lucubrations”, while a notice in “The Critic” for January, 1897, refers to his “literary work of a strange sort”, followed by the inevitable “Who’s Who” assortment of instructive facts. Lionel Johnson alone, in a note in the “Academy” for March 20, 1897, quotes Rossetti in defence against the assertion that his “work makes a goblin of the sun,” and with words that veil his own personal tragedy writes: “The terrible pages are full of an aching poignancy. The straightforward sentences hide an inner appeal. The telling of misery becomes a thing of dreadful beauty and its intensity goes nearer to the heart of the whole dark matter than many a moving sermon. The artist’s abstemiousness in Mr. Crackanthorpe, the refinement of his reticence, never chilled his reader. ‘The pity of it! The pity of it!’ That was the unspoken yet audible burden of his art.”
Crackanthorpe was the author of four books in a literary productiveness that extended for less than five years, yet in that brief boundary of a life of sheer tragedy began (as we now know it) the genuine realist movement in modern fiction. “Wreckage”, the first book, published in 1893, marks a monument to realism of the modern period. Hardy’s “Jude the Obscure” was to come in 1895. George Moore, it may be, had gone a step further in “The Mummer’s Wife” than any one since Trollope, Hardy, Gissing, or Henry James in depicting the sorrows and bypaths of pessimistic impressionism. But if the hand was the hand of Moore, the voice was assuredly the voice of Zola. The sodden sodality of the provincial theatre, the tart yet nebulous taint of viciousness made manifest in the commonplace heroine, are all identities boldly abstracted from the men and women in the series Rougon Macquart. In Zola, at least, we touch life and soil our fingers in boldly touching it. “The Mummer’s Wife” mirrors the real thing only as one would find it in a spectroscope. The emotional actress, so pathetic in her drab negation of the joy that could actually have been hers, suffers and dies in true story-fashion. The whole book is a coroner’s inquest. The process of dying has been a business—no more.
With Crackanthorpe’s “Wreckage” we come to something definitely new. Here are seven stories told in the English idiom, with excellent touches of art. We read in the prefactory quotation: “Que le roman ait cette religion que le siecle passe appelait de ce large et vaste nom: ‘Humanite’;—il lui suffit de cette conscience; son droit est la.” Humanity—that was what Crackanthorpe never forgot. It makes each of the stories in his book the shelter and vindication of pity, with a something underlying, an intelligent tragic sense that De Maupassant, for all his vivid, illusory world, never quite persuaded himself into conveying or projecting.
