THE RECLUSE
fesses with a tinge of cruelty: “I suppose I can go where I like, can’t I? I needn’t ask your leave first. Since you’re dead keen on knowing—well, I went because I was hard up.—There!” But she deserts him for good, leaving a note in which he is admonished, “never, never to find out where I’ve gone, and never to come down after me.” He meets her, all unknowingly, twelve years later in a stable-yard at Huntington. “Her husband kept the yard, and she was the mother of three chubby-cheeked girls… She knew him at once, but because of her husband refrained from betraying it. And he just glanced carelessly at her and never recognized her.”
The revival of a love, bygone and forgotten, forms the substance of “In Cumberland.” It fails to keep close in rendering convincingly the sense of appeal in Alec Burkett, who, taken ill in a tiny, unkempt mountain village, “a choppy pool of black slate roofs, wanly a-glimmer in the wet,” meets once again with a former sweetheart, and in the course of events (she had meanwhile married), being passionately urged by Burkett to elope with him, she brings the affair to an untimely end. The close of the story bites like etcher’s acid. “He strode away across the lawn, and as she watched his retreating figure, she felt for him a shallow compassion, not unmingled with contempt.”
“Modern Melodrama” and “Yew-trees and Peacocks” are two short stories that close the “Sentimental Studies”. In the latter we find great verbal beauty and retrospection. “Modern Melodrama” reverts to the naked style of journalism so succinctly used in narrating the stories in “Wreckage.” The two characters, who have been coarsened in a world that makes life adventitious only to those steeled and hardened by it, talk of hell-fire and “wince under the fierce feeling of revolt”—but for all that their fame and fury scarcely suffice to make them live. The mood of a languorous afternoon, with the foliabe turned ever so faintly by Autumn, is in “Yew-trees and Peacocks.” The heroine is delicate and mobile, her lover perhaps a little too vague and courtly. An atmosphere of saddened and mellow placidity colors this tale, which makes the common contention that Crackanthorpe was concerned solely with the trough and gutter of existence a fallacy.
A motto prefixed to “Vignettes” (1896), reads: “The pursuit of experience is the refuge of the unimaginative.” In this slender volume of only sixty-three pages will be found some of the most stimulating and exuberant prose of the Nineties. “In a work like this Crackanthorpe was perfect.” writes J. M. Kennedy. “And if there are beautiful subjects to choose from, there is no special reason why an artist of Crackanthorpe’s qualifications should deliberately choose ugly ones. Even when writing about Naples he does not forget to remind us of the garbage in the Strada del Porto and the squalidness of the Strata del Chiaia.” None the less it is this very insistence on Crackanthorpe’s part to accentuate the occasional misshapen hideousness of the human scene that converts with touches of versimilitude his perfect but ordinary prose, into broad and astonishing writing. Beauty alone he could never altogether disassociate from the element of humanity. “I dreamed of this great, dreamy London of ours,” he writes on returning to England, “of her myriad fleeting moods; of the charm of her portentous provinciality; and I awoke all a-glad and hungering for life.” Movement and the joy of movement there are in even the least of these notes, with the never-failing, ever-shifting, emotional agony that makes them distinct and discoverable as a part of life.
The “Last Studies”, a collection of three long stories, was posthumously published in 1897 with a memorial sonnet by Stopford Brooke and an appreciation by Henry James. “The troubled individual note” of Crackanthorpe, we are told, is a difficult thing to interpret. Of stories of this type, we further read, “it may be an effort preferably pictorial, a portrait of conditions, an attempt to summarize, and compress for purposes of presentation, to ‘render’ even, if possible, for purposes of expression.”
The first, “Anthony Garstin’s Courtship,” is written in complete subjection to a tragic mood. It shows the subtle but resistless antagonism of a dominant, masculine woman who pits herself in all hardihood and contention against a light and flighty creature, the choice of her son. She declares: “T’
