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[115] 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[116] 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[117] 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[118] 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[119] 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[120] “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[121] 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,[122] 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 alt............