Deep Waters
By . New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 12mo, xvi+290 pp. $1.60.
JUST how ‘recognized,’ one wonders, is William Wymark Jacobs nowadays? Though he is several years younger than Mr. Conrad, and but very little older than Messrs. Wells, Galsworthy, and Bennett, one instinctively thinks of him as a sort of institution established from time immemorial. Like the Conan Doyle of the Sherlock Holmes stories, or the Kipling of Plain Tales and BarrackRoom Ballads, or the O. Henry of The Four Million, he is, or ought to be, a household word. For something like a quarter of a century he has been furnishing one particular kind of genre story, identifying his name with one particular brand of humor. The universal recognition that accrues to such achievements becomes, after awhile, so placid and voiceless as to be half indistinguishable from universal neglect, the deferential neglect which we mete out to Captain Marryatt and Samuel Lover, Charles Lever and Fenimore Cooper — in fine, to all the worthy minor celebrities whom we inherit and take for granted, instead of reacting freshly to them for ourselves. Has this untoward fate overtaken Mr. Jacobs even while he still flourishes as productively as ever? One surmises that it may have; that there are perhaps thousands who, having read him in early youth, have since missed being reminded of his existence. And one hopes devoutly that his publishers have a different, a more reassuring and less retrospective, story to tell. All who would like to see fiction out of the hands of teachers and text-bookers and in the hands of the reading masses must want the author of Many Cargoes and More Cargoes joyously sought as a comic entertainer, not respectfully forgotten as a classic.
Except for the inclusion of a pair of journalistic and ephemeral sketches, or rather skits, Deep Waters does nothing to change or redefine the quality of Jacobs. It merely increases the extant amount of him, in exactly the way which would be expected and wished by all the readers who have learned to identify him with his own comic types of sailor and workingman. Afloat or ashore, his sailors are equally comic. They are authentic portraits in that they are real sailors and real individuals within a certain small area of droll farce; they are caricatures in that they simply do not exist outside that area. The night watchman undertakes to spin yarns on the foibles of his brother salts, and incidentally gives himself away as a combination of smart Alec, harmless rascal, and credulous dupe. The ghost that makes him shrivel with terror is predestined to be a comic hoax. The box of valuables which he loses after undertaking to safeguard it turns out to have contained nothing. The lost purse for which he wades in deep mud and filth is found by another. Mr. Harry Barrett’s mythical Australian wife and five children serve the purpose for which Mr. Harry Barrett invented them, — to save himself from the pursuit of a designing and ruthless spinster, — and then have to be killed off with unseemly dispatch as soon as Mr. Harry Barrett falls in love.
The world in which all these creatures live, move, and have their infectious being is as farcical as the world of Marietta Holley’s Samantha and Josiah. But within its own confines it is as true as Sam Weller, and it has his perennial gay immunity from change. H. T. F.