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I THINK that Ouida, and Ouida only, has ever considered Marion Crawford as a stylist, and she, in her study of him, in her Critical Studies, adopts that attitude of elder-sisterly admonishment, her favourite one to everything alive save only dogs.

Crawford, because he produced with military punctuality a new novel every autumn, was never taken with seriousness by the critics. He was a ‘professional’ novelist—that is, he was a real and true novelist in the tradition of Richardson, Thackeray, Dickens, Balzac and Zola. And of course for the specialists he had no style—for he wrote as a plain man for plain men. Yet he wrote with exact and clear accuracy of the things that he described. Whether it were the sailing of boats in The Children of the King, New York Society in Katharine Lauderdale, Roman politics in Saracinesca, nunneries in Casa Braccio, he was always exact, clear and free of all nonsense.

This matter of style in the novel has always seemed to me wrongly considered by English postwar critics. A novelist must tell his story as clearly as he can and reveal his characters as living human beings. I have myself been told again and again that my own style is careless and that I don’t know the meaning of words. Careless I may be, but I am often a good story-teller, and after thirty years of it I know my business. In any case I try to describe things as I see them, as they really are to me. How I detest pose in a novel!

Good, honest Marion Crawford, how excellent are your flat, unexciting, but truthful sentences beside the shams and gesticulations of posturing writing! Time deals with the shams, however. The poems, for example, of Stéphane Mallarmé, once considered remarkable because they were obscure, now that they are no longer obscure, are discovered to be empty and mediocre. On the reverse the stories and essays of Oscar Wilde, held, during the last thirty years, by serious critics to be the superficial poses of a man who was remembered only because of his tragedy, are now discovered to be filled with true wisdom and to include a deep and revealing philosophy!

So it may be that one day Marion Crawford, because he was an honest writer and could tell a story and knew about all kinds of things from sailing a boat to the lonely terrors of a murderer, will return. He was a minor novelist, he had talent, not genius—but what a debt we owe to the minor novelists! Yes, even of England alone, saying nothing about the Daudets and the Sologubs and the Howells and the Nexös of other countries. To Mary Shelley, G. P. R. James, Miss Ferrier, Miss Eden, Henry Kingsley, Harriet Martineau, Mortimer Collins, Rhoda Broughton, Mary Braddon, Charlotte Mary Yonge, Laurence Oliphant, Mrs. Oliphant, Olive Schreiner, C. E. Raymond, Israel Zangwill, Maurice Hewlett, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Arthur Morrison, Lucas Malet, Gilbert Cannan, Zack, John Oliver Hobbes ... I take off my crumpled black hat and make my brotherly bow!

And here was the sallow Roman lady in the dark little shop, sprung straight, I must imagine, from Francis Marion Crawford’s fecundating loins! Not that she knew it—knew in fact the alarming truth that she was, for one human being at any rate, a character from a novel not yet written and never to be written! I could imagine meeting her wispy and browbeaten little husband, with his anxious eyes and placating mouth, putting my hand on his shoulder and saying to him, “Eugenio, my friend, rise above your fears, for this lady, your wife, is not real at all. Do not quiver when she turns her eyes upon you or pretend, in your mutual bed, to be sleeping when you are not, for your Benedetta is not real. She is only in a book. And even that is not so terrifying, for the book as yet has not been written.”

I could see her, as I asked for the drawings, listening darkly in another Taquisara or Pietro Ghisleri, listening for the cries of her victim who shortly will be poisoned by the vegetable soup even now smoking on the dining-room table....

But all she said to me as she showed me the drawings, in an English remarkably free from accent, was: “Three lire. I have a case full of drawings here if you care to see them.”

“You speak English remarkably well,” I ventured.

“I ought to,” she said. “I was born in Surbiton. I married an Italian. I’ve been here twenty years.” She smiled and yawned. She was full of motherly charm.

I carried under my arm the first yellow-covered volume of Zola’s Rome, which I was reading exceedingly slowly because my French was but halting. The Abbé Froment had for three days now been staring at Rome from the top of the Janiculum.

“You read French?” she said, as the mother of some nice little boy might say to another little boy.

“A little,” I answered modestly.

“Well, I don’t know when I’ll see Surbiton again. It’s changed a bit, I shouldn’t wonder. Ever hear Marie Lloyd at the halls?”

I wasn’t sure but that that queen of subtle innuendo might not be dead, but I hated to distress this exile from home, so I lied brazenly.

“I saw her just before I left England.”

“You did! Ah, she was the one. No one like her in Italy.” She became strictly businesslike. “What about seeing the other drawings? There’s dozens of them.”

But I thought it wiser not. I knew my own weakness. Already on a number of occasions, although possessing no income to speak of, I had found myself, with hot cheeks and a thumping heart, suddenly in the street, having spent in a shop exactly twice as much as I properly possessed. I knew well, even then, that delirious longing, that crazy forgetfulness of everything save the desire to possess, that lust of acquisition. ...

So I said—no, that was all that I would be wanting. I held the copy of Raphael’s drawings in my hand before it was rolled up and confined within the brightest purple tissue paper and tied with pink string.

Enchanting page of mothers and babies! Babies running and babies falling, babies laughing and babies crying. Four mothers and three possible fathers, although one of the fathers was no more than a magnificent torso, stretching across the left side of the back of the sheet. And one madonna of exquisite beauty in the right-hand corner, a wreath of flowers set a little crookedly on her head, a child, the merest child, but holding her baby with watchful care, and the baby tottering on its tiny feet, leaning forward, waving—waving to its father perhaps, whose tremendous chest and arms were fixed for ever on the top of the page.

Only one baby was crying, and he had one eye inquisitively turned to something or someone who, new on the horizon, might be the very thing that he wanted. The theme was the child’s delight and the mother’s care, and I could, without too much fancy, see Raphael himself stopping at the street corner and smiling as he watched the child in its joyful struggle to escape its mother’s arms.

All this for three lire! I paid my money, I took my purple roll, I said that I hoped my hostess would soon see England again.

“Well, I don’t know. I expect the country’s changed a lot. I haven’t been back for twenty years. I like the sun. We never had any sun in Surbiton, except in the summer, and then it was so hot you wanted to get to the sea....”