7 June: Boreham on Richard Blackmore

Roses and Romances
On the anniversary of the death of Richard Blackmore, it is curious to reflect that, in his own day, nobody took him seriously. He was a market gardener. It is true that having been educated at Eton and Oxford, he was called to the bar at the age of 27 and practised for some time as a conveyancing counsel in London.

But he soon discovered that a sedentary life was not for him. Assisted by a legacy, he bought a large block of land at Teddington, set up as a market gardener, and followed that line of things until his death, nearly 40 years later. He specialised in vines, peaches, nectarines, strawberries, and pears. He was particularly proud of his pears, of which he cultivated more than 600 varieties. And he outdistanced most market gardeners by having a stall of his own at Covent Garden.

His contemporaries saw him pottering about among his grapes and his roses and filling up his Winter evenings by scribbling some innocuous and sentimental stories; and it seems to have occurred to none of them that anything of permanent interest was likely to trickle from his uncouth pen. His critics were caustic, his relatives cynical, and his admirers half-hearted.

As he himself observed, a trifle bitterly, the kindest of the reviewers damned him with faint praise; the others saw in his novels nothing that would justify their publication. They never dreamed that a day was coming in which, as a result of Blackmore's writings, one of the most beautiful stretches of country in the West of England would be known as the Doone country, nor that, because of the interest aroused by Blackmore's novel, thousands of tourists from all parts of the world would explore that part of Devonshire every year.

An Author's Jealousy For His Less Popular Works
Blackmore hated to be introduced as the author of "Lorna Doone." He was jealous for the honour of his earlier creations, and was angry with the public for having lavished upon one of his works a disproportionate meed of praise. He himself thought "Clara Vaughan" and "Cradock Nowell" quite as good as Lorna.

Most people feel that the outstanding weakness of "Lorna Doone" is Lorna Doone herself. The novel is magnificent but the heroine is shadowy and unconvincing. We have to take John Ridd's word for it that she was exquisitely beautiful and unutterably sweet; the author never sets her before us in such a light that we behold her charms with our own eyes and feel our hearts capitulate to her loveliness. We fall in love by proxy. John raves about her as lovers will; and we are so intent upon him, so full of admiration for his robust and virile character, so absorbed in his thrilling adventures, and so solicitous for his happiness, that we are always elated when his love affair prospers, and correspondingly depressed when a fickle fortune seems to place Lorna hopelessly beyond his reach. But, all the way through, we are loving Lorna for John's sake rather than her own.

This is more remarkable, since, generally speaking, Blackmore excels at description, and could so easily have set Lorna before us as the most exciting and desirable of women. Description is a delicate and difficult art. Most writers make it tedious. But Blackmore's descriptions hold the reader spellbound. If he points to a house, you are curious to inspect its every detail. He invests his heroes and heroines with flesh and blood, and it henceforth seems incredible that we have not actually met them.

In many respects, "Lorna Doone" is without a rival. Every syllable is vivid, graphic, and so expressed as to be in keeping with the subdued excitement and moving atmosphere of the smoothly running story. In its pages Blackmore attempts and patiently carries to complete success a scheme of literary attainment that no other writer on a comparable scale, has ever had the temerity to undertake.

Modesty That Is Content To Blush Unseen
Turning to the man himself, Blackmore is described by those who knew him as proud, shy, reticent, strong, sweet-tempered, and self-centred—a somewhat incongruous medley. He revelled in his rose garden, his vines, and his strawberry beds, and was never quite happy in any other environment.

He loathed and abhorred social functions, revealing his true self only to a select company of staunch friends. Few knew him; but those to whom that priceless privilege was accorded, worshipped the very ground he trod. He attracted little attention. Blackmore and Ruskin were buried on the same day. All the world seemed to know Ruskin; to the multitude Blackmore was merely a name.

A tablet to his memory forms one of the adornments of Exeter Cathedral. It contains two tributes, one in prose and one in verse. The prose citation is a sentence from his own "Cradock Nowell." "He added Christian courtesy and the humility of all thoughtful minds to a great and glorious gift of radiating humanity."

And the verse:

Insight and humour and the rhythmic roll
Of antique lore his futile fancies
swayed,
And with their various eloquence arrayed,
His sterling English,
pure and clean and whole.

It is difficult to determine whether the man himself or the products of his pen offer the more attractive field for study, but wise men will solve that problem by paying liberal attention to both.

F W Boreham

Image: Richard Blackmore