English essayist and novelist, died in London, June 9, 1901. He was born at Portsmouth, England, August 14, 1836, and was educated at King’s College, and at Christ’s College, Cambridge, graduating from the latter in 1859. Appointed senior professor at the College of Mauritius, French Island of Mauritius, East Africa, in 1861, Mr. Besant remained there for six years. Ill health necessitated his return to England, where he devoted his energy to writing, and in 1868 his first book, “Studies in Early French Poetry,” appeared. From this time to 1874 he was a frequent contributor to various newspapers and periodicals, forming (1871) a literary partnership with James Rice, which was one of the happiest known to letters. This alliance remained unbroken until Rice died in 1882, and among the books that resulted may be mentioned “The Golden Butterfly” (1876), “Ready Money Mortiboy” (1872), and “The Seamy Side” (1881). Thereafter Mr. Besant devoted himself principally to writing novels, among which are “All Sorts and Conditions of Men” (1882), which is perhaps the best known, and practically started the social movement resulting in the building of the People’s Palace in London; “Dorothy Forster” (1896), “The City of Refuge” (1896), and “The Orange Girl” (1898). Of his essays the most notable are, “The French Humorists,” “Rabelais,” and lives of “Coligny,” “Whittington,” “Edward Palmer,” and “Richard Jefferies” (1892), “South London” (1898), and “East London” (1900)…. Sir Walter founded in 1884 the Society of Authors, an organization designed to secure for authors, especially the young and inexperienced, fair treatment at the hands of the publishers. He was knighted in 1895.

Personal

  Urbanity—that, to put it in one word, is the first characteristic which comes into one’s mind when one thinks of Walter Besant. He is always the same: calm, cultured, polished. A “traveled” gentleman, a man who has seen many countries and many peoples, a university man and a scholar, he never fails to impress those who meet him with a sense of his innate kindliness of heart and of his cultivated charm. Nobody who wanted help—and deserved it—ever approached the author of “All Sorts and Conditions of Men” in vain…. Mr. Besant’s feelings towards Woman amount almost to reverence. She is either a goddess—a superior being who must be placed upon a pedestal, and to whom man must perpetually offer up incense and bring gifts—or she is the sweet sharer of his domestic joys, in which case she has to sit at home by the fireside while Man goes out cheerfully to work and fight, bringing home his spoils and his golden guineas to throw them in her lap. These have been his views from youth up; you may feel them, expressed or implied, in any one of his books. Woman is divine, and Woman must reign.

  I am very sorry for Sir Walter Besant. He has always had a place in my heart with the other Knights of fame—the good souls who mean so well, yet who are always on the side of the loaves and fishes and the big battalions. I am quite sure that he hates cruelty and wrong just as much as I do, and is incapable of a brutal thought or deed. But the mischief is that his very amiability leads him astray. I blame him not for loving and defending his fellow craftsmen; for kindling with indignation when he witnesses what he considers “a venomous attack” on a noble reputation. I am quite sure, indeed, that he would defend even the malefactor Buchanan, if he thought him subjected to cruelty and cowardly maltreatment. But alas, although he is kindly, he is not wise.

  Sir Walter Besant was a short, stout, thick-set man. His hair was iron-gray, he wore a full beard and had a ruddy face. His large, clear eyes looked at you through gold-rimmed spectacles. His manner was simple and sincere; his words were direct and to the point. He was a type of the John Bull whom we all love…. Sir Walter, keen on any subject, was the keenest of all the diners on the subject of America. He had been there, had known many Americans, had anyway and always been an enthusiast in promoting the friendship between England and America, and especially had he shown it in using his very exceptional and accurate knowledge of the conditions obtaining in the book-markets of London and New York to bring about international copyright—perhaps not so much for its own sake as to emphasize the solidarity of the traditions of English and American literature. On the very day of his death, indeed, he was to have presided at the Atlantic Union’s banquet; he was one of the organizers of the Union. He was at once the most English and the least insular of Englishmen.

  A quality of Sir Walter Besant’s autobiography must be touched upon—its modesty. It will only be touched upon, for to thrust praise upon one who shrank so from praise is somewhat of an outrage. The modesty in his autobiography is a fault that he would never have corrected, and throughout his record of his life he studiously underrates himself, hardly at any time assuming credit for aught but industry…. He never revised the manuscript as a whole, an important fact, because it was his habit to make considerable corrections in all his written work. Yet it is certain that he intended his autobiography to be published. For my own part, though I am sure that he would have improved the autobiography in certain directions if he could have followed the promptings of second thoughts, I am equally sure that the work as it stands must have a useful, nay, a noble influence. A scholar who was never a pedant, a beautiful dreamer who was a practical teacher, a modest and sincere man speaks in its pages, and teaches with conviction a brave scheme of life.

General

  I am more deeply interested than I can tell you in “All Sorts and Conditions of Men.” It is the first by Besant that I have read. It affects me like the perfected fruit of some glorious tree which my dear husband and I had a dim dream of planting more than thirty years ago, and which we did, in our ignorance and incapacity, attempt to plane in soil not properly prepared and far too early in the season. I cannot tell you, dear Nannie, how it has recalled the hopes and dreams of a time which, by the overruling providence of God, was so disastrous to us. It is a beautiful essay on the dignity of labour.

  Mr. Besant so genial, so friendly, with so persuasive and humorous a vein of whim…. The impersonation of good nature.

  It is not the intention of this article to offer a literary criticism on Mr. Besant’s novels. But it seems hard to ignore the graceful handling of both plot and local character in “All in a Garden Fair,” the wit and sarcasm of “The Seamy Side,” the ingenious weaving of an impossible situation in “All Sorts and Conditions of Men” and in the “Children of Gibeon,” and above all the telling dramatic character of special scenes in each and all. But many readers seek for much more than mere amusement in these pages, and the founding of the People’s Palace is a brilliant proof not only of Mr. Besant’s resources in the way of suggestion, but also of the prompt readiness of the wealthier classes to forward any scheme that offers a fair hope of giving comfort and relief to the working people. The most satisfactory feature in Mr. Besant’s treatment of the methods by which such help can be extended lies in the fact that all the plans which he puts forward have already been tested and tried in various places.

  One of the few real novelists we have left.

  A book [“Dorothy Forster”], which, according to many, is the best thing of its kind that has appeared in this country since the publication of “Esmond” in 1852. It deals with the history of the unfortunate Earl of Derwentwater—he who led the brief but romantic Northumbrian rebellion in 1715. Mr. Besant mastered first of all the history of that rebellion. Then he studied carefully from printed books and from manuscript records the story of the family concerning which he had decided to write. Next he made four journeys to Northumberland, walked from end to end of the county, and saw every thing there is to be seen in it. All this had to be done before he could put pen to paper, so to speak.

  He appeals to a larger body of readers than either Meredith or Hardy, his subjects and his treatment alike commending themselves to the general taste. No one knows better the art of handling delicate subjects without offence. His tales, moreover, require just that amount of thought that yields enjoyment—they never spoil pleasure by a sense of effort. They show a knowledge of life and character that may not be so subtle and intuitive as that of the novelists just referred to, but it is considerable, and gives the impression of having been gleaned from an intimate personal acquaintance with human nature under various conditions and in various social spheres. His plots are ingenious, and are enlivened by an abundance of incident and adventure. The characters are sharply outlined and well sustained. He has a pleasant humour, and a style that never tortures by its complexity of affectations. To all these qualities of the successful novelist, Besant unites the heart of the philanthropist and social reformer, and an attitude, generous and hopeful even towards life in its baser and less attractive forms.

  Rarely have a novelist’s books better reflected a novelist’s personality. Despite some later ventures which do not rise in point of charm to his earlier romances, despite apparent over-attention paid to certain phases of thought—as to the subject of heredity, for instance, in “The Changeling” or in “The Fourth Generation”—despite the desire that he might write less prodigiously and not spread out his stories thinly; despite the wish that he might return to the peculiar vividness and vivacity of “The Children of Gibeon,” for example, the world’s verdict will probably be that Sir Walter Besant never wrote an unwholesome or an unentertaining book…. Sir Walter Besant’s transcripts of life meant entire justice to all classes—high and low, rich and poor. In his passion for humanizing society, paupers and princes were ever alike to him, for he was one of the few Londoners equally at home in the East End and the West End. He knew as much about the anarchist holding Sunday afternoon meetings at Victoria Park and the riff-raff who gathered to listen as he did about the Earl of Rosebery at Berkeley Square—and that was a great deal.

  Sir Walter Besant was a clear-headed man who delighted in thinking out mental and social problems for himself, and detested anything that savoured of the incomprehensible. In more than one of his novels an important situation is the exposure of the vain pretension of one of the characters to extraordinary powers—powers of supernatural achievement, powers of discrimination or criticism of higher and more delicate character than those granted to ordinary mortals. He was ready to allow that we now see only through a glass darkly; but he was not ready to allow that any form of ordination would make one man see further than another, nor to believe that ceremonial might help insight by helping faith. Feeling deeply as he did the mystery of immortality, he resented any assumption on the part of a class of ability to see further into the mystery than other persons. Sir Walter Besant was, it must always be remembered, a scholar—and so successful a scholar that although in his modest record of his achievements he makes light of what he did as a young man, it is quite clear that he was from childhood an intellectual leader. His natural place was at the head.