The Master Sinner

There is a small sub-genre of letters-from-hell books. The most well-known of these is doubtless The Screwtape Letters (1942), by C.S. Lewis. But previous to Lewis there were two others that Lewis at least knew about. Breve fra Helvede by M. Rowel (the pseudonym of Valdemar Adolph Thisted) appeared in Denmark in 1866, with English translations to follow, including an 1884 one, as Letters from Hell,  with a preface by George MacDonald. Lewis is known to have read a part of this volume, leaving the whole unfinished. An earlier similar volume was Infernal Conference: or, Dialogues of Devils (1772) by John Magowan. I included extracts from each of these two books in my anthology Tales Before Narnia (2008). The Magowan book was, to me, the more interesting of the two. 

Not long after Tales Before Narnia was published, I learned of another similar book, The Master Sinner, by "A Well-Known Author." It was published by John Long in February 1901. The "Author of The Master Sinner" published a second novel, unrelated to the first, entitled The Curse of Eden (John Long, November 1901).

The Master Sinner is a sort of cynical response to books by Marie Corelli, like The Sorrows of Satan (1895) and (especially) The Master-Christian (1900). It tells of two friends, poor philosophers Anthony Grigg and Thomas Trelawny, who make a pact that whoever dies first will communicate to the other the facts about various eternal things. Trelawny dies suddenly, and Grigg receives two letters, a year apart, beginning on the anniversary of his friend's death, fulfilling the bargain, and telling him of the misrepresentation on earth of Hell and its ruling presence. In the second part of the book, Grigg reads his friend's diary, and then his own, with highlights by Satan about each of them wrecking another person's life. Trelawney made up for his mistake and so "earned" a place in "good" Hell (Trelawny describes hell as a good place, contrary to earthly understanding). The question is, can Grigg do the same?  The story is melodramatic, and has some nice descriptive passages.It keeps one reading through to the end. 

The Master Sinner has long been erroneously attributed to Herbert Vivian (1865-1940), even according to various library catalogues. This misattribution began early. In the section of "Table Talk" in The Literary World for 22 March 1901, there appeared the following:

The authorship of 'The Master Sinner', a new series of 'Letters from Hell', recently reviewed in these columns, has been unofficially fathered upon Mr Herbert Vivian, the former editor of The Whirlwind, and the prospective editor of The Rambler. There may be other claimants. 

The following lines, by an anonymous author, were picked up in the Strand:

The Hell-marked Christian was the first;
  He raved and Stormed and holloaed.
Next on the scene Corelli burst--
  The Master Christian followed.

Then for spell the lord of hell
  In peace could eat his dinner;
But not for Long, who seized his prong
  And raised the Master Sinner. 

The actual author of The Master Sinner was Wilfred Keppel Honnywill (1871-1909), the son of a clergyman, Rev. John Blake Honnywill (1824-1883) and his wife Anne Jane Montague nee Stephenson (1839-1901), born at Sompting, Sussex. He was educated at King's School, Sherborne, and served in the Royal Navy and the Mercantile Marines, before briefly owning a newspaper and turning to literature. Besides the two pseudonymous novels, he published only one other book, Irene and Other Poems (1900), as by W. Keppel Honnywill. A large inheritance following his mother's death in 1901 led to the abandonment of literature, which was furthered by alcoholism and eventually followed by suicide.  In the late morning of 21 September 1909, Honnywill jumped from a bridge above Farringdon Street, Holborn, fracturing his skull on impact. He was 38 years old.

Lost Artists: Charles Mendelssohn Horsfall

Neglected artists are much harder to rediscover even than neglected authors. A rather unusual case is that of Charles Mendelssohn Horsfall (1862-1942), who was a successful society portrait painter for about twenty years, from the early Eighteen Nineties to the outbreak of the First World War, but went on (according to one source) to paint vast mystical abstracts.

Amongst his pictures is a pastel portrait of Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener (1850-1916) in 1899, now owned by the National Portrait Gallery in London. The artist exhibited widely, in London, Dublin, Paris and especially Berlin.

Horsfall had a British father and a German mother: the genealogy of the Mendelssohn family mentions Alexandrine Mendelssohn (1833-1900) married to a John Horsfall. He was born in Germany and grew up there, and seems to have spent more time there than anywhere else. A 1924 German art encyclopaedia (Allgemeines Lexikon der Bildenden Kunstler) lists him as "living in Germany since his youth".

Nevertheless, he was interned by Germany during the Great War in the Ruehlben prison camp, where records show that he sketched fellow prisoners, and contributed to the publications that the inmates contrived to produce. In the Scotsman newspaper of April 12th 1916, he is noted as having contributed to the Prisoners' Pie annual, printed in Ruhleben. He also contributed drawings to the Ruhleben Camp Magazine. Following the war, his work was included in a 1919 exhibition of work created at the camp, and he sold some to the Crown Princess of Sweden.

In 1923, the author and journalist Herbert Vivian published his memoirs under the pseudonym of ‘X’ (Myself Not Least, Being the Personal Memoirs of ‘X’, Henry Holt, USA: the first British edition was from Thornton Butterworth in 1925). Vivian was himself a colourful character, involved in the romantic Jacobite circles of the Eighteen Nineties, who, owing to his services to certain royal families of South Eastern Europe, had been made a Knight of the Royal Servian Order of Tokovo, and an Officer of The Royal Montenegrin Order of Danilo. Under another pseudonym, he was the author of a Shielian world-conspiracy thriller, The Master Sinner (1901).

In his memoirs, he devotes a few paragraphs to Horsfall, describing him as a “Bohemian acquaintance”, and giving an account of him immediately after his recollections of Aleister Crowley. The artist came back from the camp, he says, “under the influence of [occult] spirits”.

Horsfall, says ‘X’, believed he was under the protection of an ancient Egyptian priest, and “took to doing extraordinary whorls on huge canvasses, closing his eyes and applying his colour by inspiration...one wild confusion of circles, for instance, was a map of the New Jerusalem.” Horsfall, in short, had changed from a painter of precise studio portraits to a strange visionary. Vivian may have been right in attributing the artist’s transformation to the prison camp, but if so this must have developed mostly afterwards. For in the camp he made pencil sketch portraits that are perfectly conventional.

But after this, Charles Mendelssohn Horsfall vanishes from view. None of the work described by Vivian seems to have surfaced in any major gallery or auction. We are left with this tantalising evocation of an artist utterly changed, with work that sounds dramatically different to his earlier portraits, but seemingly undiscoverable.

Mark Valentine

Picture: Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener of Khartoum
by Charles Mendelssohn Horsfall; pastel, octagonal, 1899;
given by Sir Lees Knowles, 1916. Source: National Portrait Gallery.