Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

There is a general idea that he is an American; unless an author stops at home mistakes of that kind are sure to happen. People take it for granted that he belongs where he happens to be living when they find him. Henry James had lived among us so long that he was quite commonly taken for an Englishman even before he became naturalized during the War. The same fate is overtaking Ezra Pound; he is the chief writer of a sort of poetry that is being largely written in his country and in ours, and because he has made his home with us for many years he is generally regarded here as a native. On the other hand, Richard Le Gallienne left us and has passed so large a part of his life in the United States that most of us are beginning to think of him as an American.

The mistake is perhaps more excusable in the case of Donn Byrne, for he was born at New York in 1889, but before he was three months old he was brought over to Ireland which ought to have been his birthplace, since his father was an architect there. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and when he was not improving his mind was developing his muscles; he went in enthusiastically for athletics, and in his time held the light-weight boxing championships for Dublin University and for Ulster. He knows all about horses, too, and can ride with the best, and has manifested a more than academic interest in racing. In fact, he has taken a keen interest in whatever was going on in the life around him wherever he has been, and he has been about the world a good deal, and turned his hand to many things. There is something Gallic as well as Gaelic in his wit, his vivacity, his swiftly varying moods. He is no novelist who has done all his traveling in books and dug up his facts about strange countries in a reference library. When he deals with ships his characters are not such as keep all the while in the saloon cabin; they are the ship’s master and the sailors, and you feel there is a knowledge of the sea behind them when he gets them working; and if he had not been an athlete himself he could not have described with such vigor and realistic gusto that great fight between Shane Campbell and the wrestler from Aleppo in “The Wind Bloweth.”

How much of personal experience has gone into his novels is probably more than he could say himself. But when he is picturing any place that his imaginary people visit, you know from a score of casual, intimate touches that he, too, has been there, and is remembering it while he writes. Take this vivid sketch of Marseilles, for example:

“Obvious and drowsy it might seem, but once he went ashore, the swarming, teeming life of it struck Shane like a current of air. Along the quays, along the Cannebière, was a riot of color and nationality unbelievable from aboard ship. Here were Turks, dignified and shy. Here were Greeks, wary, furtive. Here were Italians, Genoese, Neapolitans, Livornians, droll, vivacious, vindictive. Here were Moors, here were Algerians, black African folk, sneering, inimical. Here were Spaniards, with their walk like a horse’s lope. Here were French business men, very important. Here were Provencals, cheery, short, tubby, excitable, olive-colored, black-bearded, calling to one another in the _langue d’oc_ of the troubadors, _’Te, mon bon! Commoun as? Quezaco?_”

There is that same sense of seeing things in the glamorous description of the Syrian city where Shane lived with the Arab girl he had married; and in the hasty outline of Buenos Aires:

“Here now was a city growing rich, ungracefully--a city of arrogant Spanish colonists, of poverty-stricken immigrants, of down-trodden lower classes ... a city of riches ... a city of blood.... Here mud, here money.... Into a city half mud hovels, half marble-fronted houses, gauchos drove herd upon herd of cattle, baffled, afraid. Here Irish drove streams of gray bleating sheep. Here ungreased bullock carts screamed. From the bluegrass pampas they drove them, where the birds sang and waters rippled, where was the gentleness of summer rain, where was the majesty of great storms.... And by their thousands and their tens of thousands they drove them into Buenos Aires, and slew them for their hides....”

That was the Buenos Aires of Shane’s day, in the Victorian era; but in essentials it was probably as Donn Byrne saw it. For when he was about twenty-two he quitted Ireland and went back to America, and presently made his way to Buenos Aires to get married. His wife is the well-known dramatist Dolly Byrne who wrote with the actress Gilda Varesi, the delightful comedy “Enter Madam,” which has had long runs in London and in New York.

It was during this second sojourn in the States that Donn Byrne settled down seriously to literary work. He says he began by contributing to American magazines some of the world’s worst poetry, which he has never collected into a volume; but he is given to talking lightly of his own doings and you cannot take him at his own valuation. One of the poems, at least, on the San Francisco earthquake, appropriately enough, made something of a noise and was reprinted in the _United Irishman_, but Ireland had not then become such a furious storm-center and an earthquake was still enough to excite it. Before long he was making a considerable reputation with his short stories, and a collection of these, “Stories Without Heroes,” was his first book.

But he will tell you he does not like that book and will not have it reprinted. He says the same about his first novel, “The Stranger’s Banquet,” though it met with a very good reception and had a sale that many successful authors would envy. Then followed in succession three novels that are original enough in style and idea and fine enough in quality to establish the reputation of any man--“The Wind Bloweth,” “Messer Marco Polo,” and “The Foolish Matrons.” These were all written and published in America, and America knew how to appreciate them. The third enjoyed such a vogue that we became aware of him in England and the second, then the first, in quick succession, were published in this country, and “The Foolish Matron” is, at this writing, about to make its appearance here also. And with his new-won fame Donn Byrne came home and is settled among his own people--unless a wandering fit has taken him again before this can be printed.

The beauty and charm of that old-time romance of the great Venetian adventurer, “Messer Marco Polo,” are not easily defined; different critics tried to shape a definition of it by calling it fascinating, fantastic, clever, witty, strangely beautiful, a thing for laughter and tears, and I think they were all right; and that the book owes its success as much to the racy humor, the vision and emotional power with which it is written as to the stir and excitement of the story itself. Half the books you read, even when they greatly interest you, have a certain coldness in them as if they had been built up from the outside and drew no warmth from the hearts of their writers; but “Messer Marco Polo” glows and is alive with personality, it is not written after the manner of any school, but it is as full of eager, vital, human feeling as if the author had magically distilled himself into it and were speaking from its pages.

That is part of the secret, too, of the charm of his more realistically romantic “The Wind Bloweth.” You are convinced, as you read, that those early chapters telling how the boy Shane gets a holiday on his thirteenth birthday and goes alone up into the mountains to see the Dancing Town in the haze over the sea, are a memory of his own boyhood in Ireland. From the peace and fantasy of that beginning in the Ulster hills, from an unsympathetic mother and his two quaint, lovable uncles, Shane, at his own ardent desire, goes to knock about the world as a seafarer, and, always with the simplicity and idealism of his boyhood to lead and mislead him, is by-and-by tricked into marrying the cold southern Irish girl who dies after a year or so, and, his love for her having died before, he can feel no grief but only a strange dumb wonder. Then, while his trading ship is at Marseilles, he meets the beautiful, piteous Claire-Anne, and their lawless, perfect love ends in tragedy. After another interval, comes the episode of his charming little Moslem wife, and he loses her because he never understands that she loves him not for his strength but for his weakness. Thrice he meets with disillusion, but retains his simplicity, his idealism throughout, and is never really disillusioned; and it is when he is in Buenos Aires again that the kind, placid, large-hearted “easy” Swedish woman, Hedda Hages, gives him the truth, and makes clear to him what she means when she says, “No, Shane, I don’t think you know much about women.”

And it is not till his hair is graying that he arrives at the true romance and the ideal happiness at last. The story is neither planned nor written on conventional lines; you sense the tang of a brogue in its nervous English, which is continually flowering into exquisite felicities of phrase, and it lays bare the heart and mind of a man with a most sensitive understanding. It is a sort of Pilgrim’s Progress, and Shane Campbell is a desperately human pilgrim, who drifts into danger and disasters, and stumbles often, before he drops his burden and finds his way, or is led by strange influences, into the City Beautiful.

I daresay Donn Byrne will laugh to discover that I have put him among the gods; he is that sort of man. But it is possible for others to know him better than he knows himself. Abou Ben Adhem was surprised you recollect, when he noticed that Gabriel had recorded his name so high in the list of those that were worthy; and though I am no Gabriel I know a hawk from a handsaw when the wind is in the right quarter.

WILLIAM HENRY DAVIES

The lives of most modern poets would make rather tame writing, which is possibly why so much modern poetry makes rather tame reading. It is a pleasant enough thing to go from a Public School to a University, then come to London, unlock at once a few otherwise difficult doors with the _open sesame_ of effective introductions, and settle down to a literary career; but it leaves one with a narrow outlook, a limited range of ideas, little of personal experience to write about. Fortunately W. H. Davies never enjoyed these comfortable disadvantages. He did not come into his kingdom by any nicely paved highroads, but over rough ground by thorny ways that, however romantic they may seem to look back upon, must have seemed hard and bitter and sufficiently hopeless at times while he was struggling through them.

There is nothing to say of his schooling, except that it amounted to little and was not good; but later he learned more by meeting the hard facts of life and by desultory reading than any master could have taught him. Born at Newport, Monmouthshire, in 1870, he was put to the picture-frame making trade, and went from that to miscellaneous farm work. But work, he once confessed to me, is among the things for which he has never had a passion, and a legacy from a grandfather gave him an interval of liberty. This grandfather, with a sensible foresight, left him only a small sum in ready cash, but, in addition, the interest on an investment that produced a steady eight shillings a week. With the cash Davies went to America, and saw as much of that country as he could as long as the money lasted. Then he subdued his dislike of manual labor and did odd jobs on fruit farms; wearied of this and went on tramp, and picked up much out-of-the-way knowledge of the world and of men from the tramps he fell in with during his roamings. Presently, he got engaged as a hand on a cattle-boat, and as such made several voyages to England and back.

At length, getting back to America just when the gold rush for Klondike was at its height, he was seized with a yearning to go North and try his luck as a digger. The price of that long journey being beyond his means, he followed a common example and tried to “jump” a train, fell under the wheels in the attempt and was so badly injured that he lost a foot in that enterprise and had to make a slow recovery in hospital. When he was well enough, his family sent out and carried him home into Wales.

But he could not be contented there. Although he says himself that he became a poet at thirty-four (when his first book was published), the fact is, of course, he has been a poet all his life and through all his wanderings was storing up memories and impressions of nature and human nature that live again now in vivid lines and phrases of his verse and prose. He had already written poems, and sent them to various periodicals in vain, and had a feeling that if he could be at the center of things, in London, fortune and fame as a poet might be within his reach.

So to London he came, early in the century, and took up residence in a common lodging-house at Southwark, his eight shillings a week sufficing to pay his rent and keep him in food. The magazines remaining obdurate, he collected his poems into a book, and started to look for a publisher. But the publishers were equally unencouraging, till he found one who was prepared to publish provided Davies contributed twenty pounds toward the cost of the adventure. Satisfied that, once out, the book would quickly yield him profits, he asked the trustees who paid him his small dividends to advance the amount and retain his income until they had recouped themselves. They, however, being worldly-wise, compromised by saying that if he would do without his dividends for some six months, when ten pounds would be due, they would pay him that sum and advance a further ten, paying him no more till the second ten was duly refunded.

This offer he accepted; and he tramped the country as a pedlar, selling laces, needles and pins, and occasionally singing in the streets for a temporary livelihood. When the six months were past he returned to London, took up his old quarters at the lodging-house, drew the twenty pounds, and before long “The Soul’s Destroyer and Other Poems” made its appearance. But so far from putting money in his purse, it was received with complete indifference. Fifty copies went out for review, but not a single review was given to it anywhere. No publisher’s name was on the title page, but an announcement that the book was to be had, for half-a-crown, “of the Author, Farmhouse, Marshalsea Road, S.E.,” and possibly this conveyed an impression of unimportance that resulted in its remaining unread. After a week or so, seeing himself with no money coming in for the next few months, the author became desperate. He compiled from “Who’s Who,” at a public library, a list of people who might be expected to take an interest in poetry, and posted a copy of his book to each with a request that, if it seemed worth the money, he would remit the half-crown.

One of the earliest went to a journalist who was, in those days, connected with the _Daily Mail_. He read it at once and recognized that though there were crudities and even doggerel in it, there was also in it some of the freshest and most magical poetry to be found in modern books. Mingled with grimly realistic pictures of life and character in the doss-house were songs of the field and the wayside written with all Clare’s minute knowledge of nature and with something of the imagination and music of Blake. Being a journalist, he did not miss the significance of this book issuing from a common lodging-house (and one, by the way, that is described in a sketch of Dickens’), could easily read a good deal of the poet’s story between the lines of his poems, promptly forwarded his remittance and asked Davies to meet him. Not sure that he would be welcome at the doss-house, he suggested a rendezvous on the north of London Bridge, and a few evenings later the meeting came about at Finch’s a tavern in Bishopsgate Street Within. “To help you to identify me,” Davies had written, “I will have a copy of my book sticking out of my pocket”; and there he was--a short, sturdy young man, uncommunicative at first, as shy as a squirrel, bright-eyed, soft of speech, and with a general air about him of some woodland creature lost and uneasy in a place of crowds. By degrees his shyness diminished, and in the course of a two hours’ session in that bar he unfolded the whole of his story without reserve. Then said the journalist, “If I merely review your book it will not sell a dozen copies, but if you will let me combine with a review an absolutely frank narrative of your career I have an idea we can rouse public interest to some purpose.”

This permission being given, such an article duly appeared in the news columns of the _Daily Mail_, and the results were more astonishing than any one could have foreseen. Not only did the gentle reader begin to send in money for copies, but ladies called at the doss-house and left At Home cards which their recipient was much too reticent to act upon. Editors who had ignored and probably lost their review copies sent postal orders for the book and lauded it in print; illustrated papers sent photographers and interviewers; a party of critics, having now bought and read the poems, made a pilgrimage to the Farmhouse, and departed to write of the man and his poetry. After a second article in the _Mail_ had recounted these and other astonishing happenings, a literary agent wrote urging Davies to entrust him with all his remaining copies and he could sell them for him at half-a-guinea and a guinea apiece.

His advice was taken, and the last of the edition of five hundred copies went off quickly at these prices. So enriched, the poet quitted his lodging-house and went home into Wales for a holiday, and while there began the first of his prose books, “The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp,” which was published in 1908 with an introduction by George Bernard Shaw. Meanwhile, Davies had written two other volumes of verse, and his recognition as one of the truest, most individual of living lyrists was no longer in doubt. Mr. Shaw notes of his prose that it has not the academic correctness dear to the Perfect Commercial Letter Writer, but is “worth reading by literary experts for its style alone”; and much the same may be said of his poetry. It is not flawless, but its faults are curiously in harmony with its unstudied simplicity and often strangely heighten the beauty of thought and language to which verses flower as carelessly as if he thought and said his finest things by accident. He has the countryman’s intimacy with Nature--not for nothing did he work on farms, tramp the open roads, sleep under the naked sky--knows all her varying moods, has observed trivial significances in her that the deliberate student overlooks; and he writes of her with an Elizabethan candor and fantasy and a natural, simple diction that is an art in Wordsworth. He has made a selection from his several volumes in a Collected Edition, but has published other verse since. For some years after his success he lived in London, but never seemed at home; he has no liking for streets and shrinks from crowds; and now has withdrawn again into the country, where our ultra modern Georgian poets who, despite the fact that he is in the tradition of the great lyrists of the past, were constrained to embrace him as one of themselves, are less likely to infect him with their artifices.

WALTER DE LA MARE

Except in the personal sense--and the charm of his gracious personality would surely surround him with friends, whether he wanted them or not--Walter de la Mare is, like Hardy, a lonely figure in modern English poetry--no other poet of our time has a place more notably apart from his contemporaries. You might almost read an allegory of this aloofness into his “Myself”:

“There is a garden grey
With mists of autumntide;
Under the giant boughs,
Stretched green on every side,

“Along the lonely paths,
A little child like me,
With face, with hands like mine,
Plays ever silently....

“And I am there alone:
Forlornly, silently,
Plays in the evening garden
Myself with me.”

only that one knows he is happy enough and not forlorn in his aloneness. You may trace, perhaps, here and there in his verse elusive influences of Coleridge, Herrick, Poe, the songs of Shakespeare, or, now and then, in a certain brave and good use of colloquial language, of T. E. Brown, but such influences are so slight and so naturalized into his own distinctive manner that it is impossible to link him up with the past and say he is descended from any predecessor, as Tennyson was from Keats. More than with any earlier poetry, his verse has affinities with the prose of Charles Lamb--of the Lamb who wrote the tender, wistful “Dream-Children” and the elvishly grotesque, serious-humorous “New Year’s Eve”--who was sensitively wise about witches and night-fears, and could tell daintily or playfully of the little people, fairy or mortal. But the association is intangible; he is more unlike Lamb than he is like him. And when you compare him with poets of his day there is none that resembles him; he is alone in his garden. He has had imitators, but they have failed to imitate him, and left him to his solitude.

It is true, as Spencer has it, that

“sheep herd together, eagles fly alone,”

and he has this in common with the lord of the air, that he has never allied himself with any groups or literary cliques; yet his work is so authentic and so modern, so free of the idiosyncracies of any period, that our self-centered, self-conscious school of “new” poets, habitually intolerant of all who move outside their circle, are constrained to keep a door wide open for him and are glad to have him sitting down with them in their anthologies.

But he did not enter into his own promptly, or without fighting for it. He was born in 1873; and had known nearly twenty years of

“that dry drudgery at the desk’s dead wood”

in a city office, before he shook the dust of such business from his feet and began to win a livelihood as a free-lance journalist. One is apt to speak of journalism as if it were an exact calling, like that of the watchmaker; but “journalism” is a portmanteau word which embraces impartially the uninspired records of the junior reporter and the delightful social essays and sketches of Robert Lynd; the witty gossip of a “Beachcomber,” and the dull but very superior oracles of a J. A. Spender. Not any of these, but reviewing was the branch of this trade to which de la Mare devoted himself, and his reviews in the _Saturday Westminster_, _Bookman_, _Times Literary Supplement_, and elsewhere, clothed so fine a critical faculty in the distinction of style which betrays his hand in all he has written that, his reputation growing accordingly, the reviewer for a time overshadowed the poet; for though he did much of it anonymously his work could be identified by the discerning as easily as can the characteristic, unsigned paintings of a master.

Too often, in such a case, the journalist ends by destroying the author; dulls his imagination, dissipates his moods, replaces his careless raptures with a mechanical efficiency; makes him a capable craftsman, and unmakes him as an artist. But de la Mare seems to have learned how to put his heart into journalism without letting journalism get into his heart; I have seen no review of his that has the mark of the hack upon it; his mind was not “like the dyers hand” subdued to what it worked in. Fleet Street might echo his tread, but his spirit was away on other roads in a world that was beyond the jurisdiction of editors. He was not seeking to set up a home in that wilderness, but was all the while quietly paving a way out of it; and in due season he has left it behind him.

A good deal of what he wrote then bore the pseudonym of “Walter Ramal,” a transparent anagram; and throughout those days he went on contributing poems, stories, prose fantasies to _Cornhill_, the _English Review_, and other periodicals. In 1902 he had published “Songs of Childhood,” a first revelation of his exquisite genius for writing quaint nursery rhymes, dainty, homely, faery lyrics and ballads that can fascinate the mind of a child, or of any who has not forgotten his childhood--a genius that flowered to perfection eleven years later in “Peacock Pie.”

“Henry Brocken” (1904) showed another side of his gift. It is a story--you cannot call it a novel--that takes you traveling into a land unknown to the map-makers, that is inhabited by people who have never lived and will never die. You go with Brocken over a wild moor and meet with Wordsworth’s Lucy Gray; you go further to hold converse with Poe’s Annabel Lee, with Keat’s Belle Dame, with Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, with Swift’s Gulliver, with Lady Macbeth, Bottom, Titania, with folk from the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and many another. It is all a riot of fancy and poetry in prose, with an undercurrent of shrewd commentary that adds a critical value to its appeal as a story.

This fresh, individual note is as prevailing in all his prose as in his verse. It is in the prose and verse of his blithe, whimsical tale for children, “The Two Mulla-Mulgars,” and in that eerie, bizarre novel, “The Return”--where, falling asleep by the grave of old Sabathier, Arthur Lawford goes home to find his family do not know him, for, as he slept, the dead man’s spirit had subtly taken possession of him and transformed his whole appearance. And the spiritual adventures through which Lawford has to pass before he can break that grim dominance and be restored to himself are unfolded with a delicate art that never over-stresses the beauty or significance of them.

By common consent, however, de la Mare’s prose masterpiece is “The Midget.” One can think of no other present-day author who might have handled successfully so _outre_ a theme; yet the whole conception is as natural to de la Mare’s peculiar genius as it would be alien to that of any of his contemporaries, and he fashions his story of the little lady, mature and sane in mind and perfect in body, but so small that she could stand in the palm of an average hand, into a novel, a fable, a romance--call it what you will--of rare charm and interest. The midget’s dwarfish, deformed lover, and the more normal characters--Waggett, Percy Maudlin, Mrs. Bowater, Pollie--are drawn realistically and with fleeting touches of humor, and while you can read the book for its story alone, the quiet laughter and pathos of it, as you can read Bunyan’s allegory, it is veined with inner meanings and a profound, sympathetic philosophy of life is implicit in the narrative.

It was two years after his 1906 “Poems” appeared I remember, that Edward Thomas first asked me if I knew much of Walter de la Mare, and, in that soft voice and reticent, hesitating manner of his, went on to speak with an unwonted enthusiasm of the work he was doing. Until then, I had read casually only casual things of de la Mare’s in the magazines, but I knew Thomas’s fine, fastidious taste in such matters, and that he was not given to getting enthusiastic over what was merely good in an ordinary degree, and it was not long before I was qualified to understand and respond to the warmth of his admiration. The “Poems” were, with a few exceptions, more remarkable for what they promised than for what they achieved, but they had not a little of the unique magic that is in his “Songs of Childhood”; and “The Listeners and Other Poems” (1912), and “Motley and Other Poems” (1918) more than fulfilled this promise and brought him, at last such general recognition that in 1920, after a lapse of eighteen years, his poems were gathered into a Collected Edition.

He began late, as poets go, for he was nearly thirty when his first book came out, and about forty before he began to be given his due place among the poets of his generation. He was so slow in arriving because he came without noise, intrinsically unconventional but not fussily shattering the superficial conventions of others, making no sensational approach, not attempting to shock or to startle. I don’t think his verse ever had the instant appeal of a topical interest, except such of it as grew out of the War, and nothing could be more unlike the orthodox war poetry than that strange, poignant lyric of his, “The Fool Rings his Bells”--

“Come, Death, I’d have a word with thee;
And thou, poor Innocency;
And love--a lad with a broken wing;
And Pity, too:
The Fool shall sing to you,
As Fools will sing....”

Its quaintness, sincerity, tenderness and grim fancy are spontaneously in keeping with the lovely or whimsical dreamings, the wizardries and hovering music of his happier songs. He may not have lived in seclusion, unfretted by the hard facts of existence but the world has never been too much with him, so he can still hear the horns of elfland blowing over an earth that remains for him

“a magical garden with rivers and bowers,”

haunted by fays and gnomes, dryads and fawns and the witchery and enchantment that have been in dusky woods, in misty fields, in twilight and midnight places since the beginning of time. Howbeit, even the ghostly atmosphere of “The Listeners” is pierced with a cry that is not of the dead, for in his farthest flights of fantasy he is not out of touch with nature and human nature, and it is a glowing love of these at the heart of his darkling visions and gossamer imaginings that gives them life and will keep them alive.

SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

If Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were more of a conventional man of letters--had he been just “a book in breeches,” as Sidney Smith said Macaulay was--it would not be so difficult to know where to make a beginning when one sits down to write of him. But no author could be farther from being “all author”; he is much too keenly interested in life to do nothing but write about it, and probably shares Byron’s scorn of “the mighty stir made about scribbling and scribes,” and his preference of doers to writers. He has read much, but lived more, as a novelist ought to, giving freely of his time and thought and sympathy to lives outside his own. He has no fretful little moods of morbidity, cynicism, pessimism, but is essentially a big man and writes always like himself, with a complete freedom from affection, a naturalness, a healthy vigor and breadth of outlook that cannot be developed within the four walls of a study.

Characteristic of himself, I think, is this reflection in “The Tragedy of the Korosko”: “When you see the evil of cruelty which nature wears, try and peer through it, and you will sometimes catch a glimpse of a very homely, kindly face behind.” And this, which he puts into the mouth of Lord Roxton, in “The Lost World”; “There are times, young fellah, when every one of us must make a stand for human right and justice, or you never feel clean again.”

You may depend he felt that time had come for him when he took up the cudgel for George _Edalji_ and would not rest or be silent till the case had been reopened and _Edalji_ proved innocent and set at liberty; it came again when he threw everything else aside to render patriotic services in the Boer War (which were to some extent recognized by the accolade), and again in the later and greater War; it came for him when he resolutely championed the cause of the martyred natives in the Belgian Congo; when, believing in Oscar Slater’s innocence, he wrote a masterly review of the evidence against him and strove to have him re-tried; and it came once more when, risking his reputation and in defiance of the ridicule he knew he would have to face, he openly confessed himself a believer in spiritualism and has persisted in that unorthodoxy until he has become one of the most powerful and insistent of its apostles.

These and other such activities may seem outside a consideration of Doyle’s work in literature, but they are not, any more than are his medical knowledge or his love of sport, for you find their influence everywhere in his books. There were ghosts in his fiction before ever he began to raise them at the seance. Some find it hard to square his absorption in spiritualism with his robust personality, with the sane philosophy of his stories, and the fact that he is so much a man of action, a lover of the open air and all the wholesome human qualities that keep a writer’s blood sound and prevent his ink from getting muddy and slow. But it is just these circumstances that add weight to his testimony as a spiritualist; he is no dreamer predisposed to believe in psychic phenomena; he is a stolid, shrewd man of affairs who wants to look inside and see how the wheels go round before he can have faith in anything.

He has played as strenuously as he has worked. He has tasted delight of battle with his peers at football, cricket, golf; he has made balloon and aeroplane ascents; introduced ski-ing into the Grison division of Switzerland; did pioneer work in the opening up of miniature rifle ranges; can hold his own with the foils and is a formidable boxer; he is a fisherman in the largest sense, for he has been whaling in the Arctic Seas, he used to ride to hounds and is a good shot, but has a hearty hatred of all sport that involves the needless killing of birds or animals.

Born at Edinburgh, in 1859, Conan Doyle commenced writing tales of adventure when he was about six, and it was natural that he should illustrate these with drawings of his own, for he was born into a very atmosphere and world of art. His grandfather, John Doyle, was the well-known political caricaturist who for over thirty years concealed his identity under the initials “H. B.”; his father, Charles Doyle, and three of his uncles were artists, one being that Richard Doyle whose name is inseparably associated with the early days of _Punch_. The remarkable water-colors of Charles Doyle, which I have seen, have a graceful fantasy that remind one of the work of Richard Doyle, but at times they have a grimness, a sense of the eerie and the terrible that lift them beyond anything that the _Punch_ artist ever attempted; and you find this same imaginative force, this same bizarre sense of the weird and terrible in certain of the stories of Charles Doyle’s son--in “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” in some of the shorter Sherlock Holmes tales, in many of the “Round the Fire” stories and in some of those in “Round the Red Lamp.”

In 1881, by five years of medical studentship at Edinburgh University, Doyle secured his diploma and, after a voyage to West Africa, started as a medical practitioner at Southsea. But all through his student days he was giving his leisure to literary work, and in one of the professors at Edinburgh, Dr. Joseph Bell, a man of astonishing analytical and deductive powers, he found the original from whom, in due season, Sherlock Holmes was to be largely drawn. His first published story, a Kaffir romance, appeared, like Hardy’s, in _Chambers’s Journal_. That was in 1878, and it brought him three guineas; but it was not until nine years later, when “A Study in Scarlet” came out in _Beeton’s Annual_ for 1887, that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson made their first appearance in print, and laid the foundation of his success.

During ten years of hard work as medical student and practitioner Doyle had gone through the usual experience of the literary beginner; he had suffered innumerable rejections, had contributed short stories to _Cornhill_, _Temple Bar_, _Belgravia_ and other magazines, never in any year earning with his pen more than fifty pounds. His first long novel, that brilliant romance of the Monmouth rebellion, “Micah Clarke,” after being rejected on all hands, was sent to Longmans and accepted for them by Andrew Lang, whom Sir Arthur looks upon as one of his literary godfathers, James Payn, who encouraged him in _Cornhill_ being the other.

“Micah Clarke” was followed in the same year (1889) by another Sherlock Holmes story, “The Sign of Four.” In 1890 Chatto & Windus published “The Firm of Girdlestone,” and “The White Company” began to run serially in _Cornhill_. Then it was that, taking his courage in both hands, Sir Arthur resigned his practice at Southsea and came to London. He practised there for a while as an eye specialist, but the success of those two last books decided him to abandon medicine and devote himself wholly to literature.

He has written a score or so of novels and volumes of short stories since then; one--and an admirable one--of literary criticism, “The Magic Door”; two of verse; a History of the Boer War, and three or four volumes embodying his gospel and experiences as a spiritualist. This is to say nothing of his plays--“A Story of Waterloo,” the Sherlock Holmes dramas, and the rest.

“Sir Nigel” and “The White Company” are, in his own opinion, “the least unsatisfactory” of all his books, which is to put it modestly. I would not rank the latter below such high English historical romances as “The Cloister and the Hearth” and “Esmond,” and think it likely Doyle will be remembered for this and “Sir Nigel,” and perhaps “Micah Clarke,” long after the sensational, more resounding popular Sherlock Holmes books have fallen into the background. Howbeit, for the present, there is no getting away from the amazing Sherlock; not only is he the most vivid and outstanding of all Sir Arthur’s creations, but no other novelist of our time has been able to breathe such life and actuality into any of his puppets.

Not since Pickwick was born has any character in fiction taken such hold on the popular imagination, so impressed the million with a sense of his reality. He is commonly spoken of as a living person; detectives are said to have studied his methods, and when it was announced that he was about to retire into private life and devote himself to bee-keeping, letters poured in, most of them addressed to “Sherlock Holmes, Esq.,” care of Conan Doyle, expressing regret at this decision, offering him advice in the making and managing of his apiaries, and not a few applying for employment in his service. It is on record, too, that a party of French schoolboys, sight-seeing in London, were asked which they wished to see first--the Tower or Westminster Abbey, and unanimously agreed that they would prefer to go to Baker Street and see the rooms of Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

As for the imitators who have risen to compete with him--there are so many there is no guessing off-hand at their number; their assiduity has brought into being a recognized Sherlock Holmes type of story, and though some of them have been popular, none of them has rivaled the original either in popularity or ingenuity.

Obviously, then, for his own generation Doyle is, above everything else, the creator of that unique detective. But with him, as with Ulysses, it is not too late to seek a newer world, and he may yet do what nobody has done and fashion from his latter-day experiences a great novel of spiritualism.

JOHN DRINKWATER

From his essays and some of his poems you gather an idea that John Drinkwater was cradled into poetry by natural inclination but grew to maturity in it by deliberate and assiduous study of his art. He set out with a pretty definite idea of the poet’s mission, which is, he lays it down in one of his essays, “not to express his age, but to express himself”; and though he has largely lived up to that gospel, he has from time to time gone beyond it and, perhaps unwittingly, expressed his age as well. He subscribes to Coleridge’s rather inadequate definition of poetry as “the best words in the best order,” but improves upon it elsewhere by insisting that they shall be pregnant and living words. He has all along taken himself and his function with a certain high seriousness, believing it was for him and his fellow artists to awaken the soul of the world, and conceiving of himself and them as beset on every side by “prejudice, indifference, positive hostility, misrepresentation, a total failure to understand the purposes and the power of art.”

There may be a touch of exaggeration in all this, but it is the lack of some such intense belief in themselves that makes so many of our modern poets trivial and ineffective, and the possession of it that gives a sincerity and meaning to much of Drinkwater’s verse and atones for the austerity and conscientious labor with which he fashions the lofty rhyme after the manner of a builder rather than of a singer. But there is magic in his building, and if he has not often known the rapture of spontaneous singing he has known the quiet, profounder joy of really having something to say and, as Alexander Smith says, the joy, while he shaped it into words, of

“Sitting the silent term of stars to watch
Your own thought passing into beauty, like
An earnest mother watching the first smile
Dawning upon her sleeping infant’s face,
Until she cannot see it for her tears.”

During the twelve years in which he served as clerk in divers Assurance Companies, he was serving also his apprenticeship to the Muses. His first book of verse, published in 1908, when he was twenty-six, contained little of distinction or of promise, and much the same may be said of his second. If he was a born poet he was not born ready-made, and in those books he was still making himself. His third and fourth showed he was succeeding in doing that, and when the best things in those first four were gathered into one volume, in 1914, it was recognized that not merely a new but an authentic poet had arrived. One might have recognized that if this little collection had contained nothing but the four poems, “January Dusk,” “In Lady Street,” “Reckoning,” and “A Prayer,” in which he has finely expressed so much of himself, his own outlook and aspirations:

“Lord, not for light in darkness do we pray,
Not that the veil be lifted from our eyes,
Nor that the slow ascension of our day
Be otherwise.

Not for a clearer vision of the things
Whereof the fashioning shall make us great,
Nor for remission of the perils and stings
Of time and fate....

Grant us the will to fashion as we feel,
Grant us the strength to labour as we know,
Grant us the purpose, ribbed and edged with steel,
To strike the blow.

Knowledge we ask not--knowledge Thou hast lent,
But, Lord, the will--there lies our bitter need,
Give us to build above the deep intent
The deed, the deed.”

He has little of the delicate fantasy, the eerie atmosphere, the gracious humor of Walter de la Mare, and little of the grim, stark realism of Wilfrid Gibson. He cannot write of the squalors of a Birmingham street, with its trams and fried-fish and rag shops without touching it to loveliness in the dreams of the old greengrocer who, among the colors and scents of his apples, marrows, cabbages, mushrooms and gaudy chrysanthemums, sees the sun shining on lanes he had known in Gloucestershire. And when he takes a slight and elusive theme that can only be made to dance to the airiest pipings it dies on his hands and is cold and stiff and formal, an embodied idea, that should have been a thing all music and light or it is nothing. Drinkwater’s genius is more didactic, descriptive, narrative than lyrical. He is heavy and not happy on the wing; he is more at home when he feels the earth under his feet, and walking in the Cotswolds or in the streets of the city it is the visible life and beauty around him, the human joys and griefs, strivings and visions in which he can share that are his surest sources of inspiration.

There is enough dramatic and rhetorical power in several of his poems--in “Eclipse,” “Uncrowned,” “Reckoning,” “A Prayer”--to make it nothing strange that he should turn to the stage. Moreover, he is more prophet than minstrel, more preacher than singer, and though the dogmas he has formulated about art and “we” who are artists, with the claim that the renewal of the world rests with “us,” may seem confident and self-assertive, he is a very modest egoist and, I think, of a sort that must have felt he could express himself with greater freedom and force through the medium of imaginary characters than in his own person. Anyhow, in his early days, he joined in founding the Pilgrim Players who have since developed into the Birmingham Repertory Theater, and he proceeded to write plays to be produced there under his own direction. These were written in blank verse--“Cophetua,” “Rebellion” (not without hints of his practical idealism, for all its romance), the three one-act pieces he published in one volume with the title of “Pawns,” the best of which is that poignantly dramatic sketch “The Storm”--and they gave him the beginnings of a reputation as dramatist, but none of them was particularly successful from a business point of view; and even later “Mary Stuart” was not that. By some irony of circumstance, after devoting his life whole-heartedly to poetry he scored his first big success with a play that was done in prose, and the success of “Abraham Lincoln” was so big and so immediate that it carried him straightway into a full tide of popularity on both sides of the Atlantic.

I doubt whether anybody who read it can have foreseen for “Abraham Lincoln” such a triumphant reception. You might say it is completely artless, or most subtly artistic in design and workmanship with an equal chance of being right. Its structure is so simple, its dialogue cast in such natural, everyday language that you easily may overlook its bold originality of invention, overlook that it ignores theatrical technique and traditions and in the quietest way makes a drastically new departure. It is a chronicle play, but attempts none of the beauty and harmony of poetry that clothes the chronicle plays of Shakespeare in magnificence, nor is it alive with incident as his, nor even knitted up into a continuing story. It is a chronicle play in the barest meaning of the term; the dialogue is pieced out, where possible, with Lincoln’s recorded sayings; each scene presents an event in his career; there are more committee and cabinet meetings than exciting episodes, far more talk than action throughout. Yet because of the essential nobility of Lincoln’s character, his unique personality, his quaintnesses, his brave honesty of thought and intention, this unadorned presentment of the man and his doings becomes curiously impressive, profoundly moving--the more so since it strove to reincarnate what had happened with an exact and naked realism unheightened by the conventional artifice and tricks of the stage. The whole thing gained something undoubtedly by being produced in 1918 when the shadow of the Great War that was upon us gave a topical significance to Lincoln’s heroic struggle with the South, his passion for freedom, his humanitarian but practical attitude toward war in general. His vision and his ideals were at that time those of the better part of our own people; the play largely voiced the minds of the multitudes that crowded to see it, so that in writing “Abraham Lincoln,” despite his artistic faith, Drinkwater was expressing his age no less than himself.

Already he has had imitators; his method looked too easy not to be imitated; but it must be harder than it looks for none of them has succeeded. Perhaps he cannot do it twice himself, for his “Oliver Cromwell,” fashioned on similar lines, does not, in my thinking, reveal so true and convincing a portrait of the man. Nearly ten years earlier Drinkwater had tried his hand on the great Protector in a blank verse poem sympathetically and dramatically conceived but not altogether rising to the height of its subject. Like “Abraham Lincoln,” the later “Oliver Cromwell” is a chronicle play, but he has allowed himself more latitude in this than in that. He has less warrant for some of his incidents; the pathos he introduces into Cromwell’s home life is occasionally just a trifle stagey, and he has sentimentalized Oliver himself, made him less of the sturdy, bluff, uncompromising Roundhead that we know from his letters and speeches and the researches of Carlyle; but it is a vivid, vital piece of portraiture and so often catches the manner and spirit of the original as to leave a final impression of likeness in which its unlikelier aspects are lost. I am told it does not act so well as it reads, but if it does not rival “Lincoln” on the boards one has to remember that it has not the advantage of timeliness that “Lincoln” had.

I have said nothing of John Drinkwater’s excursions into criticism; his studies of Swinburne and Morris, of “The Lyric,” “The Way of Poetry”; for what he has written about poetry and the drama is of small importance in comparison with the poetry and the dramas he has written. As poet and dramatist he has developed slowly, and it is too soon yet to pass judgment on him. Plenty of men spend their lives in trying vainly to live up to a brilliant first book, but he began without fireworks and has grown steadily from the start, and is still young enough not to have done growing.

JEFFERY FARNOL

Had it been, as some believe it is, an irrevocable law that a man’s mind and temperament are naturally moulded by his early environment, Jeffery Farnol ought to have been an uncompromising realist. Plenty of good things come out of Birmingham, but they are solid things; you would not suspect it was the native city of any peddler who had nothing but dreams to sell.

Scott, Ballantyne and Stevenson were all born in Edinburgh, a very haunt of romance; Mayne Reid came from Ireland which, though Shakespeare does not seem to have known it, is where fancy is bred; Stanley Weyman hails from just such a quaint little country town as he brings into some of his stories; Manchester nursed Harrison Ainsworth, and even Manchester carries on business as usual against a shop-soiled background of fantasy and the black arts. But Birmingham--well, Birmingham forgets that it was visited by the Normans and sacked by the Cavaliers; it has made itself new and large and is as go-ahead and modern as the day after to-morrow; a place of hard facts, factories, practical efficiency, profitable commerce, achievement in iron and steel, and apparently has no use for fancy and imagination except on strictly business lines, when it manufactures idols for the heathen and jewellery that is not what it seems.