Chapter IV: Front Matter (4)

Not only had Kipling broken new ground; he had defied conventions and broken it in a new way of his own, and through the following ten years he was justified of his daring by the maturer, more masterly poems and stories in “Barrack-Room Ballads,” “The Seven Seas,” “Many Inventions,” the two “Jungle Books,” and, above all, by “Kim”--that wonderful story, steeped in the magic of the Orient, with its rich gallery of characters, native and European, and its intimately pictured panorama of the strange, motley life that flows along the Grand Trunk Road.

He was a born story-teller, and could interest you as keenly in ships, bridges, machinery and mechanical objects as in the human comedy and tragedy. He could take his tone with an equal mastery, as occasion served, from the smoke-room, the bar or the street, and from the golden phrasing and flashing visions of the biblical prophets. However much the critics might qualify and hesitate, the larger world of readers, men and women, cultured and uncultured, took him to their hearts without reserve. Never since Dickens died had any author won so magical a hold on the admiration and affection of our people.

In those days, at the height of his fame, when he lay dangerously ill in New York, the cables could not have flung more bulletins across the world, nor the newspapers followed his hourly progress more excitedly if it had been a ruling monarch _in extremis_. The Kaiser cabled enquiries; all England and America stood in suspense, as it were, at the closed door of that sick chamber, as those who loved Goldsmith lingered on his staircase, when he was near the end, waiting for news of him. Yet, curiously enough, in the personality of Kipling, so far as it has revealed itself to his readers, there is little of the gentleness and lovableness of Goldsmith, nor of the genial, overflowing kindness that drew the multitude to Dickens. It was the sheer spell and brilliance of his work, I think, that drew them to Kipling more than the lure of any personal charm.

During the Boer War he developed into the poet and apostle of Imperialism; became our high-priest of Empire, Colonial expansion, commercial supremacy and material prosperity. You may see in some of his poems of that period and in his recently published “Letters of Travel” how he has failed to advance with the times, how out of touch he is with the spirit of modern democracy. A certain arrogance and cocksureness had increased upon him; his god was the old Hebrew god of battles, his the chosen race, and even amid the magnificent contritions of the “Recessional” he cannot forget that we are superior to the “lesser breeds without the law.” He is no idealist and has no sympathy with the hopes of the poor and lowly; there is scornfulness in his attitude toward those who do not share his belief that the present social order cannot be improved, who do not join him in worshipping “the God of things as they are,” but pay homage rather to the God of things as they ought to be. And yet I remember the beauty, the wisdom and whimsical understanding there is in his stories for children--I remember that children’s song in “Puck of Pook’s Hill”--

“Teach us the strength that cannot seek,
By deed or thought, to hurt the weak;
That, under Thee, we may possess
Man’s strength to comfort man’s distress.”

--I remember stray, poignant things in this book and that, especially in “The Years Between,” and am ready to think I misjudge him when I take his intolerant Imperialism too seriously, and that these rarer, kindlier moods, these larger-hearted emotions are at least as characteristic of him.

Someday somebody will gather into one glorious volume “The Finest Story in the World,” “Without Benefit of Clergy,” “At the End of the Passage,” “The Man Who Would Be King,” “The Brushwood Boy,” “They,” and a score or so of other short stories; and with “Kim,” and a book of such poems as “Sussex,” “Tomlinson,” “To the True Romance,” “M’Andrew’s Hymn,” “The Last Chantey,” those great ballads of “The Bolivar” and “The Mary Gloster,” and half a hundred more, there will be enough and more than enough to give him rank with those whose work shall endure “while there’s a world, a people and a year.” After all, most of his Imperialistic verse and his prose essays into political and economic problems were mainly topical and are already pretty much out of date; he is rich enough to let them go and be none the poorer.

If his popularity has waned it is chiefly, as I have said, because he has not advanced with the times--he has lost touch with the real spirit of his age; and I believe that is a result of his having withdrawn too much from contact with his fellows. Dickens did not immure himself at Gads’ Hill; he was always returning to those planes where ordinary folk do congregate and found inspiration, to the last, out among the stir and business of the world. Shakespeare’s work was done in the hurly-burly of London--he stagnated, after he settled down at Stratford, and wrote no more; and one feels that if Kipling would only come out from his hermitage at Burwash and mingle again in the crowded ways of men, as he did in the fulness of his powers, he has it in him yet to be “a bringer of new things,” that shall add new luster even to his old renown.

WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE

You can account for almost every other sort of sudden outbreak, but why an author of W. J. Locke’s unquestionably popular appeal should have had to write eight novels in nine years and only achieve popularity all of a sudden with a ninth in the tenth is one of those mysteries that baffle even the wisest. There is no reason why any one out of six of those earlier books should not have done as much for him, for they have the same distinction of style, the same wit and humor, gay romance and charming sentiment that captivated the reader so effectively in “The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne”--indeed, I still think that its immediate predecessor, “Where Love Is,” at least equaled that novel in all those qualities, and in delicacy and finish of workmanship went beyond it. So I put the problem and make no pretence to offering a solution of it but cast myself for the safer, humbler role of the chronicler of facts.

The fact that nearly all his stories are sweetened with a gracious human kindness and a full allowance of love and sentiment might be traced by subtle psychologists to some benign influence that the place of his nativity had upon him, for he was born in British Guiana, at Georgetown on the Demarara, where the sugar comes from. There may or may not be something in such a theory; anyhow, that is where he was born in 1863 and after an interval in England, he was sent to school at Trinidad, where his father was a banker. Returning to England, when he was eighteen, he matriculated at Cambridge, took the Mathematical Tripos, and, having completed his education at St. John’s College, departed from it with his B. A. degree.

Thereafter, he lived for a while in France; he has lived there a good deal, from time to time, since then, and if you were not aware of this you would guess as much, and that he had a warm regard for the French people, and a wide acquaintance with the literature of France, from the sympathy and intimacy with which he draws the French characters in his stories, and from a certain airy, sparkling wit and laughing, good-humored cynicism that belong to him and are commonly accepted as peculiar to the Gallic temperament. It has been said that he has affinities with Anatole France. He has none of Anatole’s daring irreverencies; nor his passionate revolt against the existing order of society, nor his power in social satire; but he has the sure touch that is at once light and scholarly, an abounding sense of fantasy, and a tolerant, worldly-wise philosophy that he edges with an irony often as delicately shrewd though never so bitter, so devastating as that of the great French master.

But we are going ahead too fast. When Locke quitted Cambridge he was still a long way from the beginning of his literary career. I believe he was already writing stories in those days, and am told that he wrote at least one novel--one, moreover, of a highly melodramatic and sensational kind--but he was too severely self-critical to attempt to publish it and it remains hidden away in manuscript to this hour. Feeling it was time to turn to something for a livelihood, he put an end to holidaying in France and became for some years mathematical tutor at a school in the North Country. I have seen it suggested that his mastery of mathematics has been as valuable to him in the construction of his novels as Hardy’s practical knowledge of the principles of architecture has been to him, but you are at liberty to doubt this after reading the opinion of that science which he allows Marcus Ordeyne to express. “I earned my living at school-slavery,” says Marcus, “teaching children the most useless, the most disastrous, the most soul-cramping branch of knowledge wherewith pedagogues in their insensate folly have crippled the minds and blasted the lives of thousands of their fellow-creatures--elementary mathematics.” From which you may gather also that he took little joy in those years of labor in the school up North, and the wonder is that his native urbanity and gracious personal charm should have remained completely unruffled by those uncongenial experiences.

He had escaped from schoolmastering and published four novels before he was appointed secretary of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and he did not relinquish that post until after his two most successful novels had made him famous and his position in literature was more than secure.

Not as a precocious genius, but as a man of thirty-two who had seen enough of life to know something about it, Locke entered the publisher’s list in 1895 and challenged the world at large with his first book, “At the Gate of Samaria.” It was by way of being a problem novel, for the problem novel was then having a day out. It was done in rather somber, more realistic colors than he was going to use in his succeeding stories; has little of the gaiety, glancing fancy and idealistic sentiment that have now become characteristic of his work. But it was a sound, capable piece of craftsmanship, the critics were on the whole appreciative, the public interested, and the sales respectable without being exciting.

Following this in steady succession came “The Demagogue and Lady Phayre,” “A Study in Shadows,” “Derelicts,” “Idols,” “The Usurper,” “Where Love Is”--and the reviewers went on handing out laurels to him (most of them), his circle of readers remained loyal, and it began to look as if he were settling down among the many novelists whose unfailing public is large enough to make an author’s life worth while but has done growing. Yet by the time he had written “Derelicts” he had discovered the formula that was presently to carry him far beyond such quiet success into a roaring popularity; he had discovered his gift for transfiguring the commonplace world and its people, conjuring them into a fairy-tale and still making his men and women seem amazingly lifelike and his tale all true. Nor is there any hint of disparagement in saying this. Hasn’t Chesterton eulogistically declared that Mr. Pickwick is a fairy? Doesn’t he insist that all Dickens’ characters are fairies, gnomes and his scenes laid in a fairyland of his own invention? There is a sense in which this is simple truth; a sense in which it is the simplest truth of Locke. He is an idealist, and sees that soul of goodness in things evil which remains invisible to your superficial, short-sighted, unimaginative realist. He has the imagination that creates, and therefore is not contented merely to observe and describe what any of us can see for himself, but rightly treats the visible existences around him as raw material for his art, chooses his clay puppets and somewhat etherealizes them, touches them with ideal qualities that most of us have but only exercise in our dreams, as a magician might take a dull peasant and turn him into a prince, not making him less human but more finely human in the process.

For ten years he wove his spells adroitly and that circle of the faithful was susceptible to them; then he did it once again and, in 1905, with “The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne,” did it so triumphantly that Marcus was soon the talk of the town, the book of the year, and not only a special section but a wide world of all sorts and conditions was at his feet. Yet there is nothing in the story to justify the miracle. It is a typical Locke fantasy, and certainly not superior in theme or treatment to its immediate forerunner. Sir Marcus, you remember, meets on the Thames Embankment the lost, helpless, pretty Carlotta, who has been brought from a Turkish harem by a rescuer who has deserted her; he takes pity on the child, adopts her, devotes himself to her training and upbringing with, after many tribulations, the only ending that could have pleased everybody. Nothing here for which one would prophecy a “boom.” But the book was full of character; its various characters were all alive, such human traits were touched into them so subtly that you could not disbelieve in them while the author had his spell on you; and the whole thing was told with a wit and humor so lively and so delicate, a sentiment so irresistibly alluring that you surrendered yourself to the sheer delight of it without thinking what you were doing. I recollect how one critic began by saying the plot was crude and ridiculous, and ended by confessing his enjoyment, his admiration of the artistic finish with which even the slightest characters were drawn, and praising without stint the cleverness and brilliant ease of the narrative throughout. That was the kind of hold it took upon its readers. It gave Locke a vogue in America too, and being dramatized filled a London theater for many nights and toured the provinces for years.

Next year Locke clinched his success with the greatest of his books--“The Beloved Vagabond,” which eclipsed “The Morals of Marcus” as a novel if not as a play, and still remains the high-water mark of his achievement. It is the outstanding picaresque romance of our day. Mr. Locke has a special weakness for such delightful, irresponsible, romantic, golden-hearted rascals as Paragot, who could so easily have been a squalid, unmitigated bounder in the hands of a plodding realist. Sebastian Pasquale, in “The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne,” is a lesser member of the same family; so is that later, slighter, joyous heathen Aristide Pujol; and there are other such in other of his books.

The driving force behind his stories is their sincerity; their sympathy with the sins, follies, vanities, errors of the motley human multitude is his own; they are idealistic because he is himself an idealist and in some ways almost as quixotic as any of his favorite heroes. He puts himself into his books, and you find him there, scholarly, kindly, witty, unaffected, and so much a man of the world that he no more feels it necessary to write like one than a millionaire feels it necessary to prove he is rich by talking all the time about his money.

STEPHEN McKENNA

You would think it should be easy--far easier than writing a novel--for any man of literary capacity to sit down and write the story of his own life, bring into it, instead of imaginary characters, the real men and women he has known, and so make a great Autobiography. Yet there are fewer great books in autobiography than in any other form of literature. Some years ago I was remarking on this to Keble Howard, and he accounted for the deficiency by laying it down that hardly any man started to write his memoirs till his memory was failing and he was getting too old to work. It is supposed to be presumptuous, a little self-conceited, for a celebrity of any sort to publish his private history until he is so far advanced in years that, even if he has done nothing else respectable, he can claim to be respected on account of his age. Howard contended, and I agree with him, that a man of seventy or so has generally forgotten as much of the earlier half of his life as he remembers, and often misinterprets what he does remember because he looks back on it from a wholly different standpoint, misses the importance of things that were important when they happened, feels for his young self now as he did not feel at the time, makes tragedies of what then seemed comedies, and comedies of what seemed tragedies, and gets the whole picture out of focus.

I have lived long enough since then to have been able to prove for myself that all this is accurate; for I have read divers memoirs of men whom I knew when they were middle-aged and I was youthful, noting how much they omitted, incidents they have warped in the telling, events to which they have given an emotional significance that never really belonged to them. To remedy such a state of things Keble Howard’s idea was that anybody who had done anything and meant to do more, should write the first volume of his autobiography when he was under thirty, while he was still near enough to his youth not to have lost all the freshness of its feelings, still near enough to his childhood to be able to revive in his thoughts the actual magic of its atmosphere; he should write his second volume when he was about fifty, and his third when he was so far from the beginning that the end could not be much farther on. That is the only way, I believe, to do the thing perfectly. We have so few great autobiographies because most of them are more or less imaginary, so few of them are true.

Possibly Stephen McKenna arrived independently at the same conclusion, for in 1921, when he was thirty-three, he published “While I Remember,” which is in effect the first volume of his autobiography. But he reveals less of himself in this than of his surroundings. He is too much of what is commonly described as a gentleman of the old school to indulge in personalities and give away unpleasant facts about his friends, or even about his enemies; he will criticize their public life with devastating wit and epigrammatic satire, but he betrays no intimacies, will have nothing to say of their private characters or conduct, and he is almost as reticent in talking of himself as of others. You gather from his first autobiographical fragment that before he went to Oxford, of which he gives some delightful impressionistic sketches, he went to Westminster School, and was for a while, a teacher there, and perhaps the most personal note in the book is in a greeting to some of his old pupils, which owns that he blushes to recall the lessons he taught them. “My incompetence was incurable,” he says. “I should be well pleased to think that your memories of me are a hundredth part as kindly as my memories of you. Does it comfort you to know that my awe of you continued for three terms? If ever the prayer-bell had not rung before I showed that I could not solve some diabolical equation! If you could have seen into my mind during the first week when I ranged you in alphabetical order and guided myself despairingly by the two red-heads in the form!”

If he does not fill his pages with careless and indiscreet gossip of all sorts of well-known people it is not for lack of material, but simply that he has a conscience and a strict code of honor that make such chatter impossible to him. He will tell you of his experience, during the War, in the Intelligence section of the War Trade Department, and, briefly, of his experiences with the Balfour Mission in America, but though he has mixed largely in modern society and the world of letters and, as nephew of one of the ablest of latter-day Chancellors of the Exchequer, has been a good deal behind the scenes in political circles, he does not, after the manner of the usual sensational Diaries and Memoirs, now-a-days, scarify individual members of any circle, but reserves his commentary and condemnation for the changes and degeneration that have come over our general social habits and behavior, limits his discussion of contemporary writers to their works, and his criticism of famous politicians, and this is drastic enough, to their doings and misdoings in the political scene.

All which reticences are natural to him and exactly characteristic. They seem to denote an austerity that is in keeping with his somewhat ascetic appearance. But if in profile, as somebody has suggested, he curiously resembles the portraits of Dante, there is more of the graciousness than of the gloom and bitterness of the somber Florentine in his composition. You may realize that if you read “Tex,” the charming memorial volume he produced after the death of Texiera de Mattos. It is a collection of his dead friend’s letters linked together with explanatory notes of his own, and in these letters, and indirectly in the notes, I think you get more intimate glimpses of the real McKenna than anywhere else, and find him, behind the polite mask and settled air of restraint, often irresponsibly outspoken, always sympathetic, warm-hearted, and with a very genius for friendship.

If he has studiously avoided personalities in his memoirs, he has, of course, drawn freely in his novels on his knowledge of political and social life and people, though even there nobody has, so far, pretended to recognize living originals of any of his characters. He began his career as a novelist with two artificial comedies. “The Reluctant Lover,” in 1912, and “Sheila Intervenes,” in 1913. They had some affinity with the romantic fantasies of W. J. Locke and the sparkling talk of “Dodo” and “The Dolly Dialogues.” The story in each was told with the lightest of light touches, and the conversations were punctuated with smart epigrams. Their cleverness was undeniable, and already, in “Sheila,” he was making play with his knowledge of political affairs. They were brilliantly clever, but ran entertainingly on the surface of things. He was learning to use his tools; feeling his way. In “The Sixth Sense” he was beginning to find it, and he found it triumphantly in “Sonia, or Between Two Worlds.”

“Sonia” is one of the notable things in fiction that came out of the War. It appeared in 1917, when we were all uplifted to high ideals and sustained by a fine belief that a new and nobler world was to rise, phœnix-like, out of the ashes and chaos into which the old world had been resolved. The atmosphere of that time, all its surge of altruistic emotion, are so sensitively and realistically preserved in the story that one cannot re-read it now without a sense of regret that we have forgotten so much of our near past and failed so meanly to realize the better state that, in those dark days, we were all so sincerely confident of building. Beginning in the decadent world of the late ’nineties and the dawn of the century, the story comes down, or goes up, into the miraculously new world that the war made, and glances optimistically into the future. Most of its characters are drawn from the higher classes of society, and the love romance of Sonia and David O’Rane, the most charming and glowingly human hero McKenna has ever given us, has the social and political history of the period for its setting. Never before or since has he shown himself so much of an idealist nor handled great issues with such mastery and imaginative insight. “Sonia” has been ranked with the great political novels of Disraeli, and I doubt whether Disraeli ever did anything so fine in poignancy of feeling and delicacy of style.

“Ninety-Six Hours’ Leave,” his other war novel, was a lively tale written for amusement only; and “Sonia Married” maintained the tradition attaching to sequels and did not rise to the level of “Sonia.” The biggest of his other novels are, I think, “Midas and Son,” a masterpiece of irony, a mordant satire on the vanity of riches; and that brilliant study of the snobbishness, shallowness, cynicism, social ambition of the unpleasant Lady Ann Spenworth, “The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman.” It blends a maturer philosophy of life with the vivacity and sparkle of his early conversational novels. It exposes without mercy the squalid little soul of a person who is or has been of importance in society, and if her self-revelations make her seem abhorrent it is because she herself seems so abhorrently alive and so minutely true to certain morbid, unlovely sides of human nature.

You would not guess from the abounding vitality he puts into his novels that McKenna was by no means of the robust kind. In winter he generally escapes from our unsatisfactory climate, and you hear of him voyaging to remote parts of Asia or South America, or somewhere where the sun shines. But when he is at home, there is an hour before lunch, at the end of the morning’s work, that is given over to any friends who may drop in at his pleasant Lincoln’s Inn chambers, to find him the most genial and interesting and interested of hosts, with as neat a hand for mixing a cocktail as any in London.

COMPTON MACKENZIE

From a literary and dramatic point of view, Compton Mackenzie may almost be said to have been born in the purple. Even a quite modest minor prophet who had stood by his cradle at West Hartlepool, in January, 1883, might have ventured to predict a future for him. For his father was the well-known actor Edward Compton, author of several plays and founder of the Compton Comedy Company, and his aunt was “Leah” Bateman, one of the most famous Lady Macbeth’s who ever walked the stage; his uncle C. G. Compton was a novelist of parts; and he numbers among his distant relations the poet and critic John Addington Symonds and that brilliant and, nowadays, too little appreciated novelist and playwright “George Paston” (Miss E. M. Symonds). Nor did he absorb all the gifts of the family, for that distinguished actress Miss Fay Compton is his sister.

From St. Paul’s School, Mackenzie went to Oxford in the early years of this century, and if he did not break any scholarship records at Magdalen, he edited “The Oxford Point of View,” which he helped to found, and became business manager of the Oxford Union Dramatic Society, and on occasion showed himself an actor of distinction. After leaving Oxford he married and withdrew into the wilds of Cornwall, where he seems to have written industriously for some years with no immediate results, beyond the publication of a book of verse in 1907, and a play, “The Gentleman in Grey,” which was produced at the Lyceum Theater, Edinburgh, but did not stay there long enough to matter. Also in his Cornish retirement he wrote his first novel, “The Passionate Elopement,” but it took him longer to get it published than to write it. When it had been up to London and back again three or four times it began to look so worthless and he grew so indifferent toward it that he would not waste more money than necessary on it but let it go wandering unregistered up and down and take its chance of being lost in the post. Seven publishers had rejected it before, in a happy hour, he sent it to Martin Secker, who was then about setting up in business, and when he published it, early in 1911, it sold so well that within three weeks it had to be reprinted. The story is of the eighteenth century; the scene is laid at Curtain Wells, a gay and fashionable spa, where Beau Ripple reigned supreme as Beau Nash used to reign at Bath. The characters are as gracefully artificial as if they had walked out of an eighteenth century pastoral--the pretty blue-eyed Phyllida, the chivalrous Charles Lovely, who loves her in vain, and the dashing, rascally card-sharper, Vernon, who wins her and carries her off in the end--they live gracefully, and their tale is all told, and they smile and sigh and mince and bow their ways through it, with the charm and fragile daintiness that belongs to old minuets and Dresden china shepherds and shepherdesses. Mackenzie has never done another such light and exquisite caprice though he had every encouragement to repeat the experiment, for “The Passionate Elopement” pleased the public as well as the critics and had run through four editions by the end of the year.

Just before or immediately after this success, he came from his Cornish fastness up to London, settled in Westminster, and turned his hand to potting plays, writing lyrics and reviews for Pelissier, whose “Follies” were then at the height of their popularity. But in spite of these distracting employments he found time for a good deal of more important work during the brief period that Westminster’s staid, old-world North street numbered him among its tenants. There he wrote his second novel, “Carnival,” and had prepared a dramatic version of it before it was published in 1912; he collected a second volume of his verse, “Kensington Rhymes” (since when he has done no other) and it appeared in the same year; and he had begun on the writing of “Sinister Street,” but had to lay it aside to cross the water and superintend the production of “Carnival” at a New York theater.

He never set up his tent again in London; partly, I believe, because its atmosphere had affected his health unfavorably; partly, I suspect, because the social interruptions to which a town-dweller is subject interfered too much with his working arrangements. Anyhow, he transported himself to the Gulf of Naples and discovered an ideal retreat in a delightful villa on the Isle of Capri. In these latter days, as if the love of solitude had grown upon him, he has acquired one of the smaller of the Channel Islands and made himself lord of Herm, and now divides his year between that remote and rocky islet and his villa at Capri.

At Capri he finished “Sinister Street,” one of the longest of modern novels and much the longest of his own. Some of De Morgan’s were nearly as long, and some by Dickens and Thackeray were longer, but a book of two hundred and fifty thousand words is apt to daunt the degenerate reader of to-day so “Sinister Street” was published in two volumes with half a year’s interval between, and nobody was daunted. No book of Mackenzie’s had a more enthusiastic reception. His readers are uncertain whether this or “Guy and Pauline” is his highest, most artistic achievement, and I am with those who give first place to “Sinister Street.” If there has ever been a more revealing study of the heart and mind and every-day life of a boy than that of Michael Fane, I have never read it. He and his sister Stella, the Carthew family and the miscellaneous characters gathered about them in their early years are drawn with such sympathy and insight, such a sense of actuality, that not a few have professed to identify living originals from whom certain of them were modeled.

The War had broken out between the appearance of “Sinister Street” and “Guy and Pauline” and Mackenzie had gone on the Dardanelles Expedition as a Lieutenant (shortly to be promoted to a captaincy) in the Royal Marines. He was invalided out of this business and presently made successively, Military Control Officer at Athens, and Director of an Intelligence Department at Syria, and in due course received various honors for his War services. There is little or no trace of the War in his subsequent books, unless you ascribe to its disturbing influences the facts that neither “The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett” nor “Sylvia and Michael,” admirable and vivid picturesque stories as they are, will compare, either in subtlety of characterization or in grace and strength of style, with the best of his pre-war work. Neither “Rich Relatives” nor “Poor Relations” marked much of a recovery, and “The Vanity Girl,” in which he uses the war for the purpose of getting rid of a bad character, is not saved by occasional flashes of narrative power and brilliant descriptive passages from being an essay in picturesque and rather cheap melodrama. But with “The Altar Steps” in 1922, he returned to higher levels--his hand was never more cunning in the portrayal of character, and there is enough in this story of the growth of Mark Lidderdale’s soul and his progress toward the religious life to indicate that the author of “Sinister Street” and “Guy and Pauline” is not yet to be put aside with those whose future is behind them.

I have seen it said that two or three of Mackenzie’s novels are largely autobiographical. Certainly he puts into them scenes and places that were associated with his youth and early manhood, life at Oxford, Cornwall, the theater and theatrical people, and goes on handling, developing three or four of his characters in successive novels, bringing them into this, that and the other story as if he were giving them their proper place in episodes that had really happened. Sylvia Scarlett reappears in “The Vanity Girl”; Maurice Avery of “Carnival” flits through “Sinister Street,” and Guy Hazlewood, who is at Oxford in that novel, is the hero of “Guy and Pauline,” in which also, Michael Fane, the principal figure in “Sinister Street,” plays a very minor part. Thackeray, Trollope and others practised the same device, and there is no reliable significance in it, except that it helps the reader, and probably the author himself, to an easier sense of the reality of such persons. Something of Mackenzie’s childhood has gone, no doubt, into his “Kensington Rhymes”; and he, like Michael Fane, spent his boyhood at Kensington, attended a big public school in London, and, like Michael, went to Oxford, and may have given Michael throughout some of his own experiences. You may fancy resemblances between his withdrawing into Cornwall and publishing a book of verse, and Guy Hazlewood going, as his father has it, “to bury yourself in a remote village where, having saddled yourself with the responsibilities of a house, you announce your intention of living by poetry!” There may be personal touches in this, and in Guy’s effort to find a publisher for his book of poems, but who shall say where autobiography ends and fiction begins? Naturally, every novelist works with his experience as a potter works with clay, but he usually transfigures that raw material and moulds it into new shapes of his own invention. The truest, most living characters in fiction are those that draw their vitality from the author’s self. No doubt if we knew enough about him, we could find a good deal of Shakespeare in his most masterly characterizations.

There is a lot of solemn and pretentious nonsense talked in the name of psychology. It is possible to make shrewd guesses, but no man can positively analyse the mind of another.

When we think we are making a marvelous study of another’s motives, we are studying the motives that would have been ours in his circumstances. Professor Freud, with his doctrine of psychoanalysis, has turned the head and choked the narrative vein of many an otherwise capable novelist who has felt a spurious sense of superiority in trying to graft the art of medicine on the art of fiction.

There is truer psychology in Mackenzie’s novels than in the precious novels of most of our professed psychologists. He has done bigger work than theirs with a more modest conception of the novelist’s function. “I confess that I like a book to be readable,” he once wrote; “it seems to me that a capacity for entertaining a certain number of people is the chief justification for writing novels.” He deprecates this as “a low-browed ambition,” but it was high enough for the great novelists of the past, and the pseudo-medical methods of Freudism do not look like producing any that are greater.

JOHN MASEFIELD

Were I put to select the four or five poets who are most typically modern--most essentially of our own time, I think I should name Kipling, Hardy, Wilfrid Gibson, Siegfried Sassoon and John Masefield, and Masefield perhaps before all. There are others who have written poetry as fine, or even finer, but nearly all of them, had they been contemporary with Tennyson, Wordsworth, Keats, Blake, might have written very much as they are writing now without seeming to have been born out of their due period. The five I have named could not have done this: either in theme or manner their poems are too intimate a growth of our own generation, as unmistakably of to-day as the motor-bus or as wireless is. I am not forgetting Crabbe, the father of modern realistic poetry, but he mitigated his unorthodoxies by observing a respectable reticence of phrase, by subscribing to poetical conventions of language, and clothing his newness in the old-fashioned mantle of Pope.

The philosophy of my chosen five may be sometimes akin to that of Fitzgerald’s Omar, but the old wine is in aggressively new bottles. And I am not forgetting that Hardy was Tennyson’s contemporary, and not a little of his poetry was written in the 60’s and 70’s, though it was not published then. If it had been published, the tastes and standards of that formal age would have found it so wanting that it never would have won for Hardy then the fame it has given him now. Think of Tennyson, with his conviction that

“the form, the form alone is eloquent,”

trying with his hyper-sensitive ear the wingless, rugged lyrics of Hardy, setting himself to read them aloud, like the poet in his own “English Idyls,”

“mouthing out his hollow oes and aes,”

and finding it couldn’t be done, for here was a poetical nonconformist who sacrificed verbal beauty to naked truth and was more earnest about what he had to say than about mouthing it in grandiose orotundities of phrase.

Certainly, by the time Tennyson had done with it, poetry was becoming too much a matter of phrase-making; the poet himself was contracting a sort of sentimental snobbery, segregating himself from the crowd, losing touch with common life, and for their own sakes and that of their art, many of us felt, as Dixon Scott put it, that we wanted to “flatten out Parnassus. For poetry has been looked up to far too long; it is time the reader looked down on it; nothing is doing its dignity more damage than the palsying superstition that it is something excessively sublime. The reader picks out his prose-men; he is familiar with philosophers; but the moment he mentions verse he remembers the proprieties; up go his eyes and down drops his voice; and from what is no doubt just a nice, natural desire to do nothing offensive to refinement, he invariably speaks of the specially simple, jolly, frank and friendly souls who make it as though they were wilted priests. Whereas, in reality, of course, they are of all writers, exactly the men whom it is most needful to see as human beings; for of all forms of writing theirs is the most personal, intimate, instinctive--poetry being, after all, simply essence of utterance--speech with the artifice left out.”

To this it now approximates, but it was not this, nor were the poets such simple, unaffected souls until Kipling had begun to outrage their delicacies, shock their exquisite, artistic refinements with the noise and dazzle of his robust magic, and others, like Hardy, Gibson and Masefield, had brought poetry out of her sacred temple and made her at home in inns, and kitchens, and workshops, cottages and mean streets and all manner of vagabond places, restored her to plain nature and human nature and taught her to sing her heart out in the language of average men--sometimes in the language of men who were quite below the average. But even this was better than limiting her to expressing her thoughts and emotions in artificial elegancies that no man ever uses except when he is posing and perorating on public platforms.

In his beginnings Masefield was not unaffected by the Kipling influence; you can trace it in the lilting measures of some of his early “Salt Water Ballads”; perhaps here and there in his early prose stories and sketches, “A Tarpaulin Muster,” “A Mainsail Haul.” He was realizing and naturalizing the seamen there, as Kipling had realized and naturalized the soldier. But he was already doing more than that; he put into those first Ballads, and the “Poems and Ballads” that soon followed them, a grace of fancy, a charm and beauty, also true to the life he pictured, that do not come within the range of Kipling’s genius. He was feeling after and foreshadowing there, too, his own special mission as a poet--if one may use so portentous a word as mission without having it taken in any but its artistic significance. His business was not to be with dignitaries and classical heroisms, he says in “Consecration,” but with sailors and stokers and men of no account--

“Not the rulers for me, but the rankers, the tramp of the road,
The slave with the sack on his shoulders pricked on with the goad,
The man with too weighty a burden, too weary a load ...
Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind in the rain and the cold--
Of these shall my songs be fashioned, my tales be told.”

And of this purpose have come that most poignant and effective of his dramas, “The Tragedy of Nan,” his stories, “The Street of To-day,” “Multitude and Solitude,” and those narrative poems that are his highest and most distinctive achievement, “The Everlasting Mercy,” “The Widow in the Bye Street,” “Dauber,” and “The Daffodil Fields.” In these he is still on that quest for beauty--

“that one beauty
God put me here to find--”

to which he consecrated his gift at the outset, when he claimed as his kingdom

“the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the earth,”

though he is following it here less obviously than in the statelier, noble sonnet sequence of “Lollingdon Downs.” In the narrative poems he is seeking for the soul of beauty in things evil, in things common and sometimes unclean, in lives that are broken and that the world’s rough hands have soiled. His passion for realism, for the stark truth of life as it is lived, is transparently sincere; it is absurd to object that his stories are melodramatic, since they are not more so than life itself is, but there is reason in the protest that he pushes the crudities of his dialogue too far, is apt to be overviolent in language and uses ugly expletives so freely that, instead of adding to the reality of his characters and incidents, they detract from it, come to seem artificial, till one suspects an affectation in them and is more irritated than impressed. Take, for example, the close of that squabble between Saul Kane and Billy Myers, in “The Everlasting Mercy”--

“You closhy put.”

“You bloody liar.”

“This is my field.”

“This is my wire.”

“I’m ruler here.”

“You ain’t.”

“I am.”

“I’ll fight you for it.”

“Right, by dam.”

Whether such a man would say “I’m ruler here” is of small consequence, but no man swears “By dam,” and you feel that the word is either used arbitrarily for the sake of the rhyme, or with an idea of being forceful at all costs. And though a man might say, “I’ll bloody well put him in a bloody fix,” and “I’ll bloody well burn his bloody ricks,” there is the same sense of desperate straining after effect in making him say,

“I’ll bloody him a bloody fix.
I’ll bloody burn his bloody ricks,”

because no ruffian was ever heard to speak so elliptically, and you feel it is only done in order that the meter may be made to accommodate a startling plethora of profanity. Such excesses sound a false note and are out of tune with the general truth, the vivid reality that give the stories their authentic power and greatness.

I have heard it said that these aberrations represent the efforts of one who is naturally reticent and fastidious to present with due forcefulness certain brutal and lawless types of character that are not within his personal knowledge; but I doubt this. He may have exercised his imagination, and if so he exercised it potently, in writing “Reynard the Fox” and “Right Royal,” for I should guess he never went fox-hunting or steeple-chasing, but for “Dauber” and the raw human creatures of “The Everlasting Mercy,” “The Widow in the Bye Street” and “The Daffodil Fields” he may very well have drawn on memory and experience of people he has known. For he was not reared in cotton-wool nor matured among the comparative decorums of office-life. From a training vessel, he went to sea in the merchant service, knocked about the world on sailing-ships and has put some of his old shipmates into his ballads and some of them and some of their yarns into “A Mainsail Haul” and his first novel, “Captain Margaret.” Quitting the sea, he went tramping in America, picking up a livelihood by casual work on farms, and after a while settled down to serve behind a bar in New York, escaping from the noise and squalor and drudgery of it at night to solace himself with the “Morte d’Arthur” after he had gone up to his garret to bed. It was a harsh apprenticeship, that on sea and on land, but it broadened his outlook and his sympathies, and fitted him to be, as he was presently resolved to be, the interpreter of “the men of the tattered battalion”--

“He had had revelation of the lies
Cloaking the truth men never choose to know;
He could bear witness now and cleanse their eyes;
He had beheld in suffering; he was wise.”

His work as a critic is in a certain newspaper where he used to review new poets before he was recognized as one, and in his scholarly, revealing study of “Shakespeare”; but his finest, most imaginative prose is in that poignant book “Gallipoli” which he wrote after he came home from serving there in the Great War.

ALFRED EDWARD WOODLEY MASON

It is interesting, and a little saddening, to look through a list of living novelists and pick out the names of those who were well in the first flight of popularity ten or fifteen years ago but have since fallen back steadily, year after year, into the second, third and fourth flights, until now they are almost absorbed into the multitudinous rearward ranks where the unpopular and the mediocre rub shoulders with survivors who still ruffle it obscurely on the strength of a past reputation. For it is easier to become popular than to remain so. No author can take the public by surprise a second time. A novel that has some freshness of fable or style, though it be in some ways crude and in no way great, may do the trick once; but if an author follows this with a succession of books in a too-similar vein, showing no ripening of his mind, no growth of knowledge or invention, nothing but a sprightly repetition of that same morning freshness, which was well enough when the day was new, his public begins to yawn and go away. A juggler, when he has exhausted his little repertoire and finds the plate coming back to him almost empty, can roll up his scrap of carpet, walk around the corner, and in another street collect a different crowd to whom all his old conjurings are new; but no writer can attract a fresh public for each fresh book he produces--his only way is to keep sure hold on his first readers and add to them, and this he cannot do unless he matures in his books as he does, or should do, in himself. His public is all the while growing older, and the pathos and humor and general outlook on life that satisfy a young man or a young woman will rarely make the same appeal to them when they arrive at maturity. The humor that tickles you to-day will scarcely move you to a smile when you have lived, enjoyed, worked and suffered for another decade or so in such a world as this; the pathos that once melted you to pleasant tears jars upon you when you re-read it now and seems but shallow, youthful sentimentality; what you had used to think a dashingly romantic incident or character bores you now and seems tinsel unreality. You have been growing up, and if the growth of your favorite novelist does not at least keep pace with your own, you naturally pass on and leave him behind. Had “David Copperfield” been simply another “Oliver Twist,” Dickens would have been but the novelist for an age, and that not the middle-age.

Largely, I think, because he went on with a broadening vision of life, a ripening knowledge of the world, a deepening sympathy with human character, the books of A. E. W. Mason have retained for him the popularity he won about a quarter of a century ago with “The Courtship of Morrice Buckler.” Read “Morrice Buckler” again, and then “The Four Feathers” and “The Broken Road,” and you will recognize how he grew up with his readers. You can still take delight in “Morrice Buckler,” but the later books yield you a fuller enjoyment--they have put off the careless glamor and reckless gallantries of gay romance, and have put on the soberer, more enduring garb of more familiar humanity, that does not wear its romance upon its sleeve, but more poignantly, more wonderfully, at the troubled heart of it.

Born in 1865, Mason is an old Dulwich College boy, and took his B. A. degree at Oxford. At Oxford, too, he showed a strong predilection for the drama, and was one of that University’s notable amateur actors. Later, he took to the stage in earnest, and toured the provinces with the Benson Company and the Compton Comedy Company, and played in London as one of the soldiers in Shaw’s “Arms and the Man.” But the ambition that called him on to the stage presently called him off, and in 1895 he commenced his career as a novelist.

It was not a very promising beginning. His first novel, “A Romance of Wastdale,” was well enough received by the critics, but the public did not rise to it, and Mason seems to have suppressed it with unnecessary rigor. Competent judges have assured me it was a story of more than ordinary distinction and merited a better fate. However, its author had not long to wait for his due meed. A year after, in 1896, “The Courtship of Morrice Buckler” was published, and its publication gave Mason his place forthwith as an extraordinarily popular novelist. It was the novel of the day; it was read and talked about everywhere, ran through I don’t know how many thousands, and still goes as a safe seller into any series of popular reprints.

“The Philanderers” appeared in 1897, and in quick succession came “Laurence Clavering,” “Parson Kelley” (written in collaboration with Andrew Lang), “Miranda of the Balcony,” “The Watchers,” “Clementina,” that has all the dash and headlong movement of Dumas and a grace and pathos that Dumas had not, “The Four Feathers,” “The Truants,” “Running Water,” “The Broken Road,” “At the Villa Rose,” “The Turnstile,” and “The Summons.”