Chapter V: Front Matter (5)

But Mason was never one of the authors who are all authors; he is not of the sedentary breed who are contented to study life in books or from their study windows; the noise and business of it have always appealed to him irresistibly; he has roamed the world rubbing shoulders with all sorts and conditions of humanity everywhere, and his later books mirror much of his personal experience and the countries and people he has known. He blends the appearance of a writer of romance with the restless energy of a man of action, and in 1906, his superabundant energies seeking a new outlet or a new ambition prompting him, he turned his attention to politics, threw for Parliamentary honors, and was elected M. P. for Coventry. He signalized his advent in the House with a notable maiden speech; did not speak there often but proved himself shrewd and eloquent in debate, and if he had not escaped we might have been the richer by a sagacious, sympathetic Cabinet Minister and one brilliant novelist the poorer. Fortunately, however, the fascinations of the Mother of Parliaments could not subdue him, and after some three years under her shadow he did not offer himself for election again.

Fortunately, because the air of the House of Commons is not healthful breathing for poets or novelists. For them it is a soporific and suffocating air. You may note that when a writer of imaginative literature has sat in the House for more than a limited period his spirit puts on flesh, dulness settles on his faculties and communicates itself to his pen. What plays did Sheridan write after he took his seat there? And who shall say that Lytton might not have written with fewer capital letters and less of the manner of the big bow-wow if he had never ventured into that fatal atmosphere? Mason’s sojourn in the House had no influence on his fiction, unless it was his stay there that turned his thoughts toward India and the grave problem of the education of its native Princes in England and so resulted in his writing one of the most powerful of his books, “The Broken Road”; in which case he has brought more good out of it than any novelist who ever went into it, except Disraeli, and Disraeli was really a politician in his romances and a romancist in his politics, so he can hardly be counted.

I could never imagine the author of “Miranda of the Balcony” sitting out interminable debates, or trooping with his party into the voting lobby. He must have felt much more at home in uniform when he became in the first days of the war a Captain of the Manchester Regiment, and later, a Major on the General Staff. If he wrote no more romance for a time (his only book through those years was a collection of short stories, “The Four Corners of the World,” in 1917) it was because he was too busy living it. For with all its squalors and horrors and agonies, the Great War is beginning, in remembrance, to take on the color of romance by comparison with the tameness and monotony of ordinary everyday life.

You would gather from his stories that Mason was much given to boating, traveling and mountaineering, for a love of the open air blows through nearly all of them. The Alps and the enormous shadow of them dominate “Running Water”; and the skies and landscapes and peoples of present-day Egypt, Italy, India fill the pages of “The Four Feathers,” “The Broken Road,” and “At the Villa Rose.” Latterly, too, his new novels have become few and far between and he has given himself again, more and more, to the stage. He never quite severed himself from it. Soon after the novel appeared, he dramatized “Morrice Buckler,” in collaboration with Miss Isabel Bateman, and it was very successfully produced at the Grand, Islington, and had a long run in the provinces; 1901 saw a dramatic version of “Miranda of the Balcony” staged in New York; in 1909 he produced two comedies, not founded on his books “Colonel Smith” and “Marjorie Strode”; and in 1911 the most successful of all his dramatic ventures, “The Witness for the Defence.”

Since then, we have had “Open Windows,” and dramatized versions of “At the Villa Rose” and “Running Water,” and one hears rumors of other plays that he has in preparation. The indications are that in future he will appear more often on the boards than between them, and nobody need regret this if he only offers us as much pleasure in the stalls and the pit as we have had from him in our arm-chairs at home.

WILLIAM SOMERSET MAUGHAM

On the whole, I incline to the orthodox belief that if an author wants to find a short way to success he should not be too versatile. Nearly all our famous writers have been contented to do one thing well--have seemed to say with Marvell,

“Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball.”

I could name authors of our day who have dissipated their energies in half a dozen or more directions. They are journalists, novelists, poets, essayists, critics, dramatists, writers of books for children and editors of all manner of books. They have no settled reputation, the public does not know where to have them; they are all sorts of things to all sorts of readers and nothing in particular to any. They win some vague popularity, perhaps, and an income, but not fame. Fame comes to the man who concentrates on the one kind of work for which he has special gifts, puts all his heart and all his skill into the doing of that.

You may say that Somerset Maugham is versatile; but he has written no verse, no essays, no criticism, no tales for children. He wisely exercised his versatility within the range of a single art until he turned his attention to the stage, and if he has been versatile since, it has been only inside the limits of these two arts, a versatility as legitimate in the artist as it is sagacious in the man who has to earn a livelihood with his pen and hopes to go on pleasing his audience with many books. For there is no virtue in the opposite extreme to which some novelists go nowadays, who concentrate so conscientiously that they narrow their outlook to one phase of life, one type of character, and never shift their scenery. By this means they ensure that their stories are graphically accurate, meticulously true, but by the time they have told four or five the reader becomes aware of a sameness, a monotony in them, pines for a change, goes after new gods, and the old shrine begins to lack worshippers. If Maugham’s circulation ever dwindles it will not be for this reason.

Happily he has a sense of humor which prevents him from adopting anything in the nature of a pose; but, however unassuming, he is not diffident; he is without affectations, and assured me once he was without ideals, by which I believe he meant no more than that he was not too idealistic to be a practical man. It was when he had succeeded as a novelist and was starting on his successful career as a dramatist that he told me he felt there was a tremendous amount of nonsense talked about the serious drama. “All this high falutin chatter about ideals!” said he. “A playwright’s and a missionary’s calling appear to me to be two distinct and quite separate callings which should not be permitted to overlap. I cannot understand why a serious play should be held to be pre-eminently greater or more important than a humorous play, a comedy, for instance. Nor do I admit for a moment that the former is more difficult to write or demands a consideration peculiar to itself.” Briefly, he protested that his one aim as novelist or dramatist was to amuse; he thought that was the first business of all authors, adding, “I would excuse almost anything but dullness.” No book fails because its literary quality is too high, but because the writer who can write literature does not always know how to write it interestingly. And I found that Maugham, in the broad sanity of his judgment, had no sympathy with the egotistical talk of unpopular but superior persons who ascribe their failure to a fine inability, a noble disinclination to “write down” to the presumably lower apprehensions of the vast majority of mankind.

His practice, through the many years since he emerged as a new author, has always squared with his precepts. Somebody writing of him a little while ago said he got his intimate knowledge of men and women, particularly of the London poor, while he was working as a doctor, but this is scarcely accurate. After completing his education at King’s School, Canterbury, and Heidelberg University, he became a student at St. Thomas’s Hospital, and in due course took his M.R.C.S. and L.R.C.P. degrees, but he never put up his brass plate and worked as a doctor. He had never seriously intended doing so. His family wished him to study medicine, and he yielded to that wish, but his own ambition from the first had been to write for the stage. He was convinced that stage-craft was a knack he could acquire if he made up his mind to it; but he had a saving leaven of common sense and had seen enough of things to know that it was infinitely harder to worry through all the difficulties between writing a play and getting it produced than to find a publisher for a novel, so he resolved to turn novelist as a means of earning bread and butter and winning a large enough reputation to move theater managers to feel that it was at least worth their while to look at his dramas.

That was in the 90’s--the glamorous 1890’s when some would persuade us the whole world of letters in this country was dominated by Oscar Wilde and his circle. But Maugham was one of the many authors of the period--I have referred to others already--whose work shows little trace of that influence. There is nothing much of romance in the story of his literary beginnings; he did not cast himself upon the town and drudge in the byways of journalism, nor did he undergo the disheartening experience of having his manuscripts persistently rejected by the magazines. While he was still a student at St. Thomas’ he sent Fisher Unwin a collection of stories that eventually appeared under the title of “Orientations,” and that astute publisher at once accepted it, but strongly advised Maugham that it would be much better for himself that he should make a start with a novel; and he accepted the advice and went away to act upon it.

Just then the slum story was all in the air--so much so that “slumming” had become a popular pastime with young ladies of leisure. The vogue of Gissing was at its height; Arthur Morrison had written in “Tales of Mean Streets” and “The Child of the Jago” some of the most powerfully realistic of any pictures of London low life; Edwin Pugh had revealed the same underworld in “A Street in Suburbia” and “The Man of Straw”; Pett Ridge’s “Mord Em’ly,” showing something of the happier side of that drab underworld, was running serially, and various other writers were finding themes for fiction in those ugly facts of existence that the city keeps as much out of sight as possible. In any case, the slums of Lambeth lay beside St. Thomas’s Hospital, their inhabitants came into it as patients, so Somerset Maugham knew them, their homes, their habits, their manner of speech, their manner of living, and fashioned his first novel out of such personal experience. He called it “A Lambeth Idyll”; Fisher Unwin accepted it and, in 1897, published it as “Liza of Lambeth.” Its stark, violent realism roused a good deal of protest; we were not so tolerant in such matters then as we have now become; and though there were not wanting those who praised the stern faithfulness with which it depicted certain phases of London life, more and louder voices denounced it as unpleasant, brutal, repellant, extravagantly squalid. Crude and raw it may have been, somewhat obviously out to shock the delicate, omitting too much light and massing too much shadow, but there was truth if not all the truth in it, Liza and her mother and her barbaric lover, Jim, were alive and real, and the controversy that raged round the book served, at least, the good purpose of obtaining for it a measure of the success it merited.

But if any imagined that, like so many of his contemporaries, Maugham was going to devote himself to the exploitation of the slums, or of low life, they soon found they were mistaken. He finished with the slums in “Liza of Lambeth” and never wrote another novel about them. He moved through average society in “The Making of a Saint” (1898); then his actual first book, the short stories “Orientations,” made its appearance; on the heels of this followed “The Hero”; then came what I still feel to be the strongest and ablest of his novels--“Mrs. Craddock.” Good as it is, the times were not ripe for such frank handling of sex mysteries and the book was rejected by every publisher of consequence. Even Heinmann declined it at first; then, on a second consideration, accepted it and published it in 1903. The study of that elemental, passionate, intensely female creature, Mrs. Craddock, is an aggressively candid, extraordinarily subtle essay in feminine psychology; her story is touched with satire and irony and inevitably clouded with tragedy, wherefore the general reader, who prefers pleasanter things, did not take to it kindly. Maugham has never since, perhaps, been so somber, though the sex element has continued to play a potent part in most of his novels and stories, which have had their scenes in middle-class and high society, at home, at the North Pole, in the South Seas and, with those wonderful sketches of character, “On a Chinese Screen,” in China.

Meanwhile, as everybody knows, his triumphant progress as a novelist had not diverted Somerset Maugham from his original bent. In 1902 he had a one-act piece, “Schiffbrüchig,” produced in Germany. Next year he wrote “The Man of Honor” for the Stage Society, but instead of attracting theatrical managers to him it frightened them off, for there was no laughter in it, and they appear to have taken for granted that it fully represented what he could do and meant to do, and that consequently nothing of his was likely to appeal to the playgoing public or could be made to pay.

But they reckoned without their host. Maugham set to work and wrote three comedies, “Lady Frederick,” “Jack Straw” and “Dot,” which were destined to establish him as a dramatist whose plays had money in them.

His later plays have not gone begging for producers--producers have gone begging for them. And the plays of Maugham have been as varied in theme and manner as his novels. From gay, witty, frivolous, ironic comedy, he has passed to sentimental or romantic drama; but he has learned to touch in his realism more deftly, more cunningly, and is no longer faced with the task of having to placate a public obsessed by the mid-Victorian gospel that the plain truth about men and women is not respectable and must not be told.

WILLIAM BABINGTON MAXWELL

It has passed into a sort of proverb that famous men never have sons who equal them in fame. There are, of course, exceptions. Benjamin Disraeli has eclipsed that delightful bookworm, his father Isaac, who wrote the “Curiosities of Literature”; Henry James, having a father who was a distinguished novelist and theologian, used to describe himself on his earlier books as “Henry James, Junr.” but the use of “Junr.” as a means of identifying him has long ceased to be necessary. There are others; but half a dozen swallows do not make a summer, and a dozen such instances would not falsify the proverb.

Perhaps what is true concerning fathers is not so true about mothers. Nobody now reads the once popular novels of Mrs. Frances Trollope, mother of the greater Anthony; Gilbert Frankau, to come at once to our own times, looks like outshining that clever novelist, his mother, “Frank Danby”; Shaw has gone far beyond his mother’s fame as an operatic star; the novels of W. B. Maxwell surpass those of his mother, M. E. Braddon, in literary art, and though he is not so enormously popular in his day as she was in hers, he is widely read now when she is scarcely read at all.

He began to write while she was still writing; her vogue had declined, but remained considerable, and she was still writing as well as ever--in fact, in her two or three latest books, notably in “The Green Curtain,” I think she was writing better than ever. There were disadvantages for a young novelist, no doubt, in having a popular novelist for his mother; but there were also advantages. His father was the publisher, John Maxwell, whose business developed into that of Messrs. Hurst & Blackett. He grew up in a literary atmosphere; the very men who could open doors for a beginner, and make his way easier, were friends of the family; moreover, he had a critic on the hearth who could prompt his first steps and check his ’prentice errors with knowledge drawn from a long and very practical experience.

“Most of the knowledge I possess of how to write,” Maxwell once told Clive Holland, “and, indeed, the fact that I commenced to write at all, I owe to my mother. She was never too busy, or too immersed in her work to discuss my literary ambitions, or work of my own. She did not always know the way any story of mine was going, for I wished neither for it to be an imitation of hers nor in any way to trade upon her own great and worldwide reputation.” He confessed, however, to a frequent feeling that however difficult he might find it to master his art, he had an even more difficult task in the attempt to follow her and necessarily challenge comparison with her work and her unqualified success. “I remember,” he added, “the son of a great man saying in my hearing that the fact that he was so situated had, in a measure, spoiled his life. ‘People expect too much,’ he remarked pathetically, ‘and sometimes get so little. I might have been quite a success if I had not been overshadowed by my great father.’”

But he broke

“his birth’s invidious bar”

and without grasping either his mother’s skirts or those of happy chance (unless Grant Richards was wearing them on the occasion I will presently mention), he became a novelist in his own way and up built his own reputation. Considering the influences that must have been round him in his childhood, taking it that he inherited his literary gift from his mother and that she, as he tells us, taught his young idea how to shoot, if his stories had been more or less of the M. E. Braddon pattern, it would not have been surprising. But, unlike those, his novels are much less concerned with sensational happenings or plot of any kind than with intricacies of character and the mysteries of human psychology. Even from the beginning he struck out in independent line for himself, and his first book, published in 1901, when he was thirty-five, was (to give it its full title), “The Countess of Maybury: Being the Intimate Conversations of the Right Honorable the Countess of Maybury. Collected with Sedulous Care and Respectful Admiration by W. B. Maxwell,” a series of satirical, light comedy dialogues of high society which preceded the “Dolly Dialogues” by a year or two but did not, as they did, set a fashion. His second book, two years later, was a volume of short stories called “Fabulous Fancies,” and this revealed him as a realist--one not without idealism and a sensitive feeling for the romance of life, but a realist none the less, and that quality of realism predominates in all the novels and stories he has written since.

He was late in making this beginning, when he was over thirty, especially considering how his environment favored his development, but he was not hastened by the spur of necessity; he had found a sufficient outlet for his energies in a healthy love of hunting and outdoor sport, and traveled a good deal. Also he has said that he only turned to literature after he had failed in other directions. What those directions were I do not know, except that he was bitten with a young ambition to be a painter and studied on and off for some years at certain art schools in London. On the whole, and despite his ancestry, he thinks himself he might never have taken seriously to the writing of fiction if he had not happened to meet that enterprising publisher Grant Richards who, with characteristic courage and fore-sight, commissioned him to write him a novel, “an arresting novel,” of modern life. Not many publishers would have risked giving such a commission to an almost untried author, but the result amply justified the publisher’s prescience, and with “The Ragged Messenger,” in 1904, Maxwell scored the first and one of the biggest of his successes. Its success was the more remarkable in that it was a story of tragedy, and there is a tradition that the public shrinks from such, but it was its reality, the understanding and poignant truth to human experience with which its characters were drawn and their lives laid bare that caught the reader’s sympathy and gave the book its power of appeal.

“Vivian” was a readable successor to this, but “The Guarded Flame” (1906) rose to an altogether higher level. So far as my judgment goes, “The Guarded Flame” shares with the brilliant satirical story of the middle-class, self-reliant “Mrs. Thompson” and that grim and powerful study in degeneracy, “In Cotton Wool,” the distinction of representing the highest reach of Maxwell’s art, with not far below them “The Devil’s Garden” and “The Mirror and the Lamp.”

“The Devil’s Garden,” which was published in the year before the War burst upon us, brought Maxwell into trouble with our unofficial censorship and was banned by the libraries. I remember it as a vivid, uncompromising story of a self-made man whose life and the lives of his associates do not smack of the innocence of Arcadia and are portrayed with a conscientious exactitude, but the morality of the novel was implicit, and why any one should object when an artist faithfully pictures the unpleasant facts of life, why we should be shocked to find in a novel things that we go on tolerating in the world around us is one of those little eccentricities of the moral sense in man that I have left off trying to understand. The only effect of the ban was that “The Devil’s Garden” was more talked of and sold better than any other of his novels, and it is this perhaps that has led many to accept it as the best he has done; but I would rank it at most with his second best.

For five years after that event, from September 1914 till the end of the war, he turned his back on literature and served as subaltern and as Captain in the Royal Fusiliers. He says that during the war he felt that when peace came we should witness the uprising of “a new and vigorous school of romantic novelists”; that a world so long oppressed “by hideous realities must crave for the realm of pure imagination,” for gaiety, joyousness, for something more akin to the charm and happiness of the fairy-tale.

But when the war was over, he confesses, he soon found he was mistaken. No such complete change entered even into his own stories. A note of idealism is sounded in “The Mirror and the Lamp,” in “A Man and his Lesson” and “Spinster of this Parish,” but so it was in the books he wrote before the war, and otherwise, as in those, he still handles, with a subtle mastery of atmosphere and detail, the dark problems of character and temperament, the ugly but real facts of human experience that are still the spiritual inheritance and material environment of real men and women.

He did, in one of his post-war novels (“A Little More”), experiment in what was for him rather a new vein. It was the story of a once well-to-do family that was reduced to squalid poverty, and the father and one daughter faced their altered circumstances with more resolution than resignation, though the father had more courage than competence. I think Maxwell was trying his hand at the kind of grown-up fairy-tale toward which a reaction from the grim realities we had just come through inclined him; but the sentiment softened at times into sentimentality, his scenes and characters of poorer life were not so convincing as they are in some of his other novels. The spirit of the time had too thoroughly subdued him; but he made a quick recovery and with “Spinster of this Parish” triumphantly found himself again and proved that his hand had not lost its earlier cunning.

LEONARD MERRICK

Until a collected edition of his novels and stories appeared in 1918, Leonard Merrick had been writing for thirty years without receiving a tithe of the recognition that was over-due to him. I doubt whether even now he has such popularity as is enjoyed by many novelists who have not half his capacity, his sure and delicate art, his supreme gift as a story-teller. I can only explain this with a theory I have sometimes played with that a book draws its life from its author, and most books that are immediately and noisily successful are written by men of robust and pushful personality; they impart these qualities to what they write and so give their books an impetus that carries them to success, makes them as pushful and aggressive in the reading world as the personality behind them is in the world at large.

This may be purely fantastic, but the fact remains that Leonard Merrick is a personality of a gracious and retiring order; he is seldom seen in literary circles, and has no skill in self-advertisement. Once, not long ago, I told him I had often wondered that such stories as his had not from the first taken the public by storm, and asked if he could to any extent help me to understand why they had not done so. He accepted the implications in my question with a smile and said, in the quietest, most impartial fashion, “I don’t know. Of course I have been disappointed when my books were freely praised by the critics and did not meet with the large circulations I had hoped for them, and sometimes, when I have thought about it, I have had a suspicion that perhaps I wrote too much of artists--of novelists, journalists, actors--and, moreover, too much about artists who failed. I fancy the public are not particularly interested in the artist; they prefer to read about people more like themselves--people with whom and whose ways they are more familiar. Or if they are to be told of the artist, they want him to be a hero--they want to be told how he struggled through thrilling trials and difficulties to happiness and prosperity at last--they don’t want to be saddened by a tale of his failure; they don’t want to know about him unless he was the sort of man who could conquer fate and circumstance romantically and, as the Americans say, make good in the end. And I have seen a good deal of the artist’s life, and seen how there is bound to be far more failure than success in it, and I suppose I have tried to picture it truthfully. Perhaps that was a mistake and I ought, in the language of the theater, to have kept my eye on the box-office. I don’t know. That is merely a casual notion of mine, and may not account for anything.”

However that may be, and whatever it was that kept the large public that has come to him by degrees from promptly appreciating him, Merrick’s greatness as a novelist has from the beginning been fully realized by his fellow-craftsmen; he has all along been the novelists’ novelist, somewhat as Keats was the poets’ poet, and the collected edition of his works bore testimony to this in prefaces to the various volumes by Barrie, Wells, Locke, Chesterton, Neil Munro, Neil Lyons, and other distinguished authors. None was more generous in his acclaim than Barrie, who had long before greeted him as a master of fiction and, in his introduction to “Conrad in Quest of his Youth,” said, “I know scarcely a novel by any living Englishman, except a score or so of Mr. Hardy’s, that I would rather have written.” Allowing for his very different angle of vision, Merrick is as true a realist as Hardy, but he touches in his characters and incidents with a lighter hand, and has as shrewd a sense of the comedy--the piteous comedy it may be at times--as Hardy has of the tragedy of existence. He does not show his men and women as the foredoomed and helpless victims of a blind, indifferent, implacable life-force, but simply tells his story of them, what they did and what they felt and said, and any spiritual, moral, or social problem involved in their doings and sufferings is implicit in his dramatization of their lives and characters; he does not take you aside to expound it or dogmatize about it: there it is--that is how things happen, and he is a showman, not a preacher. His prevailing qualities are a Gallic sparkle and effervescence of wit and gaiety--especially in such tales as make up “While Paris Laughed” and “A Chair on the Boulevard”--a limitless charity and pity for the follies, weaknesses, caprices of mankind, a charm of sentiment that just stops short of sentimentality, a quick sensitiveness to the humor and pathos of common life, the anxieties of living by precarious employment; the tragedy of straitened circumstances; the sheer joy of living in spite of everything.

He has experienced much of the life he has depicted, and has put not a little of his personal experiences into “The Worldings,” into “Laurels and the Lady,” one of the stories of “The Man Who Understood Women,” and into other of his books. Usually there is nothing to tell of a novelist’s early days, except that he went to certain schools, practiced journalism for a while, then wrote a book or two which found acceptance sooner or later and thereafter took up permanent residence in the literary world. But Merrick’s career has been less orthodox and more varied.

A Londoner born, he went with his people to South Africa when he was eighteen and, entering the South African Civil Service, became clerk in the Magistrate’s Court on the Diamond Fields. But he had not the smallest intention of settling down to that. He was, as he told me, born “stage-struck,” and his one ambition as a youth was to tread the boards and achieve fame as an actor. In 1884 he returned to England and obtained an introduction to Augustus Harris, who gave him an engagement to act in a touring company that was traveling the country with one of the big Drury Lane autumn melodramas. He proved himself a thoroughly capable player, yet would have lost his part, because the touring manager was bent on pushing him out and supplanting him with a friend of his own, but for the voluntary intervention of another member of the company who wrote privately to Harris urging him to go down and see Leonard Merrick’s acting for himself before making any change. Harris did so, with the result that Merrick retained his position in the company for two years, at the end of which period, his enthusiasm for the actor’s life being cooled, he retired from the profession for good. Not until some years later did he discover by chance that the member of the company who, without his knowledge, had befriended him and saved him from dismissal, was Arthur Collins, who, in due season, was to succeed Augustus Harris as Drury Lane’s managing director.

When the disillusioned mummer strutted his little hour before the footlights for the last time he was twenty-three, and “The Position of Peggy Harper” is by no means the only one of his books to which his two years in motley have yielded a rich harvest. Since then, except that he wrote “The Free Pardon” with F. C. Phillips and some very popular dramas in collaboration with George R. Sims, the stage has ceased to lure him and he has devoted himself to the writing of stories.

Nor did he lose much time in passing from the one calling to the other, for his first book appeared when he was twenty-four. His second novel, “Violet Moses,” was rejected by Chatto & Windus, but accepted by Bentley; and his third, “The Man Who Was Good,” was rejected by Bentley as not up to the level of the other, but promptly accepted by Chatto & Windus; one of life’s lighter ironies that nobody--certainly not Merrick--would have wished to evade. He had published some half dozen novels before he began to write short stories. He confesses that he prefers to write these, and there are stories in at least two of his volumes that for delicate satirical comedy and subtle art of narration have not been surpassed by any of his contemporaries.

From the outset, Merrick met with a more popular reception in America than in this country; his books enjoyed a considerable vogue there, and his short stories were soon in great demand with the American magazines. This has happened to so many other of our writers that one merely mentions it as a biographical fact and not as matter for surprise. His first real success with short stories over here came when his agent, A. P. Watt, handed one of his books to the editor of the _Bystander_, urging him to read it and see whether its stories were not of the sort he wanted. He read it, and commissioned six, and before these had all appeared commissioned a further twelve. Thereafter, the trouble was not to place such stories but to write as many as were required.

While he was in his thirties Leonard Merrick lived for some time in Paris, and Paris still draws him at intervals from the retirement of his English home, for he finds there ideas and stimulation, and can work there as he never can in London. As a rule, the Londoner born has a sneaking regard for his city and cannot be long away from it without feeling its intangible human hands plucking at his heart and its multitudinous voices calling him back, but in spite of the fact that he is a true-blue Cockney, born, in 1864, at Belsize Park, on the skirts of Hampstead, Merrick tells you he does not love London. It is the most comfortable of cities, he admits, but he finds it uninspiring and can work better and more easily when he is almost anywhere away from it--especially when he is in Paris.

ALAN ALEXANDER MILNE

The tradition that the Scot has no humor still lingers among old-fashioned people who don’t like changes, but of recent years Barrie, Neil Munro (as Hugh Foulis), J. J. Bell, Ian Hay, A. A. Milne, and some others have shaken it to such an extent that only the incurably obstinate now attempt to maintain it.

But while the humor of the others smack finely of the north of the Tweed, the humor of Milne seems to indicate that his spiritual home is a much more frivolous place. There is something Irish or English about its airy gaiety, its blithe, amusing flippancy. Dr. Johnson once spoke slightingly about the art of carving faces on cherry-stones, but if he had tried his hand at that work he would have realized that to accomplish it successfully one must be born with a gift that is as rare as the more impressive gift for writing serious prose. Our ancestors, as a whole, realized that, and would exclaim with admiration at the marvelous facility of Swift who could write you an essay off-hand on anything or nothing. I remember how, when I was a small boy, a bookish old gentleman informed me of this in his library and went on to tell with bated breath the familiar yarn of how, to test the Dean’s limitless capacity, a lady challenged him to write an essay on a broomstick, and he at once sat down and did it. But we should think little of that nowadays. Milne would not need so much as a broomstick; he could do it on one of the bristles.

So could E. V. Lucas or Chesterton, or Belloc. But in the matter of slightness of theme and the capacity for writing charmingly and humorously on next to nothing at all Milne has closer affinities with Lucas; they not only can do it but make a habit of doing it. Both write light verse as well as light prose; both contributed to _Punch_ (Lucas contributes to it still), and as Anstey and many another, in various forms, had practiced the same volatile literature in those pages, it seems possible that the influence of _Punch_ may have been more or less responsible for developing likewise in them a delightfully neat and sprightly vein of humor.

However that may be, Milne had begun to exercise his characteristic style while he was at Cambridge, where he was made editor of the _Granta_. He came to London in 1903, and settled down, first in Temple Chambers, afterwards at Chelsea (where he still resides, but not in his original two rooms) to make a living as a free-lance author and journalist. His earnings through the first two years were far below the income-tax level, but in the third year he was appointed assistant-editor of _Punch_, to which he had already been contributing largely, and the world in general began to be aware of him from seeing the initials A. A. M. appearing in that periodical with significant regularity. It not only saw them, but looked out for them, and was soon betraying curiosity in public places as to the identity of the person who owned them; an infallible sign that a writer is giving the public what it wants as well as what it ought to want.

Between 1910 and 1914 he collected his _Punch_ contributions into three volumes, “The Day’s Play,” “The Holiday Round,” and “Once a Week,” but was no sooner so established as an entertaining and popular essayist than the War intervened to take him to fresh woods and pastures that were new but not desirable. It is impossible to unfold the record of any of our younger and few of our older contemporary authors without coming up against the War. Milne promptly withdrew from _Punch_, joined the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, and was sent out to France. Here, in odds and ends of leisure from military occupations, he found opportunity and the moods for writing that quaint, whimsical story “Once on a Time,” which was published in 1917; and then, too, he made a first experiment as a dramatist with his shrewdly, cleverly satirical comedy of “Wurzel-Flummery.” There is a new depth and maturity under the humor of these things, and he said that in writing the story he for the first time wrote in earnest.

By-and-by, after a breakdown which had put him in hospital for a while, when he was sent to act as signaling instructor at a fort on Portsdown Hill, he had an impulse to continue playwriting, and would spend a long day at the fort teaching his class how to signal, then go home to the cottage where he and his wife were living, a couple of miles away, and dictate to her, until he had produced in succession, “Belinda,” “The Boy Comes Home” and “The Lucky One.” These were in due course presented on the London stage, and if they had no success comparable with his later plays, they were successful enough before the footlights, and in the book into which he gathered them in 1919, to demonstrate that a new dramatist had arisen, and one to be reckoned with.

There are plenty of signs of the potential dramatist in the pre-war essays--in their easy and natural use of dialogue, and their deft, vivid handling of incidents: and there is a bite of realism in their genial satire and burlesque irony, which foreshadows the keener, riper irony and satire of “Bladys.” For instance, there is the sketch of “The Newspaper Proprietor,” that “lord of journalism,” Hector Strong, who, to oblige a lady, saves her play from failure and forces it into a raging success by the adroitness with which he booms it in his numerous newspapers. It may seem ridiculous, and Milne may have invented it all, but take away a few farcial details from his narrative, and there are those behind the scenes who will assure you that this deed was actually done. As for “A Breath of Life,” in which the actor who plays the young hero falls really in love with the actress who plays the heroine and on a passionate impulse finishes the play triumphantly at the end of the third act to such thunders of applause from the audience that the fourth is cut away for good--ask any dramatist and he will tell you that his own plays suffered worse than that at the hands of their producers until he became successful and important enough to insist on the piece being acted exactly as it was written.

Always there was this germ of truth in Milne’s earlier trifles and flippancies. “A Trunk Call” is by no means such an irresponsible farce as some may think it. Here, the dainty Celia buys a fancy knocker and puts it on the door of her husband’s study, in order that she may give him warning at any time before she comes to interrupt him. He wants her to try it forthwith, but she demurs:

“‘Not now. I’ll try later on, when you aren’t expecting it. Besides, you must begin your work. Good-bye. Work hard.’ She pushed me in and shut the door.

“I began to work.

“I work best on the sofa; I think most clearly in what appears to the hasty observer to be an attitude of rest. But I am not sure that Celia really understands this yet. Accordingly, when a knock comes at the door I jump to my feet, ruffle my hair, and stride up and down the room with one hand on my brow. ‘Come in,’ I call impatiently, and Celia finds me absolutely in the throes. If there should chance to be a second knock later on, I make a sprint for the writing-desk, seize pen and paper, upset the ink or not as it happens, and present to any one coming in at the door the most thoroughly engrossed back in London.

“But that was in the good old days of knuckle-knocking. On this particular morning I had hardly written more than a couple of thousand words--I mean I had hardly got the cushions at the back of my head comfortably settled when Celia came in.

“‘Well?’ she said eagerly.

“I struggled out of the sofa.

“‘What is it?’ I asked sternly.

“‘Did you hear it all right?’

“‘I didn’t hear anything.’

“‘Oh!’ she said in great disappointment. ‘But perhaps you were asleep,’ she went on hopefully.

“‘Certainly not. I was working.’

“‘Did I interrupt you?’

“‘You did rather; but it doesn’t matter.’

“‘Oh, well, I won’t do it again--unless I really have to. Goodbye, and good luck.’”

The knocker may be an effort of the imagination, otherwise this reads as if it were taken from life. It may even be true about Milne himself, for he has said in print that his work comes easy to him; and if you show the complete sketch to the wife of any literary man of your acquaintance the chances are she will wonder how Milne got to know so much about her husband. But his trim figure and alert, clean-shaven face, apart from the quantity of work he has placed to his credit, belie any suggestion that since he finds his work easy he takes his ease, except when it is finished. He is restlessly alive, and gives you the impression of being something of an out-door man, a golfer probably, perhaps a cricketer, though you need not believe he looks forward to the opening of the cricket season quite so enthusiastically as he suggests in “The First Game”--

“It is the day that I watch for yearly,
Never before has it come so late;
But now I’ve only a month--no, merely
A couple of fortnights left to wait;
And then (to make the matter plain)
I hold--at last!--a bat again:
Dear Hobbs! the weeks this summer--think! the _weeks_ I’ve lived in
vain.”

When he was demobilized, his old post of assistant-editor of _Punch_ was waiting for him, but he had formed other plans for his future during the war, and arranged not to go back. He did not just then intend to abandon the light essay, and in “If I may” (1920) his hand for it is as cunning as ever; but the theater had got into his blood, his ambition was taking higher flights, and “Mr. Pim Passes By” (he wrote it also into a novel as quaintly humorous and sentimental as the play) and the mordantly ironic “Truth About Bladys” soared at once and almost simultaneously to such heights of popularity that if the dramatist has not presently absorbed the essayist altogether, it won’t be for want of an excellent excuse.

ALFRED NOYES

Early in his career, being rash as well as young, Alfred Noyes made the tactical mistake of writing poetry that became popular. He was crowned with eulogy by leading critics who, naturally, could not foresee that he would also win the applause of the multitude or, no doubt, they would have been more careful. Meredith helped to mislead them; he praised the beauty and finely restrained pathos of “Michael Oaktree,” a narrative poem in Noyes’s very first volume, “The Loom of Years.” But it was his third and fourth books, those exquisite fairy tales in verse, “The Flower of Old Japan” (1903) and “The Forest of Wild Thyme” (1905), that carried him right into the popularity which disillusioned those self-centered experts who cling to a narrow faith that poetry cannot be poetry if it makes a triumphant appeal to the large world that lives and works in outer darkness beyond the limits of their own select, small circle.

Noyes has always been reckless in these matters. He never took the precaution to attach himself to any of our little groups of poetasters who ecstatically give each other the glory the common public with-holds from them. Before he made a book of his great epic, “Drake”--and it is great not only by comparison with what has been done by his living contemporaries--instead of treating it as something too rare and delicate for human nature’s daily food, he ran it serially in _Blackwood’s Magazine_, as if it had been a new novel. No poem had ever appeared in that fashion before. I believe he had not written more than half when the first instalment of it was printed, and the orthodox could not be expected to approve of that sort of thing. They began to say Noyes was too facile; wrote too hurriedly and too much; began to take it for granted that no man who wrote thus copiously and fluently could be an authentic poet, when they might more reasonably have assumed that he did by a certain native gift what was only possible to themselves by the slower, sedulous exercise of an average talent.

Howbeit, from being lauded freely, Noyes is now more misrepresented, by a group of poet-critics, whose judgments are too often sound in the wrong sense, than any other poet of our day. Whether anything less respectable than a restricted poetical outlook can account for this misrepresentation I shall not attempt to guess, but, noticing it, I have sometimes been reminded of lines he puts into the mouth of Marlowe, in his “Tales of the Mermaid Tavern”--

“I tell thee ’tis the dwarfs that find no world
Wide enough for their jostlings, while the giants,
The gods themselves, can in one tavern find
Room wide enough to swallow the wide heaven
With all its crowded solitary stars.”

Unprofessional lovers of poetry read Noyes not because it is the proper, high-brow thing to do, but solely because they enjoy reading him. It is an excellent reason; and for the same reason Tennyson and Browning are famous; so, in these times, are Masefield and Davies; de la Mare and William Watson. Noyes differs from most of his contemporaries in being at once, like Chaucer, a born story-teller and, like Swinburne, an amazing master of meter and rhyme. He is not alone in being able more readily and adequately to express himself in meter and rhyme than in prose, and it is ridiculous to assume that this ability indicates any shallowness of thought; it indicates, rather, that he is really efficient in an art he has taken pains to acquire.

It is equally ridiculous to dub him old-fashioned, as some of our superior persons do, because he accepts the classical tradition in poetry. He has not accepted it unintelligently or slavishly; if you look through his books you will note how cunningly he makes old meters new again, and that he has invented enough new meters or variations in accepted metrical forms to give him a place even with those who claim to be rebels against authority. One such rebel, a prominent American poet, included the other day in his collected works a goodly proportion of _vers libre_ from which one of our advanced critics chose two passages for admiring quotation. The ideas in these passages were a mere repetition of two that are expressed with higher art and deeper feeling in “In Memoriam,” yet that advanced critic is one who dismisses Tennyson as out of date and has hailed the American poet as the last word in modern thinking. Perhaps he and his like have not troubled to read what they consider old-fashioned. I mention the circumstance by way of showing to what a pass some of our critics and poets have come.

If Noyes has any theories of poetry, I gather they are that the poet is essentially one endowed with the gift of song; that all the great poets, from Homer downward, have been great singers; and that when he utters himself in meter and rhyme he is but putting himself in tune with the infinite order of the universe--with the rhythm of the tides, of the seasons, the recurring chime of day and night, the harmonious movement of the stars in their orbits. He once confessed to me that he was so far from fearing the possibilities of metrical invention were exhausted that he was convinced we are still at the beginning of them; they were exhausted, according to the first disciples of Whitman, sixty years ago, but Swinburne arose and invented so many new meters that he was considered more revolutionary in his era than Whitman’s later disciples are in ours.