Chapter VII: Front Matter (7)

He was born, in 1866, at Bromley, Kent, where his father, a noted cricketer who played in the County team, kept a small glass and china and general shop. But the business failed; his father had to find employment; his mother went as housekeeper to a great house near Petersfield and Wells, then about thirteen, was apprenticed to a draper at Windsor. Before long, he left there to go to Midhurst as assistant to a chemist, and presently abandoned that profession to resume his interrupted schooling at Wimblehurst. Thence, in 1881, he went to be, for a brief period, pupil teacher at his uncle’s school in Somerset, and gave that up to take to his first trade again in a draper’s shop at Southsea. After two years of this, he emerged as assistant teacher at Midhurst Grammar School, till, having won a scholarship at the South Kensington School of Science, and taken his B.Sc. degree with honors, he secured an appointment to teach Science and English at Henley House School, St. John’s Wood. To increase his income, he passed from that to work as lecturer and tutor to some University Correspondence Classes, and the incessant and arduous labor this involved resulted in such a complete breakdown of health that he had to resign his appointment and go away to the south coast to rest and recuperate.

But before he was fairly convalescent the irksomeness of doing nothing and the need of getting an income prompted him to try his luck with his pen. So far his literary work had not gone beyond what I am told was an admirable biological text-book, contributions to technical journals, and a few occasional newspaper articles. He turned now to writing essays and sketches of a light and humorous kind, and found a ready market for them in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, and other papers. Once in the lists as a literary free-lance, he rode from success to success with astonishing deftness and energy. In 1895 he published “Select Conversations with an Uncle,” but it was eclipsed by the appearance in the same year of “The Stolen Bacillus and Other Stories,” and two of the most original and characteristic of his early imaginative tales, “The Time Machine” and “The Wonderful Visit.” Next year, hard on the heels of that grim fantasy, “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” came the most charmingly humorous, realistic-idyllic of his novels, “The Wheels of Chance.”

No man with a serious purpose should, in this country, retain a sense of humor. If nature has afflicted him with one, he should do his best to have it removed; it is more inimical to his well-being than an appendix. But Wells seems to be incurable, and that he has carelessly broken through all manner of prejudices to almost universal acceptance, in spite of his handicap of humor, is in itself a testimony to the power and quality of his work. If Darwin had followed “The Origin of Species” by writing “Three Men in a Boat” I doubt whether the pundits would have taken him seriously enough to have him buried in Westminster Abbey. Wells, having published a novel and three searching and profoundly earnest books on the Great War in 1914, burst forth next year with the farcical, bitingly satirical “Boon” and the irresponsibly laughable, “Bealby,” and immediately after appealed to us with his prophetic “What is Coming?” and one of his finest novels, and certainly the finest novel of the War, “Mr. Britling Sees it Through.”

All which is, of course, as it should be. It is your little man who has only one mood for all occasions, and dare not laugh and unbend from his pose and come down from his pedestal lest he should seem no bigger than those who had looked up to him. While other scholars are toiling laboriously to write the record of a single nation, or a single reign, Wells sandwiches between novel and novel that stupendous survey, “The Outline of History,” which is not only a scholarly and vastly comprehensive chronicle of the evolution of man and the progress of humanity the world over from the dawn of time to the day before yesterday, but is, as Macaulay rightly said all history ought to be, as easy and fascinating reading as any work of fiction.

No English author has a wider vogue outside his own country--he is popular in America, and in Russia, Germany, Scandinavia, where many other of our famous writers are unknown; and who was that Frenchman that, on a visit to London, expressed himself as agreeably surprised to discover that Wells is nearly as much appreciated over here as he is in France?

ISRAEL ZANGWILL

Although I don’t think I ever exchanged a dozen words with him until recently, since the days of my youth I have felt a special personal interest in Israel Zangwill. With the passing of time, as it became possible to know him from his books and his public doings, that interest has strengthened to admiration and a real regard alike for the great qualities of his work and the courageous sincerity of his character; but I fancy it had its beginnings in quite trifling associations. We were both born Londoners, and started in the same way: when we were twenty, or less, we were competing against each other for prizes in a weekly paper called _Society_, and I believe his first appearance in print was with a prize story in that long deceased periodical. I am a little uncertain of the exact dates, but he was still in his twenties when he started _Ariel_, a brilliant rival to _Punch_, and I sent him some contributions for it which he did not use. About the same time I ran another short-lived rival to _Punch_ myself, but he sent me no contributions for it, or, without desiring to heap coals of fire on his head, I should have used them. Then we both became members of the New Vagabond Club, and used to meet at its dinners occasionally and sometimes nod to each other, but never spoke. As a matter of fact, I don’t suppose he knew who I was and cannot have suspected that I entertained such warm and proprietorial sentiments toward him. For many years now, since his marriage (his wife, the daughter of Professor W. E. Ayrton, is herself a novelist of distinction), he has made his home at East Preston, in Sussex, and his visits to London have been few and far between. But when he was up on business, staying at his chambers in the Temple, I used to come across him at long intervals careering down the Strand or Fleet Street, and always felt I was meeting a sort of old friend, though, until recently, we passed without recognition.

It was in 1864 that he was born, his father being an exile who, lying under sentence of death for a trivial military offence, had escaped to this country from a Russian prison. He was educated at the Jews’ Free School, in East London, where, a year or two before taking his B. A. degree, with triple honors, at the London University, he became a teacher. But teaching, though he proved extraordinarily successful at it, was not to be his career. In 1888, he wrote in collaboration with Louis Cowen a farcical political romance, “The Premier and the Painter,” and presently resigned his scholastic engagement and proceeded to earn a livelihood by free-lance literature and journalism. That success did not come to him till he had paid for it in hard work you may know by the moral he drew from his memories of those days when he wrote (as J. A. Hammerton records in his “Humorists of To-Day”), “If you are blessed with some talent, a great deal of industry, and an amount of conceit mighty enough to enable you to disregard superiors, equals and critics, as well as the fancied demands of the public, it is possible, without friends, or introductions, or bothering celebrities to read your manuscripts, or cultivating the camp of log-rollers, to attain, by dint of slaving day and night for years during the flower of your youth, to a fame infinitely less wide-spread than a prize-fighter’s and a pecuniary position which you might with far less trouble have been born to.”

But in the first two years of the 90’s he had established himself as a humorist with “The Bachelor’s Club,” “The Old Maid’s Club,” and “The Big Bow Mystery,” an ingenious burlesque of the popular detective story which was as exciting as the real thing; and as a new novelist of high and original achievement with “The Children of the Ghetto.” Just then Jerome and Robert Barr started _The Idler_, with G. B. Burgin as their assistant editor: a year later Jerome launched _To-Day_, and Zangwill, who, on the strength of his earlier books, had been branded by the superior as a “humorist,” was among the notable group of young writers that J. K. J. collected on his two magazines. Many of his short stories appeared in the one, and to the other he contributed a causerie, “Without Prejudice” (which re-emerged in due course as a book), and his novel, “The Master,” as a serial.

“The Master” is a sustained and revealing study of a single character--the story of a young painter, Matt Strang, who comes from Nova Scotia to London, self-centered, afire with ambition, but it is not till, broken by disillusion and failure, he withdraws from the babble and dazzle of art circles and social swaggerings, returns to the obscurity of his own home and subserviates his hopes to his wife’s happiness that he finds himself and is able to do the great work he had dreamt of doing. There is more of the ironic, satirical Zangwill in “The Mantle of Elijah”; he places his scenes in the days of Palmerston, but drives home a big-minded gospel that is as badly needed in the politics of these days as it was then. Broser, a strong, self-confident political leader, rises to power by breaking his promises and changing his convictions as often as necessary and is acclaimed the savior of his country, but he has a wife, Allegra, whose conscience is not so accommodating, who cannot abandon her principles whenever he abandons his, and in the hour of his triumph she leaves him, to devote herself to working for the cause that, in the interests of his career, he had betrayed.

Nearly twenty years later Zangwill gave us “Jinny the Carrier,” a very charming story of mid-Victorian life and character in rural Essex; but his finest, most memorable work in fiction has been done as the interpreter of his own people. This he is in “Children of the Ghetto,” in the whimsical grotesque, broadly and grimly humorous tales of “The King of Schnorrers,” that glorious Hebrew mendicant Manasseh Bueno Barzillai Azevedo da Costa, and in the masterly little stories of light and shadow that make up the “Ghetto Tragedies” and “Ghetto Comedies.” He has his unique place in letters as the novelist of London’s modern Jewry. Aldgate, Whitechapel, Hoxton, Dalston, all the roads and byways, mean lanes and squalid squares there and thereabouts are a world large and varied and crowded enough for his purposes. His pride of race glows as surely in such stories of the children of his fancy, the poor of the Ghetto, their profoundly simple piety, their patience, self-sacrifice, humble endurance, human kindness, as in his subtle studies of those real, yet scarcely more real in seeming, “Dreamers of the Ghetto,” Heine, Lasalle, Spinoza, and other such seers and prophets of latter-day Israel. But he is too much of an artist to suppress anything of the truth, and dealing with his own people, actual or imaginary, he shows them starkly as they are, their vices as well as their virtues, their avarice, meanness, hypocrisies, as well as their generosity and loyalties. He is steeped in the Jewish tradition, and fills in the atmosphere and intimate detail of his pictures with most meticulous realism; he is ready enough to ridicule obsolete racial bigotries and ancient customs that have lost their meaning, but is sensitively reverent to the beauty and mystic significance of all old ceremonies and practices that still embody the essential spirit of the faith.

Nowhere has the soul of the London Jew (and the rich Jew who lives in the West has not been overlooked) been more sympathetically or impartially unveiled than in Zangwill’s novel and tales of the Ghetto. His tragedies are touched with comedy, his comedies with tragedy; if I were limited to three of his short stories, I would name “They that Sit in Darkness,” “Transitional” and “To Die in Jerusalem,” for their delicate art and simple directness of narrative, among the greatest in the language.

How many plays Zangwill has written altogether I do not know; but he began in 1892 with “Six Persons,” a comedy, and in the last decade or so has written more plays than stories. “Merely Mary Ann,” a tale of a quaint little lodging-house slavey, came out first as a short novel, then was adapted to the stage and had a popular success in both forms. He dramatized “Children of the Ghetto”; and “Jinny the Carrier” was a domestic drama before it was a novel. But his bigger work in this kind is “The Melting Pot,” “The War God,” “The Next Religion,” “The Forcing House” and “The Cockpit.” Each of them is inspired with a high and serious purpose. The first is a moving plea for race-fusion: the Jews are not a nation but a race; they become absorbed into the nation where they make their home, and you are shown how David Quixano, in America, “God’s crucible, where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming,” is moulded into a patriotic American with a passionate ideal of freedom. “The War God,” with its appeal for international goodwill and its scathing indictment of the crime and folly of war is a prophetic commentary on much that has befallen the world since 1912; “The Forcing House” is a tragi-comedy of revolution, which has its parallel in Bolshevik Russia; “The Cockpit” is the tragi-comedy, edged at times with bitterest satire, of the restoration of a Queen who, bent on ruling by love, is thwarted and brought to disaster by her ministers, who have a family likeness to ministers everywhere; and “The War God” (1911) was recognized as the noblest, most impressive drama that had been seen on the London stage for years.

If Zangwill’s road has sometimes been difficult, one reason is that he has never gone with the crowd, never been afraid to go against the view of the majority. More than once he has got himself into trouble through championing unpopular causes. When it needed courage to come out openly in favor of Woman’s Suffrage, he supported it in the press and on the platform; for he is as witty and can be as devastating with his tongue as with his pen. And with all these activities he has found time to do a lot of spade work as President of the International Jewish Territorial Organization, which aims at establishing Jewish Colonies wherever land can be found for them, and time to give practical service in Leagues and Committees that are doing what is possible to build up the peace and universal brotherhood that politicians are too busy to do more than talk about. From which you may take it that he does not put all his sympathies into the printed page, does not write one way and live another, but that his books and his life are of a piece, and if you know them you know him.

INDEX

A

Ainsworth, W. Harrison, 103

_Ariel_, 313

Austen, Jane, 33, 273

B

Ballantyne, R. M., 103

Barr, Robert, 315

Barrie, Sir James, 153, 235, 243

Bateman, Miss Isabel, 208

Bateman, Leah, 183

“Beachcomber,” 75

Beardsley, Aubrey, 153

Beaumont and Fletcher, 13

_Beeton’s Annual_, 86

_Belgravia_, 86

Bell, J. J., 243

Bell, Dr. Joseph, 86

Belloc, Hilaire, 13, 19, 244

Belloc-Lowndes, Mrs., 274

Bennett, Arnold, 23-29, 104, 273

Benson, Stella, 274

Beresford, J. D., 33-39, 44

_Blackwood’s Magazine_, 254

Blake, William, 67, 193

Blomfield, Sir Arthur, 4

_Bookman_, 75

Bottome, Phyllis, 274

Braddon, Miss, 223, 225

Brontë, Charlotte, 76, 273, 277

Brown, T. E., 74

Browning, 8, 113, 255

Buchan, John, 43-50

Bunyan, John, 78

Burgin, G. B., 316

Burke, Thomas, 114

Burns, Robert, 43

Byrne, Donn, 53

Byron, 3, 83

_Bystander_, 238