AN ARMFUL OF NOVELS, WITH NOTES ON THE NOVELISTS
=i=
"The quiet, the calm, the extreme individualism, and the easy-going
self-content of my birthplace and early habitat--the Eastern Shore of
Maryland, have been, I fear, the dominating influences of my life," writes
Sophie Kerr. "Thank heaven, I had a restless, energetic, and very
bad-tempered father to leaven them, a man with a biting tongue and a kind
heart, a keen sense of the ridiculous and a passion for honesty in speech
and action. I, the younger of his two children, was his constant
companion. I tagged after him, every day and all day. Even when I was very
small he interested me--and very few fathers ever really interest their
children.
"The usual life of a girl in a small semi-Southern town was mine. I
learned to cook, I made most of my own frocks, I embroidered excessively,
I played the violin worse than any other person in the world, I went away
to college and I came back again. I wasn't a popular girl socially for two
reasons. I had inherited my father's gift of sarcasm, and there was the
even greater handicap of a beautiful, popular, socially malleable older
sister. Beside her I was nowhere.
"But I wanted to write, so I didn't care. I got my father to buy me a
second-hand typewriter, and learned to run it with two fingers. And I
wrote. I even sold some of the stuff. The Country Gentleman bought one of
my first stories, and the Ladies' World bought another. This was
glorious.
"Then I got a job on the Pittsburgh Chronicle-Telegraph, an afternoon
newspaper owned by Senator Oliver. Later I went to The Gazette-Times, the
morning paper also owned by the Senator. A few years later I came to New
York and found a place on the staff of the Woman's Home Companion,
eventually becoming Managing Editor. Two years ago I resigned my editorial
job to give all my time to writing. Of course I had been writing pretty
steadily anyway, but holding my job too.
"I had expected, when I gave up office work, to find my leisure time an
embarrassment. I planned so many things to do, how I would see all my
friends often, how I would travel, read, do all sorts of delightful things
that double work had before made impossible. But I've done none of them. I
haven't nearly as much time as I had when I hadn't any time at all, and
that's the honest truth.
"If only I could arrange a multiple existence--one life for work; one for
the machinery of life, housekeeping, getting clothes made, shopping; one
for seeing my friends, travel, visiting; one life for the other diversions
such as music, the theatre, clubs, politics, one life for just plain
loafing. Now that would be wonderful. But to crowd it all into twenty-four
hours a day--no, too much of it gets squeezed out.
"What do I like the most? Comfort, I think. And old painted satinwood, and
cats and prizefights, and dancing, and Spanish shawls, and looking at the
ocean, and having my own way. And I dislike argument, and perfume, and fat
women, and people who tell the sort of lies that simply insult your
intelligence, and men who begin letters 'Dear Lady,' and long earrings,
and intolerance."
All of which is excellent preparation for the reader of Sophie Kerr's new
novel, _One Thing Is Certain_. Those who read her _Painted Meadows_ will
expect and will find in this new novel the same charming background, but
they will find a much more dramatic story. Since the novel is one of
surprise, with an event at its close which throws everything that went
before in a new, a curious, a startling and profoundly significant light,
I cannot indulge in any further description of it in this place. But I do
wish to quote some sentences from a letter Sophie Kerr wrote me:
"I wanted to show that when lives get out of plumb, the way to straighten
them is not with a violent gesture. That when we do seize them, and try to
jerk them straight again, we invariably let ourselves in for long years of
unhappiness and remorse. Witness Louellen. In two desperate attempts ...
she tries to change the whole current and colour of her life."
So much for the essential character of the story, but there is a question
in my mind as to what, in the story, readers will consider the true
essential! I think for very many it will not be the action, unusual and
dramatic as that is, but the picture of a peculiar community, one typical
of Maryland's Eastern Shore, where we have farmer folk in whom there lives
the spirit and tradition of a landed aristocracy. The true essential with
such readers, will be the individuals who are drawn with such humour and
skill, the mellowness of the scene; even such a detail as the culinary
triumph that was Louellen's wedding dinner. A marvellous and incomparable
meal! One reads of it, his mouth watering and his stomach crying out.
=ii=
_The House of Five Swords_, by Tristram Tupper, is a gallant
representative of those novels which we are beginning to get in the
inevitable reaction from such realism as _Main Street_ and _Moon-Calf_, a
romantic story of age and youth, of love and hate, of bitter unyielding
hardness, and of melting pity and tenderness. It begins with the Robin,
age seven, with burnished curls, viewing with awestruck delight five
polished swords against the shining dark wall in Colonial House, where she
had gone to deliver the Colonel's boots! She forgot the boots. She lifted
two of the swords from the wall, crossed them on the floor and danced the
sword dance of Scotland. From the doorway a white-haired old figure
watched with narrowed eyes and tightened mouth. Then the storm broke....
_The House of Five Swords_ is Mr. Tupper's first novel. A native of
Virginia, he has done newspaper work, has tramped a good deal and was
fooling with the study of law when American troops were ordered to the
Mexican border. After that experience he went overseas. On his return from
the war, he tried writing and met with rapid success.
=iii=
Readers of Baroness Orczy's novels will welcome _Nicolette_.
This is essentially a love story, with the scene laid in the mountains of
Provence in the early days of the Restoration of King Louis XVIII to the
throne of France. An ancient half-ruined château perches among dwarf
olives and mimosa, orange and lemon groves. There is a vivid contrast
between the prosperity of Jaume Deydier, a rich peasant-proprietor, and
the grinding poverty of the proud and ancient family of de Ventadour,
whose last scion, Bertrand, goes to seek fortune in Paris and there
becomes affianced to a wealthy and beautiful heiress. Nicolette, the
daughter of Jaume Deydier, whose ancestor had been a lackey in the service
of the Comte de Ventadour, is passionately in love with Bertrand, but a
bitter feud keeps the lovers for long apart.
There will be a new novel this autumn, _Ann and Her Mother_, by O.
Douglas, whose _Penny Plain_ gave great pleasure to its readers. "Penny
plain," if you remember, was the way Jean described the lot of herself and
her brothers whom she mothered in the Scottish cottage; but matters were
somewhat changed when romance crossed the threshold in the person of the
Honourable Pamela and a bitter old millionaire who came to claim the house
as his own.
_Ann and Her Mother_ is the story of a Scotch family as seen through the
eyes of the mother and her daughter. The author of _Penny Plain_ and _Ann
and Her Mother_ is a sister of John Buchan, author of _The Thirty-nine
Steps_, _The Path of the King_, and many other books.
_December Love_, by Robert Hichens, will have a greater popularity than
any of his novels since _The Garden of Allah_. It is a question whether
this uncannily penetrative study of power and the need for love of a woman
of sixty does not surpass _The Garden of Allah_. In Lady Sellingworth, Mr.
Hichens is dealing with a brilliant woman. The theme is daring and calls
for both skill and delicacy. Of the action, one really should not say very
much, lest one spoil the book for the reader. The loss of the Sellingworth
jewels in Paris had caused a sensation in the midst of which Lady
Sellingworth was silent. She declined to discuss the disappearance of the
jewels. There followed the advent at No. 4 Berkeley Square of Alick
Craven, a man of thirty, vigorous, attractive and decidedly a somebody.
But inexplicably--at any rate without explanation--Lady Sellingworth
retired from society when Craven appeared.
_Tell England_ by Ernest Raymond is a novel which has been sensationally
successful in England. It is a war story and I will give you some of the
opening paragraphs of the "Prologue by Padre Monty":
"In the year that the Colonel died he took little Rupert to see the
swallows fly away. I can find no better beginning than that.
"When there devolved upon me as a labour of love the editing of Rupert
Ray's book, _Tell England_, I carried the manuscript to my room one bright
autumn afternoon and read it during the fall of a soft evening, till the
light failed, and my eyes burned with the strain of reading in the dark. I
could hardly leave his ingenuous tale to rise and turn on the gas. Nor,
perhaps, did I want such artificial brightness. There are times when one
prefers the twilight. Doubtless the tale held me fascinated because it
revealed the schooldays of those boys whom I met in their young manhood
and told afresh that wild old Gallipoli adventure which I shared with
them. Though, sadly enough, I take Heaven to witness that I was not the
idealised creature whom Rupert portrays. God bless them, how these boys
will idealise us!
"Then again, as Rupert tells you, it was I who suggested to him the
writing of his story. And well I recall how he demurred, asking:
"'But what am I to write about?' For he was always diffident and
unconscious of his power.
"'Is Gallipoli nothing to write about?' I retorted. 'And you can't have
spent five years at a great public school like Kensington without one or
two sensational things. Pick them out and let us have them. For whatever
the modern theorists say, the main duty of a story-teller is certainly to
tell stories.'"
This prologue is followed by the novel which begins with English public
school life in the fashion of _Sonia_ and other novels American readers
are familiar with. The main theme of the book is Gallipoli.
The new novel by J. E. Buckrose is _A Knight Among Ladies_. Mrs. Buckrose
says that the character of Sid Dummeris in this book is modelled upon an
actual person. "He did actually live in a remote country place where I
used to stay a great deal when I was a child and as he has been gone
twenty years, I thought I might employ my exact memories of him without
hurting anyone." This was in answer to questions asked by The Bookman
(London) of a number of English writers. The London Bookman wanted to find
out if novelists generally drew their characters from actual people. The
replies showed that this proceeding was very rare. Mrs. Buckrose recalled
only one other instance in which she had used an actual person in her
fiction. Mrs. Buckrose is Mrs. Falconer Jameson. She lives at Hornsea,
East Yorkshire, and says:
"My real hobby is my writing--as it was my secret pleasure from the age of
nine until I was over thirty when I first attempted to publish. I look
after my chickens, my house and a rather delicate husband; write my books
and try to do my duty to my neighbour!"
=iv=
Back of the new novel by Margaret Culkin Banning, _Spellbinders_, is the
question: Has the vote and its consequent widening of the mental horizon
introduced a brand new element of discord or a factor for mutual support
into modern marriage? The household of the George Flandons was almost
wrecked by it. That his wife should accept the opportunity to play her
part in State and National affairs seemed to George Flandon a desertion of
her real duty.
Mrs. Banning has written a novel which will surprise those who remember
her only by her first novel, _This Marrying_. The surprise will be less
for those who read her second novel, _Half Loaves_, for they must have
been struck by the real understanding she showed of the married
relationship and the marked increase in her skill as a writer.
_Spellbinders_ is the sort of work one looks for after such a good novel
as _Half Loaves_.
Mrs. Banning, who was married in 1914, lives in Duluth. A graduate of
Vassar, her first novel was written in one of Margaret Mayo's cottages at
Harmon, New York. She is of purely Irish ancestry, related to the Plunkett
family which bred both statesmen and revolutionaries for Ireland. On the
other side there was a Colonel Culkin, who, Mrs. Banning says, "came over
at the time of the Revolution but unfortunately fought on the wrong side,
so we forget him and begin our Culkin lineage in this country with the
Culkin who came over at the famous time of the 'potato-rot.'" That would
be the Irish famine of 1846, no doubt.
_Sunny-San_, Onoto Watanna's first novel in six years, has been the signal
for her re-entrance not only into the world of fiction, but the world of
motion pictures and plays. Even before _Sunny-San_ was ready as a book,
the motion picture producers were on the author's track. A large sum was
paid cash down for the picture rights to the novel and then the prospect
of a picture was laid aside while the possibilities of a play were
estimated. These were seen to be exceptionally good. Here was a story of
young American boys travelling in Japan and coming upon a still younger
Japanese girl, threatened with cruelty and unhappiness. The young men
endowed Sunny-San, so to speak, planking down enough money to secure her
protection and education. Thereupon they continued blithely on their
travels and forgot all about her.
Some years later a well-educated, dainty and exceedingly attractive
Japanese girl presents herself on the doorstep of a house in New York
where one of the young men resides. Situation! What shall the young man do
with his charming and unexpected protégée! In view of the prolonged
success of Fay Bainter in the play, _East Is West_, it was obviously the
thing to make a play out of _Sunny-San_. And this, I believe, is being
done as I write. In the meantime Onoto Watanna, who is really Mrs.
Winnifred Reeve, and who lives on a ranch near Calgary, Canada, is very
busy with her Canadian stories which have excited the enthusiasm of
magazine editors. I am confident that she will do a Canadian novel; the
more so because she tells me that, despite the success of _Sunny-San_ and
the enormous success of her earlier Japanese stories, like _A Japanese
Nightingale_, her interest is really centred at present in Canada, its
people and backgrounds.
=v=
Pending Dorothy Speare's second novel, let me suggest that those who have
not done so read her first, _Dancers in the Dark_. That a young woman just
out of Smith College should write this novel, that the novel should then
begin immediately selling at a great rate, and that David Belasco should
demand a play constructed from the novel is altogether a sequence to cause
surprise. I have had letters from older people who said frankly that they
could not express themselves about _Dancers in the Dark_, because it dealt
with a life with which they were utterly unfamiliar--which, in some cases,
they did not know existed. And yet it does exist! The demand for the book,
the avidity with which it has been read and the intemperance with which it
has been discussed testify that in _Dancers in the Dark_ Miss Speare wrote
a book with truth in it. I suppose it might be said of her first
novel--though I should not agree in saying it--that, like F. Scott
Fitzgerald's _This Side of Paradise_, it had every conceivable fault
except the fatal fault; it did not fail to live. The amount of publicity
that this book received was astonishing. I have handled clippings from
newspapers all over the country--and not mere "items" but "spreads" with
pictures--in which the epigrammatic utterances of the characters in
_Dancers_ were reprinted and their truth or falsity debated hotly. Is the
modern girl an "excitement eater"? Does she "live from man to man and
never kill off a man"? There was altogether too much smoke and heat in the
controversy for one to doubt the existence, underneath the surface of Miss
Speare's fiction, of glowing coals. And Miss Speare? Well, it is a fact
that, like her heroine in _Dancers_, she has an exceptional voice; and I
understand that she intends to cultivate the voice and to continue as a
writer, both. That is a very difficult programme to lay out for one's
self, but I really believe her capable of succeeding in both halves of the
programme.
Another distinctly popular novel, _The Moon Out of Reach_, by Margaret
Pedler, is the fruit of a well-developed career as a novelist. _The Hermit
of Far End_, _The House of Dreams Come True_, _The Lamp of Fate_, and _The
Splendid Folly_ were the forerunners of this immediate and distinct
success. Mrs. Pedler is the wife of a sportsman well known in the West of
England, the nearest living descendant of Sir Francis Drake. They have a
lovely home in the country and Mrs. Pedler, besides the joys of her
writing, is a collector of old furniture and china and a devotee of
driving, tennis and swimming. It is interesting that as a girl she studied
at the Royal Academy of Music with a view to being a professional singer.
Marriage diverted her from that, but she still retains her interest in
music; and it is characteristic of such novels as _The Splendid Folly_ and
_The Moon Out of Reach_ that a lyric appearing in the book embodies the
theme of the story. These lyrics of Mrs. Pedler's have mostly been set to
music.
What shall I say about Corra Harris's _The Eyes of Love_ except that it
offers such a study of marriage as only Mrs. Harris puts on paper? Shrewd
and homely wisdom, sympathetic and ironical humour, the insight and the
fundamental experience,--above all, imagination in experience--which made
their first deep and wide impression with the publication of _A Circuit
Rider's Wife_. I open _The Eyes of Love_ at random and come upon such a
passage as this, and then I don't wonder that men as well as women read
Corra Harris and continue to read her:
"Few women are ever related by marriage to the minds of their husbands.
These minds are foreign countries where they discover themselves to be
aliens, speaking another smaller language and practically incapable of
mastering the manners and customs of that place. This is sometimes the
man's fault, because his mind is not a fit place for a nice person like
his wife to dwell, but more frequently it is the wife's fault, who is not
willing to associate intimately with the hardships that inhabit the mind
of a busy man, who has no time to ornament that area with ideas pertaining
to the finer things. So it happens that both of them prefer this divorce,
the man because the woman gets in the way with her scruples and emotions
when he is about to do business without reference to either; the woman
because it is easier to keep on the domestic periphery of her husband,
where she thinks she knows him and is married to him because she knows
what foods he likes, and the people he prefers to have asked to dine when
she entertains, the chair that fits him, the large pillow or the small one
he wants for his tired old head at night, the place where the light must
be when he reads in the evening rather than talk to her, because there is
nothing to talk about, since she is only the wife of his bosom and not of
his head."
=vi=
Phyllis Bottome is just as interesting as her novels. When scarcely more
than a child with large, delightful eyes, she began to write, and
completed at the age of seventeen a novel which Andrew Lang advised an
English publisher to accept. Thereafter she wrote regularly and with
increasing distinction. Ill-health drove her to Switzerland where, living
for some years, she met all kinds of people from all the countries of
Europe and America as well.
It is interesting that her father was an American, although after his
marriage to an Englishwoman, he settled in England. Later Mr. Bottome came
to America and for six years during Phyllis Bottome's childhood he was
rector of Grace Church at Jamaica, New York. Phyllis Bottome is the wife
of A. E. Forbes Dennis, who, recovering from dangerous wounds in the war,
has been serving as passport officer at Vienna. They were married in 1917.
Those who know Phyllis Bottome personally say that the striking thing
about her is the extent of her acquaintance with people of all sorts and
conditions of life and her ready and unfailing sympathy with all kinds of
people. She herself says that she "has had friends who live humdrum and
simple lives and friends whose stories would bring a rush of doubt to the
most credulous believer in fiction." "My friendships have included
workmen, bargees, actresses, clergymen, thieves, scholars, dancers,
soldiers, sailors and even the manager of a bank. It would be true of me
to say that as a human being I prefer life to art, even if it would at the
same time be damning to admit that I know much more about it. I have no
preferences; men, women, children, animals and nature under every aspect
seem to me a mere choice of miracles. I have not perhaps many illusions,
but I have got hold of one or two certainties. I believe in life and I
know that it is very hard."
The hardness of life, its uproar, its agony, its magnificence and its
duty, is the theme of Phyllis Bottome's latest and finest novel. When it
was published, because it was so different from Phyllis Bottome's earlier
work, I tried to draw attention to it by a letter in which I said:
"I don't know whether you read J. C. Snaith's _The Sailor_. People said
Snaith got his suggestion from the life of John Masefield. _The Sailor_
sold many thousands and people recall the book today, years afterward.
But, as an ex-sailor and a few other things, I never found Snaith's 'Enry
'Arper half so convincing as Jim Barton in Phyllis Bottome's new novel,
_The Kingfisher_.
"Jim, a boy of the slums, reaching toward 'that broken image of the mind
of God--human love,' goes pretty deeply into me. Since reading those last
words of the book--'Beauty touched him. It was as if he saw, with a flash
of jewelled wings, a Kingfisher fly home'--I keep going back and rereading
bits....
"Won't you tackle _The Kingfisher_? If you'll read to the bottom of page
51, I'll take a chance beyond that. Read that far and then, if you stop
there, I've no word to say."
Although this letter called for no special reply, I received dozens of
replies promising to read the book and then enthusiastic comments after
having read the book. I do not consider _The Kingfisher_ the greatest book
Phyllis Bottome will write, but it marks an important advance in her work
and it is a novel whose positive merits will last; it will be as moving
and as significant ten years from now as it is today.
=vii=
I come to a group of novels of which the chief aim of all except two is
entertainment. _The_ _Return of Alfred_, by the anonymous author of
_Patricia Brent, Spinster_, is the diverting narrative of a man who found
himself in another man's shoes. What made it particularly difficult was
that the other man had been a very bad egg, indeed. And there was, as
might have been feared (or anticipated), a girl to complicate matters
tremendously.
E. F. Benson's _Peter_ is the story of a young man who made a point of
being different, of keeping his aloofness and paying just the amount of
charm and gaiety required for the dinners and opera seats which London
hostesses so gladly proffered. Then he married Silvia, not for her money
exactly, but he certainly would not have asked her if she hadn't had
money. No wonder E. F. Benson has a liberal and expectant audience! In
_Peter_ he shows an exquisite understanding of the quality of the love
between Peter and his boyish young wife.
A. A. Milne is another name to conjure with among those who love humour
and charm, gentleness and a quiet shafting of the human depths. There is
his novel, _Mr. Pim_. Old Mr. Pim, in his gentle way, shuffled into the
Mardens' charming household. Mr. Pim said a few words and went
absentmindedly away,--leaving Mr. Marden with the devastating knowledge
that his wife was no wife, that her first husband, instead of lying
quietly in his grave in Australia, had just landed in England. In short,
the Mardens had been living in sin for five years! Then Mr. Pim came back
for his forgotten hat and the Marden household was again revolutionised.
_Beauty for Ashes_, by Joan Sutherland, is a story with a more serious
theme. It really raises the question whether a man who has wrongly been
named as co-respondent is in honour bound to marry the defendant. The
affair of Lady Madge with Lord Desmond was an entirely innocent one,
despite what London said. Lady Madge's husband, wrought upon by shame and
anger, began his action for divorce; and Desmond found himself not merely
face to face with dishonour but bound by conventional honour for life to a
girl with whom he had simply been friendly.
William Rose Benét had been known chiefly as a poet until the publication
of his first novel, _The First Person Singular_. The scene of _The First
Person Singular_ shifts between the kinetic panorama of modern New York
and the somewhat stultifying quietude of a small Pennsylvania town. A
mysterious Mrs. Ventress is the centre of its rapidly unfolding series of
peculiar situations. Mrs. Ventress is a puzzle to the townspeople. They
believe odd things about her. The particular family in Tupton with which
she comes in contact is an eccentric one. The father is a recluse--for
reasons. His adopted daughter, Bessie Gedney, is an odd character among
young girls in fiction. Dr. Gedney's real daughter had disappeared years
before. Why? What has become of her? This complicates the mystery.
_The First Person Singular_ is a light novel, avowedly without the heavy
"significance" and desperately drab realism of many modern novels. And yet
it flashes with tragedy and implicates grim spiritual struggle without
tearing any passion to tatters. The author's touch is light, the variety
of his characters furnish him much diversion. The amusing side of each
situation does not escape him. His style has a certain effervescent
quality, but, for all that, the tragic developments of the story are not
shirked.
Another treatment of a problem of marriage, a treatment sympathetic but
robust, is found in the new novel of F. E. Mills Young, _The Stronger
Influence_. Like Miss Mills Young's earlier novels, _Imprudence_ and _The
Almonds of Life_, the scene of _The Stronger Influence_ is British Africa.
The story is of the choice confronting a girl upon whom two men have a
vital claim.
To be somebody is more ethical than to serve somebody. The individual has
not only a right but an obligation to sacrifice family entanglements in
the cause of a necessary personal independence. This is the attitude
expressed in Richard Blaker's novel, _The Voice in the Wilderness_. The
story centres around the figure of Charles Petrie, popular playwright in
London but known in Pelchester merely as a shabby fellow and to his family
a singularly sarcastic and annoying father. Sarcasm was Petrie's one
defence against the limp weight that was Mrs. Petrie His children would
have been astonished to hear him called a charming man of the world, yet
he was. It is probable that he never would have come out into the open to
combat if he hadn't been moved constantly to interfere and save his
daughter Cynthia from offering herself as a willing sacrifice to her
mother. Richard Blaker is new to America, a novelist of acutely pointed
characterisations and careful atmosphere.
=viii=
_Nêne_, the work of an unknown French school teacher, a novel
distinguished in France by the award of the Goncourt Prize as the most
distinguished French novel of the year 1920, had sold at this writing
400,000 copies in France. Three months after publication, it had sold in
this country less than 3,000 copies.
I am glad to say that it was sufficient to draw to the attention of
Americans this deplorable discrepancy to arouse interest in the novel.
People of so divergent tastes as William Lyon Phelps, Corra Harris, Ralph
Connor, Walter Prichard Eaton, Mary Johnston, Dorothy Speare and Richard
LeGallienne have been at pains to express the feeling to which _Nêne_ has
stirred them. I have not space to quote them all, and so select as typical
the comment of Walter Prichard Eaton:
"I read _Nêne_ with great interest, especially because of its relation to
_Maria Chapdelaine_. It seems to me the two books came out most happily
together. _Maria Chapdelaine_ gives us the French peasant in the new
world, touched with the pioneer spirit, and though close to the soil in
constant battle with nature, somehow always master of his fate. _Nêne_
gives us this same racial stock, again close to the soil, but an old-world
soil its fathers worked, and the peasant here seems ringed around with
those old ghosts, their prejudices and their passions. I have seldom read
any book which seemed to me so unerringly to capture the enveloping
atmosphere of place and tradition, as it conditions the lives of people,
and yet to do it so (apparently) artlessly. This struck me so forcibly
that it was not till later I began to realise with a sigh--if one himself
is a writer, a sigh of envy--that _Nêne_ has a directness, a simplicity, a
principle of internal growth or dramatic life of its own, which, alas!
most of us are incapable of attaining."
The author of _Carnival_, _Sinister Street_, _Plasher's Mead_; of those
highly comedic novels, _Poor Relations_ and _Rich Relatives_; of other and
still more diverse fiction, Compton Mackenzie, has turned to a new task.
His fine novel, _The Altar Steps_, concerns itself with a young priest of
the Church of England. We live in the England of Lytton Strachey's _Queen
Victoria_--the England of 1880 to the close of the Boer War--as we follow
Mark Lidderdale from boyhood to his ordination. _The Altar Steps_, it is
known will be followed by a novel probably to be called _The Parson's
Progress_. Evidently Mr. Mackenzie is bent upon a fictional study of the
whole problem of the Church of England in relation to our times, and
particularly the position of the Catholic party in the Church.
"Simon Pure," who writes the monthly letter from London appearing in The
Bookman (and whose identity is a well-known secret!) thus describes, in
The Bookman for September, 1922, a visit to Mr. Mackenzie:
"I have recently seen the author of _The Altar Steps_ upon his native
heath._ The Altar Steps_ is the latest work of Compton Mackenzie, and it
has done something to rehabilitate him with the critics. The press has
been less fiercely adverse than usual to the author. He is supposed to
have come back to the fold of the 'serious' writers, and so the fatted
calf has been slain for him. We shall see. My own impression is that
Mackenzie is a humorous writer, and that the wiseacres who want the novel
to be 'serious' are barking up the wrong tree. At any rate, there the book
is, and it is admitted to be a good book by all who have been condemning
Mackenzie as a trifler; and Mackenzie is going on with his sequel to it in
the pleasant land of Italy. I did not see him in Italy, but in Herm, one
of the minor Channel Islands. It took me a night to reach the place--a
night of fog and fog-signals--a night of mystery, with the moon full and
the water shrouded--and morning found the fog abruptly lifted, and the
islands before our eyes. They glittered under a brilliant sun. There came
hurried disembarking, a transference (for me, and after breakfast) to a
small boat called, by the owner's pleasantry, 'Watch Me' (Compton
Mackenzie), and then a fine sail (per motor) to Herm. I said to the
skipper that I supposed there must be many dangerous submerged rocks. 'My
dear fellow!' exclaimed the skipper, driven to familiarity by my naïveté.
And with that we reached the island. Upon the end of a pier stood a tall
figure, solitary. 'My host!' thought I. Not so. Merely an advance guard:
his engineer. We greeted--my reception being that of some foreign
potentate--and I was led up a fine winding road that made me think of
Samoa and Vailima and all the beauties of the South Seas. Upon the road
came another figure--this time a young man who made a friend of me at a
glance. He now took me in hand. Together we made the rest of the journey
along this beautiful road, and to the cottage of residence. I entered.
There was a scramble. At last I met my host, who leapt from bed to welcome
me!
"From that moment my holiday was delightful. The island is really
magnificent. Short of a stream, it has everything one could wish for in
such a place. It has cliffs, a wood, a common fields under cultivation,
fields used as pasture, caves, shell beaches, several empty cottages. Its
bird life is wealthy in cuckoos and other magic-bringers; its flowers have
extraordinary interest; dogs and cattle and horses give domestic life, and
a boat or two may be used for excursions to Jethou, a smaller island near
by. And Mackenzie has this ideal place to live in for as much of the year
as he likes. None may gather there without his permission. He is the lord
of the manor, and his boundaries are the sea and the sky. We walked about
the islands, and saw their beauties, accompanied by a big dog--a Great
Dane--which coursed rabbits and lay like a dead fish in the bottom of a
small boat. And as each marvel of the little paradise presented itself, I
became more and more filled with that wicked thing, envy. But I believe
envy does not make much progress when the owner of the desired object so
evidently appreciates it with more gusto even than the envious one. Reason
is against envy in such a case. To have said, 'He doesn't appreciate it'
would have been a lie so manifest that it did not even occur to me. He
does. That is the secret of Mackenzie's personal ability to charm. He is
filled with vitality, but he is also filled with the power to take extreme
delight in the delight of others and to better it. Moreover, he gives one
the impression of understanding islands. Herm has been in his possession
for something more than a year, and he has lived there continuously all
that time (except for two or three visits to London, of short duration).
It has been in all his thoughts. He has seen it as a whole. He knows it
from end to end, its rocks, its birds, its trees and flowers and paths.
What wonder that his health is magnificent, his spirits high! What wonder
the critics have seen fit to praise _The Altar Steps_ as they have not
praised anything of Mackenzie's for years? If they had seen Herm, they
could have done nothing at all but praise without reserve."