GODS OF MODERN GRUB STREET
[Illustration: THOMAS HARDY]
GODS OF
MODERN GRUB STREET
_IMPRESSIONS OF CONTEMPORARY
AUTHORS_
BY
A. ST. JOHN ADCOCK
_WITH THIRTY-TWO PORTRAITS
AFTER PHOTOGRAPHS BY_
E. O. HOPPÉ
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
MCMXXIII
_Copyright, 1923, by_
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
_All Rights Reserved_
_Printed in the United States of America_
CONTENTS
PAGE
THOMAS HARDY 3
HILAIRE BELLOC 13
ARNOLD BENNETT 23
JOHN DAVYS BERESFORD 33
JOHN BUCHAN 43
DONN BYRNE 53
WILLIAM HENRY DAVIES 63
WALTER DE LA MARE 73
SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE 83
JOHN DRINKWATER 93
JEFFERY FARNOL 103
JOHN GALSWORTHY 113
SIR ANTHONY HOPE HAWKINS 123
ARTHUR STUART MENTETH HUTCHINSON 133
SHEILA KAYE-SMITH 143
RUDYARD KIPLING 153
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE 163
STEPHEN MCKENNA 173
COMPTON MACKENZIE 183
JOHN MASEFIELD 193
ALFRED EDWARD WOODLEY MASON 203
WILLIAM SOMERSET MAUGHAM 213
WILLIAM BABINGTON MAXWELL 223
LEONARD MERRICK 233
ALAN ALEXANDER MILNE 243
ALFRED NOYES 253
E. PHILLIPS OPPENHEIM 263
MAY SINCLAIR 273
FRANK SWINNERTON 283
HUGH WALPOLE 293
HERBERT GEORGE WELLS 303
ISRAEL ZANGWILL 313
INDEX 323
ILLUSTRATIONS
Thomas Hardy _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Hilaire Belloc 12
Arnold Bennett 22
John Davys Beresford 32
John Buchan 42
Donn Byrne 52
William Henry Davies 62
Walter de la Mare 72
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 82
John Drinkwater 92
Jeffery Farnol 102
John Galsworthy 112
Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins 122
Arthur Stuart Menteth Hutchinson 132
Sheila Kaye-Smith 142
Rudyard Kipling 152
William John Locke 162
Stephen McKenna 172
Compton Mackenzie 182
John Masefield 192
Alfred Edward Woodley Mason 202
William Somerset Maugham 212
William Babington Maxwell 222
Leonard Merrick 232
Alan Alexander Milne 242
Alfred Noyes 252
E. Phillips Oppenheim 262
May Sinclair 272
Frank Swinnerton 282
Hugh Walpole 292
Herbert George Wells 302
Israel Zangwill 312
THOMAS HARDY
Those who dissent from Byron’s _dictum_ that Keats was “snuffed out by
an article” usually add that no author was ever killed by criticism;
yet there seems little doubt that the critics killed Thomas Hardy
the novelist, and our only consolation is that from the ashes of the
novelist, phœnix-like rose Thomas Hardy the Poet.
As a novelist, Hardy began and finished his career in the days of
Victoria, but though he has only been asserting himself as a poet
since then, his earliest verse was written in the sixties; his first
collection of poetry, the “Wessex Poems,” appeared in 1898, and his
second in the closing year of the Queen’s reign. These facts should
give us pause when we are disposed to sneer again at Victorian
literature. Even the youngest scribe among us is constrained to
grant the greatness of this living Victorian, so if we insist that
the Victorians are over-rated we imply some disparagement of their
successors, who have admittedly produced no novelists that rank so high
as Hardy and few poets, if any, that rank higher.
Born at Upper Bockhampton, a village near Dorchester, on the 2nd June,
1840, Mr. Hardy passed his childhood and youth amid the scenes and
people that were, in due season, to serve as material for his stories
and poems. At seventeen a natural bent drew him to choose architecture
as a profession, and he studied first under an ecclesiastical architect
in Dorchester, then, three years later, in London, under Sir Arthur
Blomfield, proving his efficiency by winning the Tite prize for
architectural design, and the Institute of British Architects’ prize
and medal for an essay on Colored and Terra Cotta Architecture.
But he was already finding himself and realizing that the work he was
born to do was not such as could be materialized in brick and stone. He
had been writing verse in his leisure and, in his twenties, “practised
the writing of poetry” for five years with characteristic thoroughness;
but, recognizing perhaps that it was not to be taken seriously as a
means of livelihood, he presently abandoned that art; to resume it
triumphantly when he was nearing sixty.
His first published prose was a light, humorous sketch of “How I Built
Myself a House,” which appeared in _Chambers’s Journal_ for March,
1865. In 1871 came his first novel, “Desperate Remedies,” a story more
of plot and sensation than of character, which met with no particular
success. Next year, however, Thomas Hardy entered into his kingdom with
that “rural painting of the Dutch school,” “Under the Greenwood Tree,”
a delightful, realistic prose pastoral that has more of charm and
tenderness than any other of his tales, except “The Trumpet Major.” The
critics recognized its quality and, without making a noise, it found
favor with the public. What we now know as the distinctive Hardy touch
is in its sketches of country life and subtle revelations of rural
character, in its deliberate precision of style, its naked realism, its
humor and quiet irony; and if the realism was to grow sterner, as he
went on, the irony to be edged with bitterness, his large toleration
of human error, his pity of human weakness, were to broaden and deepen
with the passing of the years.
It is said that Frederick Greenwood, then editing the _Cornhill_,
picked up a copy of “Under the Greenwood Tree” on a railway bookstall
and, reading it, was moved to commission the author to write him a
serial; and when “Far from the Madding Crowd” appeared anonymously in
_Cornhill_ its intimate acquaintance with rural England misled the
knowing ones into ascribing it to George Eliot--an amazing deduction,
seeing that it has nothing in common with George Eliot, either in
manner or design.
“A Pair of Blue Eyes” had preceded “Far From the Madding Crowd,” and
“The Hand of Ethelberta” followed it; then, in 1878, came “The Return
of the Native,” which, with “The Mayor of Casterbridge” and “The
Woodlanders,” stood as Hardy’s highest achievements until, in 1891 and
1896, “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” and “Jude the Obscure” went a flight
beyond any that had gone before them and placed him incontestibly with
the world’s greatest novelists.
Soon after Hardy had definitely turned from architecture to literature
he went back to Wessex, where he lived successively at Cranbourne,
Sturminster, and Wimborne, until in 1885 he removed to Max Gate,
Dorchester, which has been his home ever since. And through all those
years, instead of going far afield in search of inspiration, he
recreated the ancient realm of the West Saxons and found a whole world
and all the hopes, ambitions, joys, loves, follies, hatreds--all the
best and all the worst of all humanity within its borders. The magic of
his genius has enriched the hundred and forty square miles of Wessex,
which stretches from the Bristol Channel across Somerset, Devon,
Dorset, Wilts and Hampshire to the English Channel, with imaginary
associations that are as living and abiding, as inevitably part of it
now, as are the facts of its authentic history.
A grim, stoical philosophy of life is implicit alike in Hardy’s poetry
and stories, giving a strange consistency to all he has written, so
that his books are joined each to each by a religion of nature that is
in itself a natural piety. He sees men and women neither as masters
of their fate nor as wards of a beneficent deity, but as “Time’s
laughing-stocks” victims of heredity and environment, the helpless
sport of circumstance, playing out little comedies or stumbling into
tragedies shaped for them inexorably by some blind, creative spirit
of the Universe that is indifferent to their misery or happiness and
as powerless to prolong the one as to avert the other. The earlier
pastoral comedies and tragi-comedies have their roots in this belief,
which reaches its most terribly beautiful expression in the epic
tragedies of “Tess” and “Jude the Obscure.”
I am old enough to remember the clash of opinions over the tragic
figure of Tess and the author’s presentation of her as “a pure woman”;
how there were protests from pulpits; how the critics mitigated their
praise of Hardy’s art with reproof of his ethics; but the story gripped
the imagination of the public, and time has brought not a few of the
moralists round to a recognition that if Hardy’s sense of morality was
less conventional, it was also something nobler, more fundamental than
their own. He will not accept the dogmas of orthodox respectability,
but looks beyond the accidents of circumstance and conduct to the real
good or evil that is in the human heart that wrongs or is wronged. The
same passion for truth at all costs underlies his stark, uncompromising
realism and his gospel of disillusion, his vision of men as puppets
working out a destiny they cannot control. If he has, therefore,
little faith in humanity, he has infinite compassion for it, and
infinite pardon. The irony of his stories is the irony he finds in
life itself, and as true to human experience as are the humor and the
pathos of them. Other eyes, another temperament, may read a different
interpretation of it all; he has honestly and courageously given us his
own.
The outcry against “Tess” was mild compared to the babble of prudish
censure with which “Jude the Obscure” was received in many quarters,
and it is small wonder that these criticisms goaded Hardy to a
resolve that he would write no more novels for a world that could
so misunderstand his purposes and misconstrue his teachings. “The
Well-Beloved,” though it appeared a year later than “Jude,” had been
written and published serially five years before, and it was with
“Jude,” when his power was at its zenith, that Thomas Hardy wrote finis
to his work as a novelist.
Happily his adherence to this resolve drove him back on the art he had
abjured in his youth, and the last quarter of a century has yielded
some half dozen books of his poems that we would not willingly have
lost. Above all, it has yielded that stupendous chronicle-drama of the
Napoleonic wars, “The Dynasts,” which is sometimes acclaimed as the
highest and mightiest effort of his genius. This drama, and his ballads
and lyrics, often too overweighted with thought to have any beat of
wings in them, are at one with his novels in the sincere, sombre
philosophy of life that inspires them, the darkling imagination with
which it is bodied forth, and the brooding, forceful personality which
speaks unmistakably through all.
Hardy, is, and will remain, a great and lonely figure in our
literature. It is possible to trace the descent of almost every other
writer, to name the artistic influences that went to his making, but
Hardy is without literary ancestry; Dickens and Thackeray, Tennyson
and Browning, had forerunners, and have left successors. We know, as a
matter of fact, what porridge John Keats had, but we do not know that
of Hardy. Like every master, he unwittingly founded a school, but none
of his imitators could imitate him except superficially, and already
the scholars are going home and the master will presently be alone
in his place apart. His style is peculiarly his own; as novelist and
poet he has worked always within his own conception of the universe as
consistently as he has worked within the scope and bounds of his own
kingdom of Wessex, and “within that circle none durst walk but he.”
HILAIRE BELLOC
[Illustration: HILAIRE BELLOC]
So long and persistently has Hilaire Belloc been associated in
the public mind with G. K. Chesterton--one ingenious jester has
even linked and locked them together in an easy combination as the
Chesterbelloc--that quite a number of people now have a vague idea that
they are inseparables, collaborators, a sort of literary Siamese twins
like Beaumont and Fletcher or Erckmann-Chatrian; and the fact that one
appears in this volume without the other may occasion some surprise.
Let it be confessed at once that Chesterton’s omission from this
gallery is significant only of his failure--not in modern letters, but
to keep any appointments to sit for his photograph.
I regret his absence the less since it may serve as a mute protest
against the practice of always bracketing his name with that of Hilaire
Belloc. The magic influence of Belloc which is supposed to have colored
so many of G. K. C.’s views and opinions and even to have drawn him at
length into the Roman Catholic community, must be little but legendary
or evidence of it would be apparent in his writings, and it is no more
traceable there than the influence of Chesterton is to be found in
Belloc’s books. They share a dislike of Jews, which nearly equals that
of William Bailey in “Mr. Clutterbuck’s Election”; Chesterton has
illustrated some of Belloc’s stories, and Belloc being an artist, too,
has made charming illustrations for one of his own travel volumes. All
the same, there is no more real likeness between them than there was
between Dickens and Thackeray, or Tennyson and Browning, who were also,
and are to some extent still, carelessly driven in double harness.
Belloc’s humor and irony are hard, often bitter; they have none of
the geniality, nimbleness, perverse fantasy of Chesterton’s. The one
has a profound respect for fact and detail, and learns by carefully
examining all the mechanical apparatus of life scientifically through
a microscope; while the other has small reverence for facts as such,
looks on life with the poet’s rather than with the student’s eye, and
sees it by lightning-flashes of intuition. When Chesterton wrote his
History of England he put no dates in it; he felt that dates were of
no consequence to the story; but Belloc has laid it down that, though
the human motive is the prime factor in history, “the external actions
of men, the sequence in dates and hours of such actions, and their
material conditions and environments must be strictly and accurately
acquired.” There is no need to labor the argument. “The Napoleon of
Notting Hill” is not more unlike “Emanuel Burden” than their two
authors are unlike each other, individually and in what they have
written.
Born at St. Cloud in 1870, Belloc was the son of a French barrister;
his mother, an Englishwoman, was the grand-daughter of Joseph
Priestley, the famous scientist and Unitarian divine. She brought him
over to England after the death of his father, and they made their home
in Sussex, the country that has long since taken hold on his affections
and inspired the best of his poems. I don’t know when he was “living
in the Midlands,” or thereabouts except while he was at Oxford, and
earlier when he was a schoolboy at the Birmingham Oratory and came
under the spell of Cardinal Newman, and I don’t know when he wrote “The
South Country,” but not even Kipling has crowned Sussex more splendidly
than he crowns it in that vigorous and poignant lyric--
“When I am living in the Midlands,
That are sodden and unkind,
I light my lamp in the evening;
My work is left behind;
And the great hills of the South Country
Come back into my mind.
The great hills of the South Country
They stand along the sea,
And it’s there, walking in the high woods,
That I could wish to be,
And the men that were boys when I was a boy
Walking along with me....
If ever I become a rich man,
Or if ever I grow to be old,
I will build a house with a deep thatch
To shelter me from the cold,
And there shall the Sussex songs be sung
And the story of Sussex told.
I will hold my house in the high wood,
Within a walk of the sea,
And the men that were boys when I was a boy
Shall sit and drink with me.”
Nowadays, he has to some extent realized that desire, for he is settled
at Horsham, in Sussex again, if not within a walk of the sea. But
we are skipping too much, and will go back and attend to our proper
historical “sequence in dates.” His schooldays over, he accepted the
duties of his French citizenship and served his due term in the Army of
France, as driver in an Artillery regiment. These military obligations
discharged, he returned to England, went to Oxford, and matriculated at
Balliol. He ran a dazzling career at Oxford, working assiduously as a
student, carrying off the Brackenbury Scholarship and a First Class in
Honor History Schools, and at the same time reveled joyously with the
robust, gloried in riding and swimming and coruscated brilliantly in
the Union debates. His vivid, dominating personality seems to have made
itself felt among his young contemporaries there as it has since made
itself felt in the larger worlds of literature and politics; though in
those larger worlds his recognition and his achievements have never, so
far, been quite commensurate with his extraordinary abilities or the
tradition of power that has gathered about his name. In literature,
high as he stands, his fame is less than that of men who have not
a tithe of his capacity, and in politics he remains a voice crying
in the wilderness, a leader with no effective following. Perhaps in
politics his fierce sincerity drives him into tolerance, he burns to
do the impossible and change human nature at a stroke, and is too far
ahead of his time for those he would lead to keep pace with him. And
perhaps in literature he lacks some gift of concentration, dissipates
his energies over too many fields, and is too much addicted to the use
of irony, which it has been said, not without reason, is regarded with
suspicion in this country and never understood. Swift is admittedly our
supreme master in that art, and there is nothing more ironic in his
most scathingly ironical work, “Gulliver’s Travels,” than the fact that
Gulliver is only popular as an innocently amusing book for children.
Belloc began quietly enough, in 1895, with a little unimportant book of
“Verses and Sonnets.” He followed this in the next four years with four
delightfully, irresponsibly absurd books of verses and pictures such
as “The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts,” “More Beasts for Worse Children,”
publishing almost simultaneously in 1899 “The Moral Alphabet” and his
notable French Revolution study of “Danton.” In a later year he gave us
simultaneously the caustic, frivolous “Lambkin’s Remains” and his book
on “Paris,” and followed it with his able monograph on “Robespierre.”
It was less unsettling, no doubt, when “Caliban’s Guide to Letters” was
closely succeeded by the first and most powerful of his ironic novels,
“Emanuel Burden,” but serious people have never known where to have
him. He collects his essays under such careless titles as “On Nothing,”
“On Anything,” “This and That,” or simply “On”; and the same year that
found him collaborating with Cecil Chesterton in a bitter attack on
“The Party System,” found him collaborating with Lord Basil Blackwood
in the farcical “More Peers,” and issuing acute technical expositions
of the battles of Blenheim and Malplaquet.
His novels, “Emanuel Burden,” “Mr. Clutterbuck’s Election,” “A Change
in the Cabinet,” “The Mercy of Allah,” and the rest, satirize the
chicanery and humbug rampant in modern commerce, finance, politics, and
general society, and are too much in earnest to attempt to tickle the
ears of the groundlings.
For four years, in the first decade of the century, Belloc sat in
Parliament as Member for Salford, but the tricks, hypocrisies,
insincerities of the politicians disgusted and exasperated him; he
was hampered and suppressed in the House by its archaic forms, and
instead of staying there stubbornly to leaven the unholy lump he came
wrathfully out, washing his hands of it, to attack the Party system
in the Press, and inaugurate _The Witness_ in which he proceeded to
express himself on the iniquities of public life forcefully and with
devastating candor.
No journalist wielded a more potent pen than he through the dark
years of the war. His articles in _Land and Water_ recording the
various phases of the conflict, criticizing the conduct of campaigns,
explaining their course and forecasting developments drew thousands
of readers to sit every week at his feet, and were recognized as the
cleverest, most searching, most informing of all the many periodical
reviews of the war that were then current. That his prophecies were
not always fulfilled meant only that, like all prophets, he was not
infallible. His vision, his intimate knowledge of strategy, his mastery
of the technique of war were amazing--yet not so amazing when you
remember his service in the French Army and that he comes of a race
of soldiers. One of his mother’s forbears was an officer in the Irish
Brigade that fought for France at Fontenoy, and four of his father’s
uncles were among Napoleon’s generals, one of them falling at the head
of his charging troops at Waterloo. It were but natural he should
derive from such stock not merely a love of things military but that
ebullient, overpowering personality which many who come in contact with
him find irresistible.
As poet, he has written three or four things that will remain immortal
in anthologies; as novelist, he has a select niche to himself; “The
Girondin” indicates what he might have become as a sheer romantist, but
he did not pursue that vein; his books of travel, particularly “The
Path to Rome” and “Esto Perpetua,” are unsurpassed in their kind by
any living traveler; as historian, essayist, journalist, he ranks with
the highest of his contemporaries; nevertheless, you are left with a
feeling that the man himself is greater than anything he has done. You
feel that he has been deftly modeling a motley miscellany of statuettes
when he might have been carving a statue; and the only consolation is
that some of the statuettes are infinitely finer than are many statues,
and that, anyhow, he has given, and obviously taken delight in the
making of them.
ARNOLD BENNETT
[Illustration: ARNOLD BENNETT]
If his critics are inclined to write Arnold Bennett down as a man of
great talent instead of as a man of genius, he is himself to blame for
that. He has not grown long hair, nor worn eccentric hats and ties,
not cultivated anything of the unusual appearance and manner that
are vulgarly supposed to denote genius. In his robust, commonsense
conception of the literary character, as well as in certain aspects of
his work, he has affinities with Anthony Trollope.
Trollope used to laugh at the very idea of inspiration; he took to
letters as sedulously and systematically as other men take to farming
or shopkeeping, wrote regularly for three or four hours a day, whether
he was well or ill, at home or abroad, doing in those hours always the
same number of words, and keeping his watch on the table beside him to
regulate his rate of production. He was intolerant of the suggestion
that genius is a mysterious power which controls a man, instead of
being controlled by him, that
“the spirit bloweth, and is still,”
and the author is dependent on such vagrant moods, and he justified his
opinions and his practices by becoming one of the half dozen greater
Victorian novelists.
I do not say that Arnold Bennett holds exactly the same beliefs and
works in the same mechanical fashion, but that his literary outlook
is as practical and business-like is apparent from “The Truth about
an Author,” from “The Author’s Craft,” “Literary Taste,” and other
of those pocket philosophies that he wrote in the days when he was
pot-boiling, and also from the success with which, in the course of his
career, he has put his own precepts into practice.
The author who is reared in an artistic atmosphere, free from monetary
embarrassments, with social influence enough to smooth his road and
open doors to him, seldom acquires any profound knowledge of life
or develops any remarkable quality. But Bennett had none of these
disadvantages. Nor was he an infant phenomenon, rushing into print
before he was out of his teens; he took his time, and lived awhile
before he began to write about life, and did not adopt literature as
a means of livelihood until he had sensibly made up his mind what he
wanted to do and that he could do it. He was employed in a lawyer’s
office till he was twenty-six, and had turned thirty when he published
his first novel, “A Man from the North.” Meanwhile, he had been writing
stories and articles experimentally, and, having proved his capacity
by selling a sufficient proportion of these to various periodicals,
he threw up the law to go as assistant editor, and afterwards became
editor, of a magazine for women--which may, in a measure, account
for his somewhat cynical views on love and marriage and the rather
pontifical cocksureness with which he often delivers himself on those
subjects.
In 1900 he emancipated himself from the editorial chair and withdrew
into the country to live quietly and economically and devote himself
to ambitions that he knew he could realize. He had tried his strength
in “A Man from the North,” and settled down now, deliberately and
confidently, to become a novelist and a dramatist; he was out for
success in both callings, and did not mean to be long about getting it,
if not with the highest type of work, then with the most popular. For
he was too eminently practical to have artistic scruples against giving
the public what it wanted if by so doing he might get into a position
for giving it what he wanted it to have. He expresses the sanest,
healthfulest scorn for the superior but unsaleable author who cries
sour grapes and pretends to a preference for an audience fit though few.
“I can divide all the imaginative authors I have ever met,” he has
written, “into two classes--those who admitted and sometimes proclaimed
loudly that they desired popularity; and those who expressed a noble
scorn or a gentle contempt for popularity. The latter, however, always
failed to conceal their envy of popular authors, and this envy was a
phenomenon whose truculent bitterness could not be surpassed even in
political or religious life. And indeed, since the object of the artist
is to share his emotions with others, it would be strange if the
normal artist spurned popularity in order to keep his emotions as much
as possible to himself. An enormous amount of dishonest nonsense has
been and will be written by uncreative critics, of course in the higher
interests of creative authors, about popularity and the proper attitude
of the artist thereto. But possibly the attitude of a first-class
artist himself may prove a more valuable guide.” And he proceeds to
show from his letters how keenly Meredith desired to be popular, and
praises him for compromising with circumstance and turning from the
writing of poetry that did not pay to the writing of prose in the hope
that it would. I doubt whether he would sympathize with any man who
starved for art’s sake when he might have earned good bread and meat in
another calling. The author should write for success, for popularity;
that is his creed: “he owes the practice of elementary commonsense to
himself, to his work, and to his profession at large.”
Bennett was born in 1887, and not for nothing was he born at Hanley,
one of the Five Towns of Staffordshire that he has made famous in
his best stories--a somber, busy, smoky place bristling with factory
chimneys and noted for its potteries. How susceptible he was to the
spell of it, how it made him its own, and how vividly he remembers
traits and idiosyncrasies of local character and all the trivial detail
in the furnishing of its houses and the manners and customs of its
Victorian home-life are evident from his books. He came to London with
the acute commonsense, the mother wit, the shrewd business instinct
and energy of the Hanley manufacturer as inevitably in his blood as if
he had breathed them in with his native air, and he adapted himself to
the manufacture of literature as industriously and straightforwardly
as any of his equally but differently competent fellow-townsmen could
give themselves to the manufacture of pottery. He worked with his
imagination as they worked with their clay; and it was essential with
him, as with them, that the goods he produced should be marketable.
There is always a public for a good story of mystery and sensation so,
in those days when he was feeling his way, he wrote “The Grand Babylon
Hotel,” and did it so thoroughly, so efficiently that it was one of the
cleverest and most original, no less than one of the most successful
things of its kind. In the same year he published “Anna of the Five
Towns,” which was less popular but remains among the best six of his
finer realistic tales of his own people. He followed this with three
or four able enough novels of lesser note; with a wholly admirable
collection of short stories, “The Grim Smile of the Five Towns”; was
busy with those astute, provocative pot-boiling pocket-philosophies,
“Journalism for Women,” “How to Become an Author,” “How to Live on
Twenty-Four Hours a Day,” and the rest; writing dramatic criticisms;
plays, such as “Cupid and Commonsense,” “What the Public Wants”; and,
over the signature of “Jacob Tonson,” one of the most brilliant and
entertaining of weekly literary causeries.
Then, in 1908, he turned out another romance of mystery and sensation,
“Buried Alive,” and in the same year published “The Old Wives’
Tale,” perhaps the greatest of his books, and one that ranked him
unquestionably with the leading novelists of his time. A year later
came “Clayhanger,” the first volume in the trilogy which was continued,
in 1911, with “Hilda Lessways,” and completed, after a delay of five
years, with “They Twain.” This trilogy, with “The Old Wives’ Tale,”
and the much more recent “Mr. Prohack,” are Arnold Bennett’s highest
achievements in fiction. The first four are stories of disillusion;
the romance of them is the drab, poignant romance of unideal love and
disappointed marriage, and the humor of them is sharply edged with
irony and satire. In “Mr. Prohack” Bennett returns to the more genial
mood of “The Card” (1911). Prohack is a delightful, almost a lovable
creation, and the Card, with his dry, dour humor, for all his practical
hardheadedness, is scarcely less so.
Unlike most men, who set out to do one thing and end by doing another,
Bennett laid down the plan of his career and has carried it out
triumphantly. He is a popular novelist, but, though he cheerfully
stooped to conquer and did a lot of miscellaneous writing by the
way, while he was building his reputation, the novels that have made
him popular are among the masterpieces of latter-day realistic art.
And with “Milestones” (in collaboration with Edward Knoblauch) and
“The Great Adventure,” to say nothing of his seven or eight other
plays, he is a successful dramatist. His versatility is as amazing
as his industry. It may be all a matter of talent and commonsense
perseverance but he seems to do whatever he chooses with an ease
and a brilliance that is very like genius. His list of nearly sixty
volumes includes essays, dramas, short stories, several kinds of novel,
books of criticism and of travel; he paints deftly and charmingly in
water-colors; and if he has written no poetry it is probably because he
is too practical to trifle with what is so notoriously unprofitable,
for if he decided to write some you may depend upon it he could. He
has analyzed “Mental Efficiency” and “The Human Machine” in two of his
little books of essays, and illustrated both in his life.
JOHN DAVYS BERESFORD
[Illustration: JOHN DAVYS BERESFORD]
There seems to be something in the atmosphere of the manse and the
vicarage that has a notable effect of developing in many who breathe
it a capacity for writing fiction. Not a few authors have been cradled
into literature by the Law, Medicine and the Army, but as a literary
incubator no profession can vie with the Church. If it has produced no
poet of the highest rank, it gave us Donne, Herrick, Herbert, Crashaw,
Young, Crabbe, and a multitude of lesser note, and if it has yielded
no greater novelists than Sterne and Kingsley, it has fostered a vast
number that have, in their day, made up in popularity for what they
lacked in genius.
Moreover, when the parsons themselves have proved immune to that
peculiarity of the clerical environment, it has wrought magically upon
their children, and an even longer list could be made, including such
great names as Goldsmith, Jane Austen and the Brontes, of the sons and
daughters of parsons who have done good or indifferent work as poets or
as novelists.
Most of the novelists moulded by such early influences have leaned
rather to ideal or to glamorously or grimly romantic than to plainly
realistic interpretations of life and character, and J. D. Beresford
is so seldom romantic, or idealistic, so often realistically true
to secular and unregenerate aspects of human nature, that, if he did
not draw his clerical characters with such evident inside knowledge,
you would not suspect that in his beginnings he had been subject
to the limitations and repressions that necessarily obtain in an
ecclesiastical household.
He was born in Castor rectory, and his father was a minor canon and
precentor of Peterborough Cathedral, and, if it pleases you, you can
play with a theory that the stark realism with which he handles the
facts, even the uglier facts, of modern life is either a reaction from
the narrow horizon that cramped his youthful days, or that the outlook
of the paternal rectory was broader than the outlook of rectories
usually is.
After an education at Oundel, and at King’s School, Peterborough, he
was apprenticed, first to an architect in the country, then to one
in London; but before long he abandoned architecture to go into an
insurance office, and left that to take up a post with W. H. Smith &
Son, in the Strand where he became a sort of advertising expert and was
placed at the head of a bookselling department with a group of country
travellers under his control.
Before he was half-way through his teens, he had been writing stories
which were not published and can never now be brought against him,
for he is shrewdly self-critical and all that juvenilia has been
ruthlessly destroyed. He was contributing to _Punch_ in 1908, and
a little later had become a reviewer on the staff of that late and
much lamented evening paper the _Westminster Gazette_. Among the
destroyed juvenilia was more than one novel. In what leisure he could
get from his advertising and reviewing, he was busy on another which
was not destined to that inglorious end. For though “Jacob Stahl” was
rejected by the first prominent publisher to whom it was offered,
because, strangely enough, he considered it old-fashioned, it was
promptly accepted by the second, and its publication in 1911 was the
real beginning of Beresford’s literary career. Had it been really
old-fashioned, it would have delighted the orthodox reading public,
which is always the majority, but its appeal was rather to the new
and more advanced race of readers, and though its sales were not
astonishing, its mature narrative skill and sound literary qualities
were unhesitatingly recognized by the discriminating; it gave him
a reputation, and has held its ground and gone on selling steadily
ever since. One felt the restrained power of the book, alike in the
narrative and in the intimate realization of character; its careful
artistry did not bid for popularity, but it ranked its author, at once,
as a novelist who was considerably more than the mere teller of a
readable tale.
“Jacob Stahl” was the first volume in a trilogy (the other two
being “A Candidate for Truth” and “The Invisible Event”)--a trilogy
which unfolds a story of common life that might easily have been
throbbing with sentiment and noisy with melodramatic sensation; in
Mr. Beresford’s reticent hands, however, it is never overcharged
with either, but is touched only with the natural emotions, subdued
excitements, unexaggerated poignancies of feeling that are experienced
by such men and women as we know in the world as we know it.
Meredith, in “The Invisible Event,” rather grudgingly praises Jacob
Stahl’s first novel, “John Tristram,” as good realistic fiction of
the school of Madame Bovary. “It’s a recognized school,” Meredith
continued. “I don’t quite know any one in England who’s doing it, but
it’s recognized in France, of course. I don’t quite know how to define
it, but perhaps the main distinction is in the choice of the typical
incidents and emotions. The realists don’t concentrate on the larger
emotions, you see--quite the reverse; they find the common feelings
and happenings of everyday life more representative. You may have a
big scene, but the essential thing is the accurate presentation of the
commonplace.” “Yes, I think that is pretty much what I _have_ tried to
do,” commented Jacob. “I think that’s what interests me. It’s what I
know of life. I’ve never murdered any one, for instance, or talked to
a murderer, and I don’t know how it feels, or what one would do in a
position of that sort.”
That is perhaps a pretty fair statement of Beresford’s own aim as
a novelist; he prefers to exercise his imagination on what he has
observed of life, or on what he has personally experienced of it. And
no doubt the “Jacob Stahl” trilogy draws much of its convincing air
of truthfulness from the fact that it is largely autobiographical.
In the first volume, the baby Jacob, owing to the carelessness of
a nursemaid, meets with an accident that cripples him for the first
fifteen years of his existence; and just such an accident in childhood
befell Mr. Beresford himself. In due course, after toying with the
thought of taking holy orders, Jacob becomes an architect’s pupil. “A
Candidate for Truth” shows him writing short stories the magazines will
not accept, and working on a novel, but before anything can be done
with this, the erratic Cecil Barker gets tired of patronizing him and,
driven to earn a livelihood, he takes a situation in an advertising
agency and develops into an expert at writing advertisements. Then,
having revised and rewritten his novel, he is dissatisfied with it
and burns it. He does not begin to conquer his irresolutions and win
some confidence in himself until after his disastrous marriage and
separation from his wife, when he comes under the influence of the
admirable Betty Gale, who loves him and defies the conventions to help
him make the best of himself. Then he gets on to the reviewing staff
of a daily newspaper, and writes another novel, “John Tristram,” and
after one publisher has rejected it as old-fashioned, another accepts
and publishes it, and though it brings him little money or glory, it
starts him on the road to success, and he makes it the first volume of
a trilogy.
Where autobiography ends and fiction begins in these three stories
is of no importance; what is not literally true in them is so
imaginatively realized that it seems as truthful. Philip of “God’s
Counterpoint,” who was injured by an accident in boyhood is a
pathological case; there are surrenderings to the morbid and abnormal
in “Housemates,” one of the somberest of Beresford’s novels, and
in that searching and poignant study in degeneracy, “The House in
Demetrius Road”; but if these are more powerful in theme and more
brilliant in workmanship they have not the simple, everyday actuality
of the trilogy; they get their effects by violence, or by the subtle
analysis of bizarre, unusual or unpleasant attributes of humanity,
and the strength and charm of the Stahl stories, are that, without
subscribing to the conventions, they keep to the common highway on
which average men and women live and move and have their being. This
is the higher and more masterly achievement, as it is more difficult
to paint a portrait when the sitter is a person of ordinary looks than
when he has marked peculiarities of features that easily distinguish
him from the general run of mankind.
Although, in his time, Mr. Beresford was an advertising expert he has
never acquired the gift of self-advertisement; but he found himself and
was found by critics and the public while he still counted as one of
our younger novelists and had been writing for less than a decade.
He has a subdued humor that is edged with irony, and can write with
a lighter touch, as he shows in “The Jervase Comedy” and some of
his short stories; and though one deprecates his excursions into
eccentricities of psychology, for the bent of his genius is so
evidently toward portraying what Meredith described to Stahl as the
representative “feelings and happenings of everyday life,” one feels
that he is more handicapped by his reticences than by his daring. He is
so conscious an artist that he tones down all crudities of coloring,
yet the color of life is often startlingly crude. An occasional streak
of melodrama, a freer play of sentiment and motion would add to the
vitality of his scenes and characters and intensify their realism
instead of taking anything from it; but his native reticence would seem
to forbid this and he cannot let himself go. And because he cannot let
himself go he has not yet gone beyond the Jacob Stahl series, which,
clever and cunninger art though some of his other work may be, remains
the truest and most significant thing he has done.
JOHN BUCHAN
[Illustration: JOHN BUCHAN]
I have heard people express surprise that such a born romantist as John
Buchan has turned his mind successfully to practical business, and been
for so long an active partner in the great publishing house of Thomas
Nelson & Sons. But there is really nothing at all surprising about
that. One of the essays in his “Some Eighteenth Century Byways” speaks
of “the incarnation of youth and the eternal Quixotic which, happily
for Scotland, lie at the back of all her thrift and prudence”; and in
another, on “Mr. Balfour as a Man of Letters”, he says, “the average
Scot, let it never be forgotten, is incorrigibly sentimental; at
heart he would rather be ‘kindly’ and ‘innerly’ than ‘canny,’ and his
admiration is rather for Burns, who had none of the reputed national
characteristics, than for Adam Smith, who had them all.” He adds that
though Scotsmen perfectly understand the legendary Caledonian, though
“in theory they are all for dry light ‘a hard, gem-like flame,’ in
practice they like the glow from more turbid altars.”
Having that dual personality himself, it is not incongruous that
John Buchan should be at once a poet, a romantic and a shrewd man of
affairs. But he is wrong in thinking the nature he sketches is peculiar
to his countrymen, the Scots; it is as characteristically English.
Indeed, I should not count him among practical men if he had not
proved himself one by doing more practical things than publishing; for
publishing is essentially a romantic calling as you may suspect if you
consider the number of authors who have taken to it, and the number of
publishers who have become authors. Scott felt the lure of the trade,
in the past, and in the present you have J. D. Beresford working at
it with Collins & Sons; Frank Swinnerton first with Dent, now with
Chatto & Windus; Frederick Watson, a brilliant writer of romances and
of modern social comedy, with Nisbet; Michael Sadleir with Constable;
C. E. Lawrence, most fantastic and idealistic of novelists, with John
Murray; Roger Ingram, writing with authority on Shelley and making
fine anthologies, but disguised as one of the partners in Selwyn and
Blount; Alec Waugh, joining that admirable essayist his father, Arthur
Waugh, with Chapman & Hall; C. S. Evans, whose “Nash and Others” may
stand on the shelf by Kenneth Grahame’s “Golden Age,” with Heinemanns;
B. W. Matz, the Dickens enthusiast and author of many books about him,
running in harness with Cecil Palmer; you have Grant Richards writing
novels that are clever enough to make some of his authors wonder why
he publishes theirs; Sir Ernest Hodder-Williams, an author, with at
least half-a-dozen successful books to his name; Herbert Jenkins, a
popular humorist and doing sensational detective stories; Sir Algernon
Methuen developing a passion for compiling excellent anthologies of
poetry--and there are others.
But here is enough to show that Buchan need not think he is
demonstrating his Scottish practicality by going in for publishing. As
a fact, I have always felt that publishing should be properly classed
as a sport. It is more speculative than racing and I do not see how any
man on the Turf can get so much excitement and uncertainty by backing
a horse as he could get by backing a new book. You can form a pretty
reliable idea of what a horse is capable of before you put your money
on it, but for the publisher, more often than not, it is all a game of
chance, since whether he wins or loses depends less on the quality of
the book than on the taste of the public, which is uncalculable. So
when Buchan went publishing he was merely starting to live romance as
well as to write it.
A son of the manse, he was born in 1875, and going from Edinburgh
University to Brasenose, Oxford, he took the Newdigate Prize there,
with other more scholarly distinctions, and became President of the
Union. Even in those early days he developed a love of sport, and found
recreation in mountaineering, deer-stalking and fishing. His enthusiasm
for the latter expressed itself in the delightful verses of “Musa
Piscatrix,” which appeared in 1896, while he was still at Oxford, his
first novel, “Sir Quixote,” a vigorous romance somewhat in the manner
of Stevenson, who was then at the height of his career, having given
him prominence among new authors a year earlier. I recollect the
glowing things that were said of one of his finest, most brilliantly
imaginative romances, “John Burnet of Barns,” in 1898, and with the
fame of that going before him he came to London. There he studied law
in the Middle Temple, and was called to the Bar, but seems to have been
busier with literary and journalistic than with legal affairs, for
two more books, “Grey Weather” and “A Lost Lady of Old Years” came in
1889; “The Half-Hearted” in 1900, and meanwhile he was occupied with
journalism and contributing stories to the magazines.
Then for two years he sojourned in South Africa as private secretary
to Lord Milner, the High Commissioner. Two books about the present and
future of the Colony were the outcome of that excursion into diplomacy;
and better still, his South African experiences prompted him a little
later to write that remarkable romance of “Prester John,” the cunning,
clever Zulu who, turned Christian evangelist, professes to be the old
legendary Prester John reincarnate, and while he is ostensibly bent
on converting the natives, is fanning a flame of patriotism in their
chiefs and stirring them to rise against the English and create again
a great African empire. Here, and in “John Burnet of Barns,” and in
some of the short stories of “The Watcher by the Threshold” and “The
Moon Endureth,” John Buchan reaches, I think, his high-water mark as a
weaver of romance.
After his return from South Africa he joined the staff of the
_Spectator_, reviewing and writing essays for it and doing a certain
amount of editorial work. At least, I deduce the latter fact from the
statement of one who had the best means of knowing. If you look up “The
Brain of the Nation,” by Charles L. Graves, who was then assistant
editor of the _Spectator_, you will find among the witty and humorous
poems in that volume a complete biography of John Buchan in neat and
lively verse, telling how he came up to town from Oxford, settled down
to the law, went to Africa, returned and became a familiar figure in
the _Spectator’s_ old offices in Wellington Street:
“Ev’ry Tuesday morn careering
Up the stairs with flying feet,
You’d burst in upon us, cheering
Wellington’s funereal street....
Pundit, publicist and jurist;
Statistician and divine;
Mystic, mountaineer, and purist
In the high financial line;
Prince of journalistic sprinters--
Swiftest that I ever knew--
Never did you keep the printers
Longer than an hour or two.
Then, too, when the final stages
Of our weekly task drew nigh,
You would come and pass the pages
With a magisterial eye,
Seldom pausing, save to smoke a
Cigarette at half past one,
When you quaffed a cup of Mocha
And devoured a penny bun.”