rejected by the army as beyond the age limit, he worked strenuously in
Kitchener’s recruiting campaign, then served as Lieutenant-Colonel on
the British Headquarters Staff in France, and subsequently as Director
of Information. The novels he wrote in those years, “The Power House,”
“The Thirty-nine Steps,” “Greenmantle,” and “Mr. Standfast,” were
written as a relief from heavier duties. They are stories of mystery
and intrigue as able and exciting as any of their kind. “Greenmantle,”
he says in a preface, was “scribbled in every kind of odd place and
moment--in England and abroad, during long journeys, in half hours
between graver tasks.” He was present throughout the heroic fighting on
the Somme, and his official positions at the front and at home gave him
exceptional opportunities of seeing things for himself and obtaining
first-hand information for his masterly “History of the War,” which
will give him rank as a historian beside Kinglake and Napier.
With “The Path of the King,” and more so with “Huntingtower,” he is
back in his native air of romance, and one hopes he will leave the
story of plot and sensation to other artists and stay there.
Like all romancists, he is no unqualified lover of the democracy; it is
too lacking in picturesqueness, in grace and glamor to be in harmony
with his temperament. He belongs in spirit to the days when heroism
walked in splendor and war was glorious. He has laid it down that the
“denunciation of war rests at bottom upon a gross materialism. The
horrors of war are obvious enough; but it may reasonably be argued that
they are not greater than the horrors of peace ... the true way in
which to ennoble war is not to declare it in all its forms the work of
the devil, but to emphasize the spiritual and idealist element which
it contains. It is a kind of national sacrament, a grave matter into
which no one can enter lightly and for which all are responsible, more
especially in these days when wars are not the creation of princes and
statesmen but of peoples. War, on such a view, can only be banished
from the world by debasing human nature.”
That is the purely romantic vision. Since 1914, Buchan’s experiences of
War and the horrors of peace that result from it may have modified his
earlier opinions.
Anyhow, it is a wonderful theme for romance when it is far enough
away. It shows at its best in such chivalrous tales of adventure and
self-sacrifice as have gathered round the gallant figure of the Young
Pretender. You know from his books that John Buchan is steeped in the
lore of the Jacobites and sensitive to the spell of “old songs and lost
romances.” Dedicating “The Watcher by the Threshold” to Stair Agnew
Gillon, he says, “It is of the back-world of Scotland that I write, the
land behind the mist and over the seven bens, a place hard of access
for the foot-passengers but easy for the maker of stories.” One owns
to a wish that the author of “John Barnet of Barns” would now set his
genius free from the squabble and squalor of present-day politics (by
the way, he once put up for Parliament but fortunately did not get in)
and write that great story of the ’45 which he hints elsewhere has
never yet been written.
DONN BYRNE
[Illustration: DONN BYRNE]
There are more gods than any man is aware of, and there is really
more virtue in discovering a new one, and catching him young, than in
deferring your tribute until he is old and so old-established that all
the world has recognized him for what he is. You may say that Donn
Byrne is not a god of modern Grub Street, but you can take it from me
that he is going to be. He has all the necessary attributes and is
climbing to his due place in the hierarchy so rapidly that he will have
arrived there soon after you are reading what I have to say about him.
There is a general idea that he is an American; unless an author stops
at home mistakes of that kind are sure to happen. People take it for
granted that he belongs where he happens to be living when they find
him. Henry James had lived among us so long that he was quite commonly
taken for an Englishman even before he became naturalized during the
War. The same fate is overtaking Ezra Pound; he is the chief writer
of a sort of poetry that is being largely written in his country and
in ours, and because he has made his home with us for many years he
is generally regarded here as a native. On the other hand, Richard
Le Gallienne left us and has passed so large a part of his life in
the United States that most of us are beginning to think of him as an
American.
The mistake is perhaps more excusable in the case of Donn Byrne, for
he was born at New York in 1889, but before he was three months old he
was brought over to Ireland which ought to have been his birthplace,
since his father was an architect there. He was educated at Trinity
College, Dublin, and when he was not improving his mind was developing
his muscles; he went in enthusiastically for athletics, and in his time
held the light-weight boxing championships for Dublin University and
for Ulster. He knows all about horses, too, and can ride with the best,
and has manifested a more than academic interest in racing. In fact, he
has taken a keen interest in whatever was going on in the life around
him wherever he has been, and he has been about the world a good deal,
and turned his hand to many things. There is something Gallic as well
as Gaelic in his wit, his vivacity, his swiftly varying moods. He is no
novelist who has done all his traveling in books and dug up his facts
about strange countries in a reference library. When he deals with
ships his characters are not such as keep all the while in the saloon
cabin; they are the ship’s master and the sailors, and you feel there
is a knowledge of the sea behind them when he gets them working; and
if he had not been an athlete himself he could not have described with
such vigor and realistic gusto that great fight between Shane Campbell
and the wrestler from Aleppo in “The Wind Bloweth.”
How much of personal experience has gone into his novels is probably
more than he could say himself. But when he is picturing any place that
his imaginary people visit, you know from a score of casual, intimate
touches that he, too, has been there, and is remembering it while he
writes. Take this vivid sketch of Marseilles, for example:
“Obvious and drowsy it might seem, but once he went ashore, the
swarming, teeming life of it struck Shane like a current of air. Along
the quays, along the Cannebière, was a riot of color and nationality
unbelievable from aboard ship. Here were Turks, dignified and shy. Here
were Greeks, wary, furtive. Here were Italians, Genoese, Neapolitans,
Livornians, droll, vivacious, vindictive. Here were Moors, here were
Algerians, black African folk, sneering, inimical. Here were Spaniards,
with their walk like a horse’s lope. Here were French business men,
very important. Here were Provencals, cheery, short, tubby, excitable,
olive-colored, black-bearded, calling to one another in the _langue
d’oc_ of the troubadors, _’Te, mon bon! Commoun as? Quezaco?_”
There is that same sense of seeing things in the glamorous description
of the Syrian city where Shane lived with the Arab girl he had married;
and in the hasty outline of Buenos Aires:
“Here now was a city growing rich, ungracefully--a city of arrogant
Spanish colonists, of poverty-stricken immigrants, of down-trodden
lower classes ... a city of riches ... a city of blood.... Here mud,
here money.... Into a city half mud hovels, half marble-fronted
houses, gauchos drove herd upon herd of cattle, baffled, afraid. Here
Irish drove streams of gray bleating sheep. Here ungreased bullock
carts screamed. From the bluegrass pampas they drove them, where the
birds sang and waters rippled, where was the gentleness of summer rain,
where was the majesty of great storms.... And by their thousands and
their tens of thousands they drove them into Buenos Aires, and slew
them for their hides....”
That was the Buenos Aires of Shane’s day, in the Victorian era; but in
essentials it was probably as Donn Byrne saw it. For when he was about
twenty-two he quitted Ireland and went back to America, and presently
made his way to Buenos Aires to get married. His wife is the well-known
dramatist Dolly Byrne who wrote with the actress Gilda Varesi, the
delightful comedy “Enter Madam,” which has had long runs in London and
in New York.
It was during this second sojourn in the States that Donn Byrne settled
down seriously to literary work. He says he began by contributing to
American magazines some of the world’s worst poetry, which he has never
collected into a volume; but he is given to talking lightly of his
own doings and you cannot take him at his own valuation. One of the
poems, at least, on the San Francisco earthquake, appropriately enough,
made something of a noise and was reprinted in the _United Irishman_,
but Ireland had not then become such a furious storm-center and an
earthquake was still enough to excite it. Before long he was making a
considerable reputation with his short stories, and a collection of
these, “Stories Without Heroes,” was his first book.
But he will tell you he does not like that book and will not have it
reprinted. He says the same about his first novel, “The Stranger’s
Banquet,” though it met with a very good reception and had a sale that
many successful authors would envy. Then followed in succession three
novels that are original enough in style and idea and fine enough in
quality to establish the reputation of any man--“The Wind Bloweth,”
“Messer Marco Polo,” and “The Foolish Matrons.” These were all written
and published in America, and America knew how to appreciate them. The
third enjoyed such a vogue that we became aware of him in England and
the second, then the first, in quick succession, were published in this
country, and “The Foolish Matron” is, at this writing, about to make
its appearance here also. And with his new-won fame Donn Byrne came
home and is settled among his own people--unless a wandering fit has
taken him again before this can be printed.
The beauty and charm of that old-time romance of the great Venetian
adventurer, “Messer Marco Polo,” are not easily defined; different
critics tried to shape a definition of it by calling it fascinating,
fantastic, clever, witty, strangely beautiful, a thing for laughter and
tears, and I think they were all right; and that the book owes its
success as much to the racy humor, the vision and emotional power with
which it is written as to the stir and excitement of the story itself.
Half the books you read, even when they greatly interest you, have a
certain coldness in them as if they had been built up from the outside
and drew no warmth from the hearts of their writers; but “Messer Marco
Polo” glows and is alive with personality, it is not written after the
manner of any school, but it is as full of eager, vital, human feeling
as if the author had magically distilled himself into it and were
speaking from its pages.
That is part of the secret, too, of the charm of his more realistically
romantic “The Wind Bloweth.” You are convinced, as you read, that
those early chapters telling how the boy Shane gets a holiday on his
thirteenth birthday and goes alone up into the mountains to see the
Dancing Town in the haze over the sea, are a memory of his own boyhood
in Ireland. From the peace and fantasy of that beginning in the Ulster
hills, from an unsympathetic mother and his two quaint, lovable uncles,
Shane, at his own ardent desire, goes to knock about the world as a
seafarer, and, always with the simplicity and idealism of his boyhood
to lead and mislead him, is by-and-by tricked into marrying the cold
southern Irish girl who dies after a year or so, and, his love for
her having died before, he can feel no grief but only a strange dumb
wonder. Then, while his trading ship is at Marseilles, he meets the
beautiful, piteous Claire-Anne, and their lawless, perfect love ends
in tragedy. After another interval, comes the episode of his charming
little Moslem wife, and he loses her because he never understands
that she loves him not for his strength but for his weakness. Thrice
he meets with disillusion, but retains his simplicity, his idealism
throughout, and is never really disillusioned; and it is when he is in
Buenos Aires again that the kind, placid, large-hearted “easy” Swedish
woman, Hedda Hages, gives him the truth, and makes clear to him what
she means when she says, “No, Shane, I don’t think you know much about
women.”
And it is not till his hair is graying that he arrives at the true
romance and the ideal happiness at last. The story is neither planned
nor written on conventional lines; you sense the tang of a brogue in
its nervous English, which is continually flowering into exquisite
felicities of phrase, and it lays bare the heart and mind of a man with
a most sensitive understanding. It is a sort of Pilgrim’s Progress, and
Shane Campbell is a desperately human pilgrim, who drifts into danger
and disasters, and stumbles often, before he drops his burden and finds
his way, or is led by strange influences, into the City Beautiful.
I daresay Donn Byrne will laugh to discover that I have put him among
the gods; he is that sort of man. But it is possible for others to know
him better than he knows himself. Abou Ben Adhem was surprised you
recollect, when he noticed that Gabriel had recorded his name so high
in the list of those that were worthy; and though I am no Gabriel I
know a hawk from a handsaw when the wind is in the right quarter.
WILLIAM HENRY DAVIES
[Illustration: WILLIAM HENRY DAVIES]
The lives of most modern poets would make rather tame writing, which is
possibly why so much modern poetry makes rather tame reading. It is a
pleasant enough thing to go from a Public School to a University, then
come to London, unlock at once a few otherwise difficult doors with the
_open sesame_ of effective introductions, and settle down to a literary
career; but it leaves one with a narrow outlook, a limited range of
ideas, little of personal experience to write about. Fortunately W. H.
Davies never enjoyed these comfortable disadvantages. He did not come
into his kingdom by any nicely paved highroads, but over rough ground
by thorny ways that, however romantic they may seem to look back upon,
must have seemed hard and bitter and sufficiently hopeless at times
while he was struggling through them.
There is nothing to say of his schooling, except that it amounted to
little and was not good; but later he learned more by meeting the hard
facts of life and by desultory reading than any master could have
taught him. Born at Newport, Monmouthshire, in 1870, he was put to the
picture-frame making trade, and went from that to miscellaneous farm
work. But work, he once confessed to me, is among the things for which
he has never had a passion, and a legacy from a grandfather gave him
an interval of liberty. This grandfather, with a sensible foresight,
left him only a small sum in ready cash, but, in addition, the interest
on an investment that produced a steady eight shillings a week. With
the cash Davies went to America, and saw as much of that country as
he could as long as the money lasted. Then he subdued his dislike of
manual labor and did odd jobs on fruit farms; wearied of this and went
on tramp, and picked up much out-of-the-way knowledge of the world and
of men from the tramps he fell in with during his roamings. Presently,
he got engaged as a hand on a cattle-boat, and as such made several
voyages to England and back.
At length, getting back to America just when the gold rush for Klondike
was at its height, he was seized with a yearning to go North and try
his luck as a digger. The price of that long journey being beyond his
means, he followed a common example and tried to “jump” a train, fell
under the wheels in the attempt and was so badly injured that he lost
a foot in that enterprise and had to make a slow recovery in hospital.
When he was well enough, his family sent out and carried him home into
Wales.
But he could not be contented there. Although he says himself that he
became a poet at thirty-four (when his first book was published), the
fact is, of course, he has been a poet all his life and through all
his wanderings was storing up memories and impressions of nature and
human nature that live again now in vivid lines and phrases of his
verse and prose. He had already written poems, and sent them to various
periodicals in vain, and had a feeling that if he could be at the
center of things, in London, fortune and fame as a poet might be within
his reach.
So to London he came, early in the century, and took up residence
in a common lodging-house at Southwark, his eight shillings a week
sufficing to pay his rent and keep him in food. The magazines remaining
obdurate, he collected his poems into a book, and started to look for a
publisher. But the publishers were equally unencouraging, till he found
one who was prepared to publish provided Davies contributed twenty
pounds toward the cost of the adventure. Satisfied that, once out, the
book would quickly yield him profits, he asked the trustees who paid
him his small dividends to advance the amount and retain his income
until they had recouped themselves. They, however, being worldly-wise,
compromised by saying that if he would do without his dividends for
some six months, when ten pounds would be due, they would pay him that
sum and advance a further ten, paying him no more till the second ten
was duly refunded.
This offer he accepted; and he tramped the country as a pedlar, selling
laces, needles and pins, and occasionally singing in the streets for
a temporary livelihood. When the six months were past he returned to
London, took up his old quarters at the lodging-house, drew the twenty
pounds, and before long “The Soul’s Destroyer and Other Poems” made
its appearance. But so far from putting money in his purse, it was
received with complete indifference. Fifty copies went out for review,
but not a single review was given to it anywhere. No publisher’s name
was on the title page, but an announcement that the book was to be had,
for half-a-crown, “of the Author, Farmhouse, Marshalsea Road, S.E.,”
and possibly this conveyed an impression of unimportance that resulted
in its remaining unread. After a week or so, seeing himself with no
money coming in for the next few months, the author became desperate.
He compiled from “Who’s Who,” at a public library, a list of people who
might be expected to take an interest in poetry, and posted a copy of
his book to each with a request that, if it seemed worth the money, he
would remit the half-crown.
One of the earliest went to a journalist who was, in those days,
connected with the _Daily Mail_. He read it at once and recognized
that though there were crudities and even doggerel in it, there was
also in it some of the freshest and most magical poetry to be found
in modern books. Mingled with grimly realistic pictures of life and
character in the doss-house were songs of the field and the wayside
written with all Clare’s minute knowledge of nature and with something
of the imagination and music of Blake. Being a journalist, he did not
miss the significance of this book issuing from a common lodging-house
(and one, by the way, that is described in a sketch of Dickens’), could
easily read a good deal of the poet’s story between the lines of his
poems, promptly forwarded his remittance and asked Davies to meet him.
Not sure that he would be welcome at the doss-house, he suggested a
rendezvous on the north of London Bridge, and a few evenings later the
meeting came about at Finch’s a tavern in Bishopsgate Street Within.
“To help you to identify me,” Davies had written, “I will have a copy
of my book sticking out of my pocket”; and there he was--a short,
sturdy young man, uncommunicative at first, as shy as a squirrel,
bright-eyed, soft of speech, and with a general air about him of some
woodland creature lost and uneasy in a place of crowds. By degrees his
shyness diminished, and in the course of a two hours’ session in that
bar he unfolded the whole of his story without reserve. Then said the
journalist, “If I merely review your book it will not sell a dozen
copies, but if you will let me combine with a review an absolutely
frank narrative of your career I have an idea we can rouse public
interest to some purpose.”
This permission being given, such an article duly appeared in the news
columns of the _Daily Mail_, and the results were more astonishing
than any one could have foreseen. Not only did the gentle reader begin
to send in money for copies, but ladies called at the doss-house and
left At Home cards which their recipient was much too reticent to act
upon. Editors who had ignored and probably lost their review copies
sent postal orders for the book and lauded it in print; illustrated
papers sent photographers and interviewers; a party of critics, having
now bought and read the poems, made a pilgrimage to the Farmhouse, and
departed to write of the man and his poetry. After a second article
in the _Mail_ had recounted these and other astonishing happenings,
a literary agent wrote urging Davies to entrust him with all his
remaining copies and he could sell them for him at half-a-guinea and a
guinea apiece.
His advice was taken, and the last of the edition of five hundred
copies went off quickly at these prices. So enriched, the poet quitted
his lodging-house and went home into Wales for a holiday, and while
there began the first of his prose books, “The Autobiography of a
Super-Tramp,” which was published in 1908 with an introduction by
George Bernard Shaw. Meanwhile, Davies had written two other volumes
of verse, and his recognition as one of the truest, most individual
of living lyrists was no longer in doubt. Mr. Shaw notes of his prose
that it has not the academic correctness dear to the Perfect Commercial
Letter Writer, but is “worth reading by literary experts for its
style alone”; and much the same may be said of his poetry. It is not
flawless, but its faults are curiously in harmony with its unstudied
simplicity and often strangely heighten the beauty of thought and
language to which verses flower as carelessly as if he thought and said
his finest things by accident. He has the countryman’s intimacy with
Nature--not for nothing did he work on farms, tramp the open roads,
sleep under the naked sky--knows all her varying moods, has observed
trivial significances in her that the deliberate student overlooks; and
he writes of her with an Elizabethan candor and fantasy and a natural,
simple diction that is an art in Wordsworth. He has made a selection
from his several volumes in a Collected Edition, but has published
other verse since. For some years after his success he lived in London,
but never seemed at home; he has no liking for streets and shrinks from
crowds; and now has withdrawn again into the country, where our ultra
modern Georgian poets who, despite the fact that he is in the tradition
of the great lyrists of the past, were constrained to embrace him as
one of themselves, are less likely to infect him with their artifices.
WALTER DE LA MARE
[Illustration: WALTER DE LA MARE]
Except in the personal sense--and the charm of his gracious personality
would surely surround him with friends, whether he wanted them or
not--Walter de la Mare is, like Hardy, a lonely figure in modern
English poetry--no other poet of our time has a place more notably
apart from his contemporaries. You might almost read an allegory of
this aloofness into his “Myself”:
“There is a garden grey
With mists of autumntide;
Under the giant boughs,
Stretched green on every side,
“Along the lonely paths,
A little child like me,
With face, with hands like mine,
Plays ever silently....
“And I am there alone:
Forlornly, silently,
Plays in the evening garden
Myself with me.”