aloneness. You may trace, perhaps, here and there in his verse elusive
influences of Coleridge, Herrick, Poe, the songs of Shakespeare, or,
now and then, in a certain brave and good use of colloquial language,
of T. E. Brown, but such influences are so slight and so naturalized
into his own distinctive manner that it is impossible to link him
up with the past and say he is descended from any predecessor, as
Tennyson was from Keats. More than with any earlier poetry, his verse
has affinities with the prose of Charles Lamb--of the Lamb who wrote
the tender, wistful “Dream-Children” and the elvishly grotesque,
serious-humorous “New Year’s Eve”--who was sensitively wise about
witches and night-fears, and could tell daintily or playfully of the
little people, fairy or mortal. But the association is intangible; he
is more unlike Lamb than he is like him. And when you compare him with
poets of his day there is none that resembles him; he is alone in his
garden. He has had imitators, but they have failed to imitate him, and
left him to his solitude.
It is true, as Spencer has it, that
“sheep herd together, eagles fly alone,”
and he has this in common with the lord of the air, that he has
never allied himself with any groups or literary cliques; yet his
work is so authentic and so modern, so free of the idiosyncracies of
any period, that our self-centered, self-conscious school of “new”
poets, habitually intolerant of all who move outside their circle, are
constrained to keep a door wide open for him and are glad to have him
sitting down with them in their anthologies.
But he did not enter into his own promptly, or without fighting for
it. He was born in 1873; and had known nearly twenty years of
“that dry drudgery at the desk’s dead wood”
in a city office, before he shook the dust of such business from his
feet and began to win a livelihood as a free-lance journalist. One is
apt to speak of journalism as if it were an exact calling, like that of
the watchmaker; but “journalism” is a portmanteau word which embraces
impartially the uninspired records of the junior reporter and the
delightful social essays and sketches of Robert Lynd; the witty gossip
of a “Beachcomber,” and the dull but very superior oracles of a J. A.
Spender. Not any of these, but reviewing was the branch of this trade
to which de la Mare devoted himself, and his reviews in the _Saturday
Westminster_, _Bookman_, _Times Literary Supplement_, and elsewhere,
clothed so fine a critical faculty in the distinction of style which
betrays his hand in all he has written that, his reputation growing
accordingly, the reviewer for a time overshadowed the poet; for though
he did much of it anonymously his work could be identified by the
discerning as easily as can the characteristic, unsigned paintings of a
master.
Too often, in such a case, the journalist ends by destroying the
author; dulls his imagination, dissipates his moods, replaces his
careless raptures with a mechanical efficiency; makes him a capable
craftsman, and unmakes him as an artist. But de la Mare seems to
have learned how to put his heart into journalism without letting
journalism get into his heart; I have seen no review of his that has
the mark of the hack upon it; his mind was not “like the dyers hand”
subdued to what it worked in. Fleet Street might echo his tread, but
his spirit was away on other roads in a world that was beyond the
jurisdiction of editors. He was not seeking to set up a home in that
wilderness, but was all the while quietly paving a way out of it; and
in due season he has left it behind him.
A good deal of what he wrote then bore the pseudonym of “Walter
Ramal,” a transparent anagram; and throughout those days he went
on contributing poems, stories, prose fantasies to _Cornhill_, the
_English Review_, and other periodicals. In 1902 he had published
“Songs of Childhood,” a first revelation of his exquisite genius for
writing quaint nursery rhymes, dainty, homely, faery lyrics and ballads
that can fascinate the mind of a child, or of any who has not forgotten
his childhood--a genius that flowered to perfection eleven years later
in “Peacock Pie.”
“Henry Brocken” (1904) showed another side of his gift. It is a
story--you cannot call it a novel--that takes you traveling into a land
unknown to the map-makers, that is inhabited by people who have never
lived and will never die. You go with Brocken over a wild moor and meet
with Wordsworth’s Lucy Gray; you go further to hold converse with Poe’s
Annabel Lee, with Keat’s Belle Dame, with Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre,
with Swift’s Gulliver, with Lady Macbeth, Bottom, Titania, with folk
from the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and many another. It is all a riot of
fancy and poetry in prose, with an undercurrent of shrewd commentary
that adds a critical value to its appeal as a story.
This fresh, individual note is as prevailing in all his prose as in his
verse. It is in the prose and verse of his blithe, whimsical tale for
children, “The Two Mulla-Mulgars,” and in that eerie, bizarre novel,
“The Return”--where, falling asleep by the grave of old Sabathier,
Arthur Lawford goes home to find his family do not know him, for, as
he slept, the dead man’s spirit had subtly taken possession of him and
transformed his whole appearance. And the spiritual adventures through
which Lawford has to pass before he can break that grim dominance and
be restored to himself are unfolded with a delicate art that never
over-stresses the beauty or significance of them.
By common consent, however, de la Mare’s prose masterpiece is “The
Midget.” One can think of no other present-day author who might have
handled successfully so _outre_ a theme; yet the whole conception
is as natural to de la Mare’s peculiar genius as it would be alien
to that of any of his contemporaries, and he fashions his story of
the little lady, mature and sane in mind and perfect in body, but so
small that she could stand in the palm of an average hand, into a
novel, a fable, a romance--call it what you will--of rare charm and
interest. The midget’s dwarfish, deformed lover, and the more normal
characters--Waggett, Percy Maudlin, Mrs. Bowater, Pollie--are drawn
realistically and with fleeting touches of humor, and while you can
read the book for its story alone, the quiet laughter and pathos of it,
as you can read Bunyan’s allegory, it is veined with inner meanings and
a profound, sympathetic philosophy of life is implicit in the narrative.
It was two years after his 1906 “Poems” appeared I remember, that
Edward Thomas first asked me if I knew much of Walter de la Mare, and,
in that soft voice and reticent, hesitating manner of his, went on
to speak with an unwonted enthusiasm of the work he was doing. Until
then, I had read casually only casual things of de la Mare’s in the
magazines, but I knew Thomas’s fine, fastidious taste in such matters,
and that he was not given to getting enthusiastic over what was merely
good in an ordinary degree, and it was not long before I was qualified
to understand and respond to the warmth of his admiration. The “Poems”
were, with a few exceptions, more remarkable for what they promised
than for what they achieved, but they had not a little of the unique
magic that is in his “Songs of Childhood”; and “The Listeners and Other
Poems” (1912), and “Motley and Other Poems” (1918) more than fulfilled
this promise and brought him, at last such general recognition that in
1920, after a lapse of eighteen years, his poems were gathered into a
Collected Edition.
He began late, as poets go, for he was nearly thirty when his first
book came out, and about forty before he began to be given his due
place among the poets of his generation. He was so slow in arriving
because he came without noise, intrinsically unconventional but not
fussily shattering the superficial conventions of others, making no
sensational approach, not attempting to shock or to startle. I don’t
think his verse ever had the instant appeal of a topical interest,
except such of it as grew out of the War, and nothing could be more
unlike the orthodox war poetry than that strange, poignant lyric of
his, “The Fool Rings his Bells”--
“Come, Death, I’d have a word with thee;
And thou, poor Innocency;
And love--a lad with a broken wing;
And Pity, too:
The Fool shall sing to you,
As Fools will sing....”
Its quaintness, sincerity, tenderness and grim fancy are spontaneously
in keeping with the lovely or whimsical dreamings, the wizardries
and hovering music of his happier songs. He may not have lived in
seclusion, unfretted by the hard facts of existence but the world has
never been too much with him, so he can still hear the horns of elfland
blowing over an earth that remains for him
“a magical garden with rivers and bowers,”
haunted by fays and gnomes, dryads and fawns and the witchery and
enchantment that have been in dusky woods, in misty fields, in twilight
and midnight places since the beginning of time. Howbeit, even the
ghostly atmosphere of “The Listeners” is pierced with a cry that is
not of the dead, for in his farthest flights of fantasy he is not out
of touch with nature and human nature, and it is a glowing love of
these at the heart of his darkling visions and gossamer imaginings that
gives them life and will keep them alive.
SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
[Illustration: SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE]
If Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were more of a conventional man of
letters--had he been just “a book in breeches,” as Sidney Smith said
Macaulay was--it would not be so difficult to know where to make a
beginning when one sits down to write of him. But no author could be
farther from being “all author”; he is much too keenly interested in
life to do nothing but write about it, and probably shares Byron’s
scorn of “the mighty stir made about scribbling and scribes,” and his
preference of doers to writers. He has read much, but lived more, as a
novelist ought to, giving freely of his time and thought and sympathy
to lives outside his own. He has no fretful little moods of morbidity,
cynicism, pessimism, but is essentially a big man and writes always
like himself, with a complete freedom from affection, a naturalness, a
healthy vigor and breadth of outlook that cannot be developed within
the four walls of a study.
Characteristic of himself, I think, is this reflection in “The Tragedy
of the Korosko”: “When you see the evil of cruelty which nature wears,
try and peer through it, and you will sometimes catch a glimpse of a
very homely, kindly face behind.” And this, which he puts into the
mouth of Lord Roxton, in “The Lost World”; “There are times, young
fellah, when every one of us must make a stand for human right and
justice, or you never feel clean again.”
You may depend he felt that time had come for him when he took up the
cudgel for George _Edalji_ and would not rest or be silent till the
case had been reopened and _Edalji_ proved innocent and set at liberty;
it came again when he threw everything else aside to render patriotic
services in the Boer War (which were to some extent recognized by the
accolade), and again in the later and greater War; it came for him
when he resolutely championed the cause of the martyred natives in
the Belgian Congo; when, believing in Oscar Slater’s innocence, he
wrote a masterly review of the evidence against him and strove to have
him re-tried; and it came once more when, risking his reputation and
in defiance of the ridicule he knew he would have to face, he openly
confessed himself a believer in spiritualism and has persisted in that
unorthodoxy until he has become one of the most powerful and insistent
of its apostles.
These and other such activities may seem outside a consideration of
Doyle’s work in literature, but they are not, any more than are his
medical knowledge or his love of sport, for you find their influence
everywhere in his books. There were ghosts in his fiction before ever
he began to raise them at the seance. Some find it hard to square his
absorption in spiritualism with his robust personality, with the sane
philosophy of his stories, and the fact that he is so much a man of
action, a lover of the open air and all the wholesome human qualities
that keep a writer’s blood sound and prevent his ink from getting muddy
and slow. But it is just these circumstances that add weight to his
testimony as a spiritualist; he is no dreamer predisposed to believe in
psychic phenomena; he is a stolid, shrewd man of affairs who wants to
look inside and see how the wheels go round before he can have faith in
anything.
He has played as strenuously as he has worked. He has tasted delight of
battle with his peers at football, cricket, golf; he has made balloon
and aeroplane ascents; introduced ski-ing into the Grison division of
Switzerland; did pioneer work in the opening up of miniature rifle
ranges; can hold his own with the foils and is a formidable boxer; he
is a fisherman in the largest sense, for he has been whaling in the
Arctic Seas, he used to ride to hounds and is a good shot, but has a
hearty hatred of all sport that involves the needless killing of birds
or animals.
Born at Edinburgh, in 1859, Conan Doyle commenced writing tales of
adventure when he was about six, and it was natural that he should
illustrate these with drawings of his own, for he was born into a very
atmosphere and world of art. His grandfather, John Doyle, was the
well-known political caricaturist who for over thirty years concealed
his identity under the initials “H. B.”; his father, Charles Doyle, and
three of his uncles were artists, one being that Richard Doyle whose
name is inseparably associated with the early days of _Punch_. The
remarkable water-colors of Charles Doyle, which I have seen, have a
graceful fantasy that remind one of the work of Richard Doyle, but at
times they have a grimness, a sense of the eerie and the terrible that
lift them beyond anything that the _Punch_ artist ever attempted; and
you find this same imaginative force, this same bizarre sense of the
weird and terrible in certain of the stories of Charles Doyle’s son--in
“The Hound of the Baskervilles,” in some of the shorter Sherlock Holmes
tales, in many of the “Round the Fire” stories and in some of those in
“Round the Red Lamp.”
In 1881, by five years of medical studentship at Edinburgh University,
Doyle secured his diploma and, after a voyage to West Africa,
started as a medical practitioner at Southsea. But all through
his student days he was giving his leisure to literary work, and
in one of the professors at Edinburgh, Dr. Joseph Bell, a man of
astonishing analytical and deductive powers, he found the original
from whom, in due season, Sherlock Holmes was to be largely drawn.
His first published story, a Kaffir romance, appeared, like Hardy’s,
in _Chambers’s Journal_. That was in 1878, and it brought him three
guineas; but it was not until nine years later, when “A Study in
Scarlet” came out in _Beeton’s Annual_ for 1887, that Sherlock Holmes
and Dr. Watson made their first appearance in print, and laid the
foundation of his success.
During ten years of hard work as medical student and practitioner Doyle
had gone through the usual experience of the literary beginner; he
had suffered innumerable rejections, had contributed short stories to
_Cornhill_, _Temple Bar_, _Belgravia_ and other magazines, never in any
year earning with his pen more than fifty pounds. His first long novel,
that brilliant romance of the Monmouth rebellion, “Micah Clarke,” after
being rejected on all hands, was sent to Longmans and accepted for
them by Andrew Lang, whom Sir Arthur looks upon as one of his literary
godfathers, James Payn, who encouraged him in _Cornhill_ being the
other.
“Micah Clarke” was followed in the same year (1889) by another Sherlock
Holmes story, “The Sign of Four.” In 1890 Chatto & Windus published
“The Firm of Girdlestone,” and “The White Company” began to run
serially in _Cornhill_. Then it was that, taking his courage in both
hands, Sir Arthur resigned his practice at Southsea and came to London.
He practised there for a while as an eye specialist, but the success of
those two last books decided him to abandon medicine and devote himself
wholly to literature.
He has written a score or so of novels and volumes of short stories
since then; one--and an admirable one--of literary criticism, “The
Magic Door”; two of verse; a History of the Boer War, and three or four
volumes embodying his gospel and experiences as a spiritualist. This is
to say nothing of his plays--“A Story of Waterloo,” the Sherlock Holmes
dramas, and the rest.
“Sir Nigel” and “The White Company” are, in his own opinion, “the least
unsatisfactory” of all his books, which is to put it modestly. I
would not rank the latter below such high English historical romances
as “The Cloister and the Hearth” and “Esmond,” and think it likely
Doyle will be remembered for this and “Sir Nigel,” and perhaps “Micah
Clarke,” long after the sensational, more resounding popular Sherlock
Holmes books have fallen into the background. Howbeit, for the present,
there is no getting away from the amazing Sherlock; not only is he the
most vivid and outstanding of all Sir Arthur’s creations, but no other
novelist of our time has been able to breathe such life and actuality
into any of his puppets.
Not since Pickwick was born has any character in fiction taken such
hold on the popular imagination, so impressed the million with a sense
of his reality. He is commonly spoken of as a living person; detectives
are said to have studied his methods, and when it was announced
that he was about to retire into private life and devote himself to
bee-keeping, letters poured in, most of them addressed to “Sherlock
Holmes, Esq.,” care of Conan Doyle, expressing regret at this decision,
offering him advice in the making and managing of his apiaries, and not
a few applying for employment in his service. It is on record, too,
that a party of French schoolboys, sight-seeing in London, were asked
which they wished to see first--the Tower or Westminster Abbey, and
unanimously agreed that they would prefer to go to Baker Street and see
the rooms of Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
As for the imitators who have risen to compete with him--there are so
many there is no guessing off-hand at their number; their assiduity
has brought into being a recognized Sherlock Holmes type of story, and
though some of them have been popular, none of them has rivaled the
original either in popularity or ingenuity.
Obviously, then, for his own generation Doyle is, above everything
else, the creator of that unique detective. But with him, as with
Ulysses, it is not too late to seek a newer world, and he may yet do
what nobody has done and fashion from his latter-day experiences a
great novel of spiritualism.
JOHN DRINKWATER
[Illustration: JOHN DRINKWATER]
From his essays and some of his poems you gather an idea that John
Drinkwater was cradled into poetry by natural inclination but grew to
maturity in it by deliberate and assiduous study of his art. He set out
with a pretty definite idea of the poet’s mission, which is, he lays
it down in one of his essays, “not to express his age, but to express
himself”; and though he has largely lived up to that gospel, he has
from time to time gone beyond it and, perhaps unwittingly, expressed
his age as well. He subscribes to Coleridge’s rather inadequate
definition of poetry as “the best words in the best order,” but
improves upon it elsewhere by insisting that they shall be pregnant
and living words. He has all along taken himself and his function with
a certain high seriousness, believing it was for him and his fellow
artists to awaken the soul of the world, and conceiving of himself
and them as beset on every side by “prejudice, indifference, positive
hostility, misrepresentation, a total failure to understand the
purposes and the power of art.”
There may be a touch of exaggeration in all this, but it is the lack of
some such intense belief in themselves that makes so many of our modern
poets trivial and ineffective, and the possession of it that gives a
sincerity and meaning to much of Drinkwater’s verse and atones for
the austerity and conscientious labor with which he fashions the lofty
rhyme after the manner of a builder rather than of a singer. But there
is magic in his building, and if he has not often known the rapture of
spontaneous singing he has known the quiet, profounder joy of really
having something to say and, as Alexander Smith says, the joy, while he
shaped it into words, of
“Sitting the silent term of stars to watch
Your own thought passing into beauty, like
An earnest mother watching the first smile
Dawning upon her sleeping infant’s face,
Until she cannot see it for her tears.”
During the twelve years in which he served as clerk in divers Assurance
Companies, he was serving also his apprenticeship to the Muses. His
first book of verse, published in 1908, when he was twenty-six,
contained little of distinction or of promise, and much the same
may be said of his second. If he was a born poet he was not born
ready-made, and in those books he was still making himself. His third
and fourth showed he was succeeding in doing that, and when the best
things in those first four were gathered into one volume, in 1914,
it was recognized that not merely a new but an authentic poet had
arrived. One might have recognized that if this little collection had
contained nothing but the four poems, “January Dusk,” “In Lady Street,”
“Reckoning,” and “A Prayer,” in which he has finely expressed so much
of himself, his own outlook and aspirations:
“Lord, not for light in darkness do we pray,
Not that the veil be lifted from our eyes,
Nor that the slow ascension of our day
Be otherwise.
Not for a clearer vision of the things
Whereof the fashioning shall make us great,
Nor for remission of the perils and stings
Of time and fate....
Grant us the will to fashion as we feel,
Grant us the strength to labour as we know,
Grant us the purpose, ribbed and edged with steel,
To strike the blow.
Knowledge we ask not--knowledge Thou hast lent,
But, Lord, the will--there lies our bitter need,
Give us to build above the deep intent
The deed, the deed.”
He has little of the delicate fantasy, the eerie atmosphere, the
gracious humor of Walter de la Mare, and little of the grim, stark
realism of Wilfrid Gibson. He cannot write of the squalors of a
Birmingham street, with its trams and fried-fish and rag shops without
touching it to loveliness in the dreams of the old greengrocer who,
among the colors and scents of his apples, marrows, cabbages, mushrooms
and gaudy chrysanthemums, sees the sun shining on lanes he had known in
Gloucestershire. And when he takes a slight and elusive theme that can
only be made to dance to the airiest pipings it dies on his hands and
is cold and stiff and formal, an embodied idea, that should have been
a thing all music and light or it is nothing. Drinkwater’s genius is
more didactic, descriptive, narrative than lyrical. He is heavy and
not happy on the wing; he is more at home when he feels the earth under
his feet, and walking in the Cotswolds or in the streets of the city it
is the visible life and beauty around him, the human joys and griefs,
strivings and visions in which he can share that are his surest sources
of inspiration.