poems--in “Eclipse,” “Uncrowned,” “Reckoning,” “A Prayer”--to make it
nothing strange that he should turn to the stage. Moreover, he is more
prophet than minstrel, more preacher than singer, and though the dogmas
he has formulated about art and “we” who are artists, with the claim
that the renewal of the world rests with “us,” may seem confident and
self-assertive, he is a very modest egoist and, I think, of a sort
that must have felt he could express himself with greater freedom
and force through the medium of imaginary characters than in his own
person. Anyhow, in his early days, he joined in founding the Pilgrim
Players who have since developed into the Birmingham Repertory Theater,
and he proceeded to write plays to be produced there under his own
direction. These were written in blank verse--“Cophetua,” “Rebellion”
(not without hints of his practical idealism, for all its romance),
the three one-act pieces he published in one volume with the title of
“Pawns,” the best of which is that poignantly dramatic sketch “The
Storm”--and they gave him the beginnings of a reputation as dramatist,
but none of them was particularly successful from a business point
of view; and even later “Mary Stuart” was not that. By some irony of
circumstance, after devoting his life whole-heartedly to poetry he
scored his first big success with a play that was done in prose, and
the success of “Abraham Lincoln” was so big and so immediate that it
carried him straightway into a full tide of popularity on both sides of
the Atlantic.
I doubt whether anybody who read it can have foreseen for “Abraham
Lincoln” such a triumphant reception. You might say it is completely
artless, or most subtly artistic in design and workmanship with
an equal chance of being right. Its structure is so simple, its
dialogue cast in such natural, everyday language that you easily may
overlook its bold originality of invention, overlook that it ignores
theatrical technique and traditions and in the quietest way makes a
drastically new departure. It is a chronicle play, but attempts none
of the beauty and harmony of poetry that clothes the chronicle plays
of Shakespeare in magnificence, nor is it alive with incident as his,
nor even knitted up into a continuing story. It is a chronicle play
in the barest meaning of the term; the dialogue is pieced out, where
possible, with Lincoln’s recorded sayings; each scene presents an
event in his career; there are more committee and cabinet meetings
than exciting episodes, far more talk than action throughout. Yet
because of the essential nobility of Lincoln’s character, his unique
personality, his quaintnesses, his brave honesty of thought and
intention, this unadorned presentment of the man and his doings
becomes curiously impressive, profoundly moving--the more so since
it strove to reincarnate what had happened with an exact and naked
realism unheightened by the conventional artifice and tricks of the
stage. The whole thing gained something undoubtedly by being produced
in 1918 when the shadow of the Great War that was upon us gave a
topical significance to Lincoln’s heroic struggle with the South, his
passion for freedom, his humanitarian but practical attitude toward
war in general. His vision and his ideals were at that time those of
the better part of our own people; the play largely voiced the minds
of the multitudes that crowded to see it, so that in writing “Abraham
Lincoln,” despite his artistic faith, Drinkwater was expressing his age
no less than himself.
Already he has had imitators; his method looked too easy not to be
imitated; but it must be harder than it looks for none of them has
succeeded. Perhaps he cannot do it twice himself, for his “Oliver
Cromwell,” fashioned on similar lines, does not, in my thinking, reveal
so true and convincing a portrait of the man. Nearly ten years earlier
Drinkwater had tried his hand on the great Protector in a blank verse
poem sympathetically and dramatically conceived but not altogether
rising to the height of its subject. Like “Abraham Lincoln,” the later
“Oliver Cromwell” is a chronicle play, but he has allowed himself
more latitude in this than in that. He has less warrant for some of
his incidents; the pathos he introduces into Cromwell’s home life is
occasionally just a trifle stagey, and he has sentimentalized Oliver
himself, made him less of the sturdy, bluff, uncompromising Roundhead
that we know from his letters and speeches and the researches of
Carlyle; but it is a vivid, vital piece of portraiture and so often
catches the manner and spirit of the original as to leave a final
impression of likeness in which its unlikelier aspects are lost.
I am told it does not act so well as it reads, but if it does not
rival “Lincoln” on the boards one has to remember that it has not the
advantage of timeliness that “Lincoln” had.
I have said nothing of John Drinkwater’s excursions into criticism;
his studies of Swinburne and Morris, of “The Lyric,” “The Way of
Poetry”; for what he has written about poetry and the drama is of small
importance in comparison with the poetry and the dramas he has written.
As poet and dramatist he has developed slowly, and it is too soon yet
to pass judgment on him. Plenty of men spend their lives in trying
vainly to live up to a brilliant first book, but he began without
fireworks and has grown steadily from the start, and is still young
enough not to have done growing.
JEFFERY FARNOL
[Illustration: JEFFERY FARNOL]
Had it been, as some believe it is, an irrevocable law that a man’s
mind and temperament are naturally moulded by his early environment,
Jeffery Farnol ought to have been an uncompromising realist. Plenty
of good things come out of Birmingham, but they are solid things; you
would not suspect it was the native city of any peddler who had nothing
but dreams to sell.
Scott, Ballantyne and Stevenson were all born in Edinburgh, a very haunt
of romance; Mayne Reid came from Ireland which, though Shakespeare
does not seem to have known it, is where fancy is bred; Stanley
Weyman hails from just such a quaint little country town as he brings
into some of his stories; Manchester nursed Harrison Ainsworth, and
even Manchester carries on business as usual against a shop-soiled
background of fantasy and the black arts. But Birmingham--well,
Birmingham forgets that it was visited by the Normans and sacked by
the Cavaliers; it has made itself new and large and is as go-ahead and
modern as the day after to-morrow; a place of hard facts, factories,
practical efficiency, profitable commerce, achievement in iron and
steel, and apparently has no use for fancy and imagination except on
strictly business lines, when it manufactures idols for the heathen
and jewellery that is not what it seems.
Nevertheless, a fig from a thorn, a grape from a thistle, in Birmingham
Jeffery Farnol was born, and it would not have been surprising if he
had grown up to put present-day Birmingham and its people into his
novels, as Arnold Bennett has put the Five Towns and their people into
his; but instead of doing that he has perversely developed into one
of the most essentially romantic of modern novelists. He was writing
stories when he was nineteen, and some of them found their way into
the magazines. For a while, feeling after a source of income, he
coquetted with engineering, and there is some romance in that, but not
of the sort that could hold him. He experimentalized in half a dozen
trades and professions, and presently looked like becoming an artist
with brush and pencil rather than with the pen. In those uncertain
years, when he was still dividing his leisure between writing tales
and painting landscapes and drawing caricatures, he came to London
and spent his spare time at the Westminster Art School, where the
now distinguished Japanese artist, Yoshio Markino, was one of his
fellow-pupils.
Then, in 1902, he cut the painter in one sense, though not in another,
and grown more enterprising went adventuring to America; where, having
married the youngest daughter of Hughson Hawley, the American scenic
artist, he took to scene-painting himself and did it diligently for two
years at the Astor Theater, New York. When he was not busy splashing
color on back-cloths, he was working strenuously at the writing of
fiction, and if his first novel smacks somewhat of the conventions and
artificialities of the theater in whose atmosphere he was living, his
second, “The Broad Highway,” is as untrammeled by all such influences
and as breezily, robustly alive with the wholesome, free air of the
countryside of eighteenth century England and the native spirit of
romance as if he had never heard of Birmingham or been within sight of
a stage door.
With “The Broad Highway” he found himself at once; but he did not at
once find a publisher with it. Often enough an author who has been
rejected in England has been promptly received with open arms by a
publisher and a public in America; then he has come home bringing his
sheaves with him and been even more rapturously welcomed into the
households and circulating libraries of his penitent countrymen. But in
Farnol’s case the process was reversed. America would have none of “The
Broad Highway”; her publishers returned it to him time after time, as
they had returned “Mr. Tawnish,” which he had put away in despair. It
had taken him two years to write what is nowadays the most popular of
his books, and for three years it wandered round seeking acceptance or
slept in his drawer between journeys, until he began to think it would
never get out of manuscript into print at all.
It was looking travel worn and the worse for wear, and had been
sleeping neglected in his drawer for some months, when his wife rescued
it and, on the off chance, sent it over to England to an old friend of
Farnol’s who, having read it with enthusiasm, passed it on to Sampson
Low & Co., and it came to pass that “The Broad Highway” was then
published immediately and as immediately successful. That was in 1910;
and in the same year Jeffery Farnol came back to his own country and
settled in Kent, which has given him so many scenes for the best of his
romances.
Strange, you may say, that a novel so wholly and peculiarly English
should have been written so far away from its proper setting and in
such unpropitious surroundings, especially while Farnol had all the
glamorous adventure and lurid, living romance of the American outlands
waiting, as it were, at his elbow. But
“The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven,”
and an eighteenth century England of a twentieth century New York;
otherwise he might have been among the pioneer revivalists of the
riotously romantic novel of the Wild West. Stranger still that when
“The Broad Highway” recrossed the ocean it was no longer rejected and
had soon scored an even larger success with American than with English
readers. The magazines there opened their doors to the author without
delay and made haste to secure the serial rights in his next stories
before he had begun to think of them. Within the next three years,
“The Money Moon” and “The Amateur Gentleman” had increased and firmly
established his reputation, and the earlier “Mr. Tawnish” came out on
the strength of their abounding popularity, which was more than strong
enough to carry the tale of that elegant and honourable person much
farther than it might have gone if it had not had such best sellers and
long runners to set the pace for it.
Romance is Farnol’s native air, and he does not breathe happily in
any other. When he tells a story of the trousered, railway-riding
life round him he is like a wizard who has turned from his spells and
incantations to build with mundane bricks and mortar instead of with
magic--he does the ordinary thing capably but in the ordinary way. “The
Chronicles of the Imp” is an entertaining trifle, and “The Definite
Object” is a clever, exciting story of a young millionaire’s adventures
in New York’s underworld, but they lack his distinctive touch, his
individual manner; he is not himself in them. He is the antithesis of
Antaeus and renews himself when he reaches, not the solid earth, but
the impalpable shores of old romance. He can do wonders of picturesque
realism with such charming latter-day fantasies as “The Money Moon,”
but give him the knee-breeches or strapped pants and the open road
and all the motley, thronging life of it in the gallant days of the
Regency and he will spin you such virile, breezily masculine, joyously
humorous romances as “The Broad Highway,” “The Amateur Gentleman” and
“Peregrine’s Progress”; give him the hose and jerkin, the roistering
merriment and rugged chivalries of the Middle Ages and he will weave
you so glowing and lusty a saga as “Meltane the Smith”; and you will
have far to go among recent books before you find more fascinating or
more vigorously imaginative romances of piracy and stirring adventure
on land and sea than “Black Bartlemy’s Treasure” and its sequel,
“Martin Conisby’s Vengeance.”
He gives away the recipe for his best romance in that talk between
Peter Vibart and another wayfarer which preludes “The Broad Highway”:
“As I sat of an early summer morning in the shade of a tree, eating
fried bacon with a tinker, the thought came to me that I might some
day write a book of my own; a book that should treat of the roads and
by-roads, of trees, and wind in lonely places, of rapid brooks and lazy
streams, of the glory of dawn, the glow of evening, and the purple
solitude of night; a book of wayside inns and sequestered taverns; a
book of country things and ways and people. And the thought pleased me
much.
“‘But,’ objected the Tinker, for I had spoken my thought aloud, ‘trees
and suchlike don’t sound very interestin’--leastways--not in a book,
for after all a tree’s only a tree and an inn an inn; no, you must tell
of other things as well.’
“‘Yes,’ said I, a little damped, ‘to be sure there is a highwayman----’
“‘Come, that’s a little better!’ said the Tinker encouragingly.
“‘Then,’ I went on, ticking off each item on my fingers, ‘come Tom
Cragg, the pugilist----’
“‘Better and better!’ nodded the Tinker.
“‘----a long-legged soldier of the Peninsula, an adventure at a lonely
tavern, a flight through woods at midnight pursued by desperate
villains, and--a most extraordinary tinker.’”
The tinker approves of all these things, but urges that there must also
be in the story blood, and baronets, and, above all, love and plenty
of it, and though Peter Vibart is doubtful about these ingredients
because he lacks experience of them, as he goes on his journey he
makes acquaintance with them all, and they are all in the story before
it ends. The tinker was only interpreting the passion for romance
that is in Everyman when he pleaded for the inclusion of picturesque
or emotional elements that Peter was for omitting, and the instant
and continuing popularity of “The Broad Highway” shows that he was a
correct interpreter.
Born no longer ago than 1878, Farnol is younger than that in everything
but years. If he is seldom seen in literary circles it is simply
because the country draws him more than the town; he is the most
sociable of men, and his intimates will tell you that the geniality,
the warmth of feeling, the shrewd, humorous philosophy that are in his
books are also in himself; that his love of romance is as genuine and
inherent as every other sense belonging to him, and, consequently, when
he sits to write on the themes that naturally appeal to him he merely
follows Samuel Daniel’s counsel and dips his pen into his heart.
JOHN GALSWORTHY
[Illustration: JOHN GALSWORTHY]
In attempting a personal description of almost any living poet or
novelist it is becoming such a customary thing to say he does not look
in the least like an author that I am beginning to feel a consuming
curiosity to know what an author looks like and what can cause him
to look so entirely different from men of other professions that you
can tell him for one at a glance. In my own experience, the worst
poetry nowadays is written by men of the most picturesquely poetical
appearance, and the best by men who are stout, or bald, or of an
otherwise commonplace or unattractive exterior. Nor among the many
literary persons I have met do I remember meeting even one novelist of
genius who looked it. How this myth of the ideal author, the splendid
creature carrying his credentials in his face, came into being is not
within my knowledge. An old gentleman of my acquaintance who had, in
his time, set eyes on Dickens assured me that he was an insignificant
little person who might have passed for a retired sea-captain.
Thackeray rather resembled a prize fighter who had gone flabby.
Trollope, with his paunch and massive beard suggested the country
squire. Browning would not have seemed out of place as a bank manager,
and though Tennyson was said to look a typical poet, he really looked
much more like a typical stage brigand.
The fact is that while other trades and professions have developed
recognizable characteristics in such as follow them, literature has
naturally failed to do that. For men are drawn into it from all
sections of the community and there is no more reason that they should
conform to a family likeness than that they should each write the same
kind of books. They do not even, in appearance, live up to the books
they write. Stanley Weyman looks as unromantic as Austin Chamberlain;
that daring realist George Moore gazes on you with the blue-eyed
innocence of a new curate; and the mild and gentle aspect of Thomas
Burke does not harmonize with the violence and grim horrors of his
tales of Chinatown.
In a word, no two authors look alike; as a race, they have even given
up trying to achieve a superficial uniformity by growing long hair
and, when they have any, cut it to an orthodox length. A few cultivate
the mustache; not many indulge in whiskers; the majority are clean
shaven; and in this they are not peculiar, for the same, in the same
proportions, may be said of their readers. Therefore, when at a recent
dinner a lady sitting next to me surveyed John Galsworthy, who was
seated opposite, and remarked, “You could guess he was an author--he
looks so like one,” I anxiously enquired, “Which one?” and was, perhaps
not undeservedly, ignored.
If she had said he looked like an indefinite intellectual; that
his countenance was modeled on noble and dignified lines; that it
expressed at once shrewdness and benignity, I could have understood
and agreed with her. But these qualities are so far from being
infallibly the birthright of the author that they are seldom apparent
in him. With his firm, statuesque features, his grave immobility,
his air of detachment and distinction, the calm deliberation of his
voice and gesture, Galsworthy embodies rather what we have come to
regard as the legal temperament. It is not difficult to imagine
him in wig and gown pleading earnestly, impressively, but without
passion, or, appropriately robed, summing up from the bench sternly,
conscientiously, and with the most punctilious impartiality.
Consequently, it was without surprise I heard the other day, for the
first time, that he had studied for the Bar and became, in his early
years, a barrister, though he did not practice. Nor is this legal
strain to be traced only in his personal aspect and bearing; it asserts
itself as unmistakably and often with considerable effectiveness
throughout his novels and plays. He has the lawyer’s respect for fact
and detail; he must have the truth, the whole truth and nothing but
the truth; and this gives his stories a certain aridity; a hardness as
well as clearness of outline. The ways of the impressionist are not
his ways; he omits nothing, but is as precise, as exact in developing
plot and character as a lawyer is in getting up a case. He is not
satisfied merely to paint portraits of his men and women, he analyses
them meticulously, tells you every little thing about them and their
families and friends, their taste in food and dress and furniture,
shows them in their domestic relations, in their business activities,
inventories their virtues and vices and material surroundings with a
completeness that leaves nothing unexplained and affects the reader
with an extraordinary sense of the reality of it all. If he is
recording a funeral he will take care to tell you “the hearse started
at a foot’s pace; the carriages moved slowly after.” You might have
been trusted to assume that this would be the order of the procession,
but nothing is assumed, the thing has got to be described just as it
happened. You are then told who was in each carriage, and note is made
of the thirteenth carriage which follows at the very end “containing
nobody at all.” That is the Galsworthy method. When he relates, in
“The Man of Property,” that the young architect, Bosinney, is building
a house in the country for Soames Forsyte he does not slur things and
content himself with generalities but acquaints you with the size,
design and cost of the house, its architectural peculiarities, and the
point is that all these particulars are strictly relevant and serve to
reveal more intimately the characters and idiosyncrasies of Bosinney
and of Soames, and have their significance in the unfolding of that
poignant tragedy of Soames’s wife.
As the historian of later Victorian upper middle-class life in England,
Galsworthy is the legitimate successor of Anthony Trollope. He is
as true a realist as Trollope without the reticence imposed on the
Victorian writer by his period; but Trollope’s style was exuberant,
slipshod, obese, like himself, and Galsworthy’s, like himself, is lean,
subdued, direct, chary of displaying emotion; he observes a close
economy in the use of words, despite the length of his books. In common
with most of his contemporary novelists, Trollope was something of a
moralist; he handled from a sensible, man-of-the-world point of view
divers religious, financial and domestic problems of the time that lent
themselves to his purposes as a teller of stories. But the problems
that interested him were those that had to be faced by the well-to-do
and the respectable; he had no particular sympathy for the lower orders
and little contempt, good-humored or otherwise, for the vulgar folk
who had earned their own money, climbed up from the depths, and were
awkwardly trying to breathe and flutter in the refined air of good
society.
He had a nice feeling for sentiment, and lapsed carelessly into
sentimentality. Galsworthy is generally too controlled and
self-conscious to do that. But if his irony and satire are keener-edged
than his predecessor’s, his sympathies are broader and deeper. He is
a humanitarian whose sense of brotherhood extends to birds and the
animals described as dumb. On the one hand, he understands and has
compassion for the under-dog, the poor, the humble; and on the other,
though he can smile, as in the three novels that make up his greatest
achievement, “The Forsyte Saga,” and elsewhere--and smile with a
sardonic humor--at the outlook and pretensions of those old prosperous
families who move in the best circles and, comfortably materialistic,
have, in place of a sense of brotherhood, acquired an ineradicable
sense of property in their wives, money, houses, he is not blind to the
finer human qualities that underlie their inherited social conventions.
In two of his dramas, “Strife,” and “The Skin Game,” he handles the
eternal struggle between capital and labor, and the conflict of
interests between a wealthy _parvenu_ and an impoverished patrician
with such an honest balancing of wrongs and rights, such sedulous
impartiality, that you can scarcely say at the end which side retains
most of his sympathy.
He takes life too seriously, it seems, to be able to write stories or
plays for their own sake; he writes them to expose moral or economic
evils of his time, to advocate reforms in our social organization;
the crude barbarity of our prison system; the tyranny of the marriage
law; the hypocrisies of religion and orthodox morality; the vanity of
riches; the fatuity of all class inequalities--with him the creation
of character, the fashioning of a tale of individual love, rivalry,
ambition, triumph or disaster are generally more or less subordinate to
communal or national issues such as these.
It is characteristic of Galsworthy’s reticence that he issued his
first three or four novels under the pseudonym of John Sinjohn; and
of the genuineness of his democratic ideals that when he had built
up a reputation and was offered a knighthood he declined it. It is
characteristic, too, of his restrained, deliberate habit of mind that,
unlike the generality of writers, he does not seem to have rushed
into print until he was old enough to have acquired enough personal
experience to draw upon. He was thirty-one when his first novel,
“Jocelyn,” was published; and thirty-nine when, in the one year, 1906,
he made another and a real beginning as a novelist in his own name
with “The Man of Property,” and as a dramatist with “The Silver Box.”
The keynote of his work is its profound sincerity. Art and the zeal
for reform seldom run in double-harness, but they do when Galsworthy
drives.
SIR ANTHONY HOPE HAWKINS
[Illustration: SIR ANTHONY HOPE HAWKINS]