to have such matters neat and orderly, delight to call a romantic
revival in fiction. As a matter of fact, it also brought with it a
revival of realism, and both had really started before the century
began, and have continued to advance together ever since on pretty
equal terms. In the 1890’s Gissing was nearing the end of his career,
but the torch of realism was being carried on by Hubert Crackanthorpe
(who died too soon), by Arnold Bennett, Arthur Morrison, Pett Ridge,
Edwin Pugh, George Moore, Oliver Onions, Kipling, Wells (who divided
his allegiance between both movements), George Egerton, Elizabeth
Robins, Mrs. W. K. Clifford, and many another.
The romantic revival, which had started earlier, was well afoot during
the same period. Stevenson died in 1894. Rider Haggard’s best romances
were out in the 1880’s; Doyle’s “Micah Clarke” and “The White Company”
belong to 1888 and 1890; Sir Gilbert Parker came soon after; Stanley
Weyman and Anthony Hope arrived in the movement together, when the
century was still in its infancy. All these were in the same boat but,
to adopt Douglas Jerrold’s pun, with very different skulls; how they
are to take rank in the hierarchy of letters is not my concern at the
moment--I am only saying they were all romantics. That Weyman might
have been something else is indicated by the strong, quiet realism of
his second book, “The New Rector,” and the much later novels he has
written, after an inactive interval of ten years, “The Great House,”
and “The Ovington Bank”; and that Anthony Hope Hawkins might have been
something else is the inference you draw from nearly all his work after
“The Intrusions of Peggy.”
His father was the Vicar of St. Bride’s, Fleet Street, and he was a
nephew, or some other near relation, of the famous “hanging Judge,” Sir
Henry Hawkins. From Marlborough he passed to Balliol, Oxford, where he
took his M. A. degree and was president of the Oxford Union Society. He
seems to have set out with an eye on a career at the Bar which should
lead him into the House of Commons. But though he was, like Stanley
Weyman, duly called to the Bar, like Weyman, he did not do anything
much in the way of practising. Once he put up as a Parliamentary
candidate, but was not elected; yet one can imagine him as an ideal
Member--he has the distinguished presence, the urbane, genially
courteous manner, the even temper and nimbleness of mind that ought to
but do not always go to the making of an Attorney General and, as any
who have heard him take part in after-dinner discussions will know, in
addressing an audience he has all the gifts of clarity, ease and humor
that make the successful public speaker.
But law and politics piped to him in vain, and his ambition took the
right turning when he wrote his first novel, “A Man of Mark.” It was
a deft and lively enough tale; it was read and talked about, and
was considered promising, but caused no particular excitement. The
excitement was waiting for his next book. When “The Prisoner of Zenda”
burst upon the town, in 1894, it leaped into success at once. Stanley
Weyman’s “Under the Red Robe” was issued almost simultaneously and the
two ran a wild race for popularity and both won. Both were dramatized
promptly, and repeated on the stage the dazzling success they had
enjoyed between covers. Each inspired a large school of imitators,
which increased and multiplied until the sword and cloak romance, and
stories of imaginary kingdoms were, in a few years, almost as plentiful
as blackberriers and began to become a drug in the market. But,
meanwhile, the spirit of romance was awake and abroad, and any capable
novelist who rode into the library lists wearing her favors was pretty
sure of a welcome.
In the same bustling year, 1894, we had from Anthony Hope “The God in
the Car,” a tale of a South African Company promoter, and “The Dolly
Dialogues.” These were not in a direct line of descent from “The
Prisoner of Zenda,” and were possibly written before that; they were,
at all events, written before the enormous vogue of that could prompt
the author to follow it with another of the same desirable brand. But
“The Dolly Dialogues” soared to an independent success of their own.
Those crisp, neat entertaining chats of that adroitest of flirts,
Dolly Foster, with her husband, with Mr. Carter, and others of her
fashionable circle, were not without a certain distant likeness to the
bright, irresponsible talk of “Dodo,” and repeated the triumph that had
been “Dodo’s” a decade earlier. The “Dialogues” set another fashion,
and generated another school of imitators. Whether people ever talked
with such consistent brilliance in real life was of no consequence; it
was amusing, clever, it was often witty, and when it was not it was
crisp and smart and so like wit that it could pass for it. And in so
far as such acute remarks and repartee were too good to be true they
only brought the book into line with the airy, impossible romance and
inventive fantasy of “The Prisoner of Zenda.”
With “Rupert of Hentzau” Anthony Hope was back in his imaginary kingdom
next year; if the sequel was not so good as “The Prisoner” it had as
good a reception; and “The King’s Mirror,” and a romantic comedy, “The
Adventure of Lady Ursula,” not dramatized from one of his books but
specially written for the stage, followed in quick succession. For
those were days when he was working strenuously and systematically
at his art; to cultivate the habit of work he left home every
morning, like any lawyer or stockbroker, and went to a room off the
Strand--wasn’t it in Buckingham Street?--where he wrote steadily for a
fixed number of hours without interruption. The notion that an author
can only do his best by fits and starts as the mood takes him is a
romantic convention dear to the dilettante, but Hope was never that;
he kept his romance in his books as sedulously as Scott did and was as
sensibly practical as Scott in his methods of making them.
But he had to pay for his first popular success, as most novelists do.
Jerome has more than once complained that the public having accepted
“Three Men in a Boat” with enthusiasm and labeled him a humorist would
never after allow him to be anything else. His “Paul Kelver” is worth
a dozen of the other book, but it has withdrawn into the background
and “Three Men in a Boat” is still selling freely. “Quisante” (1900)
marked a new departure, suggested that Hope was turning from romance to
reality. That study of the political adventurer and the aristocratic
wife who realizes she has made a mistake in marrying out of her order,
is, as literature and as a story, a stronger, finer piece of work than
any Hope had done before, but it was not what his readers had expected
of him, and it did not win the new reputation it ought to have won for
him, though the critics did not fail to recognize its quality. To the
general world of readers he was the author of “The Prisoner of Zenda”;
that was the type of novel they wanted from him; they continued to
ask for it and would not willingly take any other. He humored them at
intervals with “The Intrusions of Peggy,” and “Sophy of Kravonia,” but
on the whole he had done with such light entertainments and settled
down to the serious interpretation of modern life and character.
Next to “Quisante,” I would place his poignant and dramatic handling
of the marriage problem in “Double Harness,” the study, in “A Servant
of the Public,” of a temperament that is only baffling by reason of
its elemental simplicity; the masterly realistic presentment of a
capable, courageous, unconventional, attractive woman in “The Great
Miss Driver,” and the brilliant treatment again of the problem of
marriage and disillusion in “Mrs. Maxon Protests.” These five--subtle
in characterization and fashioned of the comedy and tragedy of actual
human experience--these and not his more notorious trifles are the true
measure of Anthony Hope’s achievement as a novelist.
But they are obscured by the flashier glory of “The Prisoner of Zenda”
and “Rupert of Hentzau,” which are now renascent and appealing mightily
on the films to the romantic susceptibilities of a new generation of
admirers.
The novels he has written since the honor of knighthood was conferred
upon him in 1918 are sufficient to show that his invention and skill in
narrative are by no means failing him, though neither “Beaumaroy Home
from the Wars” nor “Lucinda” reach the level of “Quisante” or “Mrs.
Maxon Protests.” But “Beaumaroy” has touches of humor and character
that are in his happiest vein, and if I say that “Lucinda” is an abler
and more notable piece of work than is either of the dazzling fairy
tales that established his position, it is not that I would belittle
those delightful entertainments but would emphasize that so far from
representing his capacity they misrepresent it; they stand in the way
and prevent his better work from being seen in its just proportions,
so that though at first they may have secured a prompt recognition for
him, it looks as if, at last, they will, in a larger sense, prevent him
from being recognized.
ARTHUR STUART MENTETH HUTCHINSON
[Illustration: ARTHUR STUART MENTETH HUTCHINSON]
Success is good for people, when they do not get too much of it too
soon. Failure is even better for them, when they do not get more than
enough of it for too many years. Hardship, difficulty, failure--these
knock the nonsense out of a man and teach him his art or his business;
there is something lacking from the character and work of one who has
never known them. Many authors recover at last from their failures, but
an instant and early success is generally fatal; it makes them take
themselves too seriously and their work not seriously enough; their
vogue dwindles, in consequence, and the publishers who began to run
after them begin to run away from them. There is little more difference
between a too triumphant beginning and an unending failure than between
a drought and a deluge.
The two extremes are equally devastating, and A. S. M. Hutchinson is
among the luckier ones who have been destined to a middle course. He
has not won his pearl without diving for it; but he has not had to dive
and come up empty-handed.
Those who imagine, as some do, that, with “If Winter Comes,” he simply
came, and saw, and conquered, imagine a vain thing. He had come three
times before that, and had, moreover, toiled at the oar as a very
miscellaneous journalist, a writer of articles and short stories that
editors too frequently rejected. If he never exactly lived in Grub
Street, he sojourned for a few years in a turning out of it.
He had no literary or journalistic ancestry, and was originally
dedicated to another profession, but he did not “drift into
journalism”--that not being his way; he walked into it deliberately,
having made up his mind to go there. His father is a General in
the Indian Army, and A. S. M. was born in India, in 1880. But his
grandfather was a doctor of medicine, and at an early age Hutchinson
was settled in London, beginning a career of his own as a Medical
student. To this day, he has a quiet, kindly, sympathetic bearing that
would have served him as an excellent bedside manner, if he had taken
his M. D. and put up a brass plate. But he is one of the shyest, most
retiring of men; you cannot associate him with any sort of brass; and
even while he was trying a ’prentice hand in medicine and surgery at
St. Thomas’s Hospital a private ambition was drawing him in another
direction.
“I always intended to earn my living with my pen,” he told me, some
years ago. “I was writing then in my leisure, sending out all kinds of
MSS. and getting most of them back, and at length I took the plunge
when I had about one short story accepted by a magazine, two articles
by _Punch_ and some verses by _Scraps_. I did not know a soul who had
the remotest connection with literary work, but I chanced it.”
And threw physic to the dogs. He did not limit himself to any working
hours, but by writing hard all day contrived to pick up a regular five
shillings a week from _Scraps_ for comic verse, and, augmenting this
from a precarious sale of articles and tales to various publications,
compiled a weekly income of about one pound sterling. He had done this
for three months or so, when a letter came from _Pearson’s_ accepting a
story and asking for more; and he has related how this sent him crazy
all day with excitement. A few days later he was asked to call at the
office and undertake a small, special job, and, one thing leading to
another, was presently engaged on the staff at £2 10s. a week. By
the time he had gained experience as assistant editor of the _Royal
Magazine_ and been made co-editor of the _Rapid Review_, he felt the
hour had come for another plunge.
A friend of those days describes him as “a slight, almost boyish young
man of middle-height, who gazed at you with intense concentration
through the powerful lenses of his glasses.” This still describes him,
if you touch in an elusive twinkle of genial humor about the mouth and
eyes, and add that his slightness, despite something of a stoop, gives
him an appearance of being actually tall. Already he had started on
his first novel, “Once Aboard the Lugger,” and wanted to cut adrift
from too much editing and escape into other fields. He resigned from
_Pearson’s_ and hearing that the _Daily Graphic_ was looking for a
leader-note writer, posted specimens, and secured the appointment as
a stand-by. In 1907 he was sub-editing that paper, and edited it from
1912 to 1916.
Meanwhile, “Once Aboard the Lugger” being finished, he offered it to
one publisher who declined it, because “humor was not in his line,” and
to another who published it, in 1908; and it scored what counts for a
considerable success, if you do not compare its sales with those of
his fourth and fifth books. That out of hand, he commenced “The Happy
Warrior,” but when it was done, was dissatisfied with it, and being,
as he confesses, “an appallingly, vilely conscientious” worker, he did
it all over again. It swallowed the leisure of four years, but when it
came out, in 1912, added not a little to his reputation.
His first book was a lively mingling of comedy and burlesque; his
second, a realistic romance of humor and pathos, struck a deeper note,
was fired with a fine idealism, and revealed him as a shrewd observer
and one subtly acquainted with the complexities of human character.
Then in 1914 came “The Clean Heart,” the tragedy of a life that lost
its way, of one who had to learn through folly and suffering that
self-sacrifice is the secret of happiness. It was as successful as its
predecessors, and I am not sure that they are wrong who hold that it
is the best of all Hutchinson’s work; but the War overshadowed it and
left it no chance of anticipating the phenomenal popularity that was
waiting for his later books.
For nine years he published no more. He was serving as a lieutenant of
the Royal Engineers, attached to the Canadian forces, and, after the
peace, went as a Captain of the R. E., with the Army of Occupation,
into Germany. Before he was demobilized he had planned his fourth
novel, and when he could, at length, return to civilian life, he
decided not to hamper himself again with journalism but to stake his
prospects on his new book, and in 1921 “If Winter Comes” more than
amply justified him of his decision. Not more than one or two novels
within my remembrance have leaped into such instant and enormous
popularity. For a few weeks it was praised by the reviews, but there
was no particular stirring of the waters till a “boom” broke out in
America. The noise of it soon woke us over here, and the story got
rapidly into its stride; Hutchinson suddenly found himself famous as
a best-seller of half a million copies in America and half as many in
his own country. The furore it created had scarcely showed signs of
subsiding when “This Freedom” followed in its wake and brewed another
storm. A storm of mingled eulogy and censure; for the critics this
time were largely hostile. The story handled the problem of woman’s
emancipation, and Hutchinson stood for the old ideals of femininity,
the sanctities and traditional duties of womanhood; he believed that a
mother has positive and inalienable responsibilities, and set himself
to demonstrate that she could not put them by and arrogate to herself
a share of what is known as man’s work in the world without neglecting
her children, losing their affection, and bringing tragic disaster
on them and on her husband. He was accused of exaggeration; of being
out of sympathy with the modern spirit; but if, instead of giving the
novel this general application, you take it, as a work of imagination
should be taken--as a story of what happened when one woman strove
to break away from conventions and be herself at all risks--it is a
powerful and poignantly suggestive narrative and one that may well be
temperamentally true of such a woman and of such a family.
Here, as in his other books, Hutchinson is so in earnest and realizes
his characters so intensely, that he becomes, as it were, this
character and that in succession, slips involuntarily into writing from
their standpoints as if he personally felt the wrong, hope, pain or
passion each experienced, and this misleads some of his critics into
taking for mannerisms what are nothing but his intimate realization of
his people and the outcome of his complete sincerity. He is so closely
interested in them himself that he cannot play the showman and stand
apart exhibiting his puppets; to him they are not puppets but have
burgeoned and become living realities and their emotions are his no
less than theirs.
On the stage “If Winter Comes” did not capture the public so completely
as it did in the book, but it ran well in London and the provinces and
here and in America still keeps its place on tour. It has got on to
the films, of course and “This Freedom” is following in its footsteps.
Hutchinson took his first successes with a tranquillity that seemed
like indifference, and his later and larger triumphs and the
denunciations he has endured, have I think, moved him as little. He has
aimed at doing his own work in his own way, and his popularity is an
accident; he is not the sort of man that finds success, but the sort of
man that success finds.
SHEILA KAYE-SMITH
[Illustration: SHEILA KAYE-SMITH]
Talking of Charlotte Bronte, in a novel of Sheila Kaye-Smith’s that
goes back to mid-Victorian days, a hairy young man, with a mustache,
in addition to the whiskers of the period, agrees that she is crude
and outlandish, and adds, “That always comes when women write books.
They’re so frightened of being called feminine that they bury what
talent they may have under a mountain of manliness--and manliness for
them consists entirely of oaths and violence and scarlet sin.”
Whether you agree or disagree with him, the hairy young critic was
expressing an opinion that was common among his contemporaries, who
have handed it down to a large number of their successors. It was
probably half true, and is not so true now as it was. The women
novelists now who specialise in scarlet sin have no particular use for
oaths and violence. Moreover, though it would be easy to name several
who have a tendency to color their pages with sin of all colors, there
is nothing exclusively masculine in that and their novels remain
essentially feminine. It would be easy to name others who are much
addicted to violent scenes and characters, but I doubt whether that is
any conscious attempt on their part to be manly--on the contrary, it
arises from an inherent, very feminine admiration of that barbaric
strength and muscular vigor which the average woman is supposed to
find so splendid and so attractive in the average man. It is such an
orthodox feminine conception of the ideal male that its presence in a
story almost inevitably betrays the sex of the author.
All which means no more than that the woman novelist quite legitimately
does her best to draw a man, as the man novelist does his best to draw
a woman, and she succeeds nearly as often; and no woman novelist, past
or present, has been more uniformly and extraordinarily successful
in this difficult application of her art than Sheila Kaye-Smith. It
is usual for the male author to excuse his artistic shortcomings by
insisting that woman is a mystery and it is impossible to comprehend
her; but it seems likely that he may himself be as much of a mystery to
woman and that is why, in fiction, the men she depicts so often seem
like women in masquerade. Two of our leading women writers, who can
analyse and reveal characters of their own sex with an almost uncanny
insight, lose that power when they try to exercise it on the male of
the species and he thinks, feels and talks in their pages more or less
after the manner of women. They are brilliantly clever in every other
way, but can only make man in their own image.
But the men in Miss Kaye-Smith’s novels are the real thing; they are
the unqualified male in whom male readers unhesitatingly recognize
their kind. Not because they are harsh or brutal, though some of them
are that; not because they are susceptible to the lure of the other
sex and masterfully override the laws of conventional morality, though
some of them do that; not because they are heavy drinkers and lusty
fighters with their fists, though some of them are this and some that;
but simply because in their general habits, their ordinary everyday
behavior, in what they say no less than in what they think, they are
obviously of the masculine gender. It is easy to create an illusion
that your character is a man if you call him a soldier and describe him
as acting with vigor or daring; but take this fragment of conversation,
chosen at random from “The Challenge to Sirius,” between Frank Rainger
and the retired studious Mr. Bellack. Frank is the son of an embittered
gentleman who has withdrawn from the struggle of life; he works, from
choice, on the farm where he and his father live, and goes daily to
the Rectory to take lessons with Mr. Bellack, but has come to hesitate
between his love of working on the land and a desire to go away
somewhere and know more of life, and asks his tutor to advise him:
“‘The question is which is the best: happiness or experience? If it’s
experience, you had better get out of this hole as quickly as possible;
if it’s happiness, you had better stay where you are.’
“‘Which do you think it is, sir?’
“‘My good boy, how can I tell you? Personally I would rather you did
not go to London and take your chances there, as I feel that, though
you have brains and certain rudimentary gifts, it is not the kind of
life you are cut out for, and that you will probably fail and be
wretched. On the other hand, never renounce what seems to you a good
opportunity and a fine experience because an old chap like me hints at
trouble ahead. Besides, your father would rather see you starve as a
journalist than grow fat as a farmer. Perhaps he is right--perhaps I
am.’
“‘Did you ever have to make a choice of your own, sir?’
“‘Certainly I did, and I chose to be Rector of Wittersham with an
income of two hundred a year, no congenial society, a congregation of
hop-sacks, and for my sole distraction the teaching of a muddle-headed
boy who, at the age of nineteen, is still undecided as to how he shall
live the rest of his life.’
“‘So you chose wrong, I reckon.’
“‘How do you reckon any such thing? You don’t know what my alternative
was. Besides, you may be sure of this, no matter which way you choose
you will never definitely know whether you were wrong or right. The
great question of all choosers and adventurers is “Was it worth
while?”--and whatever else you may expect of life, don’t expect an
answer to that.’”