with you would know at once he was not talking to a woman, for there
is a man’s way of thinking, a man’s manner, even a man’s voice in all
that Mr. Bellack says. There is always this subtle, easy, truthfully
realistic presentation of Miss Kaye-Smith’s male characters, of the
mild, unassertive, commonplace, as well as the aggressive and more
virile of them. Her rustic clowns are as roughly human and racy of the
soil as Hardy’s. Robert Fuller, half animal, half saint, in “Green
Apple Harvest”; Monypenny, the practical idealist of “Tamarisk Town,”
who, ambitious to develop and popularize a seaside resort, triumphs
over all obstacles, carries his schemes through, rises to wealth and
dignity, and, sacrificing to his ambition the woman he loves, finds
himself lonely and unhappy on his height and turns remorsefully
and madly to destroy all he has so laboriously built; Miles, in
“Starbrace,” with his strangely varying moods, his strength and pitiful
weaknesses; the stern, harsh, ruggedly heroic Reuben Backfield, in
“Sussex Gorse,” wholly given over to his desperate, indomitable fight
for the possession of a wild unfruitful common; Mr. Sumption, the dour,
pathetic Baptist minister in “Little England,” a graphic, poignant
revelation of what the war meant in a rural community, and one of the
two or three great novels of that era--these and, in their differing
class and degree, all the men who belong to her stories are real,
authentic, humans--are men in flesh and bone and spirit, easy, natural,
alive.
Her women are drawn with a knowledge that is apparently as minutely
exact and is certainly as sympathetic. If I had to single out her most
remarkable study in feminine temperament and psychology, I think I
should say Joanna Godden; but her explicit interpretations of women are
not so unusual as her understanding of men. She knows their businesses
as thoroughly as she knows them. If, like Coalbran or Backfield, they
are farmers and working on the land, she is not contented with vivid
generalities but makes the varied, multifarious circumstance of farming
and cattle raising, and the whole atmosphere and environment that has
moulded their lives part of her story. When Monypenny devotes himself
to the development of Tamarisk Town you are not asked to take anything
for granted but are shown how he financed his scheme, acquired land,
carried out his building operations, how the borough was formed, and
the elections conducted--you follow the growth of the place through its
various stages, and Monypenny’s own story grows with and through it.
It is this acquaintance with practical detail, this filling in of all
essential surroundings that help to give the novels their convincing
air of realism.
You would not suspect such broad and deep knowledge of humanity and the
affairs of the world in the quiet, soft-spoken, grey-eyed, dreamy, very
feminine person you discover the author to be when you meet her. At a
little distance, too, with her slight figure and bobbed hair, you might
take her for a mere school-girl. Little more than a school-girl she was
when she wrote her first novel, “The Tramping Methodist,” which, after
being rejected half a dozen times, was published in 1909. She had no
further difficulties with publishers, however, for this and her second
book, “Starbrace,” next year, put her on sure ground with critics and
public, though she had to wait for the beginnings of popularity until
“Tamarisk Town” came out in 1919.
She was born at Hastings, her father being a doctor there, and has
passed all her life in Sussex. Her first two novels are of the
eighteenth century; one or two are of mid-Victorian times; the rest
are of our own day. Occasionally she brings her people to London, but
nearly always they are at home in Kent or Sussex. In “The Challenge to
Sirius” and “The End of the House of Alard” they are on the borderland
of the two counties; but mostly her scenes are in the county where she
was born. In her books she has become its interpreter and made it her
own. She has put something of her love of it and of the rugged lives
and passions of its folk into the poems in “Willow Forge,” and “Saints
in Sussex”; but her best poetry is in her novels. If you can compare
her with some of her leading women contemporaries you have a sense of
as much difference between them as there is between the collector of
insects and the hunter of big game. Those others take you into a study
and scientifically exhibit curious specimens under a microscope; she
is too warmly human for such pendantries and takes you where there is
sky and grass and a whole ordinary world full of mortal creatures and
shows you them living and working in the light of common day. I believe
the secret of her power is largely in her complete unselfconsciousness;
she has no affectations; the charm and strength of her style is its
limpid simplicity; she seems, while you read, to be merely letting her
characters act and think; to be thinking of her work and never of her
own cleverness; as if she were too sure and spontaneous an artist to be
even aware of the fact.
RUDYARD KIPLING
[Illustration: RUDYARD KIPLING]
It is usual to write of the 1890’s as the days of the decadents; but I
never see them so labeled without being reminded of the Hans Brietmann
ballad--
“Hans Brietmann gif a barty:
Vhere is dot barty now?”...
For though Wilde and Beardsley remain, the rest of their hectic
group have either gone home or are going, and, from this distance
it is possible to focus that decade and realize that its prevailing
influences were Henley and Stevenson, and that the true glory of the
90’s is that they were the flowering time of Shaw, Barrie, Wells and
Kipling.
Kipling, indeed, began his literary career in the 80’s, and by the end
of the 90’s was the most popular, the most belauded and decried of
living authors. After being sent home to Westward Ho! in Devon, to be
educated at the school he has immortalized in “Stalkey & Co.,” he went
back to India (where he was born in 1865), and served successively on
the staffs of the Lahore _Civil and Military Gazette_ and the Allahabad
_Pioneer_ from 1882 to 1889. The satirical verses, sketches of native
character, stories of Anglo-Indian life, with their intriguings and
their shrewd understandings of the shabbier side of human nature,
that he contributed to those papers between the age of seventeen and
twenty-five, rather justified Barrie’s _dictum_ that he was “born
_blasé_.” But when they were collected into his first eight or nine
small books--“Departmental Ditties,” “Plain Tales from the Hills,”
“In Black and White,” “Soldiers Three,” “Under the Deodars,” and the
rest--they capped an instant boom in India with an even more roaring
success in England and America. The vogue of the shilling shocker was
then in its infancy, and Kipling’s insignificant looking drab-covered
booklets competed triumphantly with that showy ephemeral fiction on
our bookstalls for the suffrage of the railway traveller. From the
start, like Dickens, he was no pet of a select circle but appealed to
the crowd. While his contemporaries, the daintier decadents, issued
their more perishable preciosities in limited editions elegantly bound,
he carelessly flung his pearls before swine, and the maligned swine
recognized that they were pearls before the critics began to tell them
so.
And when he came to England again, a youth of five-and-twenty, his
fame had come before him. He settled down from 1889 to 1891, on an
upper floor of a gloomy building squeezed between shops, at 19 Villiers
Street, Strand, and in that somewhat squalid London thoroughfare
were written some of the best stories in “Life’s Handicap,” and two
of his comparative failures--“The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot,” and
his first novel, “The Light that Failed.” Stevenson in his letters,
about then, deplored his “copiousness and haste,” said, “He is all
smart journalism and cleverness; it is all bright and shallow and
limpid, like a business paper--a good one, _s’entendu_; but there’s
no blot of heart’s blood and the Old Night ... I look on and admire;
but in a kind of ambition we all have for our tongue and literature,
I am wounded.” But, naturally, Stevenson, conjuring fastidiously with
words, like a lapidary with jewels, felt that his literary ideals
were outraged by this exuberant, amazing young man who, coming with a
banjo for a lyre, took the sacred temple of the Muses by violence and
disturbed it with raucous echoes of the music hall; who brought the
manners and speech of the canteen into the library, made free use of
slang and ugly colloquialisms with the most brilliant effectiveness,
and in general strode rough-shod over so many accepted artistic
conventions. It was easy to say his verse was meretriciously catchy,
but its cleverness, the bite of its irony and humor were indisputable;
that his Anglo-Indian stories were marred by vulgarities and crudities
of characterization; that the riotous humors of Mulvaney and his
soldier-chums showed nothing but a boisterous, schoolboyish sense of
fun; but there was no denying the originality of mind, the abounding
genius that was experimentally at work in all these things.
Not only had Kipling broken new ground; he had defied conventions
and broken it in a new way of his own, and through the following ten
years he was justified of his daring by the maturer, more masterly
poems and stories in “Barrack-Room Ballads,” “The Seven Seas,” “Many
Inventions,” the two “Jungle Books,” and, above all, by “Kim”--that
wonderful story, steeped in the magic of the Orient, with its rich
gallery of characters, native and European, and its intimately pictured
panorama of the strange, motley life that flows along the Grand Trunk
Road.
He was a born story-teller, and could interest you as keenly in ships,
bridges, machinery and mechanical objects as in the human comedy and
tragedy. He could take his tone with an equal mastery, as occasion
served, from the smoke-room, the bar or the street, and from the golden
phrasing and flashing visions of the biblical prophets. However much
the critics might qualify and hesitate, the larger world of readers,
men and women, cultured and uncultured, took him to their hearts
without reserve. Never since Dickens died had any author won so magical
a hold on the admiration and affection of our people.
In those days, at the height of his fame, when he lay dangerously ill
in New York, the cables could not have flung more bulletins across the
world, nor the newspapers followed his hourly progress more excitedly
if it had been a ruling monarch _in extremis_. The Kaiser cabled
enquiries; all England and America stood in suspense, as it were, at
the closed door of that sick chamber, as those who loved Goldsmith
lingered on his staircase, when he was near the end, waiting for news
of him. Yet, curiously enough, in the personality of Kipling, so far
as it has revealed itself to his readers, there is little of the
gentleness and lovableness of Goldsmith, nor of the genial, overflowing
kindness that drew the multitude to Dickens. It was the sheer spell and
brilliance of his work, I think, that drew them to Kipling more than
the lure of any personal charm.
During the Boer War he developed into the poet and apostle of
Imperialism; became our high-priest of Empire, Colonial expansion,
commercial supremacy and material prosperity. You may see in some
of his poems of that period and in his recently published “Letters
of Travel” how he has failed to advance with the times, how out of
touch he is with the spirit of modern democracy. A certain arrogance
and cocksureness had increased upon him; his god was the old Hebrew
god of battles, his the chosen race, and even amid the magnificent
contritions of the “Recessional” he cannot forget that we are superior
to the “lesser breeds without the law.” He is no idealist and has no
sympathy with the hopes of the poor and lowly; there is scornfulness in
his attitude toward those who do not share his belief that the present
social order cannot be improved, who do not join him in worshipping
“the God of things as they are,” but pay homage rather to the God of
things as they ought to be. And yet I remember the beauty, the wisdom
and whimsical understanding there is in his stories for children--I
remember that children’s song in “Puck of Pook’s Hill”--
“Teach us the strength that cannot seek,
By deed or thought, to hurt the weak;
That, under Thee, we may possess
Man’s strength to comfort man’s distress.”
--I remember stray, poignant things in this book and that, especially
in “The Years Between,” and am ready to think I misjudge him when
I take his intolerant Imperialism too seriously, and that these
rarer, kindlier moods, these larger-hearted emotions are at least as
characteristic of him.
Someday somebody will gather into one glorious volume “The Finest
Story in the World,” “Without Benefit of Clergy,” “At the End of the
Passage,” “The Man Who Would Be King,” “The Brushwood Boy,” “They,” and
a score or so of other short stories; and with “Kim,” and a book of
such poems as “Sussex,” “Tomlinson,” “To the True Romance,” “M’Andrew’s
Hymn,” “The Last Chantey,” those great ballads of “The Bolivar” and
“The Mary Gloster,” and half a hundred more, there will be enough and
more than enough to give him rank with those whose work shall endure
“while there’s a world, a people and a year.” After all, most of his
Imperialistic verse and his prose essays into political and economic
problems were mainly topical and are already pretty much out of date;
he is rich enough to let them go and be none the poorer.
If his popularity has waned it is chiefly, as I have said, because he
has not advanced with the times--he has lost touch with the real spirit
of his age; and I believe that is a result of his having withdrawn too
much from contact with his fellows. Dickens did not immure himself at
Gads’ Hill; he was always returning to those planes where ordinary
folk do congregate and found inspiration, to the last, out among
the stir and business of the world. Shakespeare’s work was done in
the hurly-burly of London--he stagnated, after he settled down at
Stratford, and wrote no more; and one feels that if Kipling would only
come out from his hermitage at Burwash and mingle again in the crowded
ways of men, as he did in the fulness of his powers, he has it in him
yet to be “a bringer of new things,” that shall add new luster even to
his old renown.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
[Illustration: WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE]
You can account for almost every other sort of sudden outbreak, but why
an author of W. J. Locke’s unquestionably popular appeal should have
had to write eight novels in nine years and only achieve popularity all
of a sudden with a ninth in the tenth is one of those mysteries that
baffle even the wisest. There is no reason why any one out of six of
those earlier books should not have done as much for him, for they have
the same distinction of style, the same wit and humor, gay romance and
charming sentiment that captivated the reader so effectively in “The
Morals of Marcus Ordeyne”--indeed, I still think that its immediate
predecessor, “Where Love Is,” at least equaled that novel in all those
qualities, and in delicacy and finish of workmanship went beyond it. So
I put the problem and make no pretence to offering a solution of it but
cast myself for the safer, humbler role of the chronicler of facts.
The fact that nearly all his stories are sweetened with a gracious
human kindness and a full allowance of love and sentiment might be
traced by subtle psychologists to some benign influence that the place
of his nativity had upon him, for he was born in British Guiana, at
Georgetown on the Demarara, where the sugar comes from. There may or
may not be something in such a theory; anyhow, that is where he was
born in 1863 and after an interval in England, he was sent to school
at Trinidad, where his father was a banker. Returning to England, when
he was eighteen, he matriculated at Cambridge, took the Mathematical
Tripos, and, having completed his education at St. John’s College,
departed from it with his B. A. degree.
Thereafter, he lived for a while in France; he has lived there a good
deal, from time to time, since then, and if you were not aware of this
you would guess as much, and that he had a warm regard for the French
people, and a wide acquaintance with the literature of France, from
the sympathy and intimacy with which he draws the French characters
in his stories, and from a certain airy, sparkling wit and laughing,
good-humored cynicism that belong to him and are commonly accepted
as peculiar to the Gallic temperament. It has been said that he has
affinities with Anatole France. He has none of Anatole’s daring
irreverencies; nor his passionate revolt against the existing order of
society, nor his power in social satire; but he has the sure touch that
is at once light and scholarly, an abounding sense of fantasy, and a
tolerant, worldly-wise philosophy that he edges with an irony often as
delicately shrewd though never so bitter, so devastating as that of the
great French master.
But we are going ahead too fast. When Locke quitted Cambridge he was
still a long way from the beginning of his literary career. I believe
he was already writing stories in those days, and am told that he
wrote at least one novel--one, moreover, of a highly melodramatic and
sensational kind--but he was too severely self-critical to attempt
to publish it and it remains hidden away in manuscript to this hour.
Feeling it was time to turn to something for a livelihood, he put an
end to holidaying in France and became for some years mathematical
tutor at a school in the North Country. I have seen it suggested
that his mastery of mathematics has been as valuable to him in the
construction of his novels as Hardy’s practical knowledge of the
principles of architecture has been to him, but you are at liberty to
doubt this after reading the opinion of that science which he allows
Marcus Ordeyne to express. “I earned my living at school-slavery,”
says Marcus, “teaching children the most useless, the most disastrous,
the most soul-cramping branch of knowledge wherewith pedagogues in
their insensate folly have crippled the minds and blasted the lives
of thousands of their fellow-creatures--elementary mathematics.” From
which you may gather also that he took little joy in those years
of labor in the school up North, and the wonder is that his native
urbanity and gracious personal charm should have remained completely
unruffled by those uncongenial experiences.
He had escaped from schoolmastering and published four novels before he
was appointed secretary of the Royal Institute of British Architects,
and he did not relinquish that post until after his two most successful
novels had made him famous and his position in literature was more than
secure.
Not as a precocious genius, but as a man of thirty-two who had
seen enough of life to know something about it, Locke entered the
publisher’s list in 1895 and challenged the world at large with his
first book, “At the Gate of Samaria.” It was by way of being a problem
novel, for the problem novel was then having a day out. It was done
in rather somber, more realistic colors than he was going to use in
his succeeding stories; has little of the gaiety, glancing fancy
and idealistic sentiment that have now become characteristic of his
work. But it was a sound, capable piece of craftsmanship, the critics
were on the whole appreciative, the public interested, and the sales
respectable without being exciting.
Following this in steady succession came “The Demagogue and Lady
Phayre,” “A Study in Shadows,” “Derelicts,” “Idols,” “The Usurper,”
“Where Love Is”--and the reviewers went on handing out laurels to him
(most of them), his circle of readers remained loyal, and it began
to look as if he were settling down among the many novelists whose
unfailing public is large enough to make an author’s life worth while
but has done growing. Yet by the time he had written “Derelicts” he had
discovered the formula that was presently to carry him far beyond such
quiet success into a roaring popularity; he had discovered his gift
for transfiguring the commonplace world and its people, conjuring them
into a fairy-tale and still making his men and women seem amazingly
lifelike and his tale all true. Nor is there any hint of disparagement
in saying this. Hasn’t Chesterton eulogistically declared that Mr.
Pickwick is a fairy? Doesn’t he insist that all Dickens’ characters
are fairies, gnomes and his scenes laid in a fairyland of his own
invention? There is a sense in which this is simple truth; a sense
in which it is the simplest truth of Locke. He is an idealist, and
sees that soul of goodness in things evil which remains invisible to
your superficial, short-sighted, unimaginative realist. He has the
imagination that creates, and therefore is not contented merely to
observe and describe what any of us can see for himself, but rightly
treats the visible existences around him as raw material for his art,
chooses his clay puppets and somewhat etherealizes them, touches them
with ideal qualities that most of us have but only exercise in our
dreams, as a magician might take a dull peasant and turn him into a
prince, not making him less human but more finely human in the process.
For ten years he wove his spells adroitly and that circle of the
faithful was susceptible to them; then he did it once again and, in
1905, with “The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne,” did it so triumphantly that
Marcus was soon the talk of the town, the book of the year, and not
only a special section but a wide world of all sorts and conditions was
at his feet. Yet there is nothing in the story to justify the miracle.
It is a typical Locke fantasy, and certainly not superior in theme or
treatment to its immediate forerunner. Sir Marcus, you remember, meets
on the Thames Embankment the lost, helpless, pretty Carlotta, who has
been brought from a Turkish harem by a rescuer who has deserted her; he
takes pity on the child, adopts her, devotes himself to her training
and upbringing with, after many tribulations, the only ending that
could have pleased everybody. Nothing here for which one would prophecy
a “boom.” But the book was full of character; its various characters
were all alive, such human traits were touched into them so subtly that
you could not disbelieve in them while the author had his spell on
you; and the whole thing was told with a wit and humor so lively and
so delicate, a sentiment so irresistibly alluring that you surrendered
yourself to the sheer delight of it without thinking what you were
doing. I recollect how one critic began by saying the plot was crude
and ridiculous, and ended by confessing his enjoyment, his admiration
of the artistic finish with which even the slightest characters were
drawn, and praising without stint the cleverness and brilliant ease of
the narrative throughout. That was the kind of hold it took upon its
readers. It gave Locke a vogue in America too, and being dramatized
filled a London theater for many nights and toured the provinces for
years.
Next year Locke clinched his success with the greatest of his
books--“The Beloved Vagabond,” which eclipsed “The Morals of Marcus”
as a novel if not as a play, and still remains the high-water mark of
his achievement. It is the outstanding picaresque romance of our day.
Mr. Locke has a special weakness for such delightful, irresponsible,
romantic, golden-hearted rascals as Paragot, who could so easily have
been a squalid, unmitigated bounder in the hands of a plodding realist.
Sebastian Pasquale, in “The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne,” is a lesser
member of the same family; so is that later, slighter, joyous heathen
Aristide Pujol; and there are other such in other of his books.
The driving force behind his stories is their sincerity; their sympathy
with the sins, follies, vanities, errors of the motley human multitude
is his own; they are idealistic because he is himself an idealist and
in some ways almost as quixotic as any of his favorite heroes. He puts
himself into his books, and you find him there, scholarly, kindly,
witty, unaffected, and so much a man of the world that he no more feels
it necessary to write like one than a millionaire feels it necessary to
prove he is rich by talking all the time about his money.
STEPHEN McKENNA
[Illustration: STEPHEN MCKENNA]