any man of literary capacity to sit down and write the story of his
own life, bring into it, instead of imaginary characters, the real
men and women he has known, and so make a great Autobiography. Yet
there are fewer great books in autobiography than in any other form of
literature. Some years ago I was remarking on this to Keble Howard, and
he accounted for the deficiency by laying it down that hardly any man
started to write his memoirs till his memory was failing and he was
getting too old to work. It is supposed to be presumptuous, a little
self-conceited, for a celebrity of any sort to publish his private
history until he is so far advanced in years that, even if he has done
nothing else respectable, he can claim to be respected on account of
his age. Howard contended, and I agree with him, that a man of seventy
or so has generally forgotten as much of the earlier half of his life
as he remembers, and often misinterprets what he does remember because
he looks back on it from a wholly different standpoint, misses the
importance of things that were important when they happened, feels for
his young self now as he did not feel at the time, makes tragedies of
what then seemed comedies, and comedies of what seemed tragedies, and
gets the whole picture out of focus.
I have lived long enough since then to have been able to prove for
myself that all this is accurate; for I have read divers memoirs of men
whom I knew when they were middle-aged and I was youthful, noting how
much they omitted, incidents they have warped in the telling, events
to which they have given an emotional significance that never really
belonged to them. To remedy such a state of things Keble Howard’s idea
was that anybody who had done anything and meant to do more, should
write the first volume of his autobiography when he was under thirty,
while he was still near enough to his youth not to have lost all the
freshness of its feelings, still near enough to his childhood to be
able to revive in his thoughts the actual magic of its atmosphere; he
should write his second volume when he was about fifty, and his third
when he was so far from the beginning that the end could not be much
farther on. That is the only way, I believe, to do the thing perfectly.
We have so few great autobiographies because most of them are more or
less imaginary, so few of them are true.
Possibly Stephen McKenna arrived independently at the same conclusion,
for in 1921, when he was thirty-three, he published “While I Remember,”
which is in effect the first volume of his autobiography. But he
reveals less of himself in this than of his surroundings. He is too
much of what is commonly described as a gentleman of the old school
to indulge in personalities and give away unpleasant facts about his
friends, or even about his enemies; he will criticize their public
life with devastating wit and epigrammatic satire, but he betrays no
intimacies, will have nothing to say of their private characters or
conduct, and he is almost as reticent in talking of himself as of
others. You gather from his first autobiographical fragment that before
he went to Oxford, of which he gives some delightful impressionistic
sketches, he went to Westminster School, and was for a while, a
teacher there, and perhaps the most personal note in the book is in
a greeting to some of his old pupils, which owns that he blushes to
recall the lessons he taught them. “My incompetence was incurable,”
he says. “I should be well pleased to think that your memories of me
are a hundredth part as kindly as my memories of you. Does it comfort
you to know that my awe of you continued for three terms? If ever the
prayer-bell had not rung before I showed that I could not solve some
diabolical equation! If you could have seen into my mind during the
first week when I ranged you in alphabetical order and guided myself
despairingly by the two red-heads in the form!”
If he does not fill his pages with careless and indiscreet gossip of
all sorts of well-known people it is not for lack of material, but
simply that he has a conscience and a strict code of honor that make
such chatter impossible to him. He will tell you of his experience,
during the War, in the Intelligence section of the War Trade
Department, and, briefly, of his experiences with the Balfour Mission
in America, but though he has mixed largely in modern society and the
world of letters and, as nephew of one of the ablest of latter-day
Chancellors of the Exchequer, has been a good deal behind the scenes
in political circles, he does not, after the manner of the usual
sensational Diaries and Memoirs, now-a-days, scarify individual members
of any circle, but reserves his commentary and condemnation for the
changes and degeneration that have come over our general social habits
and behavior, limits his discussion of contemporary writers to their
works, and his criticism of famous politicians, and this is drastic
enough, to their doings and misdoings in the political scene.
All which reticences are natural to him and exactly characteristic.
They seem to denote an austerity that is in keeping with his somewhat
ascetic appearance. But if in profile, as somebody has suggested,
he curiously resembles the portraits of Dante, there is more of the
graciousness than of the gloom and bitterness of the somber Florentine
in his composition. You may realize that if you read “Tex,” the
charming memorial volume he produced after the death of Texiera
de Mattos. It is a collection of his dead friend’s letters linked
together with explanatory notes of his own, and in these letters, and
indirectly in the notes, I think you get more intimate glimpses of the
real McKenna than anywhere else, and find him, behind the polite mask
and settled air of restraint, often irresponsibly outspoken, always
sympathetic, warm-hearted, and with a very genius for friendship.
If he has studiously avoided personalities in his memoirs, he has,
of course, drawn freely in his novels on his knowledge of political
and social life and people, though even there nobody has, so far,
pretended to recognize living originals of any of his characters. He
began his career as a novelist with two artificial comedies. “The
Reluctant Lover,” in 1912, and “Sheila Intervenes,” in 1913. They
had some affinity with the romantic fantasies of W. J. Locke and the
sparkling talk of “Dodo” and “The Dolly Dialogues.” The story in each
was told with the lightest of light touches, and the conversations
were punctuated with smart epigrams. Their cleverness was undeniable,
and already, in “Sheila,” he was making play with his knowledge of
political affairs. They were brilliantly clever, but ran entertainingly
on the surface of things. He was learning to use his tools; feeling his
way. In “The Sixth Sense” he was beginning to find it, and he found it
triumphantly in “Sonia, or Between Two Worlds.”
“Sonia” is one of the notable things in fiction that came out of the
War. It appeared in 1917, when we were all uplifted to high ideals and
sustained by a fine belief that a new and nobler world was to rise,
phœnix-like, out of the ashes and chaos into which the old world had
been resolved. The atmosphere of that time, all its surge of altruistic
emotion, are so sensitively and realistically preserved in the story
that one cannot re-read it now without a sense of regret that we have
forgotten so much of our near past and failed so meanly to realize
the better state that, in those dark days, we were all so sincerely
confident of building. Beginning in the decadent world of the late
’nineties and the dawn of the century, the story comes down, or goes
up, into the miraculously new world that the war made, and glances
optimistically into the future. Most of its characters are drawn from
the higher classes of society, and the love romance of Sonia and David
O’Rane, the most charming and glowingly human hero McKenna has ever
given us, has the social and political history of the period for its
setting. Never before or since has he shown himself so much of an
idealist nor handled great issues with such mastery and imaginative
insight. “Sonia” has been ranked with the great political novels of
Disraeli, and I doubt whether Disraeli ever did anything so fine in
poignancy of feeling and delicacy of style.
“Ninety-Six Hours’ Leave,” his other war novel, was a lively tale
written for amusement only; and “Sonia Married” maintained the
tradition attaching to sequels and did not rise to the level of
“Sonia.” The biggest of his other novels are, I think, “Midas and Son,”
a masterpiece of irony, a mordant satire on the vanity of riches; and
that brilliant study of the snobbishness, shallowness, cynicism, social
ambition of the unpleasant Lady Ann Spenworth, “The Confessions of a
Well-Meaning Woman.” It blends a maturer philosophy of life with the
vivacity and sparkle of his early conversational novels. It exposes
without mercy the squalid little soul of a person who is or has been
of importance in society, and if her self-revelations make her seem
abhorrent it is because she herself seems so abhorrently alive and so
minutely true to certain morbid, unlovely sides of human nature.
You would not guess from the abounding vitality he puts into his novels
that McKenna was by no means of the robust kind. In winter he generally
escapes from our unsatisfactory climate, and you hear of him voyaging
to remote parts of Asia or South America, or somewhere where the sun
shines. But when he is at home, there is an hour before lunch, at the
end of the morning’s work, that is given over to any friends who may
drop in at his pleasant Lincoln’s Inn chambers, to find him the most
genial and interesting and interested of hosts, with as neat a hand for
mixing a cocktail as any in London.
COMPTON MACKENZIE
[Illustration: COMPTON MACKENZIE]
From a literary and dramatic point of view, Compton Mackenzie may
almost be said to have been born in the purple. Even a quite modest
minor prophet who had stood by his cradle at West Hartlepool, in
January, 1883, might have ventured to predict a future for him. For his
father was the well-known actor Edward Compton, author of several plays
and founder of the Compton Comedy Company, and his aunt was “Leah”
Bateman, one of the most famous Lady Macbeth’s who ever walked the
stage; his uncle C. G. Compton was a novelist of parts; and he numbers
among his distant relations the poet and critic John Addington Symonds
and that brilliant and, nowadays, too little appreciated novelist and
playwright “George Paston” (Miss E. M. Symonds). Nor did he absorb
all the gifts of the family, for that distinguished actress Miss Fay
Compton is his sister.
From St. Paul’s School, Mackenzie went to Oxford in the early years
of this century, and if he did not break any scholarship records
at Magdalen, he edited “The Oxford Point of View,” which he helped
to found, and became business manager of the Oxford Union Dramatic
Society, and on occasion showed himself an actor of distinction. After
leaving Oxford he married and withdrew into the wilds of Cornwall,
where he seems to have written industriously for some years with no
immediate results, beyond the publication of a book of verse in 1907,
and a play, “The Gentleman in Grey,” which was produced at the Lyceum
Theater, Edinburgh, but did not stay there long enough to matter. Also
in his Cornish retirement he wrote his first novel, “The Passionate
Elopement,” but it took him longer to get it published than to write
it. When it had been up to London and back again three or four times
it began to look so worthless and he grew so indifferent toward it
that he would not waste more money than necessary on it but let it go
wandering unregistered up and down and take its chance of being lost in
the post. Seven publishers had rejected it before, in a happy hour, he
sent it to Martin Secker, who was then about setting up in business,
and when he published it, early in 1911, it sold so well that within
three weeks it had to be reprinted. The story is of the eighteenth
century; the scene is laid at Curtain Wells, a gay and fashionable spa,
where Beau Ripple reigned supreme as Beau Nash used to reign at Bath.
The characters are as gracefully artificial as if they had walked out
of an eighteenth century pastoral--the pretty blue-eyed Phyllida, the
chivalrous Charles Lovely, who loves her in vain, and the dashing,
rascally card-sharper, Vernon, who wins her and carries her off in
the end--they live gracefully, and their tale is all told, and they
smile and sigh and mince and bow their ways through it, with the charm
and fragile daintiness that belongs to old minuets and Dresden china
shepherds and shepherdesses. Mackenzie has never done another such
light and exquisite caprice though he had every encouragement to repeat
the experiment, for “The Passionate Elopement” pleased the public as
well as the critics and had run through four editions by the end of the
year.
Just before or immediately after this success, he came from his Cornish
fastness up to London, settled in Westminster, and turned his hand
to potting plays, writing lyrics and reviews for Pelissier, whose
“Follies” were then at the height of their popularity. But in spite
of these distracting employments he found time for a good deal of
more important work during the brief period that Westminster’s staid,
old-world North street numbered him among its tenants. There he wrote
his second novel, “Carnival,” and had prepared a dramatic version of it
before it was published in 1912; he collected a second volume of his
verse, “Kensington Rhymes” (since when he has done no other) and it
appeared in the same year; and he had begun on the writing of “Sinister
Street,” but had to lay it aside to cross the water and superintend the
production of “Carnival” at a New York theater.
He never set up his tent again in London; partly, I believe, because
its atmosphere had affected his health unfavorably; partly, I
suspect, because the social interruptions to which a town-dweller is
subject interfered too much with his working arrangements. Anyhow,
he transported himself to the Gulf of Naples and discovered an ideal
retreat in a delightful villa on the Isle of Capri. In these latter
days, as if the love of solitude had grown upon him, he has acquired
one of the smaller of the Channel Islands and made himself lord of
Herm, and now divides his year between that remote and rocky islet and
his villa at Capri.
At Capri he finished “Sinister Street,” one of the longest of modern
novels and much the longest of his own. Some of De Morgan’s were
nearly as long, and some by Dickens and Thackeray were longer, but
a book of two hundred and fifty thousand words is apt to daunt the
degenerate reader of to-day so “Sinister Street” was published in two
volumes with half a year’s interval between, and nobody was daunted.
No book of Mackenzie’s had a more enthusiastic reception. His readers
are uncertain whether this or “Guy and Pauline” is his highest, most
artistic achievement, and I am with those who give first place to
“Sinister Street.” If there has ever been a more revealing study of the
heart and mind and every-day life of a boy than that of Michael Fane,
I have never read it. He and his sister Stella, the Carthew family and
the miscellaneous characters gathered about them in their early years
are drawn with such sympathy and insight, such a sense of actuality,
that not a few have professed to identify living originals from whom
certain of them were modeled.
The War had broken out between the appearance of “Sinister Street” and
“Guy and Pauline” and Mackenzie had gone on the Dardanelles Expedition
as a Lieutenant (shortly to be promoted to a captaincy) in the
Royal Marines. He was invalided out of this business and presently
made successively, Military Control Officer at Athens, and Director
of an Intelligence Department at Syria, and in due course received
various honors for his War services. There is little or no trace of
the War in his subsequent books, unless you ascribe to its disturbing
influences the facts that neither “The Early Life and Adventures
of Sylvia Scarlett” nor “Sylvia and Michael,” admirable and vivid
picturesque stories as they are, will compare, either in subtlety of
characterization or in grace and strength of style, with the best
of his pre-war work. Neither “Rich Relatives” nor “Poor Relations”
marked much of a recovery, and “The Vanity Girl,” in which he uses the
war for the purpose of getting rid of a bad character, is not saved
by occasional flashes of narrative power and brilliant descriptive
passages from being an essay in picturesque and rather cheap melodrama.
But with “The Altar Steps” in 1922, he returned to higher levels--his
hand was never more cunning in the portrayal of character, and there
is enough in this story of the growth of Mark Lidderdale’s soul and
his progress toward the religious life to indicate that the author of
“Sinister Street” and “Guy and Pauline” is not yet to be put aside with
those whose future is behind them.
I have seen it said that two or three of Mackenzie’s novels are largely
autobiographical. Certainly he puts into them scenes and places that
were associated with his youth and early manhood, life at Oxford,
Cornwall, the theater and theatrical people, and goes on handling,
developing three or four of his characters in successive novels,
bringing them into this, that and the other story as if he were giving
them their proper place in episodes that had really happened. Sylvia
Scarlett reappears in “The Vanity Girl”; Maurice Avery of “Carnival”
flits through “Sinister Street,” and Guy Hazlewood, who is at Oxford in
that novel, is the hero of “Guy and Pauline,” in which also, Michael
Fane, the principal figure in “Sinister Street,” plays a very minor
part. Thackeray, Trollope and others practised the same device, and
there is no reliable significance in it, except that it helps the
reader, and probably the author himself, to an easier sense of the
reality of such persons. Something of Mackenzie’s childhood has gone,
no doubt, into his “Kensington Rhymes”; and he, like Michael Fane,
spent his boyhood at Kensington, attended a big public school in
London, and, like Michael, went to Oxford, and may have given Michael
throughout some of his own experiences. You may fancy resemblances
between his withdrawing into Cornwall and publishing a book of verse,
and Guy Hazlewood going, as his father has it, “to bury yourself in a
remote village where, having saddled yourself with the responsibilities
of a house, you announce your intention of living by poetry!” There may
be personal touches in this, and in Guy’s effort to find a publisher
for his book of poems, but who shall say where autobiography ends and
fiction begins? Naturally, every novelist works with his experience as
a potter works with clay, but he usually transfigures that raw material
and moulds it into new shapes of his own invention. The truest, most
living characters in fiction are those that draw their vitality from
the author’s self. No doubt if we knew enough about him, we could find
a good deal of Shakespeare in his most masterly characterizations.
There is a lot of solemn and pretentious nonsense talked in the name
of psychology. It is possible to make shrewd guesses, but no man can
positively analyse the mind of another.
When we think we are making a marvelous study of another’s motives,
we are studying the motives that would have been ours in his
circumstances. Professor Freud, with his doctrine of psychoanalysis,
has turned the head and choked the narrative vein of many an otherwise
capable novelist who has felt a spurious sense of superiority in trying
to graft the art of medicine on the art of fiction.
There is truer psychology in Mackenzie’s novels than in the precious
novels of most of our professed psychologists. He has done bigger work
than theirs with a more modest conception of the novelist’s function.
“I confess that I like a book to be readable,” he once wrote; “it seems
to me that a capacity for entertaining a certain number of people is
the chief justification for writing novels.” He deprecates this as “a
low-browed ambition,” but it was high enough for the great novelists of
the past, and the pseudo-medical methods of Freudism do not look like
producing any that are greater.
JOHN MASEFIELD
[Illustration: JOHN MASEFIELD]
Were I put to select the four or five poets who are most typically
modern--most essentially of our own time, I think I should name
Kipling, Hardy, Wilfrid Gibson, Siegfried Sassoon and John Masefield,
and Masefield perhaps before all. There are others who have written
poetry as fine, or even finer, but nearly all of them, had they been
contemporary with Tennyson, Wordsworth, Keats, Blake, might have
written very much as they are writing now without seeming to have been
born out of their due period. The five I have named could not have done
this: either in theme or manner their poems are too intimate a growth
of our own generation, as unmistakably of to-day as the motor-bus
or as wireless is. I am not forgetting Crabbe, the father of modern
realistic poetry, but he mitigated his unorthodoxies by observing a
respectable reticence of phrase, by subscribing to poetical conventions
of language, and clothing his newness in the old-fashioned mantle of
Pope.
The philosophy of my chosen five may be sometimes akin to that of
Fitzgerald’s Omar, but the old wine is in aggressively new bottles. And
I am not forgetting that Hardy was Tennyson’s contemporary, and not a
little of his poetry was written in the 60’s and 70’s, though it was
not published then. If it had been published, the tastes and standards
of that formal age would have found it so wanting that it never would
have won for Hardy then the fame it has given him now. Think of
Tennyson, with his conviction that
“the form, the form alone is eloquent,”
trying with his hyper-sensitive ear the wingless, rugged lyrics of
Hardy, setting himself to read them aloud, like the poet in his own
“English Idyls,”
“mouthing out his hollow oes and aes,”
and finding it couldn’t be done, for here was a poetical nonconformist
who sacrificed verbal beauty to naked truth and was more earnest about
what he had to say than about mouthing it in grandiose orotundities of
phrase.
Certainly, by the time Tennyson had done with it, poetry was becoming
too much a matter of phrase-making; the poet himself was contracting
a sort of sentimental snobbery, segregating himself from the crowd,
losing touch with common life, and for their own sakes and that of
their art, many of us felt, as Dixon Scott put it, that we wanted
to “flatten out Parnassus. For poetry has been looked up to far too
long; it is time the reader looked down on it; nothing is doing its
dignity more damage than the palsying superstition that it is something
excessively sublime. The reader picks out his prose-men; he is familiar
with philosophers; but the moment he mentions verse he remembers the
proprieties; up go his eyes and down drops his voice; and from what
is no doubt just a nice, natural desire to do nothing offensive to
refinement, he invariably speaks of the specially simple, jolly, frank
and friendly souls who make it as though they were wilted priests.
Whereas, in reality, of course, they are of all writers, exactly the
men whom it is most needful to see as human beings; for of all forms
of writing theirs is the most personal, intimate, instinctive--poetry
being, after all, simply essence of utterance--speech with the artifice
left out.”