such simple, unaffected souls until Kipling had begun to outrage their
delicacies, shock their exquisite, artistic refinements with the noise
and dazzle of his robust magic, and others, like Hardy, Gibson and
Masefield, had brought poetry out of her sacred temple and made her at
home in inns, and kitchens, and workshops, cottages and mean streets
and all manner of vagabond places, restored her to plain nature and
human nature and taught her to sing her heart out in the language of
average men--sometimes in the language of men who were quite below the
average. But even this was better than limiting her to expressing her
thoughts and emotions in artificial elegancies that no man ever uses
except when he is posing and perorating on public platforms.
In his beginnings Masefield was not unaffected by the Kipling
influence; you can trace it in the lilting measures of some of his
early “Salt Water Ballads”; perhaps here and there in his early prose
stories and sketches, “A Tarpaulin Muster,” “A Mainsail Haul.” He was
realizing and naturalizing the seamen there, as Kipling had realized
and naturalized the soldier. But he was already doing more than that;
he put into those first Ballads, and the “Poems and Ballads” that soon
followed them, a grace of fancy, a charm and beauty, also true to
the life he pictured, that do not come within the range of Kipling’s
genius. He was feeling after and foreshadowing there, too, his own
special mission as a poet--if one may use so portentous a word as
mission without having it taken in any but its artistic significance.
His business was not to be with dignitaries and classical heroisms,
he says in “Consecration,” but with sailors and stokers and men of no
account--
“Not the rulers for me, but the rankers, the tramp of the road,
The slave with the sack on his shoulders pricked on with the goad,
The man with too weighty a burden, too weary a load ...
Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind in the rain and the cold--
Of these shall my songs be fashioned, my tales be told.”
And of this purpose have come that most poignant and effective of his
dramas, “The Tragedy of Nan,” his stories, “The Street of To-day,”
“Multitude and Solitude,” and those narrative poems that are his
highest and most distinctive achievement, “The Everlasting Mercy,” “The
Widow in the Bye Street,” “Dauber,” and “The Daffodil Fields.” In these
he is still on that quest for beauty--
“that one beauty
God put me here to find--”
to which he consecrated his gift at the outset, when he claimed as his
kingdom
“the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the earth,”
though he is following it here less obviously than in the statelier,
noble sonnet sequence of “Lollingdon Downs.” In the narrative poems he
is seeking for the soul of beauty in things evil, in things common and
sometimes unclean, in lives that are broken and that the world’s rough
hands have soiled. His passion for realism, for the stark truth of
life as it is lived, is transparently sincere; it is absurd to object
that his stories are melodramatic, since they are not more so than
life itself is, but there is reason in the protest that he pushes the
crudities of his dialogue too far, is apt to be overviolent in language
and uses ugly expletives so freely that, instead of adding to the
reality of his characters and incidents, they detract from it, come to
seem artificial, till one suspects an affectation in them and is more
irritated than impressed. Take, for example, the close of that squabble
between Saul Kane and Billy Myers, in “The Everlasting Mercy”--
“You closhy put.”
“You bloody liar.”
“This is my field.”
“This is my wire.”
“I’m ruler here.”
“You ain’t.”
“I am.”
“I’ll fight you for it.”
“Right, by dam.”
Whether such a man would say “I’m ruler here” is of small consequence,
but no man swears “By dam,” and you feel that the word is either
used arbitrarily for the sake of the rhyme, or with an idea of being
forceful at all costs. And though a man might say, “I’ll bloody well
put him in a bloody fix,” and “I’ll bloody well burn his bloody ricks,”
there is the same sense of desperate straining after effect in making
him say,
“I’ll bloody him a bloody fix.
I’ll bloody burn his bloody ricks,”
because no ruffian was ever heard to speak so elliptically, and you
feel it is only done in order that the meter may be made to accommodate
a startling plethora of profanity. Such excesses sound a false note and
are out of tune with the general truth, the vivid reality that give the
stories their authentic power and greatness.
I have heard it said that these aberrations represent the efforts
of one who is naturally reticent and fastidious to present with due
forcefulness certain brutal and lawless types of character that are
not within his personal knowledge; but I doubt this. He may have
exercised his imagination, and if so he exercised it potently, in
writing “Reynard the Fox” and “Right Royal,” for I should guess he
never went fox-hunting or steeple-chasing, but for “Dauber” and the
raw human creatures of “The Everlasting Mercy,” “The Widow in the
Bye Street” and “The Daffodil Fields” he may very well have drawn on
memory and experience of people he has known. For he was not reared in
cotton-wool nor matured among the comparative decorums of office-life.
From a training vessel, he went to sea in the merchant service, knocked
about the world on sailing-ships and has put some of his old shipmates
into his ballads and some of them and some of their yarns into “A
Mainsail Haul” and his first novel, “Captain Margaret.” Quitting the
sea, he went tramping in America, picking up a livelihood by casual
work on farms, and after a while settled down to serve behind a bar in
New York, escaping from the noise and squalor and drudgery of it at
night to solace himself with the “Morte d’Arthur” after he had gone up
to his garret to bed. It was a harsh apprenticeship, that on sea and on
land, but it broadened his outlook and his sympathies, and fitted him
to be, as he was presently resolved to be, the interpreter of “the men
of the tattered battalion”--
“He had had revelation of the lies
Cloaking the truth men never choose to know;
He could bear witness now and cleanse their eyes;
He had beheld in suffering; he was wise.”
His work as a critic is in a certain newspaper where he used to review
new poets before he was recognized as one, and in his scholarly,
revealing study of “Shakespeare”; but his finest, most imaginative
prose is in that poignant book “Gallipoli” which he wrote after he came
home from serving there in the Great War.
ALFRED EDWARD WOODLEY MASON
[Illustration: ALFRED EDWARD WOODLEY MASON]
It is interesting, and a little saddening, to look through a list
of living novelists and pick out the names of those who were well
in the first flight of popularity ten or fifteen years ago but have
since fallen back steadily, year after year, into the second, third
and fourth flights, until now they are almost absorbed into the
multitudinous rearward ranks where the unpopular and the mediocre rub
shoulders with survivors who still ruffle it obscurely on the strength
of a past reputation. For it is easier to become popular than to
remain so. No author can take the public by surprise a second time.
A novel that has some freshness of fable or style, though it be in
some ways crude and in no way great, may do the trick once; but if an
author follows this with a succession of books in a too-similar vein,
showing no ripening of his mind, no growth of knowledge or invention,
nothing but a sprightly repetition of that same morning freshness,
which was well enough when the day was new, his public begins to yawn
and go away. A juggler, when he has exhausted his little repertoire
and finds the plate coming back to him almost empty, can roll up his
scrap of carpet, walk around the corner, and in another street collect
a different crowd to whom all his old conjurings are new; but no writer
can attract a fresh public for each fresh book he produces--his only
way is to keep sure hold on his first readers and add to them, and
this he cannot do unless he matures in his books as he does, or should
do, in himself. His public is all the while growing older, and the
pathos and humor and general outlook on life that satisfy a young man
or a young woman will rarely make the same appeal to them when they
arrive at maturity. The humor that tickles you to-day will scarcely
move you to a smile when you have lived, enjoyed, worked and suffered
for another decade or so in such a world as this; the pathos that once
melted you to pleasant tears jars upon you when you re-read it now
and seems but shallow, youthful sentimentality; what you had used to
think a dashingly romantic incident or character bores you now and
seems tinsel unreality. You have been growing up, and if the growth of
your favorite novelist does not at least keep pace with your own, you
naturally pass on and leave him behind. Had “David Copperfield” been
simply another “Oliver Twist,” Dickens would have been but the novelist
for an age, and that not the middle-age.
Largely, I think, because he went on with a broadening vision of life,
a ripening knowledge of the world, a deepening sympathy with human
character, the books of A. E. W. Mason have retained for him the
popularity he won about a quarter of a century ago with “The Courtship
of Morrice Buckler.” Read “Morrice Buckler” again, and then “The Four
Feathers” and “The Broken Road,” and you will recognize how he grew
up with his readers. You can still take delight in “Morrice Buckler,”
but the later books yield you a fuller enjoyment--they have put off
the careless glamor and reckless gallantries of gay romance, and have
put on the soberer, more enduring garb of more familiar humanity, that
does not wear its romance upon its sleeve, but more poignantly, more
wonderfully, at the troubled heart of it.
Born in 1865, Mason is an old Dulwich College boy, and took his B. A.
degree at Oxford. At Oxford, too, he showed a strong predilection for
the drama, and was one of that University’s notable amateur actors.
Later, he took to the stage in earnest, and toured the provinces with
the Benson Company and the Compton Comedy Company, and played in London
as one of the soldiers in Shaw’s “Arms and the Man.” But the ambition
that called him on to the stage presently called him off, and in 1895
he commenced his career as a novelist.
It was not a very promising beginning. His first novel, “A Romance of
Wastdale,” was well enough received by the critics, but the public did
not rise to it, and Mason seems to have suppressed it with unnecessary
rigor. Competent judges have assured me it was a story of more than
ordinary distinction and merited a better fate. However, its author
had not long to wait for his due meed. A year after, in 1896, “The
Courtship of Morrice Buckler” was published, and its publication gave
Mason his place forthwith as an extraordinarily popular novelist. It
was the novel of the day; it was read and talked about everywhere,
ran through I don’t know how many thousands, and still goes as a safe
seller into any series of popular reprints.
“The Philanderers” appeared in 1897, and in quick succession came
“Laurence Clavering,” “Parson Kelley” (written in collaboration with
Andrew Lang), “Miranda of the Balcony,” “The Watchers,” “Clementina,”
that has all the dash and headlong movement of Dumas and a grace and
pathos that Dumas had not, “The Four Feathers,” “The Truants,” “Running
Water,” “The Broken Road,” “At the Villa Rose,” “The Turnstile,” and
“The Summons.”
But Mason was never one of the authors who are all authors; he is not
of the sedentary breed who are contented to study life in books or from
their study windows; the noise and business of it have always appealed
to him irresistibly; he has roamed the world rubbing shoulders with
all sorts and conditions of humanity everywhere, and his later books
mirror much of his personal experience and the countries and people he
has known. He blends the appearance of a writer of romance with the
restless energy of a man of action, and in 1906, his superabundant
energies seeking a new outlet or a new ambition prompting him, he
turned his attention to politics, threw for Parliamentary honors, and
was elected M. P. for Coventry. He signalized his advent in the House
with a notable maiden speech; did not speak there often but proved
himself shrewd and eloquent in debate, and if he had not escaped we
might have been the richer by a sagacious, sympathetic Cabinet Minister
and one brilliant novelist the poorer. Fortunately, however, the
fascinations of the Mother of Parliaments could not subdue him, and
after some three years under her shadow he did not offer himself for
election again.
Fortunately, because the air of the House of Commons is not healthful
breathing for poets or novelists. For them it is a soporific and
suffocating air. You may note that when a writer of imaginative
literature has sat in the House for more than a limited period his
spirit puts on flesh, dulness settles on his faculties and communicates
itself to his pen. What plays did Sheridan write after he took his seat
there? And who shall say that Lytton might not have written with fewer
capital letters and less of the manner of the big bow-wow if he had
never ventured into that fatal atmosphere? Mason’s sojourn in the House
had no influence on his fiction, unless it was his stay there that
turned his thoughts toward India and the grave problem of the education
of its native Princes in England and so resulted in his writing one of
the most powerful of his books, “The Broken Road”; in which case he has
brought more good out of it than any novelist who ever went into it,
except Disraeli, and Disraeli was really a politician in his romances
and a romancist in his politics, so he can hardly be counted.
I could never imagine the author of “Miranda of the Balcony” sitting
out interminable debates, or trooping with his party into the voting
lobby. He must have felt much more at home in uniform when he became
in the first days of the war a Captain of the Manchester Regiment, and
later, a Major on the General Staff. If he wrote no more romance for
a time (his only book through those years was a collection of short
stories, “The Four Corners of the World,” in 1917) it was because he
was too busy living it. For with all its squalors and horrors and
agonies, the Great War is beginning, in remembrance, to take on the
color of romance by comparison with the tameness and monotony of
ordinary everyday life.
You would gather from his stories that Mason was much given to boating,
traveling and mountaineering, for a love of the open air blows
through nearly all of them. The Alps and the enormous shadow of them
dominate “Running Water”; and the skies and landscapes and peoples of
present-day Egypt, Italy, India fill the pages of “The Four Feathers,”
“The Broken Road,” and “At the Villa Rose.” Latterly, too, his new
novels have become few and far between and he has given himself again,
more and more, to the stage. He never quite severed himself from it.
Soon after the novel appeared, he dramatized “Morrice Buckler,” in
collaboration with Miss Isabel Bateman, and it was very successfully
produced at the Grand, Islington, and had a long run in the provinces;
1901 saw a dramatic version of “Miranda of the Balcony” staged in
New York; in 1909 he produced two comedies, not founded on his books
“Colonel Smith” and “Marjorie Strode”; and in 1911 the most successful
of all his dramatic ventures, “The Witness for the Defence.”
Since then, we have had “Open Windows,” and dramatized versions of “At
the Villa Rose” and “Running Water,” and one hears rumors of other
plays that he has in preparation. The indications are that in future he
will appear more often on the boards than between them, and nobody need
regret this if he only offers us as much pleasure in the stalls and the
pit as we have had from him in our arm-chairs at home.
WILLIAM SOMERSET MAUGHAM
[Illustration: WILLIAM SOMERSET MAUGHAM]
On the whole, I incline to the orthodox belief that if an author wants
to find a short way to success he should not be too versatile. Nearly
all our famous writers have been contented to do one thing well--have
seemed to say with Marvell,
“Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball.”
I could name authors of our day who have dissipated their energies
in half a dozen or more directions. They are journalists, novelists,
poets, essayists, critics, dramatists, writers of books for children
and editors of all manner of books. They have no settled reputation,
the public does not know where to have them; they are all sorts of
things to all sorts of readers and nothing in particular to any. They
win some vague popularity, perhaps, and an income, but not fame. Fame
comes to the man who concentrates on the one kind of work for which he
has special gifts, puts all his heart and all his skill into the doing
of that.
You may say that Somerset Maugham is versatile; but he has written
no verse, no essays, no criticism, no tales for children. He wisely
exercised his versatility within the range of a single art until he
turned his attention to the stage, and if he has been versatile since,
it has been only inside the limits of these two arts, a versatility as
legitimate in the artist as it is sagacious in the man who has to earn
a livelihood with his pen and hopes to go on pleasing his audience with
many books. For there is no virtue in the opposite extreme to which
some novelists go nowadays, who concentrate so conscientiously that
they narrow their outlook to one phase of life, one type of character,
and never shift their scenery. By this means they ensure that their
stories are graphically accurate, meticulously true, but by the time
they have told four or five the reader becomes aware of a sameness,
a monotony in them, pines for a change, goes after new gods, and the
old shrine begins to lack worshippers. If Maugham’s circulation ever
dwindles it will not be for this reason.
Happily he has a sense of humor which prevents him from adopting
anything in the nature of a pose; but, however unassuming, he is not
diffident; he is without affectations, and assured me once he was
without ideals, by which I believe he meant no more than that he was
not too idealistic to be a practical man. It was when he had succeeded
as a novelist and was starting on his successful career as a dramatist
that he told me he felt there was a tremendous amount of nonsense
talked about the serious drama. “All this high falutin chatter about
ideals!” said he. “A playwright’s and a missionary’s calling appear to
me to be two distinct and quite separate callings which should not be
permitted to overlap. I cannot understand why a serious play should
be held to be pre-eminently greater or more important than a humorous
play, a comedy, for instance. Nor do I admit for a moment that the
former is more difficult to write or demands a consideration peculiar
to itself.” Briefly, he protested that his one aim as novelist or
dramatist was to amuse; he thought that was the first business of all
authors, adding, “I would excuse almost anything but dullness.” No
book fails because its literary quality is too high, but because the
writer who can write literature does not always know how to write it
interestingly. And I found that Maugham, in the broad sanity of his
judgment, had no sympathy with the egotistical talk of unpopular but
superior persons who ascribe their failure to a fine inability, a noble
disinclination to “write down” to the presumably lower apprehensions of
the vast majority of mankind.
His practice, through the many years since he emerged as a new author,
has always squared with his precepts. Somebody writing of him a
little while ago said he got his intimate knowledge of men and women,
particularly of the London poor, while he was working as a doctor, but
this is scarcely accurate. After completing his education at King’s
School, Canterbury, and Heidelberg University, he became a student at
St. Thomas’s Hospital, and in due course took his M.R.C.S. and L.R.C.P.
degrees, but he never put up his brass plate and worked as a doctor.
He had never seriously intended doing so. His family wished him to
study medicine, and he yielded to that wish, but his own ambition
from the first had been to write for the stage. He was convinced that
stage-craft was a knack he could acquire if he made up his mind to
it; but he had a saving leaven of common sense and had seen enough
of things to know that it was infinitely harder to worry through all
the difficulties between writing a play and getting it produced than
to find a publisher for a novel, so he resolved to turn novelist as a
means of earning bread and butter and winning a large enough reputation
to move theater managers to feel that it was at least worth their while
to look at his dramas.
That was in the 90’s--the glamorous 1890’s when some would persuade
us the whole world of letters in this country was dominated by Oscar
Wilde and his circle. But Maugham was one of the many authors of
the period--I have referred to others already--whose work shows
little trace of that influence. There is nothing much of romance in
the story of his literary beginnings; he did not cast himself upon
the town and drudge in the byways of journalism, nor did he undergo
the disheartening experience of having his manuscripts persistently
rejected by the magazines. While he was still a student at St. Thomas’
he sent Fisher Unwin a collection of stories that eventually appeared
under the title of “Orientations,” and that astute publisher at once
accepted it, but strongly advised Maugham that it would be much better
for himself that he should make a start with a novel; and he accepted
the advice and went away to act upon it.
Just then the slum story was all in the air--so much so that
“slumming” had become a popular pastime with young ladies of leisure.
The vogue of Gissing was at its height; Arthur Morrison had written in
“Tales of Mean Streets” and “The Child of the Jago” some of the most
powerfully realistic of any pictures of London low life; Edwin Pugh
had revealed the same underworld in “A Street in Suburbia” and “The
Man of Straw”; Pett Ridge’s “Mord Em’ly,” showing something of the
happier side of that drab underworld, was running serially, and various
other writers were finding themes for fiction in those ugly facts of
existence that the city keeps as much out of sight as possible. In any
case, the slums of Lambeth lay beside St. Thomas’s Hospital, their
inhabitants came into it as patients, so Somerset Maugham knew them,
their homes, their habits, their manner of speech, their manner of
living, and fashioned his first novel out of such personal experience.
He called it “A Lambeth Idyll”; Fisher Unwin accepted it and, in 1897,
published it as “Liza of Lambeth.” Its stark, violent realism roused
a good deal of protest; we were not so tolerant in such matters then
as we have now become; and though there were not wanting those who
praised the stern faithfulness with which it depicted certain phases
of London life, more and louder voices denounced it as unpleasant,
brutal, repellant, extravagantly squalid. Crude and raw it may have
been, somewhat obviously out to shock the delicate, omitting too much
light and massing too much shadow, but there was truth if not all the
truth in it, Liza and her mother and her barbaric lover, Jim, were
alive and real, and the controversy that raged round the book served,
at least, the good purpose of obtaining for it a measure of the success
it merited.