was going to devote himself to the exploitation of the slums, or of
low life, they soon found they were mistaken. He finished with the
slums in “Liza of Lambeth” and never wrote another novel about them.
He moved through average society in “The Making of a Saint” (1898);
then his actual first book, the short stories “Orientations,” made
its appearance; on the heels of this followed “The Hero”; then came
what I still feel to be the strongest and ablest of his novels--“Mrs.
Craddock.” Good as it is, the times were not ripe for such frank
handling of sex mysteries and the book was rejected by every publisher
of consequence. Even Heinmann declined it at first; then, on a second
consideration, accepted it and published it in 1903. The study of
that elemental, passionate, intensely female creature, Mrs. Craddock,
is an aggressively candid, extraordinarily subtle essay in feminine
psychology; her story is touched with satire and irony and inevitably
clouded with tragedy, wherefore the general reader, who prefers
pleasanter things, did not take to it kindly. Maugham has never since,
perhaps, been so somber, though the sex element has continued to play
a potent part in most of his novels and stories, which have had their
scenes in middle-class and high society, at home, at the North Pole, in
the South Seas and, with those wonderful sketches of character, “On a
Chinese Screen,” in China.
Meanwhile, as everybody knows, his triumphant progress as a novelist
had not diverted Somerset Maugham from his original bent. In 1902
he had a one-act piece, “Schiffbrüchig,” produced in Germany. Next
year he wrote “The Man of Honor” for the Stage Society, but instead
of attracting theatrical managers to him it frightened them off, for
there was no laughter in it, and they appear to have taken for granted
that it fully represented what he could do and meant to do, and that
consequently nothing of his was likely to appeal to the playgoing
public or could be made to pay.
But they reckoned without their host. Maugham set to work and wrote
three comedies, “Lady Frederick,” “Jack Straw” and “Dot,” which were
destined to establish him as a dramatist whose plays had money in them.
His later plays have not gone begging for producers--producers have
gone begging for them. And the plays of Maugham have been as varied
in theme and manner as his novels. From gay, witty, frivolous, ironic
comedy, he has passed to sentimental or romantic drama; but he has
learned to touch in his realism more deftly, more cunningly, and is no
longer faced with the task of having to placate a public obsessed by
the mid-Victorian gospel that the plain truth about men and women is
not respectable and must not be told.
WILLIAM BABINGTON MAXWELL
[Illustration: WILLIAM BABINGTON MAXWELL]
It has passed into a sort of proverb that famous men never have sons
who equal them in fame. There are, of course, exceptions. Benjamin
Disraeli has eclipsed that delightful bookworm, his father Isaac, who
wrote the “Curiosities of Literature”; Henry James, having a father who
was a distinguished novelist and theologian, used to describe himself
on his earlier books as “Henry James, Junr.” but the use of “Junr.” as
a means of identifying him has long ceased to be necessary. There are
others; but half a dozen swallows do not make a summer, and a dozen
such instances would not falsify the proverb.
Perhaps what is true concerning fathers is not so true about mothers.
Nobody now reads the once popular novels of Mrs. Frances Trollope,
mother of the greater Anthony; Gilbert Frankau, to come at once to our
own times, looks like outshining that clever novelist, his mother,
“Frank Danby”; Shaw has gone far beyond his mother’s fame as an
operatic star; the novels of W. B. Maxwell surpass those of his mother,
M. E. Braddon, in literary art, and though he is not so enormously
popular in his day as she was in hers, he is widely read now when she
is scarcely read at all.
He began to write while she was still writing; her vogue had declined,
but remained considerable, and she was still writing as well as
ever--in fact, in her two or three latest books, notably in “The
Green Curtain,” I think she was writing better than ever. There were
disadvantages for a young novelist, no doubt, in having a popular
novelist for his mother; but there were also advantages. His father
was the publisher, John Maxwell, whose business developed into that
of Messrs. Hurst & Blackett. He grew up in a literary atmosphere; the
very men who could open doors for a beginner, and make his way easier,
were friends of the family; moreover, he had a critic on the hearth
who could prompt his first steps and check his ’prentice errors with
knowledge drawn from a long and very practical experience.
“Most of the knowledge I possess of how to write,” Maxwell once told
Clive Holland, “and, indeed, the fact that I commenced to write at all,
I owe to my mother. She was never too busy, or too immersed in her work
to discuss my literary ambitions, or work of my own. She did not always
know the way any story of mine was going, for I wished neither for it
to be an imitation of hers nor in any way to trade upon her own great
and worldwide reputation.” He confessed, however, to a frequent feeling
that however difficult he might find it to master his art, he had an
even more difficult task in the attempt to follow her and necessarily
challenge comparison with her work and her unqualified success. “I
remember,” he added, “the son of a great man saying in my hearing that
the fact that he was so situated had, in a measure, spoiled his life.
‘People expect too much,’ he remarked pathetically, ‘and sometimes
get so little. I might have been quite a success if I had not been
overshadowed by my great father.’”
But he broke
“his birth’s invidious bar”
and without grasping either his mother’s skirts or those of happy
chance (unless Grant Richards was wearing them on the occasion I will
presently mention), he became a novelist in his own way and up built
his own reputation. Considering the influences that must have been
round him in his childhood, taking it that he inherited his literary
gift from his mother and that she, as he tells us, taught his young
idea how to shoot, if his stories had been more or less of the M. E.
Braddon pattern, it would not have been surprising. But, unlike those,
his novels are much less concerned with sensational happenings or plot
of any kind than with intricacies of character and the mysteries of
human psychology. Even from the beginning he struck out in independent
line for himself, and his first book, published in 1901, when he was
thirty-five, was (to give it its full title), “The Countess of Maybury:
Being the Intimate Conversations of the Right Honorable the Countess
of Maybury. Collected with Sedulous Care and Respectful Admiration by
W. B. Maxwell,” a series of satirical, light comedy dialogues of high
society which preceded the “Dolly Dialogues” by a year or two but did
not, as they did, set a fashion. His second book, two years later, was
a volume of short stories called “Fabulous Fancies,” and this revealed
him as a realist--one not without idealism and a sensitive feeling for
the romance of life, but a realist none the less, and that quality of
realism predominates in all the novels and stories he has written since.
He was late in making this beginning, when he was over thirty,
especially considering how his environment favored his development,
but he was not hastened by the spur of necessity; he had found a
sufficient outlet for his energies in a healthy love of hunting and
outdoor sport, and traveled a good deal. Also he has said that he only
turned to literature after he had failed in other directions. What
those directions were I do not know, except that he was bitten with a
young ambition to be a painter and studied on and off for some years at
certain art schools in London. On the whole, and despite his ancestry,
he thinks himself he might never have taken seriously to the writing
of fiction if he had not happened to meet that enterprising publisher
Grant Richards who, with characteristic courage and fore-sight,
commissioned him to write him a novel, “an arresting novel,” of modern
life. Not many publishers would have risked giving such a commission
to an almost untried author, but the result amply justified the
publisher’s prescience, and with “The Ragged Messenger,” in 1904,
Maxwell scored the first and one of the biggest of his successes. Its
success was the more remarkable in that it was a story of tragedy, and
there is a tradition that the public shrinks from such, but it was its
reality, the understanding and poignant truth to human experience with
which its characters were drawn and their lives laid bare that caught
the reader’s sympathy and gave the book its power of appeal.
“Vivian” was a readable successor to this, but “The Guarded Flame”
(1906) rose to an altogether higher level. So far as my judgment goes,
“The Guarded Flame” shares with the brilliant satirical story of the
middle-class, self-reliant “Mrs. Thompson” and that grim and powerful
study in degeneracy, “In Cotton Wool,” the distinction of representing
the highest reach of Maxwell’s art, with not far below them “The
Devil’s Garden” and “The Mirror and the Lamp.”
“The Devil’s Garden,” which was published in the year before the
War burst upon us, brought Maxwell into trouble with our unofficial
censorship and was banned by the libraries. I remember it as a vivid,
uncompromising story of a self-made man whose life and the lives of his
associates do not smack of the innocence of Arcadia and are portrayed
with a conscientious exactitude, but the morality of the novel was
implicit, and why any one should object when an artist faithfully
pictures the unpleasant facts of life, why we should be shocked to find
in a novel things that we go on tolerating in the world around us is
one of those little eccentricities of the moral sense in man that I
have left off trying to understand. The only effect of the ban was that
“The Devil’s Garden” was more talked of and sold better than any other
of his novels, and it is this perhaps that has led many to accept it as
the best he has done; but I would rank it at most with his second best.
For five years after that event, from September 1914 till the end of
the war, he turned his back on literature and served as subaltern and
as Captain in the Royal Fusiliers. He says that during the war he felt
that when peace came we should witness the uprising of “a new and
vigorous school of romantic novelists”; that a world so long oppressed
“by hideous realities must crave for the realm of pure imagination,”
for gaiety, joyousness, for something more akin to the charm and
happiness of the fairy-tale.
But when the war was over, he confesses, he soon found he was mistaken.
No such complete change entered even into his own stories. A note of
idealism is sounded in “The Mirror and the Lamp,” in “A Man and his
Lesson” and “Spinster of this Parish,” but so it was in the books he
wrote before the war, and otherwise, as in those, he still handles,
with a subtle mastery of atmosphere and detail, the dark problems of
character and temperament, the ugly but real facts of human experience
that are still the spiritual inheritance and material environment of
real men and women.
He did, in one of his post-war novels (“A Little More”), experiment
in what was for him rather a new vein. It was the story of a once
well-to-do family that was reduced to squalid poverty, and the
father and one daughter faced their altered circumstances with more
resolution than resignation, though the father had more courage than
competence. I think Maxwell was trying his hand at the kind of grown-up
fairy-tale toward which a reaction from the grim realities we had just
come through inclined him; but the sentiment softened at times into
sentimentality, his scenes and characters of poorer life were not so
convincing as they are in some of his other novels. The spirit of the
time had too thoroughly subdued him; but he made a quick recovery and
with “Spinster of this Parish” triumphantly found himself again and
proved that his hand had not lost its earlier cunning.
LEONARD MERRICK
[Illustration: LEONARD MERRICK]
Until a collected edition of his novels and stories appeared in 1918,
Leonard Merrick had been writing for thirty years without receiving
a tithe of the recognition that was over-due to him. I doubt whether
even now he has such popularity as is enjoyed by many novelists who
have not half his capacity, his sure and delicate art, his supreme
gift as a story-teller. I can only explain this with a theory I have
sometimes played with that a book draws its life from its author, and
most books that are immediately and noisily successful are written by
men of robust and pushful personality; they impart these qualities to
what they write and so give their books an impetus that carries them to
success, makes them as pushful and aggressive in the reading world as
the personality behind them is in the world at large.
This may be purely fantastic, but the fact remains that Leonard Merrick
is a personality of a gracious and retiring order; he is seldom seen
in literary circles, and has no skill in self-advertisement. Once,
not long ago, I told him I had often wondered that such stories as
his had not from the first taken the public by storm, and asked if he
could to any extent help me to understand why they had not done so. He
accepted the implications in my question with a smile and said, in
the quietest, most impartial fashion, “I don’t know. Of course I have
been disappointed when my books were freely praised by the critics
and did not meet with the large circulations I had hoped for them,
and sometimes, when I have thought about it, I have had a suspicion
that perhaps I wrote too much of artists--of novelists, journalists,
actors--and, moreover, too much about artists who failed. I fancy the
public are not particularly interested in the artist; they prefer to
read about people more like themselves--people with whom and whose
ways they are more familiar. Or if they are to be told of the artist,
they want him to be a hero--they want to be told how he struggled
through thrilling trials and difficulties to happiness and prosperity
at last--they don’t want to be saddened by a tale of his failure; they
don’t want to know about him unless he was the sort of man who could
conquer fate and circumstance romantically and, as the Americans say,
make good in the end. And I have seen a good deal of the artist’s life,
and seen how there is bound to be far more failure than success in it,
and I suppose I have tried to picture it truthfully. Perhaps that was
a mistake and I ought, in the language of the theater, to have kept my
eye on the box-office. I don’t know. That is merely a casual notion of
mine, and may not account for anything.”
However that may be, and whatever it was that kept the large public
that has come to him by degrees from promptly appreciating him,
Merrick’s greatness as a novelist has from the beginning been fully
realized by his fellow-craftsmen; he has all along been the novelists’
novelist, somewhat as Keats was the poets’ poet, and the collected
edition of his works bore testimony to this in prefaces to the various
volumes by Barrie, Wells, Locke, Chesterton, Neil Munro, Neil Lyons,
and other distinguished authors. None was more generous in his acclaim
than Barrie, who had long before greeted him as a master of fiction
and, in his introduction to “Conrad in Quest of his Youth,” said, “I
know scarcely a novel by any living Englishman, except a score or so
of Mr. Hardy’s, that I would rather have written.” Allowing for his
very different angle of vision, Merrick is as true a realist as Hardy,
but he touches in his characters and incidents with a lighter hand,
and has as shrewd a sense of the comedy--the piteous comedy it may be
at times--as Hardy has of the tragedy of existence. He does not show
his men and women as the foredoomed and helpless victims of a blind,
indifferent, implacable life-force, but simply tells his story of
them, what they did and what they felt and said, and any spiritual,
moral, or social problem involved in their doings and sufferings is
implicit in his dramatization of their lives and characters; he does
not take you aside to expound it or dogmatize about it: there it
is--that is how things happen, and he is a showman, not a preacher.
His prevailing qualities are a Gallic sparkle and effervescence of wit
and gaiety--especially in such tales as make up “While Paris Laughed”
and “A Chair on the Boulevard”--a limitless charity and pity for
the follies, weaknesses, caprices of mankind, a charm of sentiment
that just stops short of sentimentality, a quick sensitiveness to the
humor and pathos of common life, the anxieties of living by precarious
employment; the tragedy of straitened circumstances; the sheer joy of
living in spite of everything.
He has experienced much of the life he has depicted, and has put
not a little of his personal experiences into “The Worldings,” into
“Laurels and the Lady,” one of the stories of “The Man Who Understood
Women,” and into other of his books. Usually there is nothing to tell
of a novelist’s early days, except that he went to certain schools,
practiced journalism for a while, then wrote a book or two which found
acceptance sooner or later and thereafter took up permanent residence
in the literary world. But Merrick’s career has been less orthodox and
more varied.
A Londoner born, he went with his people to South Africa when he was
eighteen and, entering the South African Civil Service, became clerk
in the Magistrate’s Court on the Diamond Fields. But he had not the
smallest intention of settling down to that. He was, as he told me,
born “stage-struck,” and his one ambition as a youth was to tread the
boards and achieve fame as an actor. In 1884 he returned to England and
obtained an introduction to Augustus Harris, who gave him an engagement
to act in a touring company that was traveling the country with one of
the big Drury Lane autumn melodramas. He proved himself a thoroughly
capable player, yet would have lost his part, because the touring
manager was bent on pushing him out and supplanting him with a friend
of his own, but for the voluntary intervention of another member of the
company who wrote privately to Harris urging him to go down and see
Leonard Merrick’s acting for himself before making any change. Harris
did so, with the result that Merrick retained his position in the
company for two years, at the end of which period, his enthusiasm for
the actor’s life being cooled, he retired from the profession for good.
Not until some years later did he discover by chance that the member of
the company who, without his knowledge, had befriended him and saved
him from dismissal, was Arthur Collins, who, in due season, was to
succeed Augustus Harris as Drury Lane’s managing director.
When the disillusioned mummer strutted his little hour before the
footlights for the last time he was twenty-three, and “The Position of
Peggy Harper” is by no means the only one of his books to which his two
years in motley have yielded a rich harvest. Since then, except that
he wrote “The Free Pardon” with F. C. Phillips and some very popular
dramas in collaboration with George R. Sims, the stage has ceased to
lure him and he has devoted himself to the writing of stories.
Nor did he lose much time in passing from the one calling to the other,
for his first book appeared when he was twenty-four. His second novel,
“Violet Moses,” was rejected by Chatto & Windus, but accepted by
Bentley; and his third, “The Man Who Was Good,” was rejected by Bentley
as not up to the level of the other, but promptly accepted by Chatto
& Windus; one of life’s lighter ironies that nobody--certainly not
Merrick--would have wished to evade. He had published some half dozen
novels before he began to write short stories. He confesses that he
prefers to write these, and there are stories in at least two of his
volumes that for delicate satirical comedy and subtle art of narration
have not been surpassed by any of his contemporaries.
From the outset, Merrick met with a more popular reception in America
than in this country; his books enjoyed a considerable vogue there,
and his short stories were soon in great demand with the American
magazines. This has happened to so many other of our writers that
one merely mentions it as a biographical fact and not as matter for
surprise. His first real success with short stories over here came when
his agent, A. P. Watt, handed one of his books to the editor of the
_Bystander_, urging him to read it and see whether its stories were not
of the sort he wanted. He read it, and commissioned six, and before
these had all appeared commissioned a further twelve. Thereafter, the
trouble was not to place such stories but to write as many as were
required.
While he was in his thirties Leonard Merrick lived for some time in
Paris, and Paris still draws him at intervals from the retirement of
his English home, for he finds there ideas and stimulation, and can
work there as he never can in London. As a rule, the Londoner born has
a sneaking regard for his city and cannot be long away from it without
feeling its intangible human hands plucking at his heart and its
multitudinous voices calling him back, but in spite of the fact that he
is a true-blue Cockney, born, in 1864, at Belsize Park, on the skirts
of Hampstead, Merrick tells you he does not love London. It is the
most comfortable of cities, he admits, but he finds it uninspiring and
can work better and more easily when he is almost anywhere away from
it--especially when he is in Paris.
ALAN ALEXANDER MILNE
[Illustration: ALAN ALEXANDER MILNE]
The tradition that the Scot has no humor still lingers among
old-fashioned people who don’t like changes, but of recent years
Barrie, Neil Munro (as Hugh Foulis), J. J. Bell, Ian Hay, A. A.
Milne, and some others have shaken it to such an extent that only the
incurably obstinate now attempt to maintain it.
But while the humor of the others smack finely of the north of the
Tweed, the humor of Milne seems to indicate that his spiritual home
is a much more frivolous place. There is something Irish or English
about its airy gaiety, its blithe, amusing flippancy. Dr. Johnson once
spoke slightingly about the art of carving faces on cherry-stones, but
if he had tried his hand at that work he would have realized that to
accomplish it successfully one must be born with a gift that is as rare
as the more impressive gift for writing serious prose. Our ancestors,
as a whole, realized that, and would exclaim with admiration at the
marvelous facility of Swift who could write you an essay off-hand
on anything or nothing. I remember how, when I was a small boy, a
bookish old gentleman informed me of this in his library and went on
to tell with bated breath the familiar yarn of how, to test the Dean’s
limitless capacity, a lady challenged him to write an essay on a
broomstick, and he at once sat down and did it. But we should think
little of that nowadays. Milne would not need so much as a broomstick;
he could do it on one of the bristles.
So could E. V. Lucas or Chesterton, or Belloc. But in the matter
of slightness of theme and the capacity for writing charmingly and
humorously on next to nothing at all Milne has closer affinities with
Lucas; they not only can do it but make a habit of doing it. Both write
light verse as well as light prose; both contributed to _Punch_ (Lucas
contributes to it still), and as Anstey and many another, in various
forms, had practiced the same volatile literature in those pages, it
seems possible that the influence of _Punch_ may have been more or less
responsible for developing likewise in them a delightfully neat and
sprightly vein of humor.
However that may be, Milne had begun to exercise his characteristic
style while he was at Cambridge, where he was made editor of the
_Granta_. He came to London in 1903, and settled down, first in Temple
Chambers, afterwards at Chelsea (where he still resides, but not
in his original two rooms) to make a living as a free-lance author
and journalist. His earnings through the first two years were far
below the income-tax level, but in the third year he was appointed
assistant-editor of _Punch_, to which he had already been contributing
largely, and the world in general began to be aware of him from seeing
the initials A. A. M. appearing in that periodical with significant
regularity. It not only saw them, but looked out for them, and was
soon betraying curiosity in public places as to the identity of the
person who owned them; an infallible sign that a writer is giving the
public what it wants as well as what it ought to want.