volumes, “The Day’s Play,” “The Holiday Round,” and “Once a Week,” but
was no sooner so established as an entertaining and popular essayist
than the War intervened to take him to fresh woods and pastures that
were new but not desirable. It is impossible to unfold the record of
any of our younger and few of our older contemporary authors without
coming up against the War. Milne promptly withdrew from _Punch_,
joined the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, and was sent out to France.
Here, in odds and ends of leisure from military occupations, he found
opportunity and the moods for writing that quaint, whimsical story
“Once on a Time,” which was published in 1917; and then, too, he made a
first experiment as a dramatist with his shrewdly, cleverly satirical
comedy of “Wurzel-Flummery.” There is a new depth and maturity under
the humor of these things, and he said that in writing the story he for
the first time wrote in earnest.
By-and-by, after a breakdown which had put him in hospital for a while,
when he was sent to act as signaling instructor at a fort on Portsdown
Hill, he had an impulse to continue playwriting, and would spend a long
day at the fort teaching his class how to signal, then go home to the
cottage where he and his wife were living, a couple of miles away, and
dictate to her, until he had produced in succession, “Belinda,” “The
Boy Comes Home” and “The Lucky One.” These were in due course presented
on the London stage, and if they had no success comparable with his
later plays, they were successful enough before the footlights, and in
the book into which he gathered them in 1919, to demonstrate that a new
dramatist had arisen, and one to be reckoned with.
There are plenty of signs of the potential dramatist in the pre-war
essays--in their easy and natural use of dialogue, and their deft,
vivid handling of incidents: and there is a bite of realism in their
genial satire and burlesque irony, which foreshadows the keener, riper
irony and satire of “Bladys.” For instance, there is the sketch of “The
Newspaper Proprietor,” that “lord of journalism,” Hector Strong, who,
to oblige a lady, saves her play from failure and forces it into a
raging success by the adroitness with which he booms it in his numerous
newspapers. It may seem ridiculous, and Milne may have invented it all,
but take away a few farcial details from his narrative, and there are
those behind the scenes who will assure you that this deed was actually
done. As for “A Breath of Life,” in which the actor who plays the young
hero falls really in love with the actress who plays the heroine and
on a passionate impulse finishes the play triumphantly at the end of
the third act to such thunders of applause from the audience that the
fourth is cut away for good--ask any dramatist and he will tell you
that his own plays suffered worse than that at the hands of their
producers until he became successful and important enough to insist on
the piece being acted exactly as it was written.
Always there was this germ of truth in Milne’s earlier trifles and
flippancies. “A Trunk Call” is by no means such an irresponsible farce
as some may think it. Here, the dainty Celia buys a fancy knocker and
puts it on the door of her husband’s study, in order that she may give
him warning at any time before she comes to interrupt him. He wants her
to try it forthwith, but she demurs:
“‘Not now. I’ll try later on, when you aren’t expecting it. Besides,
you must begin your work. Good-bye. Work hard.’ She pushed me in and
shut the door.
“I began to work.
“I work best on the sofa; I think most clearly in what appears to
the hasty observer to be an attitude of rest. But I am not sure that
Celia really understands this yet. Accordingly, when a knock comes at
the door I jump to my feet, ruffle my hair, and stride up and down
the room with one hand on my brow. ‘Come in,’ I call impatiently, and
Celia finds me absolutely in the throes. If there should chance to be a
second knock later on, I make a sprint for the writing-desk, seize pen
and paper, upset the ink or not as it happens, and present to any one
coming in at the door the most thoroughly engrossed back in London.
“But that was in the good old days of knuckle-knocking. On this
particular morning I had hardly written more than a couple of thousand
words--I mean I had hardly got the cushions at the back of my head
comfortably settled when Celia came in.
“‘Well?’ she said eagerly.
“I struggled out of the sofa.
“‘What is it?’ I asked sternly.
“‘Did you hear it all right?’
“‘I didn’t hear anything.’
“‘Oh!’ she said in great disappointment. ‘But perhaps you were asleep,’
she went on hopefully.
“‘Certainly not. I was working.’
“‘Did I interrupt you?’
“‘You did rather; but it doesn’t matter.’
“‘Oh, well, I won’t do it again--unless I really have to. Goodbye, and
good luck.’”
The knocker may be an effort of the imagination, otherwise this reads
as if it were taken from life. It may even be true about Milne himself,
for he has said in print that his work comes easy to him; and if you
show the complete sketch to the wife of any literary man of your
acquaintance the chances are she will wonder how Milne got to know so
much about her husband. But his trim figure and alert, clean-shaven
face, apart from the quantity of work he has placed to his credit,
belie any suggestion that since he finds his work easy he takes his
ease, except when it is finished. He is restlessly alive, and gives
you the impression of being something of an out-door man, a golfer
probably, perhaps a cricketer, though you need not believe he looks
forward to the opening of the cricket season quite so enthusiastically
as he suggests in “The First Game”--
“It is the day that I watch for yearly,
Never before has it come so late;
But now I’ve only a month--no, merely
A couple of fortnights left to wait;
And then (to make the matter plain)
I hold--at last!--a bat again:
Dear Hobbs! the weeks this summer--think! the _weeks_ I’ve lived in
vain.”
When he was demobilized, his old post of assistant-editor of _Punch_
was waiting for him, but he had formed other plans for his future
during the war, and arranged not to go back. He did not just then
intend to abandon the light essay, and in “If I may” (1920) his hand
for it is as cunning as ever; but the theater had got into his blood,
his ambition was taking higher flights, and “Mr. Pim Passes By” (he
wrote it also into a novel as quaintly humorous and sentimental as the
play) and the mordantly ironic “Truth About Bladys” soared at once
and almost simultaneously to such heights of popularity that if the
dramatist has not presently absorbed the essayist altogether, it won’t
be for want of an excellent excuse.
ALFRED NOYES
[Illustration: ALFRED NOYES]
Early in his career, being rash as well as young, Alfred Noyes made the
tactical mistake of writing poetry that became popular. He was crowned
with eulogy by leading critics who, naturally, could not foresee that
he would also win the applause of the multitude or, no doubt, they
would have been more careful. Meredith helped to mislead them; he
praised the beauty and finely restrained pathos of “Michael Oaktree,”
a narrative poem in Noyes’s very first volume, “The Loom of Years.”
But it was his third and fourth books, those exquisite fairy tales in
verse, “The Flower of Old Japan” (1903) and “The Forest of Wild Thyme”
(1905), that carried him right into the popularity which disillusioned
those self-centered experts who cling to a narrow faith that poetry
cannot be poetry if it makes a triumphant appeal to the large world
that lives and works in outer darkness beyond the limits of their own
select, small circle.
Noyes has always been reckless in these matters. He never took the
precaution to attach himself to any of our little groups of poetasters
who ecstatically give each other the glory the common public with-holds
from them. Before he made a book of his great epic, “Drake”--and
it is great not only by comparison with what has been done by his
living contemporaries--instead of treating it as something too rare
and delicate for human nature’s daily food, he ran it serially in
_Blackwood’s Magazine_, as if it had been a new novel. No poem had ever
appeared in that fashion before. I believe he had not written more than
half when the first instalment of it was printed, and the orthodox
could not be expected to approve of that sort of thing. They began to
say Noyes was too facile; wrote too hurriedly and too much; began to
take it for granted that no man who wrote thus copiously and fluently
could be an authentic poet, when they might more reasonably have
assumed that he did by a certain native gift what was only possible to
themselves by the slower, sedulous exercise of an average talent.
Howbeit, from being lauded freely, Noyes is now more misrepresented,
by a group of poet-critics, whose judgments are too often sound in
the wrong sense, than any other poet of our day. Whether anything
less respectable than a restricted poetical outlook can account for
this misrepresentation I shall not attempt to guess, but, noticing
it, I have sometimes been reminded of lines he puts into the mouth of
Marlowe, in his “Tales of the Mermaid Tavern”--
“I tell thee ’tis the dwarfs that find no world
Wide enough for their jostlings, while the giants,
The gods themselves, can in one tavern find
Room wide enough to swallow the wide heaven
With all its crowded solitary stars.”
Unprofessional lovers of poetry read Noyes not because it is the
proper, high-brow thing to do, but solely because they enjoy reading
him. It is an excellent reason; and for the same reason Tennyson and
Browning are famous; so, in these times, are Masefield and Davies;
de la Mare and William Watson. Noyes differs from most of his
contemporaries in being at once, like Chaucer, a born story-teller
and, like Swinburne, an amazing master of meter and rhyme. He is not
alone in being able more readily and adequately to express himself in
meter and rhyme than in prose, and it is ridiculous to assume that this
ability indicates any shallowness of thought; it indicates, rather,
that he is really efficient in an art he has taken pains to acquire.
It is equally ridiculous to dub him old-fashioned, as some of our
superior persons do, because he accepts the classical tradition in
poetry. He has not accepted it unintelligently or slavishly; if you
look through his books you will note how cunningly he makes old meters
new again, and that he has invented enough new meters or variations
in accepted metrical forms to give him a place even with those who
claim to be rebels against authority. One such rebel, a prominent
American poet, included the other day in his collected works a goodly
proportion of _vers libre_ from which one of our advanced critics chose
two passages for admiring quotation. The ideas in these passages were
a mere repetition of two that are expressed with higher art and deeper
feeling in “In Memoriam,” yet that advanced critic is one who dismisses
Tennyson as out of date and has hailed the American poet as the last
word in modern thinking. Perhaps he and his like have not troubled to
read what they consider old-fashioned. I mention the circumstance by
way of showing to what a pass some of our critics and poets have come.
If Noyes has any theories of poetry, I gather they are that the poet
is essentially one endowed with the gift of song; that all the great
poets, from Homer downward, have been great singers; and that when he
utters himself in meter and rhyme he is but putting himself in tune
with the infinite order of the universe--with the rhythm of the tides,
of the seasons, the recurring chime of day and night, the harmonious
movement of the stars in their orbits. He once confessed to me that he
was so far from fearing the possibilities of metrical invention were
exhausted that he was convinced we are still at the beginning of them;
they were exhausted, according to the first disciples of Whitman, sixty
years ago, but Swinburne arose and invented so many new meters that
he was considered more revolutionary in his era than Whitman’s later
disciples are in ours.
There is a virility and range of subject and style in Noyes’s work
that make a good deal of modern verse seem old-maidish or anæmic by
comparison. It is a far cry from the grace and tenderness and dainty
fancy of “The Flower of Old Japan”, “The Forest of Wild Thyme”, and
some of the lyrics in “The Elfin Artist”, and elsewhere, to the
masculine imaginative splendor in thought and diction, the robust
energy of his epic, “Drake”, or, though gentler moods of pathos,
humor, wistful fantasy are never absent from any of his books, to the
series of narratives that make up “The Torch Bearers”--an ambitious
succession of poems that reveal, with dramatic power and insight
and a quick sensitiveness to the poetry of science, the progress of
scientific discovery in the life-stories of the great discoverers.
None has pictured War in more terribly realistic terms or with a more
passionate hatred of its inhumanity than he has in “The Wine Press”;
and you have him in the breeziest, most riotously humorous of his moods
in “Forty Singing Seamen.” But if I should single my own favorite from
his books it would be the “Tales of the Mermaid Tavern.” Here he finds
full scope for his many-sided gift; you can turn from the rollicking
yarn of “Black Bill’s Honeymoon” to the dignity and poignance of “The
Burial of a Queen,” from the anecdotal picturesqueness of “A Coiner of
Angels” to the fervor and glittering pageantry of “Flos Mercatorum,”
from the suspense and tragedy of “Raleigh” to the laughter and lighter
tears and buoyant tripping measures of “The Companion of a Mile,”
telling how Will Kemp, the player, danced from London to Norwich for a
wager, and passing through Sudbury met a young butcher who offered to
dance a mile with him--
“By Sudbury, by Sudbury, by little red-roofed Sudbury,
He wished to dance a mile with me! I made a courtly bow:
I fitted him with morrice-bells, with treble, bass and tenor bells,
_And ‘Tickle your tabor, Tom,’ I cried, ‘we’re going to market now.’_
And rollicking down the lanes we dashed, and frolicking up the hills we
clashed,
And like a sail behind me flapped his great white frock a-while,
Till with a gasp, he sank and swore that he could dance with me no
more;
And over the hedge a milk-maid laughed, _Not dance with him a mile_?
‘You lout!’ she laughed, ‘I’ll leave my pail, and dance with him
for cakes and ale!
‘I’ll dance a mile for love,’ she laughed, ‘and win my wager too.
‘Your feet are shod and mine are bare; but when could leather dance on
air?
‘A milk-maid’s feet can fall as fair and light as falling dew.’
I fitted her with morrice-bells, with treble, bass and tenor bells:
The fore-bells, as I linked them to her throat, how soft they sang!
Green linnets in a golden nest, they chirped and trembled on her
breast,
And faint as elfin blue-bells at her nut-brown ankles rang.
I fitted her with morrice-bells that sweetened into woodbine bells,
And trembled as I hung them there and crowned her sunny brow:
‘Strike up,’ she laughed, ‘my summer king!’ And all her bells began to
ring,
_And ‘Tickle your tabor, Tom,’ I cried, ‘we’re going to Sherwood
now!’_”
This, and the rest of it, is very typical of Noyes in his lighter vein,
and if you can’t see the poetry that twinkles through the deft, airy
gallop of the verse we won’t talk about it; typical of him too is the
pathetic aftermath of the dance, so delicately touched in that the
pathos is almost lost in the beauty of it, till the motley epilogue
strikes the deeper note of sadness through the loud laughter of the
fool.
Noyes was born in Staffordshire in 1880, and I know nothing of his
doings at Oxford, except that he rowed in the Exeter College Eight. He
is nowadays an Hon. Litt. D. of Yale University, and since 1914 has
been Professor of Modern English Literature at Princeton University,
in America, and divides his time between that country and this. He is
the most unassuming of men, looking much younger than his years, and of
a sturdy, robust, serious aspect that (till his genial laugh, when he
breaks silence, spoils your calculations) seems more in keeping with
the vigor of his epic narratives, or with the noble rhetoric of such
as that most impressive of his shorter poems, “The Creation,” than
with the fairy fancies, the butterfly blitheness and laughing music
of “Come down to Kew at lilac time” and other of his daintier lyrics.
Like most true poets who have not died young, he has become popular in
his lifetime; and if he were not so versatile less versatile critics,
instead of panting after him in vain, would be able to grasp him and
get him under their microscopes and recognize him for the poet that he
is.
E. PHILLIPS OPPENHEIM
[Illustration: E. PHILLIPS OPPENHEIM]
Even if we grant that there is a wide world of difference between
imaginative and inventive fiction, and that the way to immortality is
only open to the former, there is still so much to be said in praise of
the latter that, if the verdict rested with his contemporaries instead
of with posterity, the inventive author would often go permanently
crowned with the fame that is now reserved for his more imaginative
rival. Within my own recollection Wilkie Collins was the most popular
novelist of his day; Meredith and Hardy had their thousands of readers
and Collins his tens of thousands; everybody read him then, but hardly
anybody reads him now. He used to complain, as Hall Caine records in
“My Story,” that the reviewers were all along disposed to sniff and
qualify their appreciation, but he boasted that the public always
received him with enthusiasm and overwhelmed him with grateful and
adulatory letters. Moreover, his brother novelists admired and lauded
his amazing ingenuity; Dickens collaborated with him, and his influence
is perhaps traceable in “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”--in the unusual
dexterity and subtlety with which its plot is constructed.
His own formula for holding the reader’s attention was “make him
laugh; make him weep; or make him wait”; and he devoted himself almost
exclusively to the third of these methods. Character is of quite
minor importance in his stories--Count Fosco was his one masterly
creation; the only one of all his _dramatis personæ_ you recall without
effort--there is little humor in them, and little pathos. For him, the
plot was the thing, a cunningly contrived, carefully dovetailed plot,
with a heart of mystery and sensation that should hold the reader in
suspense till it was unraveled and cleared up in the last pages. His
justification was that he thrilled and delighted enormous multitudes.
It is enough that he did triumphantly what he set himself to do; the
best and most precious things in life are not often the most lasting;
and whether or not his work is immortal, it was great in its kind and
an art beyond the genius of novelists who seem destined to outlive him.
And, as a form of literature, the novel of sensation, crime, mystery
is immortal if its authors are not. Collins has been dethroned, but
his successors are legion, and none has made out a stronger title to
the inheritance of his mantle than Phillips Oppenheim. For the skill
with which he constructs a baffling plot, intrigues his readers from
the opening, and keeps them in suspense till it is time, at last, to
give away his secret, none of them excels--I am not sure that more
than one of them equals him. I don’t think he aims to be anything but
entertaining, and how many of our novelists who claim to be much more
are not even that! Two of our most distinguished critics have, at
different times, confessed to me that with the passing of years they
have lost their taste for fiction; the modern psychological novel
seems pretentious and bores them; they are no longer young enough
to be susceptible to romantic adventure; they can learn nothing and
get no amusement from the crudeness and boyish or girlish naïveté of
the latter-day sex novel, but they do find interest, excitement and
a tonic recreation in novels such as Oppenheim writes. “I suppose I
have seen too much of actual life,” said one of them, “to be startled
or particularly interested in what I am told about it by a novelist
who knows no more of it than I know myself. I like Oppenheim because
he takes me outside my personal experiences; he does not appeal to
my memory but to my imagination; he tells me a tale that is new to
me, that rouses my curiosity, keeps me guessing, makes me forget
everything else in my keenness to follow up the clues to his mystery
and see how he solves it. I don’t care whether it is good literature,
I know it is a good story, and that’s what every novel ought to be
and few are. I sometimes think we take our novelists and they take
themselves and their function too seriously. The old troubador, when
he sang his ballads and told his yarns in the street, didn’t do it for
glory but for the coppers the crowd, if he pleased them, would throw
into his hat. He was nothing but an entertainer; people didn’t want
him to be anything else--it is all I want his modern representative,
the novelist, to be, and it is what Oppenheim emphatically is. He
simply writes for the time, and the time is promptly rewarding him with
popularity and hard cash, while so many of our little artists will not
stoop to the present and are writing neatly for a future that will
never read them.”
He has written some sixty novels and books of short stories, having
seen his first novel published in 1886, when he was twenty. I do
not pretend to have read them all, but since I read “Mysterious Mr.
Sabin,” a good many years ago, I have never missed reading any Phillips
Oppenheim story that has come within reach of me. Read “The Amazing
Partnership,” “The Plunderers,” “A Prince of Sinners,” “Mr. Lessingham
Goes Home,” and you will find that while he is as ingenious as Wilkie
Collins at fashioning a plot that captures your interest in its
complexities, he gets more rapidly into his story, handles dialogue
more skillfully, unfolds his incidents as vividly but with a lighter
hand and loses no time on the way.
After he left school Phillips Oppenheim went into his father’s leather
business at Leicester, but he had started writing stories for his own
amusement before that. The leather business was so successful that
Blumenthals, the big American and Paris leather firm, bought it up,
and appointed Phillips Oppenheim their director at Leicester. His
experience in that trade has proved immensely useful to him. It has
not only helped him to material for his tales, but it was through the
American head of Blumenthals that he had his chief incentive to the
writing of the type of story that has brought him such success as
a novelist. This gentleman introduced him to the proprietor of the
Café de Rat Mort, the once famous Montmartre haunt, for Oppenheim was
frequently in Paris on the affairs of his leather company, and at the
Café he acquired his taste for the mysteries of those international
intriguings and rascalities that figure so largely in several of his
books, for the proprietor used to tell him all manner of thrilling
yarns about political and international adventurers, some of whom had
been among his customers, and his listener formed a habit of weaving
stories round the more striking personalities in the cosmopolitan crowd
that he met in the Rat Mort. He assured me that however ingenious I
might think them, he never really constructs his stories but simply
lets them grow. “Two or three people in a crowded restaurant may arouse
my interest, and the atmosphere is compelling,” says he. “I start
weaving a story round them--the circumstances and the people gradually
develop as I go on dictating to my secretary the casual thoughts
about them that arose in me while I was looking at them and their
surroundings. First of all I must have a congenial atmosphere--then the
rest is easy.”