it was the method that came natural to him and suited his temperament.
There is no use in telling any one how to write a novel, in laying down
rules for doing it as if it were a mechanical trade. James Payn’s plan
was to prepare an elaborate synopsis, divide this into chapters, then
write down a description of each character, and keep these details
pinned on a screen where they were handy reference while he was
working. William De Morgan would start with little more than a general
idea of what was going to happen in future pages; he would get his
characters together and give them their heads and let them develop the
story as it went along. Every way is the best way--for the author who
finds it for himself and can do as well in it as Phillips Oppenheim has
done in his.
He has traveled considerably; spent much of his time in America,
where he was married (and, by the way, large as his vogue is in Great
Britain, he is another of our authors whose vogue is even larger in
America); but for the most part he divides his days of work and leisure
now between his home in London and his other home by the sea, in North
Devon.
He is fond of the country, and of golf and all kinds of sports; he is
an equally keen theater-goer, but gets more enjoyment out of writing
stories than out of anything else, and since he draws more inspiration
for these from the town than from the country, he is never happier than
when he is in town. “The cities for me!” he said to an interviewer.
“Half a dozen thoroughfares and squares in London, a handful of
restaurants, the people one meets in a single morning, are quite
sufficient for the production of more and greater stories than I shall
ever write.” He wrote “Mr. Laxworthy’s Adventures” while he was staying
at a hotel in Paris; but though Paris and New York attract him, London
is his spiritual home and, with its endless streets and motley crowds,
is the chief begetter of his sensational romances.
Yet his appearance is less suggestive of the city than of rural life.
Ruddy, genial, smiling, with his sturdy figure and bluff manner, it
is easier to fancy him, in gaiters, carrying a riding whip, as a
typical country squire, than as a brilliant imaginative author creating
fictitious villains and preoccupied with dreams of strange crimes and
the mysterious doings of lawless and desperate men. Which is to say
only that he no more gives himself away to the casual observer than he
gives away the secret of any of his plots in the first chapter of the
book.
MAY SINCLAIR
[Illustration: MAY SINCLAIR]
In a rash moment, recently, Michael Sadleir committed himself to the
retrospective and prophetic assertion that there never had been a great
woman novelist and never would be. The first part of that statement is,
of course, open to argument; the second cannot be proved. If he had
said the greatest novelists, so far, have been men, he would have been
on safe ground; for I don’t think even the most politely complaisant
master of the ceremonies would suggest that Fielding, Dickens and
Thackeray should step back and allow Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and
George Eliot to lead this particular procession of the immortals. Which
is not to say that these last are not great, but only that there have
been greater.
Turning to living authors, if, so far as this country is concerned (and
here we are not concerned with any other), the same order of precedence
still obtains, the distance between the men in the first rank and the
women in the second has, at least, sensibly diminished. Leaving Hardy
apart in his incontestible supremacy, have we any novelists alive who
are, on the whole, superior to Wells, Conrad, Bennett, Galsworthy? It
is a question Time alone can decide with certainty, but fallible men
must needs, meanwhile, make up their separate minds as best they can,
and, for my part, I would answer in the negative. But should any one
claim that there are four women novelists who, if they do not surpass,
are equal in achievement with the four men I have named, I could not
begin to deny it until I had read them all over again. So nice, so
delicate a matter is not to be settled off-hand. Even such godlike
judges as Gosse and Squire might well lay aside their thunder and
lightning in face of it and be disposed to temporize.
For, relegating to outer darkness (where many of us would be willing
to join them) all whose glory is nothing but a vast popularity and
its accessories--think what a galaxy of women novelists there are and
what sound and notable work the best of them have done. Of course
who have been longest before the public, you have Lucas Malet, Sarah
Grand, George Colmore, Mary Cholmondeley, Mary and Jane Findlater,
Mrs. W. K. Clifford, Mary E. Mann; of those who began somewhat later,
Elinor Mordaunt, Dolf Wyllarde, Violet Hunt, Mrs. Henry Dudeney, M. P.
Willcocks, Peggy Webling, Mrs. Dawson Scott, Beatrice Harraden, Mrs.
Belloc Lowndes, Phillis Bottome, Rose Macaulay, May Sinclair, Sheila
Kaye-Smith; and of a still later day, Viola Meynell, Ethel Sidgwick,
Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Mary Webb, Clemence Dane, Rebecca
West, G. B. Stern, Storm Jameson, M. Leonora Eyles, Stella Benson....
This by no means completes the list, and there is no reason for ending
it here except that it is long enough and contains a sufficient number
of names for whomsoever will to select from it four whose work may
fairly challenge comparison with the greatest that has been done by
contemporary novelists of the other sex.
Any adequate survey of the modern English novel would, at all events,
have to take into account most of the women writers I have mentioned,
but for my present less ambitious occasions I am contented to limit my
record to two--May Sinclair and Sheila Kaye-Smith--whom I take to be
generally representative of such of them as are still in the full tide
of their careers: the latter as having acquaintance with the larger
variety of human character and giving breadth, color and fullness
of life to her stories out of a wider, robuster interest in the
multifarious affairs that absorb so much of the thought and activities
of men; the former as being the subtler artist both in psychology and
style.
As long ago as 1916, the distinguished American critic, Dr. Lyon
Phelps, described Miss Sinclair as “to-day the foremost living writer
among English-speaking women.” He rightly dated her rise to this
eminence from the publication of “The Divine Fire,” in 1904, and as
rightly reminded us that “the British audience for whom it was intended
paid no attention to it” till it had been acclaimed by critics and
read with enthusiasm by thousands of readers in America. Why Miss
Sinclair had to wait eight years for that recognition I cannot explain.
She adventured into literature in orthodox fashion by publishing two
volumes of verse early in the ’nineties. Her first novel, “Audrey
Craven,” appeared in 1896. Then came, with longish intervals between,
“Mr. and Mrs. Nevil Tyson” and “Two Sides of a Question.” These three
books were touched with something of the grey realism that prevented
Gissing from becoming popular with a public which, then more than now,
disliked novels of that hue and preferred its fiction to be either
elevating or pleasantly entertaining. But if there was no run on these
three books at the libraries, they did not pass, unless my memory
misleads me, without due meed of praise from the more discriminating
reviews; and, as Miss Sinclair has done far finer work since “The
Divine Fire,” so I think she did truer, finer work before that in, at
least, the second of her three earlier volumes. It were harder to say
why the laurels fell upon the fourth than why they missed the second.
Rock Ferry, in Cheshire, was Miss Sinclair’s birthplace, but when
fame discovered her she had been living some years at Hampstead, in
London, and “The Divine Fire” moves among London literary circles,
sketches cleverly various literary types of character and life in
boarding-houses round about Bloomsbury, with for central figure a young
Cockney poet, a kind of new Keats, who worked as a shop-assistant,
wrote exquisite verse, had all the instincts of a gentleman, but was
afflicted with a deplorable habit of dropping his aitches. So much
is made of this weakness (which was really only as superficially
significant as was Stevenson’s inability to spell certain words
correctly) that the frequent insistence on it comes by degrees to seem
a little finicking, a little irritating. I do not share Dr. Phelp’s
fancy that Charlotte Bronte returned to earth to write “The Divine
Fire.” Miss Sinclair may have learned things from Charlotte Bronte;
she has written ably and searchingly of her in “The Three Brontes”;
but influence from that source--even from the Charlotte of “Shirley”
days--is scarcely traceable in any of her books and certainly does not,
in “The Divine Fire,” dominate her own quietly distinctive personality.
Few authors owe their popularity to their best work, and, at the
risk of appearing heretical, I will admit I have always counted “The
Divine Fire” as one of Miss Sinclair’s unsuccessful experiments, and
“The Helpmate” as another. Both have charm and distinction of style,
but they have not the insight, the clearness of vision, that mark her
later novels. She is, especially in the second, like an artist drawing
without models and erring in small details, getting the anatomy of
her characters here and there out of proportion. The cleverness and
the interest of “The Helpmate” are undeniable, but its people do not
wear flesh about them; they are seriously presented, but one feels
they are as outside the world of actual humanity as are the brilliant
creations that play so deftly in some of the artificial comedies of the
Restoration.
“The Creators” is another tale of literary life, and one in which you
are not always sure whether the author wishes you to take her poets
and novelists in dead earnest or whether she is secretly laughing at
them and touching off their idiosyncrasies with a covert irony, the
latter suspicion finding encouragement in the neat realism and hard-cut
brilliance with which the whole thing is done. Some have complained
that several of her novels are too preoccupied with the mysteries and
intimacies of sexual relationship, but you might as reasonably complain
that other authors exclude these from their scheme of things and are
too preoccupied with other and less vitally human experiences. There
is no forbidden tree in the garden of literature; all the world is the
artist’s parish and he is justified of any theme so long as he can
handle it with such artistic success as Miss Sinclair does in “Kitty
Tailleur,” in “The Combined Maze,” and in that tragically poignant
short story “The Judgment of Eve.”
Perhaps she reaches the highest expression of her genius in this
and other of her short stories (“The Wrackham Memoirs” is a little
masterpiece of ironic comedy) and in the shortest of her novels, “The
Life and Death of Harriet Frean”--the detached pity, the insight,
the minute, illuminating realism with which the whole feeble,
self-sacrificing, sentimental little soul of Harriet is revealed, and
the perfect technique with which it is all set down, give power and
beauty to what in less skilled, less sensitive hands might have been a
frail, wistful story of no particular significance.
Miss Sinclair is more erudite than the majority of novelists and,
outside the world of fiction, has proved herself a suggestive and
original thinker in such philosophical subtleties as “A Defence of
Idealism.” She worked, during the early stages of the War, with the
Red Cross, recording her experiences in “A Journal of Impressions in
Belgium,” and she drew on those experiences for scenes in some of her
novels, notably in “Tasker Jevons” and in that finer story of the same
period, “The Tree of Heaven.”
Literary characters, the literary life, and sex problems enter pretty
largely into Miss Sinclair’s novels, but she has never like so many of
the successful settled down to run in a groove; she does not repeat
herself. She has not accepted ready-made formulas of art but has been
continually reaching out for new ways of advance. She was quick to see
virtue in the literary method of James Joyce and Dorothy Richardson
and the possibilities inherent in the novel which should look on
everything through the consciousness of a single one of its characters,
and proclaimed it as the type of novel that would have a future. She
may not have convinced us of this when she applied the method in
the ejaculatory, minutely detailed “Mary Olivier,” but its maturer
development in “Harriet Frean” demonstrated that it was a manner which
could be used with supreme artistic effectiveness. All the same, the
method is not so new as James Joyce; you may find the beginnings of it,
employed less self-consciously, with more reticence and more humor, in
the first and last novels of that very old-fashioned novelist William
De Morgan.
FRANK SWINNERTON
[Illustration: FRANK SWINNERTON]
When his first novel, “The Merry Heart,” was published, in 1909, Frank
Swinnerton was still so youthful that I remember persons of my own
age had a way of referring to him, with an avuncular air, as “young
Swinnerton.” He was twenty-four, but his smooth, boyish face, his
unassuming manner, that hovered between a natural vivacity and a sort
of shyness, made him look and seem younger than he was. In the fourteen
years since then he has done work, as novelist and as critic, that has
made him famous on at least two continents, he has grown a moustache
and a trim, pointed reddish beard that with the lurking twinkle in his
eyes, give him somewhat the appearance of an acute Frenchman (though
nobody could, in general, be more thoroughly English), and, so far from
being shy, he will now rise on a platform or at a public dinner and
make you an admirably serious or witty and humorous address with the
completest self-possession.
In fact, he has so matured, in himself and in his knowledge of life,
that he makes those who once called him young feel as if they had not
kept time with him and he had become their senior. Yet in the best way
he is still as young as ever. He has that tonic streak of frivolity
in him which is better than any monkey-gland for saving a man from
getting old. He can be as serious as most people on occasion, but his
joyous gifts for telling a droll anecdote or mimicking the voice,
manner and peculiarities of an acquaintance are gifts not so commonly
shared. He takes his art seriously, but unless you catch him in the
right mood he is not ready to talk seriously about it. Some authors
appear to be so in love with their work that they will tell you they
are never happier than when they are driving the pen and putting
their thoughts on paper, but Frank Swinnerton is not one of those. He
protests that he writes slowly; with difficulty; that he does not like
work; finds it irksome; that he finds pleasure in thinking out an idea,
but once he has thought it out he has a feeling that it ought to be
all done with, and puts off shaping it into words as long as he can,
and then can only bring himself to do it by fits and starts or with
intermittent bursts of energy. But if you took him too literally in
this I think you would misunderstand him. It would be truer to say of
him, as he has said of Gissing, “Conscientiousness was the note of his
artistic character.... The books are full of steady and sincere work.
Only when they were written with joy (which does not signify gaiety)
they were of original value.” For if his own books were not written
with that same joy in creation (which may co-exist with a dislike of
the mechanical act of writing) they could not be so intensely alive as
they are.
You might almost guess from his novels that Swinnerton was a Londoner,
or at least, like Dickens, had been made a naturalized citizen of the
“dear, damned, delightful, dirty” town when he was a child. He was born
at Wood Green, no such ideally rural suburb as its name suggests, and
has lived in London all his life. A severe illness when he was eight
years old made going to school out of the question for some time,
and continued delicate health and recurring break-downs rendered any
education so fragmentary as to be pretty well negligible. But he was
all the while, without knowing it, educating himself in ways that were
fitting him for the career he was to follow. Books were his teachers,
and his literary ambitions took an active form so early that at the
age of ten he was running an amateur magazine--one of the kind that
years ago (and probably still) used to circulate in manuscript among
subscribers who were all contributors and usefully, and sometimes
mercilessly, criticized each other’s effort.
He was about fourteen when he turned his hand to real business
and became a clerk in the London office of some Glasgow newspaper
publishers. After an interval, he worked for a few years in the
publishing house of J. M. Dent & Co.; then transferred himself to the
firm of Chatto & Windus, whose literary adviser he has since remained,
dividing his time between writing books of his own and reading and
passing judgment on the books of others, to say nothing of his doings
as a reviewer or as the writer for an American magazine of one of the
best monthly literary letters that go out of London.
At twenty he wrote his first novel, and it was rejected by every
publisher to whom it was offered. Two more novels shared the same
discouraging fate, and I believe their author has now destroyed all
three. But a happier fate was reserved for his fourth, “The Merry
Heart,” which was promptly accepted and published; and if neither in
story nor in characterization this buoyant, quietly humorous romance of
a London clerk will compare with his maturer fiction, it has a charm
and morning freshness of feeling and outlook to atone for what it may
lack in finish.
“The Young Idea” marks a great advance in his mastery of the type of
novel to which he was particularly devoting himself. This “comedy of
environment,” traces with a wonderfully sympathetic understanding
the mental and moral development of Hilda Vernon, who is a clerk
in a London office. She shares a flat with her boorish brother and
delightful younger sister, and disillusioned and disheartened by her
everyday experiences of the meanness and squalor of the life around
her, longing still to believe “in the beauty of something, in the
purity of some idea, or the integrity of some individual,” but giving
up hope, she meets with a man, a clerk like herself, who by his clean,
courageous personality and strength of character saves her from despair
and revives her old faith in humankind.
The novel is remarkable for its insight and subtle analysis of
character no less than for the interest of its story; but henceforth
in Swinnerton’s work the analysis of character grows and the story
itself declines in importance. It is so in “The Casement,” “The Happy
Family,” “On the Staircase,” “The Chaste Wife,” “Nocturne,” until with
“The Three Lovers,” the story begins to reassert itself. I have seen
“The Chaste Wife” described as his one failure, but to me it seems one
of the ablest and most poignant of his books and Priscilla Evandine one
of the most gracious, finely simple women he has ever drawn. “Shops and
Houses” is perhaps less satisfactory, though it follows his favorite
method and studies very skillfully and with a shrewd irony the various
members of a middle-class family. It is in “September,” a brilliant
handling of the marriage of incompatible temperaments, in “The Happy
Family,” “The Casement,” “On the Staircase,” and, more than all, in
“Nocturne” that Swinnerton’s art is at its surest and highest. There
are only five characters in “Nocturne,” and from the time when Jenny
Blanchard is riding home in the tram to her going out and returning
from a covert visit to her lover in his yacht on the Thames, the
action occupies less than six hours. Jenny, her sister Emily, their
pitiful, tiresome, amusing old father, and the homely, dull Alf Rylett,
who pursues Jenny with unwelcome attentions--they and their whole
environment are revealed with a most graphic and intimate realism, and
Jenny’s impetuous rebellion against the squalor and narrowness of her
lot, the spiritual tragedy of her brief, passionate self-surrender
are touched with an emotional power and sense of pity that make a
story which easily might have been drab and gross a thing strangely
beautiful. Few who read it will wonder that H. G. Wells should have
declared it is a book “that will not die. It is perfect, authentic, and
alive.”
One of his American critics (and his vogue is larger in America than
in this country) has described Swinnerton as “the analyst of lovers.”
He is that in most of his books, but he is a good deal more than that.
It is loosely said that he is a disciple of Gissing, but so far as I
can see he is one of the most original of living novelists and derives
less from his predecessors than do most of his contemporaries. He deals
with the gray, swarming London streets, and with middle and lower class
London life, but that life has changed radically since Gissing’s day,
and Swinnerton is true to its modern developments. Moreover, he is no
pessimist; he writes with a genial sympathy of the people whom Gissing
despised, and there is a prevailing sense of humor in his pages that is
never in Gissing’s. His mental attitude, his style, his realistic art
are altogether different.
In his book on Gissing (I have not read his book on Stevenson, which
they tell me is unorthodox, and gave offence to Stevenson’s admirers)
he says that in Gissing’s time realism was regarded as “something
very repulsive and unimaginative ... he did not see in realism very
much more than laborious technical method. We are all realists
today, trying very hard to see without falsity and to reproduce our
vision with exactitude. Realism, I think, is no longer associated
with the foot-rule and a stupid purposeless reproduction of detail.”
It is not so associated in the reticent, imaginative realism he
practises himself. I fancy, too, that he is getting back to his
earlier manner--to the making of the story as important as the study
of psychology. “The Three Lovers,” as I have said, moves in that
direction, and if it goes so far as to be occasionally melodramatic
there is no falsity in that, for life itself is full of melodrama. He
recognized in “The Casement” that love is not the whole of life, that
“work of any kind seems to absorb the faculties, and some business men
do, I suppose, live for their work”; and recently he has owned to a
feeling that in its next development the novel will be a definite and
plain tale, that there will be a revival of realistic romance which
will pay less attention to men’s intermittent amorous adventures and
more to the business and general affairs that preoccupy most of the
time of the majority. And the signs are that he is of those who are
beginning to travel on those lines.
HUGH WALPOLE
[Illustration: HUGH WALPOLE]
Without reading anything of an author’s works, or anything that was
written about them, you might form a practical notion of his value and
follow his progress along the path to glory by merely watching the
growth of his reviews and the extent to which they climbed up from the
obscurer into the more prominent parts of the papers. Unless he breaks
the precedents and is a roaring success from the first, and that seldom
happens, he will start by receiving short, inconspicuous notices some
weeks or months after his book is issued, or be grouped with four or
five others in a collective article, on the sardine principle. Perhaps
he will never escape out of that limbo; but if he is destined for
success, you will presently note that he is promoted to the dignity of
long reviews with a special heading to himself; and when you find him
topping a column, discussed at considerable length, with a breathless
announcement bracketed under the title, “Published Today,” you may be
sure that, if you have not yet started to read him, it is time you
began.
Hugh Walpole has been through all those stages; he went through
more rapidly than most authors do, and has gone beyond them, for he
was still three or four years short of forty when a leading London
publisher sealed him of the elect by producing a collected edition of
his works. So as far as I can recall, he is the youngest novelist who
ever had that mark of distinction bestowed upon him. And, by way of
corroborating the significance of this, a selection of passages from
his books has been published in a special “Hugh Walpole Anthology,” and
two years in succession, with “The Secret City” and “The Captives,” he
has taken the Tait Black Prize awarded by the University of Edinburgh
for the best novel of the year.