when Hugh Walpole was born. In 1887 the family removed to New York,
where Dr. Walpole had accepted an appointment as Professor in a
Theological College; and seven years later they migrated to England,
where, in the fulness of time, the son was to become a famous novelist,
and the father Bishop of Edinburgh. After completing his education at
King’s School, Canterbury, and Emanuel College, Cambridge, Hugh Walpole
worked for a year or so as teacher at a boy’s school in the provinces.
Then he went to London, settled in cheap lodgings at Chelsea, and
reviewed books for the newspapers, to provide for his present needs,
and wrote novels with an eye on the future.
He had written his first, “The Wooden Horse,” while he was at
Cambridge, but discouraged by the friend to whose judgment he submitted
it, laid it aside for about five years, and only offered it for
publication and had it accepted in 1909, after he had taken the plunge
and entered on that journalistic career in London. It was well enough
received and put a little money into his purse, and “Maradick at
Forty,” a much maturer work which followed within a year, met with a
reception from critics and public that made it clear he had found his
vocation; then with “Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill,” a brilliant, somewhat
bitter, study of the boys and masters at a dreary, lonely school in
Cornwall (reminiscent, no doubt, of his own teaching days) he fairly
established himself. That was in 1911, and thence-forward his story
is the story of the successive books he wrote, until the War came to
interrupt his career.
In the earlier days of the war he worked with the Red Cross on the
Russian front; later, he was put in charge of British propaganda
at Petrograd, and lived there throughout the chaos of the first
Revolution, keeping a full diary of his experiences which has never
been published. People he met, things he did and saw while he was
serving with the Red Cross went into “The Dark Forest,” the sombrest
and one of the most ably written of his books. It came out in 1916,
while he was in Petrograd. He made a finely sympathetic study of the
soul of the Slav, and pictured Petrograd in the days of the Revolution,
in “The Secret City,” which has been described as the truest novel
of Russian life ever written by an alien, and was published toward
the close of the war, when he was home again and working here in the
Ministry of Information.
But these two books, though they rank with his best, are not
representative. Hugh Walpole is probably as near to being a typical
Englishman as any man can be, and of his dozen other novels, “The
Golden Scarecrow” and “Jeremy” show how wonderfully he can enter into
the minds of children, and the rest are stories of lower-middle,
middle and higher English society in town and country. “The Duchess of
Wrexe,” with its vividly realistic drawing of the dreadful old Duchess,
enshrines an essentially English _grande dame_ of the old-school
that is rapidly becoming extinct; there are no better pictures of
English family life than the pictures of the Trenchards in “The Green
Mirror,” and a later novel; and you guess that personal observation
and experience have gone into “The Captives,” “The Cathedral,” and
other of his stories concerned with the clergy and schoolmasters, and
into the narrative in “Fortitude” of how Peter Westcott ran away from
his Cornish home to face poverty in London and embark on a successful
career as a novelist; for though Walpole has stated that he never draws
his characters from living models, he owns that living persons suggest
themes and characteristics to him.
He reveals an English trait, I think, by his confession of faith in the
outlook and methods of Anthony Trollope, the most thoroughly English of
all our novelists. It is curious how in writing of present-day fiction
I am continually coming up against Trollope. His style is easygoing,
undistinguished, often slipshod; he did not pretend to be an artist;
rarely troubled much for a plot, never worried about psychology, never
heard of psychoanalysis, but wrote simply of people as he saw and
knew them, put them into a loose sort of story of things that were
happening round about him, and now we are more and more recognizing
that in his unassuming tales of the social, political and business life
of his period he was a closer observer, a greater realist than were
some of his contemporaries who surpassed him in humor, imagination and
in literary genius. I come up against him so often that I suspect his
quiet influence is growing more potent with our younger writers than
that of Dickens, or Thackeray, or Meredith.
Not long ago, both W. L. George and Douglas Goldring announced that
they would write no more psychological novels; they had arrived at
a conclusion that the novelist’s real business was to tell a plain
tale in which his characters should be left to express themselves in
action. Compton Mackenzie had preceded them with a declaration that
the novelist’s function was not to analyse states of mind and emotions
but to dramatize them, that the novelist should before everything else
be an entertainer, a teller of tales; and since the war Hugh Walpole
has laid down his own views on this subject in a statement that was
published by Meredith Starr in his book on “The Future of the Novel.”
“A novel seems to me,” says Walpole, “quite simply a business of
telling a story about certain people whom the writer attempts to make
as living as possible. Probably behind the lines of these people there
would be some philosophy of life either stated definitely or implied
in the attitude of the author.... If I were to make any prophesy
about the future of the novel, I would say that many of us are growing
tired of the thirst for novelty and are turning back with relief to
any simple presentment of real people in a real way. A good instance
of this is the wonderful recrudescence of Anthony Trollope, who cared
nothing about form or technique or style, and had, indeed, the smallest
pretensions of himself as a novelist. But he kept his eyes fixed on
the characters about whom he was writing and tried to tell the truth
about them as he saw them. He was indeed too deeply interested in their
adventures to think about anything else. And I believe that it is this
kind of simplicity of interest on the part of the narrator to which we
will return.”
The Trenchards are a kind of family Trollope might have created had he
been living now; “The Cathedral” is a kind of story he might have told,
with its realistic melodrama and its clerical atmosphere, but Walpole
tells it with a subtler art in the writing and the construction, with
a conciseness and charm of style that are outside the range of the
earlier novelist. Trollope was fat, ponderous, bewhiskered; Walpole
is tall, well-knit, clean-shaven, looks even younger than his years,
is nimble-witted and modern-minded; and the two do not differ more in
personality than in their manner of telling a tale. The tale, and the
truth of it, may be the law for both, but though they row in the same
boat, to apply the pun to Douglas Jerrold, it is with very different
skulls.
Most of Walpole’s work is done at his cottage by the sea in Cornwall;
he retires to that seclusion when a new idea has taken hold upon him,
stays there for some months at a stretch, then, with another novel
completed, returns to London for recreation, and is a very familiar
figure again at all manner of social functions, and one of the
cleverest and most popular of after-dinner speakers. “We love him out
yonder,” an American assured me; “none of your author-lecturers who
come over to us has larger or more delighted audiences.” A cousin of
the Earl of Orford, I have seen it said that he indirectly inherits
no little of the wit and shrewd worldly wisdom of his distant kinsman
Horace Walpole; but the realism and haunting mysticism of “The Dark
Forest” have nothing in common with the crudely romantic terrors of
“The Castle of Otranto,” and his wit and perspicacity are mitigated
by a genial human kindness that is no part of that conjectural
inheritance.
HERBERT GEORGE WELLS
[Illustration: HERBERT GEORGE WELLS]
H. G. Wells made one of his mistakes--even the wisest of us have to
make a few--when, during a controversy with Henry James, he breezily
denied that he was an artist and proclaimed himself a journalist. I
think he must have said it with his tongue in his cheek; anyhow, it was
a mistake to put that opinion into anybody’s mind and those words into
anybody’s mouth, for there are always critics and artists, mainly of
the lesser breeds, ready enough, without such prompting, to belittle
any greatness that gets in their way.
Undoubtedly, Wells is a journalist, and a mightily efficient one;
but he is also as subtle and fine an artist as you shall find among
our living men of letters, and something of an authentic prophet,
to boot. I hope his ideal state will never be realized; it is too
dreadfully efficient, too exactly organized, so all mechanical, with
human beings clicking in as part of the machinery that, if it ever
came to pass, life in it would be reduced to such monotony that I
am quite certain he would himself be one of the first to emigrate.
You may say the journalist is uppermost in his social and economic
gospels, such as “A Modern Utopia” and “New Worlds for Old,” in those
wonderful imaginative, inventive scientific romances, “The First Men
in the Moon,” “The War of the Worlds,” “The War in the Air,” “Men
Like Gods,” and in novels so given over to problems of religion,
morals, sex, education and general contemporary life and conduct as
are “God the Invisible King,” “Joan and Peter,” “Ann Veronica,” “The
Soul of a Bishop,” “The Undying Fire,” and “The Secret Places of the
Heart,” yet in all these it could be demonstrated that the artist and
the prophet collaborated with the journalist. It has been said that
when in those early romances he foresaw the coming of the Great War
and the part the aeroplane would play in it he was no prophet but a
clever prognosticator who had followed the progress of invention, noted
certain tendencies and calculated their developments as one might work
out a problem in mathematics, and that a prophet needs no such guides
to knowledge but speaks by inspiration and is concerned only with the
things of the spirit. However that may be, it is with the things of the
spirit that he is mostly preoccupied in at least three of the six later
novels I have just mentioned and, to name but one, his vision of “God
the Invisible King” is more like prophetic utterance than any we have
had in our time.
But he is before all else an artist in the greatest of his novels--in
“The Wheels of Chance,” “Love and Mr. Lewisham,” “Kipps,” “The History
of Mr. Polly,” “Tono Bungay” and “The New Machiavelli,” in “The Country
of the Blind” and nearly all the other short stories in the same
volume. That book epitomises Wells’s versatile genius; its stories
represent in little nearly every variety of his work. They are by turns
fantastic, humorous, supernatural, visionary, grimly terrible and
sternly or sympathetically realistic. Personally, I like him best here,
as in his larger works, when his stories are all of ordinary men and
women living average human lives in the light of common day; but his
bizarre studies in psychology, his short tales of the eerie, nightmare
order and those that grow out of surprising scientific discoveries are
fashioned with an art as sure and as strong and as finished. If the
author of “The Country of the Blind” and “Kipps” is not an artist but a
journalist the sooner our other writers of fiction take to journalism
the better, both for them and for us.
He is one of those exceptional authors who are in themselves exactly
what they seem to be in their books. Unaffected, alive with energy,
sociable, genially talkative, it is an amusing object lesson to see
him seated at a public dinner next to some distinguished but orthodox
philosopher of less learning than himself, younger but looking
older, with none of his imaginary power, his far-seeing vision, his
originality and suggestiveness as a thinker, who is yet clothed in the
gravity, reticence, aloofness that are supposed to denote superior
wisdom. There is nothing so impressive in Wells’s manner, his quick
gestures, his high, not unpleasant voice; but his keen gray eyes, with
a humorous twinkle in the depths of them, look out from under a broad,
massive forehead that prevents his appearance from being commonplace.
Sidney Dark has called him “The Superman-in-the-Street.” He is a great
deal more than that, but he owes his deep knowledge of humanity, his
broad sympathy with its sufferings and aspirations to the fact that he
did at the outset share the homely satisfactions, the limitations and
disadvantages that are the lot of the man-in-the-street, grew wise in
those experiences, and carried the memory of them with him into the
study. A far more profitable proceeding than to arrive in the study
ignorant and learn of the outer world from hearsay or from what others
have written.
Socialist, scientist, practical idealist, immensely interested in
men and affairs, insatiably curious about all life, its origins,
implications, possibilities, restlessly delving into the history and
mystery of the past for truths that would light his guesses at the
darker mystery of the future, it was natural for Wells to put his
latest interests into each new book that he wrote, whether it was a
matter-of-fact philosophical treatise or romantic or realistic fiction.
If this habit of using as material for his work whatever was readiest
to hand led to his scandalizing friends and acquaintance by putting
even them, under thin disguises, into certain of his novels, he has, at
least, put himself into them also and no little of his autobiography.
You may trace the growth of his mind, the development of his ideas
through his successive books. He has been accused of inconsistency by
those who fancied his opinion had changed because it had matured, that
he had acquired a new root when he had merely grown new branches. All
his life, as somebody once said, he has been thus educating himself in
the public eye, but he was educating himself strenuously and in face of
many difficulties long before the eye of the public became aware of him.
He was born, in 1866, at Bromley, Kent, where his father, a noted
cricketer who played in the County team, kept a small glass and china
and general shop. But the business failed; his father had to find
employment; his mother went as housekeeper to a great house near
Petersfield and Wells, then about thirteen, was apprenticed to a draper
at Windsor. Before long, he left there to go to Midhurst as assistant
to a chemist, and presently abandoned that profession to resume his
interrupted schooling at Wimblehurst. Thence, in 1881, he went to be,
for a brief period, pupil teacher at his uncle’s school in Somerset,
and gave that up to take to his first trade again in a draper’s shop at
Southsea. After two years of this, he emerged as assistant teacher at
Midhurst Grammar School, till, having won a scholarship at the South
Kensington School of Science, and taken his B.Sc. degree with honors,
he secured an appointment to teach Science and English at Henley House
School, St. John’s Wood. To increase his income, he passed from that to
work as lecturer and tutor to some University Correspondence Classes,
and the incessant and arduous labor this involved resulted in such a
complete breakdown of health that he had to resign his appointment and
go away to the south coast to rest and recuperate.
But before he was fairly convalescent the irksomeness of doing nothing
and the need of getting an income prompted him to try his luck with his
pen. So far his literary work had not gone beyond what I am told was an
admirable biological text-book, contributions to technical journals,
and a few occasional newspaper articles. He turned now to writing
essays and sketches of a light and humorous kind, and found a ready
market for them in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, and other papers. Once in
the lists as a literary free-lance, he rode from success to success
with astonishing deftness and energy. In 1895 he published “Select
Conversations with an Uncle,” but it was eclipsed by the appearance in
the same year of “The Stolen Bacillus and Other Stories,” and two of
the most original and characteristic of his early imaginative tales,
“The Time Machine” and “The Wonderful Visit.” Next year, hard on the
heels of that grim fantasy, “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” came the most
charmingly humorous, realistic-idyllic of his novels, “The Wheels of
Chance.”
No man with a serious purpose should, in this country, retain a sense
of humor. If nature has afflicted him with one, he should do his best
to have it removed; it is more inimical to his well-being than an
appendix. But Wells seems to be incurable, and that he has carelessly
broken through all manner of prejudices to almost universal acceptance,
in spite of his handicap of humor, is in itself a testimony to the
power and quality of his work. If Darwin had followed “The Origin
of Species” by writing “Three Men in a Boat” I doubt whether the
pundits would have taken him seriously enough to have him buried in
Westminster Abbey. Wells, having published a novel and three searching
and profoundly earnest books on the Great War in 1914, burst forth next
year with the farcical, bitingly satirical “Boon” and the irresponsibly
laughable, “Bealby,” and immediately after appealed to us with his
prophetic “What is Coming?” and one of his finest novels, and certainly
the finest novel of the War, “Mr. Britling Sees it Through.”
All which is, of course, as it should be. It is your little man who
has only one mood for all occasions, and dare not laugh and unbend
from his pose and come down from his pedestal lest he should seem
no bigger than those who had looked up to him. While other scholars
are toiling laboriously to write the record of a single nation, or a
single reign, Wells sandwiches between novel and novel that stupendous
survey, “The Outline of History,” which is not only a scholarly and
vastly comprehensive chronicle of the evolution of man and the progress
of humanity the world over from the dawn of time to the day before
yesterday, but is, as Macaulay rightly said all history ought to be, as
easy and fascinating reading as any work of fiction.
No English author has a wider vogue outside his own country--he is
popular in America, and in Russia, Germany, Scandinavia, where many
other of our famous writers are unknown; and who was that Frenchman
that, on a visit to London, expressed himself as agreeably surprised to
discover that Wells is nearly as much appreciated over here as he is in
France?
ISRAEL ZANGWILL
[Illustration: ISRAEL ZANGWILL]
Although I don’t think I ever exchanged a dozen words with him until
recently, since the days of my youth I have felt a special personal
interest in Israel Zangwill. With the passing of time, as it became
possible to know him from his books and his public doings, that
interest has strengthened to admiration and a real regard alike for
the great qualities of his work and the courageous sincerity of
his character; but I fancy it had its beginnings in quite trifling
associations. We were both born Londoners, and started in the same
way: when we were twenty, or less, we were competing against each
other for prizes in a weekly paper called _Society_, and I believe his
first appearance in print was with a prize story in that long deceased
periodical. I am a little uncertain of the exact dates, but he was
still in his twenties when he started _Ariel_, a brilliant rival to
_Punch_, and I sent him some contributions for it which he did not
use. About the same time I ran another short-lived rival to _Punch_
myself, but he sent me no contributions for it, or, without desiring
to heap coals of fire on his head, I should have used them. Then we
both became members of the New Vagabond Club, and used to meet at
its dinners occasionally and sometimes nod to each other, but never
spoke. As a matter of fact, I don’t suppose he knew who I was and
cannot have suspected that I entertained such warm and proprietorial
sentiments toward him. For many years now, since his marriage (his
wife, the daughter of Professor W. E. Ayrton, is herself a novelist of
distinction), he has made his home at East Preston, in Sussex, and his
visits to London have been few and far between. But when he was up on
business, staying at his chambers in the Temple, I used to come across
him at long intervals careering down the Strand or Fleet Street, and
always felt I was meeting a sort of old friend, though, until recently,
we passed without recognition.
It was in 1864 that he was born, his father being an exile who, lying
under sentence of death for a trivial military offence, had escaped
to this country from a Russian prison. He was educated at the Jews’
Free School, in East London, where, a year or two before taking his
B. A. degree, with triple honors, at the London University, he became
a teacher. But teaching, though he proved extraordinarily successful
at it, was not to be his career. In 1888, he wrote in collaboration
with Louis Cowen a farcical political romance, “The Premier and
the Painter,” and presently resigned his scholastic engagement and
proceeded to earn a livelihood by free-lance literature and journalism.
That success did not come to him till he had paid for it in hard work
you may know by the moral he drew from his memories of those days when
he wrote (as J. A. Hammerton records in his “Humorists of To-Day”), “If
you are blessed with some talent, a great deal of industry, and an
amount of conceit mighty enough to enable you to disregard superiors,
equals and critics, as well as the fancied demands of the public, it is
possible, without friends, or introductions, or bothering celebrities
to read your manuscripts, or cultivating the camp of log-rollers,
to attain, by dint of slaving day and night for years during the
flower of your youth, to a fame infinitely less wide-spread than a
prize-fighter’s and a pecuniary position which you might with far less
trouble have been born to.”
But in the first two years of the 90’s he had established himself as a
humorist with “The Bachelor’s Club,” “The Old Maid’s Club,” and “The
Big Bow Mystery,” an ingenious burlesque of the popular detective story
which was as exciting as the real thing; and as a new novelist of high
and original achievement with “The Children of the Ghetto.” Just then
Jerome and Robert Barr started _The Idler_, with G. B. Burgin as their
assistant editor: a year later Jerome launched _To-Day_, and Zangwill,
who, on the strength of his earlier books, had been branded by the
superior as a “humorist,” was among the notable group of young writers
that J. K. J. collected on his two magazines. Many of his short stories
appeared in the one, and to the other he contributed a causerie,
“Without Prejudice” (which re-emerged in due course as a book), and his
novel, “The Master,” as a serial.