Chapter I: Front Matter (1)

GODS OF MODERN GRUB STREET

GODS OF
MODERN GRUB STREET

_IMPRESSIONS OF CONTEMPORARY
AUTHORS_

BY
A. ST. JOHN ADCOCK

_WITH THIRTY-TWO PORTRAITS
AFTER PHOTOGRAPHS BY_

E. O. HOPPÉ

NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
MCMXXIII

_Copyright, 1923, by_
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY

_All Rights Reserved_

_Printed in the United States of America_

CONTENTS

PAGE

THOMAS HARDY 3

HILAIRE BELLOC 13

ARNOLD BENNETT 23

JOHN DAVYS BERESFORD 33

JOHN BUCHAN 43

DONN BYRNE 53

WILLIAM HENRY DAVIES 63

WALTER DE LA MARE 73

SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE 83

JOHN DRINKWATER 93

JEFFERY FARNOL 103

JOHN GALSWORTHY 113

SIR ANTHONY HOPE HAWKINS 123

ARTHUR STUART MENTETH HUTCHINSON 133

SHEILA KAYE-SMITH 143

RUDYARD KIPLING 153

WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE 163

STEPHEN MCKENNA 173

COMPTON MACKENZIE 183

JOHN MASEFIELD 193

ALFRED EDWARD WOODLEY MASON 203

WILLIAM SOMERSET MAUGHAM 213

WILLIAM BABINGTON MAXWELL 223

LEONARD MERRICK 233

ALAN ALEXANDER MILNE 243

ALFRED NOYES 253

E. PHILLIPS OPPENHEIM 263

MAY SINCLAIR 273

FRANK SWINNERTON 283

HUGH WALPOLE 293

HERBERT GEORGE WELLS 303

ISRAEL ZANGWILL 313

INDEX 323

ILLUSTRATIONS

Thomas Hardy _Frontispiece_

FACING PAGE

Hilaire Belloc 12

Arnold Bennett 22

John Davys Beresford 32

John Buchan 42

Donn Byrne 52

William Henry Davies 62

Walter de la Mare 72

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 82

John Drinkwater 92

Jeffery Farnol 102

John Galsworthy 112

Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins 122

Arthur Stuart Menteth Hutchinson 132

Sheila Kaye-Smith 142

Rudyard Kipling 152

William John Locke 162

Stephen McKenna 172

Compton Mackenzie 182

John Masefield 192

Alfred Edward Woodley Mason 202

William Somerset Maugham 212

William Babington Maxwell 222

Leonard Merrick 232

Alan Alexander Milne 242

Alfred Noyes 252

E. Phillips Oppenheim 262

May Sinclair 272

Frank Swinnerton 282

Hugh Walpole 292

Herbert George Wells 302

Israel Zangwill 312

THOMAS HARDY

Those who dissent from Byron’s _dictum_ that Keats was “snuffed out by an article” usually add that no author was ever killed by criticism; yet there seems little doubt that the critics killed Thomas Hardy the novelist, and our only consolation is that from the ashes of the novelist, phœnix-like rose Thomas Hardy the Poet.

As a novelist, Hardy began and finished his career in the days of Victoria, but though he has only been asserting himself as a poet since then, his earliest verse was written in the sixties; his first collection of poetry, the “Wessex Poems,” appeared in 1898, and his second in the closing year of the Queen’s reign. These facts should give us pause when we are disposed to sneer again at Victorian literature. Even the youngest scribe among us is constrained to grant the greatness of this living Victorian, so if we insist that the Victorians are over-rated we imply some disparagement of their successors, who have admittedly produced no novelists that rank so high as Hardy and few poets, if any, that rank higher.

Born at Upper Bockhampton, a village near Dorchester, on the 2nd June, 1840, Mr. Hardy passed his childhood and youth amid the scenes and people that were, in due season, to serve as material for his stories and poems. At seventeen a natural bent drew him to choose architecture as a profession, and he studied first under an ecclesiastical architect in Dorchester, then, three years later, in London, under Sir Arthur Blomfield, proving his efficiency by winning the Tite prize for architectural design, and the Institute of British Architects’ prize and medal for an essay on Colored and Terra Cotta Architecture.

But he was already finding himself and realizing that the work he was born to do was not such as could be materialized in brick and stone. He had been writing verse in his leisure and, in his twenties, “practised the writing of poetry” for five years with characteristic thoroughness; but, recognizing perhaps that it was not to be taken seriously as a means of livelihood, he presently abandoned that art; to resume it triumphantly when he was nearing sixty.

His first published prose was a light, humorous sketch of “How I Built Myself a House,” which appeared in _Chambers’s Journal_ for March, 1865. In 1871 came his first novel, “Desperate Remedies,” a story more of plot and sensation than of character, which met with no particular success. Next year, however, Thomas Hardy entered into his kingdom with that “rural painting of the Dutch school,” “Under the Greenwood Tree,” a delightful, realistic prose pastoral that has more of charm and tenderness than any other of his tales, except “The Trumpet Major.” The critics recognized its quality and, without making a noise, it found favor with the public. What we now know as the distinctive Hardy touch is in its sketches of country life and subtle revelations of rural character, in its deliberate precision of style, its naked realism, its humor and quiet irony; and if the realism was to grow sterner, as he went on, the irony to be edged with bitterness, his large toleration of human error, his pity of human weakness, were to broaden and deepen with the passing of the years.

It is said that Frederick Greenwood, then editing the _Cornhill_, picked up a copy of “Under the Greenwood Tree” on a railway bookstall and, reading it, was moved to commission the author to write him a serial; and when “Far from the Madding Crowd” appeared anonymously in _Cornhill_ its intimate acquaintance with rural England misled the knowing ones into ascribing it to George Eliot--an amazing deduction, seeing that it has nothing in common with George Eliot, either in manner or design.

“A Pair of Blue Eyes” had preceded “Far From the Madding Crowd,” and “The Hand of Ethelberta” followed it; then, in 1878, came “The Return of the Native,” which, with “The Mayor of Casterbridge” and “The Woodlanders,” stood as Hardy’s highest achievements until, in 1891 and 1896, “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” and “Jude the Obscure” went a flight beyond any that had gone before them and placed him incontestibly with the world’s greatest novelists.

Soon after Hardy had definitely turned from architecture to literature he went back to Wessex, where he lived successively at Cranbourne, Sturminster, and Wimborne, until in 1885 he removed to Max Gate, Dorchester, which has been his home ever since. And through all those years, instead of going far afield in search of inspiration, he recreated the ancient realm of the West Saxons and found a whole world and all the hopes, ambitions, joys, loves, follies, hatreds--all the best and all the worst of all humanity within its borders. The magic of his genius has enriched the hundred and forty square miles of Wessex, which stretches from the Bristol Channel across Somerset, Devon, Dorset, Wilts and Hampshire to the English Channel, with imaginary associations that are as living and abiding, as inevitably part of it now, as are the facts of its authentic history.

A grim, stoical philosophy of life is implicit alike in Hardy’s poetry and stories, giving a strange consistency to all he has written, so that his books are joined each to each by a religion of nature that is in itself a natural piety. He sees men and women neither as masters of their fate nor as wards of a beneficent deity, but as “Time’s laughing-stocks” victims of heredity and environment, the helpless sport of circumstance, playing out little comedies or stumbling into tragedies shaped for them inexorably by some blind, creative spirit of the Universe that is indifferent to their misery or happiness and as powerless to prolong the one as to avert the other. The earlier pastoral comedies and tragi-comedies have their roots in this belief, which reaches its most terribly beautiful expression in the epic tragedies of “Tess” and “Jude the Obscure.”

I am old enough to remember the clash of opinions over the tragic figure of Tess and the author’s presentation of her as “a pure woman”; how there were protests from pulpits; how the critics mitigated their praise of Hardy’s art with reproof of his ethics; but the story gripped the imagination of the public, and time has brought not a few of the moralists round to a recognition that if Hardy’s sense of morality was less conventional, it was also something nobler, more fundamental than their own. He will not accept the dogmas of orthodox respectability, but looks beyond the accidents of circumstance and conduct to the real good or evil that is in the human heart that wrongs or is wronged. The same passion for truth at all costs underlies his stark, uncompromising realism and his gospel of disillusion, his vision of men as puppets working out a destiny they cannot control. If he has, therefore, little faith in humanity, he has infinite compassion for it, and infinite pardon. The irony of his stories is the irony he finds in life itself, and as true to human experience as are the humor and the pathos of them. Other eyes, another temperament, may read a different interpretation of it all; he has honestly and courageously given us his own.

The outcry against “Tess” was mild compared to the babble of prudish censure with which “Jude the Obscure” was received in many quarters, and it is small wonder that these criticisms goaded Hardy to a resolve that he would write no more novels for a world that could so misunderstand his purposes and misconstrue his teachings. “The Well-Beloved,” though it appeared a year later than “Jude,” had been written and published serially five years before, and it was with “Jude,” when his power was at its zenith, that Thomas Hardy wrote finis to his work as a novelist.

Happily his adherence to this resolve drove him back on the art he had abjured in his youth, and the last quarter of a century has yielded some half dozen books of his poems that we would not willingly have lost. Above all, it has yielded that stupendous chronicle-drama of the Napoleonic wars, “The Dynasts,” which is sometimes acclaimed as the highest and mightiest effort of his genius. This drama, and his ballads and lyrics, often too overweighted with thought to have any beat of wings in them, are at one with his novels in the sincere, sombre philosophy of life that inspires them, the darkling imagination with which it is bodied forth, and the brooding, forceful personality which speaks unmistakably through all.

Hardy, is, and will remain, a great and lonely figure in our literature. It is possible to trace the descent of almost every other writer, to name the artistic influences that went to his making, but Hardy is without literary ancestry; Dickens and Thackeray, Tennyson and Browning, had forerunners, and have left successors. We know, as a matter of fact, what porridge John Keats had, but we do not know that of Hardy. Like every master, he unwittingly founded a school, but none of his imitators could imitate him except superficially, and already the scholars are going home and the master will presently be alone in his place apart. His style is peculiarly his own; as novelist and poet he has worked always within his own conception of the universe as consistently as he has worked within the scope and bounds of his own kingdom of Wessex, and “within that circle none durst walk but he.”

HILAIRE BELLOC

So long and persistently has Hilaire Belloc been associated in the public mind with G. K. Chesterton--one ingenious jester has even linked and locked them together in an easy combination as the Chesterbelloc--that quite a number of people now have a vague idea that they are inseparables, collaborators, a sort of literary Siamese twins like Beaumont and Fletcher or Erckmann-Chatrian; and the fact that one appears in this volume without the other may occasion some surprise. Let it be confessed at once that Chesterton’s omission from this gallery is significant only of his failure--not in modern letters, but to keep any appointments to sit for his photograph.

I regret his absence the less since it may serve as a mute protest against the practice of always bracketing his name with that of Hilaire Belloc. The magic influence of Belloc which is supposed to have colored so many of G. K. C.’s views and opinions and even to have drawn him at length into the Roman Catholic community, must be little but legendary or evidence of it would be apparent in his writings, and it is no more traceable there than the influence of Chesterton is to be found in Belloc’s books. They share a dislike of Jews, which nearly equals that of William Bailey in “Mr. Clutterbuck’s Election”; Chesterton has illustrated some of Belloc’s stories, and Belloc being an artist, too, has made charming illustrations for one of his own travel volumes. All the same, there is no more real likeness between them than there was between Dickens and Thackeray, or Tennyson and Browning, who were also, and are to some extent still, carelessly driven in double harness. Belloc’s humor and irony are hard, often bitter; they have none of the geniality, nimbleness, perverse fantasy of Chesterton’s. The one has a profound respect for fact and detail, and learns by carefully examining all the mechanical apparatus of life scientifically through a microscope; while the other has small reverence for facts as such, looks on life with the poet’s rather than with the student’s eye, and sees it by lightning-flashes of intuition. When Chesterton wrote his History of England he put no dates in it; he felt that dates were of no consequence to the story; but Belloc has laid it down that, though the human motive is the prime factor in history, “the external actions of men, the sequence in dates and hours of such actions, and their material conditions and environments must be strictly and accurately acquired.” There is no need to labor the argument. “The Napoleon of Notting Hill” is not more unlike “Emanuel Burden” than their two authors are unlike each other, individually and in what they have written.

Born at St. Cloud in 1870, Belloc was the son of a French barrister; his mother, an Englishwoman, was the grand-daughter of Joseph Priestley, the famous scientist and Unitarian divine. She brought him over to England after the death of his father, and they made their home in Sussex, the country that has long since taken hold on his affections and inspired the best of his poems. I don’t know when he was “living in the Midlands,” or thereabouts except while he was at Oxford, and earlier when he was a schoolboy at the Birmingham Oratory and came under the spell of Cardinal Newman, and I don’t know when he wrote “The South Country,” but not even Kipling has crowned Sussex more splendidly than he crowns it in that vigorous and poignant lyric--

“When I am living in the Midlands,
That are sodden and unkind,
I light my lamp in the evening;
My work is left behind;
And the great hills of the South Country
Come back into my mind.

The great hills of the South Country
They stand along the sea,
And it’s there, walking in the high woods,
That I could wish to be,
And the men that were boys when I was a boy
Walking along with me....

If ever I become a rich man,
Or if ever I grow to be old,
I will build a house with a deep thatch
To shelter me from the cold,
And there shall the Sussex songs be sung
And the story of Sussex told.

I will hold my house in the high wood,
Within a walk of the sea,
And the men that were boys when I was a boy
Shall sit and drink with me.”

Nowadays, he has to some extent realized that desire, for he is settled at Horsham, in Sussex again, if not within a walk of the sea. But we are skipping too much, and will go back and attend to our proper historical “sequence in dates.” His schooldays over, he accepted the duties of his French citizenship and served his due term in the Army of France, as driver in an Artillery regiment. These military obligations discharged, he returned to England, went to Oxford, and matriculated at Balliol. He ran a dazzling career at Oxford, working assiduously as a student, carrying off the Brackenbury Scholarship and a First Class in Honor History Schools, and at the same time reveled joyously with the robust, gloried in riding and swimming and coruscated brilliantly in the Union debates. His vivid, dominating personality seems to have made itself felt among his young contemporaries there as it has since made itself felt in the larger worlds of literature and politics; though in those larger worlds his recognition and his achievements have never, so far, been quite commensurate with his extraordinary abilities or the tradition of power that has gathered about his name. In literature, high as he stands, his fame is less than that of men who have not a tithe of his capacity, and in politics he remains a voice crying in the wilderness, a leader with no effective following. Perhaps in politics his fierce sincerity drives him into tolerance, he burns to do the impossible and change human nature at a stroke, and is too far ahead of his time for those he would lead to keep pace with him. And perhaps in literature he lacks some gift of concentration, dissipates his energies over too many fields, and is too much addicted to the use of irony, which it has been said, not without reason, is regarded with suspicion in this country and never understood. Swift is admittedly our supreme master in that art, and there is nothing more ironic in his most scathingly ironical work, “Gulliver’s Travels,” than the fact that Gulliver is only popular as an innocently amusing book for children.

Belloc began quietly enough, in 1895, with a little unimportant book of “Verses and Sonnets.” He followed this in the next four years with four delightfully, irresponsibly absurd books of verses and pictures such as “The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts,” “More Beasts for Worse Children,” publishing almost simultaneously in 1899 “The Moral Alphabet” and his notable French Revolution study of “Danton.” In a later year he gave us simultaneously the caustic, frivolous “Lambkin’s Remains” and his book on “Paris,” and followed it with his able monograph on “Robespierre.” It was less unsettling, no doubt, when “Caliban’s Guide to Letters” was closely succeeded by the first and most powerful of his ironic novels, “Emanuel Burden,” but serious people have never known where to have him. He collects his essays under such careless titles as “On Nothing,” “On Anything,” “This and That,” or simply “On”; and the same year that found him collaborating with Cecil Chesterton in a bitter attack on “The Party System,” found him collaborating with Lord Basil Blackwood in the farcical “More Peers,” and issuing acute technical expositions of the battles of Blenheim and Malplaquet.

His novels, “Emanuel Burden,” “Mr. Clutterbuck’s Election,” “A Change in the Cabinet,” “The Mercy of Allah,” and the rest, satirize the chicanery and humbug rampant in modern commerce, finance, politics, and general society, and are too much in earnest to attempt to tickle the ears of the groundlings.

For four years, in the first decade of the century, Belloc sat in Parliament as Member for Salford, but the tricks, hypocrisies, insincerities of the politicians disgusted and exasperated him; he was hampered and suppressed in the House by its archaic forms, and instead of staying there stubbornly to leaven the unholy lump he came wrathfully out, washing his hands of it, to attack the Party system in the Press, and inaugurate _The Witness_ in which he proceeded to express himself on the iniquities of public life forcefully and with devastating candor.

No journalist wielded a more potent pen than he through the dark years of the war. His articles in _Land and Water_ recording the various phases of the conflict, criticizing the conduct of campaigns, explaining their course and forecasting developments drew thousands of readers to sit every week at his feet, and were recognized as the cleverest, most searching, most informing of all the many periodical reviews of the war that were then current. That his prophecies were not always fulfilled meant only that, like all prophets, he was not infallible. His vision, his intimate knowledge of strategy, his mastery of the technique of war were amazing--yet not so amazing when you remember his service in the French Army and that he comes of a race of soldiers. One of his mother’s forbears was an officer in the Irish Brigade that fought for France at Fontenoy, and four of his father’s uncles were among Napoleon’s generals, one of them falling at the head of his charging troops at Waterloo. It were but natural he should derive from such stock not merely a love of things military but that ebullient, overpowering personality which many who come in contact with him find irresistible.

As poet, he has written three or four things that will remain immortal in anthologies; as novelist, he has a select niche to himself; “The Girondin” indicates what he might have become as a sheer romantist, but he did not pursue that vein; his books of travel, particularly “The Path to Rome” and “Esto Perpetua,” are unsurpassed in their kind by any living traveler; as historian, essayist, journalist, he ranks with the highest of his contemporaries; nevertheless, you are left with a feeling that the man himself is greater than anything he has done. You feel that he has been deftly modeling a motley miscellany of statuettes when he might have been carving a statue; and the only consolation is that some of the statuettes are infinitely finer than are many statues, and that, anyhow, he has given, and obviously taken delight in the making of them.

ARNOLD BENNETT

If his critics are inclined to write Arnold Bennett down as a man of great talent instead of as a man of genius, he is himself to blame for that. He has not grown long hair, nor worn eccentric hats and ties, not cultivated anything of the unusual appearance and manner that are vulgarly supposed to denote genius. In his robust, commonsense conception of the literary character, as well as in certain aspects of his work, he has affinities with Anthony Trollope.

Trollope used to laugh at the very idea of inspiration; he took to letters as sedulously and systematically as other men take to farming or shopkeeping, wrote regularly for three or four hours a day, whether he was well or ill, at home or abroad, doing in those hours always the same number of words, and keeping his watch on the table beside him to regulate his rate of production. He was intolerant of the suggestion that genius is a mysterious power which controls a man, instead of being controlled by him, that

“the spirit bloweth, and is still,”

and the author is dependent on such vagrant moods, and he justified his opinions and his practices by becoming one of the half dozen greater Victorian novelists.

I do not say that Arnold Bennett holds exactly the same beliefs and works in the same mechanical fashion, but that his literary outlook is as practical and business-like is apparent from “The Truth about an Author,” from “The Author’s Craft,” “Literary Taste,” and other of those pocket philosophies that he wrote in the days when he was pot-boiling, and also from the success with which, in the course of his career, he has put his own precepts into practice.

The author who is reared in an artistic atmosphere, free from monetary embarrassments, with social influence enough to smooth his road and open doors to him, seldom acquires any profound knowledge of life or develops any remarkable quality. But Bennett had none of these disadvantages. Nor was he an infant phenomenon, rushing into print before he was out of his teens; he took his time, and lived awhile before he began to write about life, and did not adopt literature as a means of livelihood until he had sensibly made up his mind what he wanted to do and that he could do it. He was employed in a lawyer’s office till he was twenty-six, and had turned thirty when he published his first novel, “A Man from the North.” Meanwhile, he had been writing stories and articles experimentally, and, having proved his capacity by selling a sufficient proportion of these to various periodicals, he threw up the law to go as assistant editor, and afterwards became editor, of a magazine for women--which may, in a measure, account for his somewhat cynical views on love and marriage and the rather pontifical cocksureness with which he often delivers himself on those subjects.

In 1900 he emancipated himself from the editorial chair and withdrew into the country to live quietly and economically and devote himself to ambitions that he knew he could realize. He had tried his strength in “A Man from the North,” and settled down now, deliberately and confidently, to become a novelist and a dramatist; he was out for success in both callings, and did not mean to be long about getting it, if not with the highest type of work, then with the most popular. For he was too eminently practical to have artistic scruples against giving the public what it wanted if by so doing he might get into a position for giving it what he wanted it to have. He expresses the sanest, healthfulest scorn for the superior but unsaleable author who cries sour grapes and pretends to a preference for an audience fit though few.

“I can divide all the imaginative authors I have ever met,” he has written, “into two classes--those who admitted and sometimes proclaimed loudly that they desired popularity; and those who expressed a noble scorn or a gentle contempt for popularity. The latter, however, always failed to conceal their envy of popular authors, and this envy was a phenomenon whose truculent bitterness could not be surpassed even in political or religious life. And indeed, since the object of the artist is to share his emotions with others, it would be strange if the normal artist spurned popularity in order to keep his emotions as much as possible to himself. An enormous amount of dishonest nonsense has been and will be written by uncreative critics, of course in the higher interests of creative authors, about popularity and the proper attitude of the artist thereto. But possibly the attitude of a first-class artist himself may prove a more valuable guide.” And he proceeds to show from his letters how keenly Meredith desired to be popular, and praises him for compromising with circumstance and turning from the writing of poetry that did not pay to the writing of prose in the hope that it would. I doubt whether he would sympathize with any man who starved for art’s sake when he might have earned good bread and meat in another calling. The author should write for success, for popularity; that is his creed: “he owes the practice of elementary commonsense to himself, to his work, and to his profession at large.”

Bennett was born in 1887, and not for nothing was he born at Hanley, one of the Five Towns of Staffordshire that he has made famous in his best stories--a somber, busy, smoky place bristling with factory chimneys and noted for its potteries. How susceptible he was to the spell of it, how it made him its own, and how vividly he remembers traits and idiosyncrasies of local character and all the trivial detail in the furnishing of its houses and the manners and customs of its Victorian home-life are evident from his books. He came to London with the acute commonsense, the mother wit, the shrewd business instinct and energy of the Hanley manufacturer as inevitably in his blood as if he had breathed them in with his native air, and he adapted himself to the manufacture of literature as industriously and straightforwardly as any of his equally but differently competent fellow-townsmen could give themselves to the manufacture of pottery. He worked with his imagination as they worked with their clay; and it was essential with him, as with them, that the goods he produced should be marketable.

There is always a public for a good story of mystery and sensation so, in those days when he was feeling his way, he wrote “The Grand Babylon Hotel,” and did it so thoroughly, so efficiently that it was one of the cleverest and most original, no less than one of the most successful things of its kind. In the same year he published “Anna of the Five Towns,” which was less popular but remains among the best six of his finer realistic tales of his own people. He followed this with three or four able enough novels of lesser note; with a wholly admirable collection of short stories, “The Grim Smile of the Five Towns”; was busy with those astute, provocative pot-boiling pocket-philosophies, “Journalism for Women,” “How to Become an Author,” “How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day,” and the rest; writing dramatic criticisms; plays, such as “Cupid and Commonsense,” “What the Public Wants”; and, over the signature of “Jacob Tonson,” one of the most brilliant and entertaining of weekly literary causeries.

Then, in 1908, he turned out another romance of mystery and sensation, “Buried Alive,” and in the same year published “The Old Wives’ Tale,” perhaps the greatest of his books, and one that ranked him unquestionably with the leading novelists of his time. A year later came “Clayhanger,” the first volume in the trilogy which was continued, in 1911, with “Hilda Lessways,” and completed, after a delay of five years, with “They Twain.” This trilogy, with “The Old Wives’ Tale,” and the much more recent “Mr. Prohack,” are Arnold Bennett’s highest achievements in fiction. The first four are stories of disillusion; the romance of them is the drab, poignant romance of unideal love and disappointed marriage, and the humor of them is sharply edged with irony and satire. In “Mr. Prohack” Bennett returns to the more genial mood of “The Card” (1911). Prohack is a delightful, almost a lovable creation, and the Card, with his dry, dour humor, for all his practical hardheadedness, is scarcely less so.

Unlike most men, who set out to do one thing and end by doing another, Bennett laid down the plan of his career and has carried it out triumphantly. He is a popular novelist, but, though he cheerfully stooped to conquer and did a lot of miscellaneous writing by the way, while he was building his reputation, the novels that have made him popular are among the masterpieces of latter-day realistic art. And with “Milestones” (in collaboration with Edward Knoblauch) and “The Great Adventure,” to say nothing of his seven or eight other plays, he is a successful dramatist. His versatility is as amazing as his industry. It may be all a matter of talent and commonsense perseverance but he seems to do whatever he chooses with an ease and a brilliance that is very like genius. His list of nearly sixty volumes includes essays, dramas, short stories, several kinds of novel, books of criticism and of travel; he paints deftly and charmingly in water-colors; and if he has written no poetry it is probably because he is too practical to trifle with what is so notoriously unprofitable, for if he decided to write some you may depend upon it he could. He has analyzed “Mental Efficiency” and “The Human Machine” in two of his little books of essays, and illustrated both in his life.

JOHN DAVYS BERESFORD

There seems to be something in the atmosphere of the manse and the vicarage that has a notable effect of developing in many who breathe it a capacity for writing fiction. Not a few authors have been cradled into literature by the Law, Medicine and the Army, but as a literary incubator no profession can vie with the Church. If it has produced no poet of the highest rank, it gave us Donne, Herrick, Herbert, Crashaw, Young, Crabbe, and a multitude of lesser note, and if it has yielded no greater novelists than Sterne and Kingsley, it has fostered a vast number that have, in their day, made up in popularity for what they lacked in genius.

Moreover, when the parsons themselves have proved immune to that peculiarity of the clerical environment, it has wrought magically upon their children, and an even longer list could be made, including such great names as Goldsmith, Jane Austen and the Brontes, of the sons and daughters of parsons who have done good or indifferent work as poets or as novelists.

Most of the novelists moulded by such early influences have leaned rather to ideal or to glamorously or grimly romantic than to plainly realistic interpretations of life and character, and J. D. Beresford is so seldom romantic, or idealistic, so often realistically true to secular and unregenerate aspects of human nature, that, if he did not draw his clerical characters with such evident inside knowledge, you would not suspect that in his beginnings he had been subject to the limitations and repressions that necessarily obtain in an ecclesiastical household.

He was born in Castor rectory, and his father was a minor canon and precentor of Peterborough Cathedral, and, if it pleases you, you can play with a theory that the stark realism with which he handles the facts, even the uglier facts, of modern life is either a reaction from the narrow horizon that cramped his youthful days, or that the outlook of the paternal rectory was broader than the outlook of rectories usually is.

After an education at Oundel, and at King’s School, Peterborough, he was apprenticed, first to an architect in the country, then to one in London; but before long he abandoned architecture to go into an insurance office, and left that to take up a post with W. H. Smith & Son, in the Strand where he became a sort of advertising expert and was placed at the head of a bookselling department with a group of country travellers under his control.

Before he was half-way through his teens, he had been writing stories which were not published and can never now be brought against him, for he is shrewdly self-critical and all that juvenilia has been ruthlessly destroyed. He was contributing to _Punch_ in 1908, and a little later had become a reviewer on the staff of that late and much lamented evening paper the _Westminster Gazette_. Among the destroyed juvenilia was more than one novel. In what leisure he could get from his advertising and reviewing, he was busy on another which was not destined to that inglorious end. For though “Jacob Stahl” was rejected by the first prominent publisher to whom it was offered, because, strangely enough, he considered it old-fashioned, it was promptly accepted by the second, and its publication in 1911 was the real beginning of Beresford’s literary career. Had it been really old-fashioned, it would have delighted the orthodox reading public, which is always the majority, but its appeal was rather to the new and more advanced race of readers, and though its sales were not astonishing, its mature narrative skill and sound literary qualities were unhesitatingly recognized by the discriminating; it gave him a reputation, and has held its ground and gone on selling steadily ever since. One felt the restrained power of the book, alike in the narrative and in the intimate realization of character; its careful artistry did not bid for popularity, but it ranked its author, at once, as a novelist who was considerably more than the mere teller of a readable tale.

“Jacob Stahl” was the first volume in a trilogy (the other two being “A Candidate for Truth” and “The Invisible Event”)--a trilogy which unfolds a story of common life that might easily have been throbbing with sentiment and noisy with melodramatic sensation; in Mr. Beresford’s reticent hands, however, it is never overcharged with either, but is touched only with the natural emotions, subdued excitements, unexaggerated poignancies of feeling that are experienced by such men and women as we know in the world as we know it.

Meredith, in “The Invisible Event,” rather grudgingly praises Jacob Stahl’s first novel, “John Tristram,” as good realistic fiction of the school of Madame Bovary. “It’s a recognized school,” Meredith continued. “I don’t quite know any one in England who’s doing it, but it’s recognized in France, of course. I don’t quite know how to define it, but perhaps the main distinction is in the choice of the typical incidents and emotions. The realists don’t concentrate on the larger emotions, you see--quite the reverse; they find the common feelings and happenings of everyday life more representative. You may have a big scene, but the essential thing is the accurate presentation of the commonplace.” “Yes, I think that is pretty much what I _have_ tried to do,” commented Jacob. “I think that’s what interests me. It’s what I know of life. I’ve never murdered any one, for instance, or talked to a murderer, and I don’t know how it feels, or what one would do in a position of that sort.”

That is perhaps a pretty fair statement of Beresford’s own aim as a novelist; he prefers to exercise his imagination on what he has observed of life, or on what he has personally experienced of it. And no doubt the “Jacob Stahl” trilogy draws much of its convincing air of truthfulness from the fact that it is largely autobiographical. In the first volume, the baby Jacob, owing to the carelessness of a nursemaid, meets with an accident that cripples him for the first fifteen years of his existence; and just such an accident in childhood befell Mr. Beresford himself. In due course, after toying with the thought of taking holy orders, Jacob becomes an architect’s pupil. “A Candidate for Truth” shows him writing short stories the magazines will not accept, and working on a novel, but before anything can be done with this, the erratic Cecil Barker gets tired of patronizing him and, driven to earn a livelihood, he takes a situation in an advertising agency and develops into an expert at writing advertisements. Then, having revised and rewritten his novel, he is dissatisfied with it and burns it. He does not begin to conquer his irresolutions and win some confidence in himself until after his disastrous marriage and separation from his wife, when he comes under the influence of the admirable Betty Gale, who loves him and defies the conventions to help him make the best of himself. Then he gets on to the reviewing staff of a daily newspaper, and writes another novel, “John Tristram,” and after one publisher has rejected it as old-fashioned, another accepts and publishes it, and though it brings him little money or glory, it starts him on the road to success, and he makes it the first volume of a trilogy.

Where autobiography ends and fiction begins in these three stories is of no importance; what is not literally true in them is so imaginatively realized that it seems as truthful. Philip of “God’s Counterpoint,” who was injured by an accident in boyhood is a pathological case; there are surrenderings to the morbid and abnormal in “Housemates,” one of the somberest of Beresford’s novels, and in that searching and poignant study in degeneracy, “The House in Demetrius Road”; but if these are more powerful in theme and more brilliant in workmanship they have not the simple, everyday actuality of the trilogy; they get their effects by violence, or by the subtle analysis of bizarre, unusual or unpleasant attributes of humanity, and the strength and charm of the Stahl stories, are that, without subscribing to the conventions, they keep to the common highway on which average men and women live and move and have their being. This is the higher and more masterly achievement, as it is more difficult to paint a portrait when the sitter is a person of ordinary looks than when he has marked peculiarities of features that easily distinguish him from the general run of mankind.

Although, in his time, Mr. Beresford was an advertising expert he has never acquired the gift of self-advertisement; but he found himself and was found by critics and the public while he still counted as one of our younger novelists and had been writing for less than a decade.

He has a subdued humor that is edged with irony, and can write with a lighter touch, as he shows in “The Jervase Comedy” and some of his short stories; and though one deprecates his excursions into eccentricities of psychology, for the bent of his genius is so evidently toward portraying what Meredith described to Stahl as the representative “feelings and happenings of everyday life,” one feels that he is more handicapped by his reticences than by his daring. He is so conscious an artist that he tones down all crudities of coloring, yet the color of life is often startlingly crude. An occasional streak of melodrama, a freer play of sentiment and motion would add to the vitality of his scenes and characters and intensify their realism instead of taking anything from it; but his native reticence would seem to forbid this and he cannot let himself go. And because he cannot let himself go he has not yet gone beyond the Jacob Stahl series, which, clever and cunninger art though some of his other work may be, remains the truest and most significant thing he has done.

JOHN BUCHAN

I have heard people express surprise that such a born romantist as John Buchan has turned his mind successfully to practical business, and been for so long an active partner in the great publishing house of Thomas Nelson & Sons. But there is really nothing at all surprising about that. One of the essays in his “Some Eighteenth Century Byways” speaks of “the incarnation of youth and the eternal Quixotic which, happily for Scotland, lie at the back of all her thrift and prudence”; and in another, on “Mr. Balfour as a Man of Letters”, he says, “the average Scot, let it never be forgotten, is incorrigibly sentimental; at heart he would rather be ‘kindly’ and ‘innerly’ than ‘canny,’ and his admiration is rather for Burns, who had none of the reputed national characteristics, than for Adam Smith, who had them all.” He adds that though Scotsmen perfectly understand the legendary Caledonian, though “in theory they are all for dry light ‘a hard, gem-like flame,’ in practice they like the glow from more turbid altars.”

Having that dual personality himself, it is not incongruous that John Buchan should be at once a poet, a romantic and a shrewd man of affairs. But he is wrong in thinking the nature he sketches is peculiar to his countrymen, the Scots; it is as characteristically English. Indeed, I should not count him among practical men if he had not proved himself one by doing more practical things than publishing; for publishing is essentially a romantic calling as you may suspect if you consider the number of authors who have taken to it, and the number of publishers who have become authors. Scott felt the lure of the trade, in the past, and in the present you have J. D. Beresford working at it with Collins & Sons; Frank Swinnerton first with Dent, now with Chatto & Windus; Frederick Watson, a brilliant writer of romances and of modern social comedy, with Nisbet; Michael Sadleir with Constable; C. E. Lawrence, most fantastic and idealistic of novelists, with John Murray; Roger Ingram, writing with authority on Shelley and making fine anthologies, but disguised as one of the partners in Selwyn and Blount; Alec Waugh, joining that admirable essayist his father, Arthur Waugh, with Chapman & Hall; C. S. Evans, whose “Nash and Others” may stand on the shelf by Kenneth Grahame’s “Golden Age,” with Heinemanns; B. W. Matz, the Dickens enthusiast and author of many books about him, running in harness with Cecil Palmer; you have Grant Richards writing novels that are clever enough to make some of his authors wonder why he publishes theirs; Sir Ernest Hodder-Williams, an author, with at least half-a-dozen successful books to his name; Herbert Jenkins, a popular humorist and doing sensational detective stories; Sir Algernon Methuen developing a passion for compiling excellent anthologies of poetry--and there are others.

But here is enough to show that Buchan need not think he is demonstrating his Scottish practicality by going in for publishing. As a fact, I have always felt that publishing should be properly classed as a sport. It is more speculative than racing and I do not see how any man on the Turf can get so much excitement and uncertainty by backing a horse as he could get by backing a new book. You can form a pretty reliable idea of what a horse is capable of before you put your money on it, but for the publisher, more often than not, it is all a game of chance, since whether he wins or loses depends less on the quality of the book than on the taste of the public, which is uncalculable. So when Buchan went publishing he was merely starting to live romance as well as to write it.

A son of the manse, he was born in 1875, and going from Edinburgh University to Brasenose, Oxford, he took the Newdigate Prize there, with other more scholarly distinctions, and became President of the Union. Even in those early days he developed a love of sport, and found recreation in mountaineering, deer-stalking and fishing. His enthusiasm for the latter expressed itself in the delightful verses of “Musa Piscatrix,” which appeared in 1896, while he was still at Oxford, his first novel, “Sir Quixote,” a vigorous romance somewhat in the manner of Stevenson, who was then at the height of his career, having given him prominence among new authors a year earlier. I recollect the glowing things that were said of one of his finest, most brilliantly imaginative romances, “John Burnet of Barns,” in 1898, and with the fame of that going before him he came to London. There he studied law in the Middle Temple, and was called to the Bar, but seems to have been busier with literary and journalistic than with legal affairs, for two more books, “Grey Weather” and “A Lost Lady of Old Years” came in 1889; “The Half-Hearted” in 1900, and meanwhile he was occupied with journalism and contributing stories to the magazines.

Then for two years he sojourned in South Africa as private secretary to Lord Milner, the High Commissioner. Two books about the present and future of the Colony were the outcome of that excursion into diplomacy; and better still, his South African experiences prompted him a little later to write that remarkable romance of “Prester John,” the cunning, clever Zulu who, turned Christian evangelist, professes to be the old legendary Prester John reincarnate, and while he is ostensibly bent on converting the natives, is fanning a flame of patriotism in their chiefs and stirring them to rise against the English and create again a great African empire. Here, and in “John Burnet of Barns,” and in some of the short stories of “The Watcher by the Threshold” and “The Moon Endureth,” John Buchan reaches, I think, his high-water mark as a weaver of romance.

After his return from South Africa he joined the staff of the _Spectator_, reviewing and writing essays for it and doing a certain amount of editorial work. At least, I deduce the latter fact from the statement of one who had the best means of knowing. If you look up “The Brain of the Nation,” by Charles L. Graves, who was then assistant editor of the _Spectator_, you will find among the witty and humorous poems in that volume a complete biography of John Buchan in neat and lively verse, telling how he came up to town from Oxford, settled down to the law, went to Africa, returned and became a familiar figure in the _Spectator’s_ old offices in Wellington Street:

“Ev’ry Tuesday morn careering
Up the stairs with flying feet,
You’d burst in upon us, cheering
Wellington’s funereal street....

Pundit, publicist and jurist;
Statistician and divine;
Mystic, mountaineer, and purist
In the high financial line;
Prince of journalistic sprinters--
Swiftest that I ever knew--
Never did you keep the printers
Longer than an hour or two.

Then, too, when the final stages
Of our weekly task drew nigh,
You would come and pass the pages
With a magisterial eye,
Seldom pausing, save to smoke a
Cigarette at half past one,
When you quaffed a cup of Mocha
And devoured a penny bun.”

The War turned those activities into other channels, and after being rejected by the army as beyond the age limit, he worked strenuously in Kitchener’s recruiting campaign, then served as Lieutenant-Colonel on the British Headquarters Staff in France, and subsequently as Director of Information. The novels he wrote in those years, “The Power House,” “The Thirty-nine Steps,” “Greenmantle,” and “Mr. Standfast,” were written as a relief from heavier duties. They are stories of mystery and intrigue as able and exciting as any of their kind. “Greenmantle,” he says in a preface, was “scribbled in every kind of odd place and moment--in England and abroad, during long journeys, in half hours between graver tasks.” He was present throughout the heroic fighting on the Somme, and his official positions at the front and at home gave him exceptional opportunities of seeing things for himself and obtaining first-hand information for his masterly “History of the War,” which will give him rank as a historian beside Kinglake and Napier.

With “The Path of the King,” and more so with “Huntingtower,” he is back in his native air of romance, and one hopes he will leave the story of plot and sensation to other artists and stay there.

Like all romancists, he is no unqualified lover of the democracy; it is too lacking in picturesqueness, in grace and glamor to be in harmony with his temperament. He belongs in spirit to the days when heroism walked in splendor and war was glorious. He has laid it down that the “denunciation of war rests at bottom upon a gross materialism. The horrors of war are obvious enough; but it may reasonably be argued that they are not greater than the horrors of peace ... the true way in which to ennoble war is not to declare it in all its forms the work of the devil, but to emphasize the spiritual and idealist element which it contains. It is a kind of national sacrament, a grave matter into which no one can enter lightly and for which all are responsible, more especially in these days when wars are not the creation of princes and statesmen but of peoples. War, on such a view, can only be banished from the world by debasing human nature.”

That is the purely romantic vision. Since 1914, Buchan’s experiences of War and the horrors of peace that result from it may have modified his earlier opinions.

Anyhow, it is a wonderful theme for romance when it is far enough away. It shows at its best in such chivalrous tales of adventure and self-sacrifice as have gathered round the gallant figure of the Young Pretender. You know from his books that John Buchan is steeped in the lore of the Jacobites and sensitive to the spell of “old songs and lost romances.” Dedicating “The Watcher by the Threshold” to Stair Agnew Gillon, he says, “It is of the back-world of Scotland that I write, the land behind the mist and over the seven bens, a place hard of access for the foot-passengers but easy for the maker of stories.” One owns to a wish that the author of “John Barnet of Barns” would now set his genius free from the squabble and squalor of present-day politics (by the way, he once put up for Parliament but fortunately did not get in) and write that great story of the ’45 which he hints elsewhere has never yet been written.

DONN BYRNE

There are more gods than any man is aware of, and there is really more virtue in discovering a new one, and catching him young, than in deferring your tribute until he is old and so old-established that all the world has recognized him for what he is. You may say that Donn Byrne is not a god of modern Grub Street, but you can take it from me that he is going to be. He has all the necessary attributes and is climbing to his due place in the hierarchy so rapidly that he will have arrived there soon after you are reading what I have to say about him.