Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

Nevertheless, a fig from a thorn, a grape from a thistle, in Birmingham Jeffery Farnol was born, and it would not have been surprising if he had grown up to put present-day Birmingham and its people into his novels, as Arnold Bennett has put the Five Towns and their people into his; but instead of doing that he has perversely developed into one of the most essentially romantic of modern novelists. He was writing stories when he was nineteen, and some of them found their way into the magazines. For a while, feeling after a source of income, he coquetted with engineering, and there is some romance in that, but not of the sort that could hold him. He experimentalized in half a dozen trades and professions, and presently looked like becoming an artist with brush and pencil rather than with the pen. In those uncertain years, when he was still dividing his leisure between writing tales and painting landscapes and drawing caricatures, he came to London and spent his spare time at the Westminster Art School, where the now distinguished Japanese artist, Yoshio Markino, was one of his fellow-pupils.

Then, in 1902, he cut the painter in one sense, though not in another, and grown more enterprising went adventuring to America; where, having married the youngest daughter of Hughson Hawley, the American scenic artist, he took to scene-painting himself and did it diligently for two years at the Astor Theater, New York. When he was not busy splashing color on back-cloths, he was working strenuously at the writing of fiction, and if his first novel smacks somewhat of the conventions and artificialities of the theater in whose atmosphere he was living, his second, “The Broad Highway,” is as untrammeled by all such influences and as breezily, robustly alive with the wholesome, free air of the countryside of eighteenth century England and the native spirit of romance as if he had never heard of Birmingham or been within sight of a stage door.

With “The Broad Highway” he found himself at once; but he did not at once find a publisher with it. Often enough an author who has been rejected in England has been promptly received with open arms by a publisher and a public in America; then he has come home bringing his sheaves with him and been even more rapturously welcomed into the households and circulating libraries of his penitent countrymen. But in Farnol’s case the process was reversed. America would have none of “The Broad Highway”; her publishers returned it to him time after time, as they had returned “Mr. Tawnish,” which he had put away in despair. It had taken him two years to write what is nowadays the most popular of his books, and for three years it wandered round seeking acceptance or slept in his drawer between journeys, until he began to think it would never get out of manuscript into print at all.

It was looking travel worn and the worse for wear, and had been sleeping neglected in his drawer for some months, when his wife rescued it and, on the off chance, sent it over to England to an old friend of Farnol’s who, having read it with enthusiasm, passed it on to Sampson Low & Co., and it came to pass that “The Broad Highway” was then published immediately and as immediately successful. That was in 1910; and in the same year Jeffery Farnol came back to his own country and settled in Kent, which has given him so many scenes for the best of his romances.

Strange, you may say, that a novel so wholly and peculiarly English should have been written so far away from its proper setting and in such unpropitious surroundings, especially while Farnol had all the glamorous adventure and lurid, living romance of the American outlands waiting, as it were, at his elbow. But

“The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven,”

and an eighteenth century England of a twentieth century New York; otherwise he might have been among the pioneer revivalists of the riotously romantic novel of the Wild West. Stranger still that when “The Broad Highway” recrossed the ocean it was no longer rejected and had soon scored an even larger success with American than with English readers. The magazines there opened their doors to the author without delay and made haste to secure the serial rights in his next stories before he had begun to think of them. Within the next three years, “The Money Moon” and “The Amateur Gentleman” had increased and firmly established his reputation, and the earlier “Mr. Tawnish” came out on the strength of their abounding popularity, which was more than strong enough to carry the tale of that elegant and honourable person much farther than it might have gone if it had not had such best sellers and long runners to set the pace for it.

Romance is Farnol’s native air, and he does not breathe happily in any other. When he tells a story of the trousered, railway-riding life round him he is like a wizard who has turned from his spells and incantations to build with mundane bricks and mortar instead of with magic--he does the ordinary thing capably but in the ordinary way. “The Chronicles of the Imp” is an entertaining trifle, and “The Definite Object” is a clever, exciting story of a young millionaire’s adventures in New York’s underworld, but they lack his distinctive touch, his individual manner; he is not himself in them. He is the antithesis of Antaeus and renews himself when he reaches, not the solid earth, but the impalpable shores of old romance. He can do wonders of picturesque realism with such charming latter-day fantasies as “The Money Moon,” but give him the knee-breeches or strapped pants and the open road and all the motley, thronging life of it in the gallant days of the Regency and he will spin you such virile, breezily masculine, joyously humorous romances as “The Broad Highway,” “The Amateur Gentleman” and “Peregrine’s Progress”; give him the hose and jerkin, the roistering merriment and rugged chivalries of the Middle Ages and he will weave you so glowing and lusty a saga as “Meltane the Smith”; and you will have far to go among recent books before you find more fascinating or more vigorously imaginative romances of piracy and stirring adventure on land and sea than “Black Bartlemy’s Treasure” and its sequel, “Martin Conisby’s Vengeance.”

He gives away the recipe for his best romance in that talk between Peter Vibart and another wayfarer which preludes “The Broad Highway”:

“As I sat of an early summer morning in the shade of a tree, eating fried bacon with a tinker, the thought came to me that I might some day write a book of my own; a book that should treat of the roads and by-roads, of trees, and wind in lonely places, of rapid brooks and lazy streams, of the glory of dawn, the glow of evening, and the purple solitude of night; a book of wayside inns and sequestered taverns; a book of country things and ways and people. And the thought pleased me much.

“‘But,’ objected the Tinker, for I had spoken my thought aloud, ‘trees and suchlike don’t sound very interestin’--leastways--not in a book, for after all a tree’s only a tree and an inn an inn; no, you must tell of other things as well.’

“‘Yes,’ said I, a little damped, ‘to be sure there is a highwayman----’

“‘Come, that’s a little better!’ said the Tinker encouragingly.

“‘Then,’ I went on, ticking off each item on my fingers, ‘come Tom Cragg, the pugilist----’

“‘Better and better!’ nodded the Tinker.

“‘----a long-legged soldier of the Peninsula, an adventure at a lonely tavern, a flight through woods at midnight pursued by desperate villains, and--a most extraordinary tinker.’”

The tinker approves of all these things, but urges that there must also be in the story blood, and baronets, and, above all, love and plenty of it, and though Peter Vibart is doubtful about these ingredients because he lacks experience of them, as he goes on his journey he makes acquaintance with them all, and they are all in the story before it ends. The tinker was only interpreting the passion for romance that is in Everyman when he pleaded for the inclusion of picturesque or emotional elements that Peter was for omitting, and the instant and continuing popularity of “The Broad Highway” shows that he was a correct interpreter.

Born no longer ago than 1878, Farnol is younger than that in everything but years. If he is seldom seen in literary circles it is simply because the country draws him more than the town; he is the most sociable of men, and his intimates will tell you that the geniality, the warmth of feeling, the shrewd, humorous philosophy that are in his books are also in himself; that his love of romance is as genuine and inherent as every other sense belonging to him, and, consequently, when he sits to write on the themes that naturally appeal to him he merely follows Samuel Daniel’s counsel and dips his pen into his heart.

JOHN GALSWORTHY

In attempting a personal description of almost any living poet or novelist it is becoming such a customary thing to say he does not look in the least like an author that I am beginning to feel a consuming curiosity to know what an author looks like and what can cause him to look so entirely different from men of other professions that you can tell him for one at a glance. In my own experience, the worst poetry nowadays is written by men of the most picturesquely poetical appearance, and the best by men who are stout, or bald, or of an otherwise commonplace or unattractive exterior. Nor among the many literary persons I have met do I remember meeting even one novelist of genius who looked it. How this myth of the ideal author, the splendid creature carrying his credentials in his face, came into being is not within my knowledge. An old gentleman of my acquaintance who had, in his time, set eyes on Dickens assured me that he was an insignificant little person who might have passed for a retired sea-captain. Thackeray rather resembled a prize fighter who had gone flabby. Trollope, with his paunch and massive beard suggested the country squire. Browning would not have seemed out of place as a bank manager, and though Tennyson was said to look a typical poet, he really looked much more like a typical stage brigand.

The fact is that while other trades and professions have developed recognizable characteristics in such as follow them, literature has naturally failed to do that. For men are drawn into it from all sections of the community and there is no more reason that they should conform to a family likeness than that they should each write the same kind of books. They do not even, in appearance, live up to the books they write. Stanley Weyman looks as unromantic as Austin Chamberlain; that daring realist George Moore gazes on you with the blue-eyed innocence of a new curate; and the mild and gentle aspect of Thomas Burke does not harmonize with the violence and grim horrors of his tales of Chinatown.

In a word, no two authors look alike; as a race, they have even given up trying to achieve a superficial uniformity by growing long hair and, when they have any, cut it to an orthodox length. A few cultivate the mustache; not many indulge in whiskers; the majority are clean shaven; and in this they are not peculiar, for the same, in the same proportions, may be said of their readers. Therefore, when at a recent dinner a lady sitting next to me surveyed John Galsworthy, who was seated opposite, and remarked, “You could guess he was an author--he looks so like one,” I anxiously enquired, “Which one?” and was, perhaps not undeservedly, ignored.

If she had said he looked like an indefinite intellectual; that his countenance was modeled on noble and dignified lines; that it expressed at once shrewdness and benignity, I could have understood and agreed with her. But these qualities are so far from being infallibly the birthright of the author that they are seldom apparent in him. With his firm, statuesque features, his grave immobility, his air of detachment and distinction, the calm deliberation of his voice and gesture, Galsworthy embodies rather what we have come to regard as the legal temperament. It is not difficult to imagine him in wig and gown pleading earnestly, impressively, but without passion, or, appropriately robed, summing up from the bench sternly, conscientiously, and with the most punctilious impartiality.

Consequently, it was without surprise I heard the other day, for the first time, that he had studied for the Bar and became, in his early years, a barrister, though he did not practice. Nor is this legal strain to be traced only in his personal aspect and bearing; it asserts itself as unmistakably and often with considerable effectiveness throughout his novels and plays. He has the lawyer’s respect for fact and detail; he must have the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth; and this gives his stories a certain aridity; a hardness as well as clearness of outline. The ways of the impressionist are not his ways; he omits nothing, but is as precise, as exact in developing plot and character as a lawyer is in getting up a case. He is not satisfied merely to paint portraits of his men and women, he analyses them meticulously, tells you every little thing about them and their families and friends, their taste in food and dress and furniture, shows them in their domestic relations, in their business activities, inventories their virtues and vices and material surroundings with a completeness that leaves nothing unexplained and affects the reader with an extraordinary sense of the reality of it all. If he is recording a funeral he will take care to tell you “the hearse started at a foot’s pace; the carriages moved slowly after.” You might have been trusted to assume that this would be the order of the procession, but nothing is assumed, the thing has got to be described just as it happened. You are then told who was in each carriage, and note is made of the thirteenth carriage which follows at the very end “containing nobody at all.” That is the Galsworthy method. When he relates, in “The Man of Property,” that the young architect, Bosinney, is building a house in the country for Soames Forsyte he does not slur things and content himself with generalities but acquaints you with the size, design and cost of the house, its architectural peculiarities, and the point is that all these particulars are strictly relevant and serve to reveal more intimately the characters and idiosyncrasies of Bosinney and of Soames, and have their significance in the unfolding of that poignant tragedy of Soames’s wife.

As the historian of later Victorian upper middle-class life in England, Galsworthy is the legitimate successor of Anthony Trollope. He is as true a realist as Trollope without the reticence imposed on the Victorian writer by his period; but Trollope’s style was exuberant, slipshod, obese, like himself, and Galsworthy’s, like himself, is lean, subdued, direct, chary of displaying emotion; he observes a close economy in the use of words, despite the length of his books. In common with most of his contemporary novelists, Trollope was something of a moralist; he handled from a sensible, man-of-the-world point of view divers religious, financial and domestic problems of the time that lent themselves to his purposes as a teller of stories. But the problems that interested him were those that had to be faced by the well-to-do and the respectable; he had no particular sympathy for the lower orders and little contempt, good-humored or otherwise, for the vulgar folk who had earned their own money, climbed up from the depths, and were awkwardly trying to breathe and flutter in the refined air of good society.

He had a nice feeling for sentiment, and lapsed carelessly into sentimentality. Galsworthy is generally too controlled and self-conscious to do that. But if his irony and satire are keener-edged than his predecessor’s, his sympathies are broader and deeper. He is a humanitarian whose sense of brotherhood extends to birds and the animals described as dumb. On the one hand, he understands and has compassion for the under-dog, the poor, the humble; and on the other, though he can smile, as in the three novels that make up his greatest achievement, “The Forsyte Saga,” and elsewhere--and smile with a sardonic humor--at the outlook and pretensions of those old prosperous families who move in the best circles and, comfortably materialistic, have, in place of a sense of brotherhood, acquired an ineradicable sense of property in their wives, money, houses, he is not blind to the finer human qualities that underlie their inherited social conventions. In two of his dramas, “Strife,” and “The Skin Game,” he handles the eternal struggle between capital and labor, and the conflict of interests between a wealthy _parvenu_ and an impoverished patrician with such an honest balancing of wrongs and rights, such sedulous impartiality, that you can scarcely say at the end which side retains most of his sympathy.

He takes life too seriously, it seems, to be able to write stories or plays for their own sake; he writes them to expose moral or economic evils of his time, to advocate reforms in our social organization; the crude barbarity of our prison system; the tyranny of the marriage law; the hypocrisies of religion and orthodox morality; the vanity of riches; the fatuity of all class inequalities--with him the creation of character, the fashioning of a tale of individual love, rivalry, ambition, triumph or disaster are generally more or less subordinate to communal or national issues such as these.

It is characteristic of Galsworthy’s reticence that he issued his first three or four novels under the pseudonym of John Sinjohn; and of the genuineness of his democratic ideals that when he had built up a reputation and was offered a knighthood he declined it. It is characteristic, too, of his restrained, deliberate habit of mind that, unlike the generality of writers, he does not seem to have rushed into print until he was old enough to have acquired enough personal experience to draw upon. He was thirty-one when his first novel, “Jocelyn,” was published; and thirty-nine when, in the one year, 1906, he made another and a real beginning as a novelist in his own name with “The Man of Property,” and as a dramatist with “The Silver Box.” The keynote of his work is its profound sincerity. Art and the zeal for reform seldom run in double-harness, but they do when Galsworthy drives.

SIR ANTHONY HOPE HAWKINS

The dawn of the present century brought with it what critics, who like to have such matters neat and orderly, delight to call a romantic revival in fiction. As a matter of fact, it also brought with it a revival of realism, and both had really started before the century began, and have continued to advance together ever since on pretty equal terms. In the 1890’s Gissing was nearing the end of his career, but the torch of realism was being carried on by Hubert Crackanthorpe (who died too soon), by Arnold Bennett, Arthur Morrison, Pett Ridge, Edwin Pugh, George Moore, Oliver Onions, Kipling, Wells (who divided his allegiance between both movements), George Egerton, Elizabeth Robins, Mrs. W. K. Clifford, and many another.

The romantic revival, which had started earlier, was well afoot during the same period. Stevenson died in 1894. Rider Haggard’s best romances were out in the 1880’s; Doyle’s “Micah Clarke” and “The White Company” belong to 1888 and 1890; Sir Gilbert Parker came soon after; Stanley Weyman and Anthony Hope arrived in the movement together, when the century was still in its infancy. All these were in the same boat but, to adopt Douglas Jerrold’s pun, with very different skulls; how they are to take rank in the hierarchy of letters is not my concern at the moment--I am only saying they were all romantics. That Weyman might have been something else is indicated by the strong, quiet realism of his second book, “The New Rector,” and the much later novels he has written, after an inactive interval of ten years, “The Great House,” and “The Ovington Bank”; and that Anthony Hope Hawkins might have been something else is the inference you draw from nearly all his work after “The Intrusions of Peggy.”

His father was the Vicar of St. Bride’s, Fleet Street, and he was a nephew, or some other near relation, of the famous “hanging Judge,” Sir Henry Hawkins. From Marlborough he passed to Balliol, Oxford, where he took his M. A. degree and was president of the Oxford Union Society. He seems to have set out with an eye on a career at the Bar which should lead him into the House of Commons. But though he was, like Stanley Weyman, duly called to the Bar, like Weyman, he did not do anything much in the way of practising. Once he put up as a Parliamentary candidate, but was not elected; yet one can imagine him as an ideal Member--he has the distinguished presence, the urbane, genially courteous manner, the even temper and nimbleness of mind that ought to but do not always go to the making of an Attorney General and, as any who have heard him take part in after-dinner discussions will know, in addressing an audience he has all the gifts of clarity, ease and humor that make the successful public speaker.

But law and politics piped to him in vain, and his ambition took the right turning when he wrote his first novel, “A Man of Mark.” It was a deft and lively enough tale; it was read and talked about, and was considered promising, but caused no particular excitement. The excitement was waiting for his next book. When “The Prisoner of Zenda” burst upon the town, in 1894, it leaped into success at once. Stanley Weyman’s “Under the Red Robe” was issued almost simultaneously and the two ran a wild race for popularity and both won. Both were dramatized promptly, and repeated on the stage the dazzling success they had enjoyed between covers. Each inspired a large school of imitators, which increased and multiplied until the sword and cloak romance, and stories of imaginary kingdoms were, in a few years, almost as plentiful as blackberriers and began to become a drug in the market. But, meanwhile, the spirit of romance was awake and abroad, and any capable novelist who rode into the library lists wearing her favors was pretty sure of a welcome.

In the same bustling year, 1894, we had from Anthony Hope “The God in the Car,” a tale of a South African Company promoter, and “The Dolly Dialogues.” These were not in a direct line of descent from “The Prisoner of Zenda,” and were possibly written before that; they were, at all events, written before the enormous vogue of that could prompt the author to follow it with another of the same desirable brand. But “The Dolly Dialogues” soared to an independent success of their own. Those crisp, neat entertaining chats of that adroitest of flirts, Dolly Foster, with her husband, with Mr. Carter, and others of her fashionable circle, were not without a certain distant likeness to the bright, irresponsible talk of “Dodo,” and repeated the triumph that had been “Dodo’s” a decade earlier. The “Dialogues” set another fashion, and generated another school of imitators. Whether people ever talked with such consistent brilliance in real life was of no consequence; it was amusing, clever, it was often witty, and when it was not it was crisp and smart and so like wit that it could pass for it. And in so far as such acute remarks and repartee were too good to be true they only brought the book into line with the airy, impossible romance and inventive fantasy of “The Prisoner of Zenda.”

With “Rupert of Hentzau” Anthony Hope was back in his imaginary kingdom next year; if the sequel was not so good as “The Prisoner” it had as good a reception; and “The King’s Mirror,” and a romantic comedy, “The Adventure of Lady Ursula,” not dramatized from one of his books but specially written for the stage, followed in quick succession. For those were days when he was working strenuously and systematically at his art; to cultivate the habit of work he left home every morning, like any lawyer or stockbroker, and went to a room off the Strand--wasn’t it in Buckingham Street?--where he wrote steadily for a fixed number of hours without interruption. The notion that an author can only do his best by fits and starts as the mood takes him is a romantic convention dear to the dilettante, but Hope was never that; he kept his romance in his books as sedulously as Scott did and was as sensibly practical as Scott in his methods of making them.

But he had to pay for his first popular success, as most novelists do. Jerome has more than once complained that the public having accepted “Three Men in a Boat” with enthusiasm and labeled him a humorist would never after allow him to be anything else. His “Paul Kelver” is worth a dozen of the other book, but it has withdrawn into the background and “Three Men in a Boat” is still selling freely. “Quisante” (1900) marked a new departure, suggested that Hope was turning from romance to reality. That study of the political adventurer and the aristocratic wife who realizes she has made a mistake in marrying out of her order, is, as literature and as a story, a stronger, finer piece of work than any Hope had done before, but it was not what his readers had expected of him, and it did not win the new reputation it ought to have won for him, though the critics did not fail to recognize its quality. To the general world of readers he was the author of “The Prisoner of Zenda”; that was the type of novel they wanted from him; they continued to ask for it and would not willingly take any other. He humored them at intervals with “The Intrusions of Peggy,” and “Sophy of Kravonia,” but on the whole he had done with such light entertainments and settled down to the serious interpretation of modern life and character. Next to “Quisante,” I would place his poignant and dramatic handling of the marriage problem in “Double Harness,” the study, in “A Servant of the Public,” of a temperament that is only baffling by reason of its elemental simplicity; the masterly realistic presentment of a capable, courageous, unconventional, attractive woman in “The Great Miss Driver,” and the brilliant treatment again of the problem of marriage and disillusion in “Mrs. Maxon Protests.” These five--subtle in characterization and fashioned of the comedy and tragedy of actual human experience--these and not his more notorious trifles are the true measure of Anthony Hope’s achievement as a novelist.

But they are obscured by the flashier glory of “The Prisoner of Zenda” and “Rupert of Hentzau,” which are now renascent and appealing mightily on the films to the romantic susceptibilities of a new generation of admirers.

The novels he has written since the honor of knighthood was conferred upon him in 1918 are sufficient to show that his invention and skill in narrative are by no means failing him, though neither “Beaumaroy Home from the Wars” nor “Lucinda” reach the level of “Quisante” or “Mrs. Maxon Protests.” But “Beaumaroy” has touches of humor and character that are in his happiest vein, and if I say that “Lucinda” is an abler and more notable piece of work than is either of the dazzling fairy tales that established his position, it is not that I would belittle those delightful entertainments but would emphasize that so far from representing his capacity they misrepresent it; they stand in the way and prevent his better work from being seen in its just proportions, so that though at first they may have secured a prompt recognition for him, it looks as if, at last, they will, in a larger sense, prevent him from being recognized.

ARTHUR STUART MENTETH HUTCHINSON

Success is good for people, when they do not get too much of it too soon. Failure is even better for them, when they do not get more than enough of it for too many years. Hardship, difficulty, failure--these knock the nonsense out of a man and teach him his art or his business; there is something lacking from the character and work of one who has never known them. Many authors recover at last from their failures, but an instant and early success is generally fatal; it makes them take themselves too seriously and their work not seriously enough; their vogue dwindles, in consequence, and the publishers who began to run after them begin to run away from them. There is little more difference between a too triumphant beginning and an unending failure than between a drought and a deluge.

The two extremes are equally devastating, and A. S. M. Hutchinson is among the luckier ones who have been destined to a middle course. He has not won his pearl without diving for it; but he has not had to dive and come up empty-handed.

Those who imagine, as some do, that, with “If Winter Comes,” he simply came, and saw, and conquered, imagine a vain thing. He had come three times before that, and had, moreover, toiled at the oar as a very miscellaneous journalist, a writer of articles and short stories that editors too frequently rejected. If he never exactly lived in Grub Street, he sojourned for a few years in a turning out of it.

He had no literary or journalistic ancestry, and was originally dedicated to another profession, but he did not “drift into journalism”--that not being his way; he walked into it deliberately, having made up his mind to go there. His father is a General in the Indian Army, and A. S. M. was born in India, in 1880. But his grandfather was a doctor of medicine, and at an early age Hutchinson was settled in London, beginning a career of his own as a Medical student. To this day, he has a quiet, kindly, sympathetic bearing that would have served him as an excellent bedside manner, if he had taken his M. D. and put up a brass plate. But he is one of the shyest, most retiring of men; you cannot associate him with any sort of brass; and even while he was trying a ’prentice hand in medicine and surgery at St. Thomas’s Hospital a private ambition was drawing him in another direction.

“I always intended to earn my living with my pen,” he told me, some years ago. “I was writing then in my leisure, sending out all kinds of MSS. and getting most of them back, and at length I took the plunge when I had about one short story accepted by a magazine, two articles by _Punch_ and some verses by _Scraps_. I did not know a soul who had the remotest connection with literary work, but I chanced it.”

And threw physic to the dogs. He did not limit himself to any working hours, but by writing hard all day contrived to pick up a regular five shillings a week from _Scraps_ for comic verse, and, augmenting this from a precarious sale of articles and tales to various publications, compiled a weekly income of about one pound sterling. He had done this for three months or so, when a letter came from _Pearson’s_ accepting a story and asking for more; and he has related how this sent him crazy all day with excitement. A few days later he was asked to call at the office and undertake a small, special job, and, one thing leading to another, was presently engaged on the staff at £2 10s. a week. By the time he had gained experience as assistant editor of the _Royal Magazine_ and been made co-editor of the _Rapid Review_, he felt the hour had come for another plunge.

A friend of those days describes him as “a slight, almost boyish young man of middle-height, who gazed at you with intense concentration through the powerful lenses of his glasses.” This still describes him, if you touch in an elusive twinkle of genial humor about the mouth and eyes, and add that his slightness, despite something of a stoop, gives him an appearance of being actually tall. Already he had started on his first novel, “Once Aboard the Lugger,” and wanted to cut adrift from too much editing and escape into other fields. He resigned from _Pearson’s_ and hearing that the _Daily Graphic_ was looking for a leader-note writer, posted specimens, and secured the appointment as a stand-by. In 1907 he was sub-editing that paper, and edited it from 1912 to 1916.

Meanwhile, “Once Aboard the Lugger” being finished, he offered it to one publisher who declined it, because “humor was not in his line,” and to another who published it, in 1908; and it scored what counts for a considerable success, if you do not compare its sales with those of his fourth and fifth books. That out of hand, he commenced “The Happy Warrior,” but when it was done, was dissatisfied with it, and being, as he confesses, “an appallingly, vilely conscientious” worker, he did it all over again. It swallowed the leisure of four years, but when it came out, in 1912, added not a little to his reputation.

His first book was a lively mingling of comedy and burlesque; his second, a realistic romance of humor and pathos, struck a deeper note, was fired with a fine idealism, and revealed him as a shrewd observer and one subtly acquainted with the complexities of human character. Then in 1914 came “The Clean Heart,” the tragedy of a life that lost its way, of one who had to learn through folly and suffering that self-sacrifice is the secret of happiness. It was as successful as its predecessors, and I am not sure that they are wrong who hold that it is the best of all Hutchinson’s work; but the War overshadowed it and left it no chance of anticipating the phenomenal popularity that was waiting for his later books.

For nine years he published no more. He was serving as a lieutenant of the Royal Engineers, attached to the Canadian forces, and, after the peace, went as a Captain of the R. E., with the Army of Occupation, into Germany. Before he was demobilized he had planned his fourth novel, and when he could, at length, return to civilian life, he decided not to hamper himself again with journalism but to stake his prospects on his new book, and in 1921 “If Winter Comes” more than amply justified him of his decision. Not more than one or two novels within my remembrance have leaped into such instant and enormous popularity. For a few weeks it was praised by the reviews, but there was no particular stirring of the waters till a “boom” broke out in America. The noise of it soon woke us over here, and the story got rapidly into its stride; Hutchinson suddenly found himself famous as a best-seller of half a million copies in America and half as many in his own country. The furore it created had scarcely showed signs of subsiding when “This Freedom” followed in its wake and brewed another storm. A storm of mingled eulogy and censure; for the critics this time were largely hostile. The story handled the problem of woman’s emancipation, and Hutchinson stood for the old ideals of femininity, the sanctities and traditional duties of womanhood; he believed that a mother has positive and inalienable responsibilities, and set himself to demonstrate that she could not put them by and arrogate to herself a share of what is known as man’s work in the world without neglecting her children, losing their affection, and bringing tragic disaster on them and on her husband. He was accused of exaggeration; of being out of sympathy with the modern spirit; but if, instead of giving the novel this general application, you take it, as a work of imagination should be taken--as a story of what happened when one woman strove to break away from conventions and be herself at all risks--it is a powerful and poignantly suggestive narrative and one that may well be temperamentally true of such a woman and of such a family.

Here, as in his other books, Hutchinson is so in earnest and realizes his characters so intensely, that he becomes, as it were, this character and that in succession, slips involuntarily into writing from their standpoints as if he personally felt the wrong, hope, pain or passion each experienced, and this misleads some of his critics into taking for mannerisms what are nothing but his intimate realization of his people and the outcome of his complete sincerity. He is so closely interested in them himself that he cannot play the showman and stand apart exhibiting his puppets; to him they are not puppets but have burgeoned and become living realities and their emotions are his no less than theirs.

On the stage “If Winter Comes” did not capture the public so completely as it did in the book, but it ran well in London and the provinces and here and in America still keeps its place on tour. It has got on to the films, of course and “This Freedom” is following in its footsteps.

Hutchinson took his first successes with a tranquillity that seemed like indifference, and his later and larger triumphs and the denunciations he has endured, have I think, moved him as little. He has aimed at doing his own work in his own way, and his popularity is an accident; he is not the sort of man that finds success, but the sort of man that success finds.

SHEILA KAYE-SMITH

Talking of Charlotte Bronte, in a novel of Sheila Kaye-Smith’s that goes back to mid-Victorian days, a hairy young man, with a mustache, in addition to the whiskers of the period, agrees that she is crude and outlandish, and adds, “That always comes when women write books. They’re so frightened of being called feminine that they bury what talent they may have under a mountain of manliness--and manliness for them consists entirely of oaths and violence and scarlet sin.”

Whether you agree or disagree with him, the hairy young critic was expressing an opinion that was common among his contemporaries, who have handed it down to a large number of their successors. It was probably half true, and is not so true now as it was. The women novelists now who specialise in scarlet sin have no particular use for oaths and violence. Moreover, though it would be easy to name several who have a tendency to color their pages with sin of all colors, there is nothing exclusively masculine in that and their novels remain essentially feminine. It would be easy to name others who are much addicted to violent scenes and characters, but I doubt whether that is any conscious attempt on their part to be manly--on the contrary, it arises from an inherent, very feminine admiration of that barbaric strength and muscular vigor which the average woman is supposed to find so splendid and so attractive in the average man. It is such an orthodox feminine conception of the ideal male that its presence in a story almost inevitably betrays the sex of the author.

All which means no more than that the woman novelist quite legitimately does her best to draw a man, as the man novelist does his best to draw a woman, and she succeeds nearly as often; and no woman novelist, past or present, has been more uniformly and extraordinarily successful in this difficult application of her art than Sheila Kaye-Smith. It is usual for the male author to excuse his artistic shortcomings by insisting that woman is a mystery and it is impossible to comprehend her; but it seems likely that he may himself be as much of a mystery to woman and that is why, in fiction, the men she depicts so often seem like women in masquerade. Two of our leading women writers, who can analyse and reveal characters of their own sex with an almost uncanny insight, lose that power when they try to exercise it on the male of the species and he thinks, feels and talks in their pages more or less after the manner of women. They are brilliantly clever in every other way, but can only make man in their own image.

But the men in Miss Kaye-Smith’s novels are the real thing; they are the unqualified male in whom male readers unhesitatingly recognize their kind. Not because they are harsh or brutal, though some of them are that; not because they are susceptible to the lure of the other sex and masterfully override the laws of conventional morality, though some of them do that; not because they are heavy drinkers and lusty fighters with their fists, though some of them are this and some that; but simply because in their general habits, their ordinary everyday behavior, in what they say no less than in what they think, they are obviously of the masculine gender. It is easy to create an illusion that your character is a man if you call him a soldier and describe him as acting with vigor or daring; but take this fragment of conversation, chosen at random from “The Challenge to Sirius,” between Frank Rainger and the retired studious Mr. Bellack. Frank is the son of an embittered gentleman who has withdrawn from the struggle of life; he works, from choice, on the farm where he and his father live, and goes daily to the Rectory to take lessons with Mr. Bellack, but has come to hesitate between his love of working on the land and a desire to go away somewhere and know more of life, and asks his tutor to advise him:

“‘The question is which is the best: happiness or experience? If it’s experience, you had better get out of this hole as quickly as possible; if it’s happiness, you had better stay where you are.’

“‘Which do you think it is, sir?’

“‘My good boy, how can I tell you? Personally I would rather you did not go to London and take your chances there, as I feel that, though you have brains and certain rudimentary gifts, it is not the kind of life you are cut out for, and that you will probably fail and be wretched. On the other hand, never renounce what seems to you a good opportunity and a fine experience because an old chap like me hints at trouble ahead. Besides, your father would rather see you starve as a journalist than grow fat as a farmer. Perhaps he is right--perhaps I am.’

“‘Did you ever have to make a choice of your own, sir?’

“‘Certainly I did, and I chose to be Rector of Wittersham with an income of two hundred a year, no congenial society, a congregation of hop-sacks, and for my sole distraction the teaching of a muddle-headed boy who, at the age of nineteen, is still undecided as to how he shall live the rest of his life.’

“‘So you chose wrong, I reckon.’

“‘How do you reckon any such thing? You don’t know what my alternative was. Besides, you may be sure of this, no matter which way you choose you will never definitely know whether you were wrong or right. The great question of all choosers and adventurers is “Was it worth while?”--and whatever else you may expect of life, don’t expect an answer to that.’”

Now if there had been nothing to indicate who the boy was talking with you would know at once he was not talking to a woman, for there is a man’s way of thinking, a man’s manner, even a man’s voice in all that Mr. Bellack says. There is always this subtle, easy, truthfully realistic presentation of Miss Kaye-Smith’s male characters, of the mild, unassertive, commonplace, as well as the aggressive and more virile of them. Her rustic clowns are as roughly human and racy of the soil as Hardy’s. Robert Fuller, half animal, half saint, in “Green Apple Harvest”; Monypenny, the practical idealist of “Tamarisk Town,” who, ambitious to develop and popularize a seaside resort, triumphs over all obstacles, carries his schemes through, rises to wealth and dignity, and, sacrificing to his ambition the woman he loves, finds himself lonely and unhappy on his height and turns remorsefully and madly to destroy all he has so laboriously built; Miles, in “Starbrace,” with his strangely varying moods, his strength and pitiful weaknesses; the stern, harsh, ruggedly heroic Reuben Backfield, in “Sussex Gorse,” wholly given over to his desperate, indomitable fight for the possession of a wild unfruitful common; Mr. Sumption, the dour, pathetic Baptist minister in “Little England,” a graphic, poignant revelation of what the war meant in a rural community, and one of the two or three great novels of that era--these and, in their differing class and degree, all the men who belong to her stories are real, authentic, humans--are men in flesh and bone and spirit, easy, natural, alive.

Her women are drawn with a knowledge that is apparently as minutely exact and is certainly as sympathetic. If I had to single out her most remarkable study in feminine temperament and psychology, I think I should say Joanna Godden; but her explicit interpretations of women are not so unusual as her understanding of men. She knows their businesses as thoroughly as she knows them. If, like Coalbran or Backfield, they are farmers and working on the land, she is not contented with vivid generalities but makes the varied, multifarious circumstance of farming and cattle raising, and the whole atmosphere and environment that has moulded their lives part of her story. When Monypenny devotes himself to the development of Tamarisk Town you are not asked to take anything for granted but are shown how he financed his scheme, acquired land, carried out his building operations, how the borough was formed, and the elections conducted--you follow the growth of the place through its various stages, and Monypenny’s own story grows with and through it. It is this acquaintance with practical detail, this filling in of all essential surroundings that help to give the novels their convincing air of realism.

You would not suspect such broad and deep knowledge of humanity and the affairs of the world in the quiet, soft-spoken, grey-eyed, dreamy, very feminine person you discover the author to be when you meet her. At a little distance, too, with her slight figure and bobbed hair, you might take her for a mere school-girl. Little more than a school-girl she was when she wrote her first novel, “The Tramping Methodist,” which, after being rejected half a dozen times, was published in 1909. She had no further difficulties with publishers, however, for this and her second book, “Starbrace,” next year, put her on sure ground with critics and public, though she had to wait for the beginnings of popularity until “Tamarisk Town” came out in 1919.

She was born at Hastings, her father being a doctor there, and has passed all her life in Sussex. Her first two novels are of the eighteenth century; one or two are of mid-Victorian times; the rest are of our own day. Occasionally she brings her people to London, but nearly always they are at home in Kent or Sussex. In “The Challenge to Sirius” and “The End of the House of Alard” they are on the borderland of the two counties; but mostly her scenes are in the county where she was born. In her books she has become its interpreter and made it her own. She has put something of her love of it and of the rugged lives and passions of its folk into the poems in “Willow Forge,” and “Saints in Sussex”; but her best poetry is in her novels. If you can compare her with some of her leading women contemporaries you have a sense of as much difference between them as there is between the collector of insects and the hunter of big game. Those others take you into a study and scientifically exhibit curious specimens under a microscope; she is too warmly human for such pendantries and takes you where there is sky and grass and a whole ordinary world full of mortal creatures and shows you them living and working in the light of common day. I believe the secret of her power is largely in her complete unselfconsciousness; she has no affectations; the charm and strength of her style is its limpid simplicity; she seems, while you read, to be merely letting her characters act and think; to be thinking of her work and never of her own cleverness; as if she were too sure and spontaneous an artist to be even aware of the fact.

RUDYARD KIPLING

It is usual to write of the 1890’s as the days of the decadents; but I never see them so labeled without being reminded of the Hans Brietmann ballad--

“Hans Brietmann gif a barty:
Vhere is dot barty now?”...

For though Wilde and Beardsley remain, the rest of their hectic group have either gone home or are going, and, from this distance it is possible to focus that decade and realize that its prevailing influences were Henley and Stevenson, and that the true glory of the 90’s is that they were the flowering time of Shaw, Barrie, Wells and Kipling.

Kipling, indeed, began his literary career in the 80’s, and by the end of the 90’s was the most popular, the most belauded and decried of living authors. After being sent home to Westward Ho! in Devon, to be educated at the school he has immortalized in “Stalkey & Co.,” he went back to India (where he was born in 1865), and served successively on the staffs of the Lahore _Civil and Military Gazette_ and the Allahabad _Pioneer_ from 1882 to 1889. The satirical verses, sketches of native character, stories of Anglo-Indian life, with their intriguings and their shrewd understandings of the shabbier side of human nature, that he contributed to those papers between the age of seventeen and twenty-five, rather justified Barrie’s _dictum_ that he was “born _blasé_.” But when they were collected into his first eight or nine small books--“Departmental Ditties,” “Plain Tales from the Hills,” “In Black and White,” “Soldiers Three,” “Under the Deodars,” and the rest--they capped an instant boom in India with an even more roaring success in England and America. The vogue of the shilling shocker was then in its infancy, and Kipling’s insignificant looking drab-covered booklets competed triumphantly with that showy ephemeral fiction on our bookstalls for the suffrage of the railway traveller. From the start, like Dickens, he was no pet of a select circle but appealed to the crowd. While his contemporaries, the daintier decadents, issued their more perishable preciosities in limited editions elegantly bound, he carelessly flung his pearls before swine, and the maligned swine recognized that they were pearls before the critics began to tell them so.

And when he came to England again, a youth of five-and-twenty, his fame had come before him. He settled down from 1889 to 1891, on an upper floor of a gloomy building squeezed between shops, at 19 Villiers Street, Strand, and in that somewhat squalid London thoroughfare were written some of the best stories in “Life’s Handicap,” and two of his comparative failures--“The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot,” and his first novel, “The Light that Failed.” Stevenson in his letters, about then, deplored his “copiousness and haste,” said, “He is all smart journalism and cleverness; it is all bright and shallow and limpid, like a business paper--a good one, _s’entendu_; but there’s no blot of heart’s blood and the Old Night ... I look on and admire; but in a kind of ambition we all have for our tongue and literature, I am wounded.” But, naturally, Stevenson, conjuring fastidiously with words, like a lapidary with jewels, felt that his literary ideals were outraged by this exuberant, amazing young man who, coming with a banjo for a lyre, took the sacred temple of the Muses by violence and disturbed it with raucous echoes of the music hall; who brought the manners and speech of the canteen into the library, made free use of slang and ugly colloquialisms with the most brilliant effectiveness, and in general strode rough-shod over so many accepted artistic conventions. It was easy to say his verse was meretriciously catchy, but its cleverness, the bite of its irony and humor were indisputable; that his Anglo-Indian stories were marred by vulgarities and crudities of characterization; that the riotous humors of Mulvaney and his soldier-chums showed nothing but a boisterous, schoolboyish sense of fun; but there was no denying the originality of mind, the abounding genius that was experimentally at work in all these things.