Chapter VI: Front Matter (6)

There is a virility and range of subject and style in Noyes’s work that make a good deal of modern verse seem old-maidish or anæmic by comparison. It is a far cry from the grace and tenderness and dainty fancy of “The Flower of Old Japan”, “The Forest of Wild Thyme”, and some of the lyrics in “The Elfin Artist”, and elsewhere, to the masculine imaginative splendor in thought and diction, the robust energy of his epic, “Drake”, or, though gentler moods of pathos, humor, wistful fantasy are never absent from any of his books, to the series of narratives that make up “The Torch Bearers”--an ambitious succession of poems that reveal, with dramatic power and insight and a quick sensitiveness to the poetry of science, the progress of scientific discovery in the life-stories of the great discoverers. None has pictured War in more terribly realistic terms or with a more passionate hatred of its inhumanity than he has in “The Wine Press”; and you have him in the breeziest, most riotously humorous of his moods in “Forty Singing Seamen.” But if I should single my own favorite from his books it would be the “Tales of the Mermaid Tavern.” Here he finds full scope for his many-sided gift; you can turn from the rollicking yarn of “Black Bill’s Honeymoon” to the dignity and poignance of “The Burial of a Queen,” from the anecdotal picturesqueness of “A Coiner of Angels” to the fervor and glittering pageantry of “Flos Mercatorum,” from the suspense and tragedy of “Raleigh” to the laughter and lighter tears and buoyant tripping measures of “The Companion of a Mile,” telling how Will Kemp, the player, danced from London to Norwich for a wager, and passing through Sudbury met a young butcher who offered to dance a mile with him--

“By Sudbury, by Sudbury, by little red-roofed Sudbury,
He wished to dance a mile with me! I made a courtly bow:
I fitted him with morrice-bells, with treble, bass and tenor bells,
_And ‘Tickle your tabor, Tom,’ I cried, ‘we’re going to market now.’_

And rollicking down the lanes we dashed, and frolicking up the hills we
clashed,
And like a sail behind me flapped his great white frock a-while,
Till with a gasp, he sank and swore that he could dance with me no
more;
And over the hedge a milk-maid laughed, _Not dance with him a mile_?

‘You lout!’ she laughed, ‘I’ll leave my pail, and dance with him
for cakes and ale!
‘I’ll dance a mile for love,’ she laughed, ‘and win my wager too.
‘Your feet are shod and mine are bare; but when could leather dance on
air?
‘A milk-maid’s feet can fall as fair and light as falling dew.’

I fitted her with morrice-bells, with treble, bass and tenor bells:
The fore-bells, as I linked them to her throat, how soft they sang!
Green linnets in a golden nest, they chirped and trembled on her
breast,
And faint as elfin blue-bells at her nut-brown ankles rang.

I fitted her with morrice-bells that sweetened into woodbine bells,
And trembled as I hung them there and crowned her sunny brow:
‘Strike up,’ she laughed, ‘my summer king!’ And all her bells began to
ring,
_And ‘Tickle your tabor, Tom,’ I cried, ‘we’re going to Sherwood
now!’_”

This, and the rest of it, is very typical of Noyes in his lighter vein, and if you can’t see the poetry that twinkles through the deft, airy gallop of the verse we won’t talk about it; typical of him too is the pathetic aftermath of the dance, so delicately touched in that the pathos is almost lost in the beauty of it, till the motley epilogue strikes the deeper note of sadness through the loud laughter of the fool.

Noyes was born in Staffordshire in 1880, and I know nothing of his doings at Oxford, except that he rowed in the Exeter College Eight. He is nowadays an Hon. Litt. D. of Yale University, and since 1914 has been Professor of Modern English Literature at Princeton University, in America, and divides his time between that country and this. He is the most unassuming of men, looking much younger than his years, and of a sturdy, robust, serious aspect that (till his genial laugh, when he breaks silence, spoils your calculations) seems more in keeping with the vigor of his epic narratives, or with the noble rhetoric of such as that most impressive of his shorter poems, “The Creation,” than with the fairy fancies, the butterfly blitheness and laughing music of “Come down to Kew at lilac time” and other of his daintier lyrics. Like most true poets who have not died young, he has become popular in his lifetime; and if he were not so versatile less versatile critics, instead of panting after him in vain, would be able to grasp him and get him under their microscopes and recognize him for the poet that he is.

E. PHILLIPS OPPENHEIM

Even if we grant that there is a wide world of difference between imaginative and inventive fiction, and that the way to immortality is only open to the former, there is still so much to be said in praise of the latter that, if the verdict rested with his contemporaries instead of with posterity, the inventive author would often go permanently crowned with the fame that is now reserved for his more imaginative rival. Within my own recollection Wilkie Collins was the most popular novelist of his day; Meredith and Hardy had their thousands of readers and Collins his tens of thousands; everybody read him then, but hardly anybody reads him now. He used to complain, as Hall Caine records in “My Story,” that the reviewers were all along disposed to sniff and qualify their appreciation, but he boasted that the public always received him with enthusiasm and overwhelmed him with grateful and adulatory letters. Moreover, his brother novelists admired and lauded his amazing ingenuity; Dickens collaborated with him, and his influence is perhaps traceable in “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”--in the unusual dexterity and subtlety with which its plot is constructed.

His own formula for holding the reader’s attention was “make him laugh; make him weep; or make him wait”; and he devoted himself almost exclusively to the third of these methods. Character is of quite minor importance in his stories--Count Fosco was his one masterly creation; the only one of all his _dramatis personæ_ you recall without effort--there is little humor in them, and little pathos. For him, the plot was the thing, a cunningly contrived, carefully dovetailed plot, with a heart of mystery and sensation that should hold the reader in suspense till it was unraveled and cleared up in the last pages. His justification was that he thrilled and delighted enormous multitudes. It is enough that he did triumphantly what he set himself to do; the best and most precious things in life are not often the most lasting; and whether or not his work is immortal, it was great in its kind and an art beyond the genius of novelists who seem destined to outlive him.

And, as a form of literature, the novel of sensation, crime, mystery is immortal if its authors are not. Collins has been dethroned, but his successors are legion, and none has made out a stronger title to the inheritance of his mantle than Phillips Oppenheim. For the skill with which he constructs a baffling plot, intrigues his readers from the opening, and keeps them in suspense till it is time, at last, to give away his secret, none of them excels--I am not sure that more than one of them equals him. I don’t think he aims to be anything but entertaining, and how many of our novelists who claim to be much more are not even that! Two of our most distinguished critics have, at different times, confessed to me that with the passing of years they have lost their taste for fiction; the modern psychological novel seems pretentious and bores them; they are no longer young enough to be susceptible to romantic adventure; they can learn nothing and get no amusement from the crudeness and boyish or girlish naïveté of the latter-day sex novel, but they do find interest, excitement and a tonic recreation in novels such as Oppenheim writes. “I suppose I have seen too much of actual life,” said one of them, “to be startled or particularly interested in what I am told about it by a novelist who knows no more of it than I know myself. I like Oppenheim because he takes me outside my personal experiences; he does not appeal to my memory but to my imagination; he tells me a tale that is new to me, that rouses my curiosity, keeps me guessing, makes me forget everything else in my keenness to follow up the clues to his mystery and see how he solves it. I don’t care whether it is good literature, I know it is a good story, and that’s what every novel ought to be and few are. I sometimes think we take our novelists and they take themselves and their function too seriously. The old troubador, when he sang his ballads and told his yarns in the street, didn’t do it for glory but for the coppers the crowd, if he pleased them, would throw into his hat. He was nothing but an entertainer; people didn’t want him to be anything else--it is all I want his modern representative, the novelist, to be, and it is what Oppenheim emphatically is. He simply writes for the time, and the time is promptly rewarding him with popularity and hard cash, while so many of our little artists will not stoop to the present and are writing neatly for a future that will never read them.”

He has written some sixty novels and books of short stories, having seen his first novel published in 1886, when he was twenty. I do not pretend to have read them all, but since I read “Mysterious Mr. Sabin,” a good many years ago, I have never missed reading any Phillips Oppenheim story that has come within reach of me. Read “The Amazing Partnership,” “The Plunderers,” “A Prince of Sinners,” “Mr. Lessingham Goes Home,” and you will find that while he is as ingenious as Wilkie Collins at fashioning a plot that captures your interest in its complexities, he gets more rapidly into his story, handles dialogue more skillfully, unfolds his incidents as vividly but with a lighter hand and loses no time on the way.

After he left school Phillips Oppenheim went into his father’s leather business at Leicester, but he had started writing stories for his own amusement before that. The leather business was so successful that Blumenthals, the big American and Paris leather firm, bought it up, and appointed Phillips Oppenheim their director at Leicester. His experience in that trade has proved immensely useful to him. It has not only helped him to material for his tales, but it was through the American head of Blumenthals that he had his chief incentive to the writing of the type of story that has brought him such success as a novelist. This gentleman introduced him to the proprietor of the Café de Rat Mort, the once famous Montmartre haunt, for Oppenheim was frequently in Paris on the affairs of his leather company, and at the Café he acquired his taste for the mysteries of those international intriguings and rascalities that figure so largely in several of his books, for the proprietor used to tell him all manner of thrilling yarns about political and international adventurers, some of whom had been among his customers, and his listener formed a habit of weaving stories round the more striking personalities in the cosmopolitan crowd that he met in the Rat Mort. He assured me that however ingenious I might think them, he never really constructs his stories but simply lets them grow. “Two or three people in a crowded restaurant may arouse my interest, and the atmosphere is compelling,” says he. “I start weaving a story round them--the circumstances and the people gradually develop as I go on dictating to my secretary the casual thoughts about them that arose in me while I was looking at them and their surroundings. First of all I must have a congenial atmosphere--then the rest is easy.”

Easy, that is, to him, partly from long practice but chiefly because it was the method that came natural to him and suited his temperament. There is no use in telling any one how to write a novel, in laying down rules for doing it as if it were a mechanical trade. James Payn’s plan was to prepare an elaborate synopsis, divide this into chapters, then write down a description of each character, and keep these details pinned on a screen where they were handy reference while he was working. William De Morgan would start with little more than a general idea of what was going to happen in future pages; he would get his characters together and give them their heads and let them develop the story as it went along. Every way is the best way--for the author who finds it for himself and can do as well in it as Phillips Oppenheim has done in his.

He has traveled considerably; spent much of his time in America, where he was married (and, by the way, large as his vogue is in Great Britain, he is another of our authors whose vogue is even larger in America); but for the most part he divides his days of work and leisure now between his home in London and his other home by the sea, in North Devon.

He is fond of the country, and of golf and all kinds of sports; he is an equally keen theater-goer, but gets more enjoyment out of writing stories than out of anything else, and since he draws more inspiration for these from the town than from the country, he is never happier than when he is in town. “The cities for me!” he said to an interviewer. “Half a dozen thoroughfares and squares in London, a handful of restaurants, the people one meets in a single morning, are quite sufficient for the production of more and greater stories than I shall ever write.” He wrote “Mr. Laxworthy’s Adventures” while he was staying at a hotel in Paris; but though Paris and New York attract him, London is his spiritual home and, with its endless streets and motley crowds, is the chief begetter of his sensational romances.

Yet his appearance is less suggestive of the city than of rural life. Ruddy, genial, smiling, with his sturdy figure and bluff manner, it is easier to fancy him, in gaiters, carrying a riding whip, as a typical country squire, than as a brilliant imaginative author creating fictitious villains and preoccupied with dreams of strange crimes and the mysterious doings of lawless and desperate men. Which is to say only that he no more gives himself away to the casual observer than he gives away the secret of any of his plots in the first chapter of the book.

MAY SINCLAIR

In a rash moment, recently, Michael Sadleir committed himself to the retrospective and prophetic assertion that there never had been a great woman novelist and never would be. The first part of that statement is, of course, open to argument; the second cannot be proved. If he had said the greatest novelists, so far, have been men, he would have been on safe ground; for I don’t think even the most politely complaisant master of the ceremonies would suggest that Fielding, Dickens and Thackeray should step back and allow Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot to lead this particular procession of the immortals. Which is not to say that these last are not great, but only that there have been greater.

Turning to living authors, if, so far as this country is concerned (and here we are not concerned with any other), the same order of precedence still obtains, the distance between the men in the first rank and the women in the second has, at least, sensibly diminished. Leaving Hardy apart in his incontestible supremacy, have we any novelists alive who are, on the whole, superior to Wells, Conrad, Bennett, Galsworthy? It is a question Time alone can decide with certainty, but fallible men must needs, meanwhile, make up their separate minds as best they can, and, for my part, I would answer in the negative. But should any one claim that there are four women novelists who, if they do not surpass, are equal in achievement with the four men I have named, I could not begin to deny it until I had read them all over again. So nice, so delicate a matter is not to be settled off-hand. Even such godlike judges as Gosse and Squire might well lay aside their thunder and lightning in face of it and be disposed to temporize.

For, relegating to outer darkness (where many of us would be willing to join them) all whose glory is nothing but a vast popularity and its accessories--think what a galaxy of women novelists there are and what sound and notable work the best of them have done. Of course who have been longest before the public, you have Lucas Malet, Sarah Grand, George Colmore, Mary Cholmondeley, Mary and Jane Findlater, Mrs. W. K. Clifford, Mary E. Mann; of those who began somewhat later, Elinor Mordaunt, Dolf Wyllarde, Violet Hunt, Mrs. Henry Dudeney, M. P. Willcocks, Peggy Webling, Mrs. Dawson Scott, Beatrice Harraden, Mrs. Belloc Lowndes, Phillis Bottome, Rose Macaulay, May Sinclair, Sheila Kaye-Smith; and of a still later day, Viola Meynell, Ethel Sidgwick, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Mary Webb, Clemence Dane, Rebecca West, G. B. Stern, Storm Jameson, M. Leonora Eyles, Stella Benson.... This by no means completes the list, and there is no reason for ending it here except that it is long enough and contains a sufficient number of names for whomsoever will to select from it four whose work may fairly challenge comparison with the greatest that has been done by contemporary novelists of the other sex.

Any adequate survey of the modern English novel would, at all events, have to take into account most of the women writers I have mentioned, but for my present less ambitious occasions I am contented to limit my record to two--May Sinclair and Sheila Kaye-Smith--whom I take to be generally representative of such of them as are still in the full tide of their careers: the latter as having acquaintance with the larger variety of human character and giving breadth, color and fullness of life to her stories out of a wider, robuster interest in the multifarious affairs that absorb so much of the thought and activities of men; the former as being the subtler artist both in psychology and style.

As long ago as 1916, the distinguished American critic, Dr. Lyon Phelps, described Miss Sinclair as “to-day the foremost living writer among English-speaking women.” He rightly dated her rise to this eminence from the publication of “The Divine Fire,” in 1904, and as rightly reminded us that “the British audience for whom it was intended paid no attention to it” till it had been acclaimed by critics and read with enthusiasm by thousands of readers in America. Why Miss Sinclair had to wait eight years for that recognition I cannot explain. She adventured into literature in orthodox fashion by publishing two volumes of verse early in the ’nineties. Her first novel, “Audrey Craven,” appeared in 1896. Then came, with longish intervals between, “Mr. and Mrs. Nevil Tyson” and “Two Sides of a Question.” These three books were touched with something of the grey realism that prevented Gissing from becoming popular with a public which, then more than now, disliked novels of that hue and preferred its fiction to be either elevating or pleasantly entertaining. But if there was no run on these three books at the libraries, they did not pass, unless my memory misleads me, without due meed of praise from the more discriminating reviews; and, as Miss Sinclair has done far finer work since “The Divine Fire,” so I think she did truer, finer work before that in, at least, the second of her three earlier volumes. It were harder to say why the laurels fell upon the fourth than why they missed the second.

Rock Ferry, in Cheshire, was Miss Sinclair’s birthplace, but when fame discovered her she had been living some years at Hampstead, in London, and “The Divine Fire” moves among London literary circles, sketches cleverly various literary types of character and life in boarding-houses round about Bloomsbury, with for central figure a young Cockney poet, a kind of new Keats, who worked as a shop-assistant, wrote exquisite verse, had all the instincts of a gentleman, but was afflicted with a deplorable habit of dropping his aitches. So much is made of this weakness (which was really only as superficially significant as was Stevenson’s inability to spell certain words correctly) that the frequent insistence on it comes by degrees to seem a little finicking, a little irritating. I do not share Dr. Phelp’s fancy that Charlotte Bronte returned to earth to write “The Divine Fire.” Miss Sinclair may have learned things from Charlotte Bronte; she has written ably and searchingly of her in “The Three Brontes”; but influence from that source--even from the Charlotte of “Shirley” days--is scarcely traceable in any of her books and certainly does not, in “The Divine Fire,” dominate her own quietly distinctive personality.

Few authors owe their popularity to their best work, and, at the risk of appearing heretical, I will admit I have always counted “The Divine Fire” as one of Miss Sinclair’s unsuccessful experiments, and “The Helpmate” as another. Both have charm and distinction of style, but they have not the insight, the clearness of vision, that mark her later novels. She is, especially in the second, like an artist drawing without models and erring in small details, getting the anatomy of her characters here and there out of proportion. The cleverness and the interest of “The Helpmate” are undeniable, but its people do not wear flesh about them; they are seriously presented, but one feels they are as outside the world of actual humanity as are the brilliant creations that play so deftly in some of the artificial comedies of the Restoration.

“The Creators” is another tale of literary life, and one in which you are not always sure whether the author wishes you to take her poets and novelists in dead earnest or whether she is secretly laughing at them and touching off their idiosyncrasies with a covert irony, the latter suspicion finding encouragement in the neat realism and hard-cut brilliance with which the whole thing is done. Some have complained that several of her novels are too preoccupied with the mysteries and intimacies of sexual relationship, but you might as reasonably complain that other authors exclude these from their scheme of things and are too preoccupied with other and less vitally human experiences. There is no forbidden tree in the garden of literature; all the world is the artist’s parish and he is justified of any theme so long as he can handle it with such artistic success as Miss Sinclair does in “Kitty Tailleur,” in “The Combined Maze,” and in that tragically poignant short story “The Judgment of Eve.”

Perhaps she reaches the highest expression of her genius in this and other of her short stories (“The Wrackham Memoirs” is a little masterpiece of ironic comedy) and in the shortest of her novels, “The Life and Death of Harriet Frean”--the detached pity, the insight, the minute, illuminating realism with which the whole feeble, self-sacrificing, sentimental little soul of Harriet is revealed, and the perfect technique with which it is all set down, give power and beauty to what in less skilled, less sensitive hands might have been a frail, wistful story of no particular significance.

Miss Sinclair is more erudite than the majority of novelists and, outside the world of fiction, has proved herself a suggestive and original thinker in such philosophical subtleties as “A Defence of Idealism.” She worked, during the early stages of the War, with the Red Cross, recording her experiences in “A Journal of Impressions in Belgium,” and she drew on those experiences for scenes in some of her novels, notably in “Tasker Jevons” and in that finer story of the same period, “The Tree of Heaven.”

Literary characters, the literary life, and sex problems enter pretty largely into Miss Sinclair’s novels, but she has never like so many of the successful settled down to run in a groove; she does not repeat herself. She has not accepted ready-made formulas of art but has been continually reaching out for new ways of advance. She was quick to see virtue in the literary method of James Joyce and Dorothy Richardson and the possibilities inherent in the novel which should look on everything through the consciousness of a single one of its characters, and proclaimed it as the type of novel that would have a future. She may not have convinced us of this when she applied the method in the ejaculatory, minutely detailed “Mary Olivier,” but its maturer development in “Harriet Frean” demonstrated that it was a manner which could be used with supreme artistic effectiveness. All the same, the method is not so new as James Joyce; you may find the beginnings of it, employed less self-consciously, with more reticence and more humor, in the first and last novels of that very old-fashioned novelist William De Morgan.

FRANK SWINNERTON

When his first novel, “The Merry Heart,” was published, in 1909, Frank Swinnerton was still so youthful that I remember persons of my own age had a way of referring to him, with an avuncular air, as “young Swinnerton.” He was twenty-four, but his smooth, boyish face, his unassuming manner, that hovered between a natural vivacity and a sort of shyness, made him look and seem younger than he was. In the fourteen years since then he has done work, as novelist and as critic, that has made him famous on at least two continents, he has grown a moustache and a trim, pointed reddish beard that with the lurking twinkle in his eyes, give him somewhat the appearance of an acute Frenchman (though nobody could, in general, be more thoroughly English), and, so far from being shy, he will now rise on a platform or at a public dinner and make you an admirably serious or witty and humorous address with the completest self-possession.

In fact, he has so matured, in himself and in his knowledge of life, that he makes those who once called him young feel as if they had not kept time with him and he had become their senior. Yet in the best way he is still as young as ever. He has that tonic streak of frivolity in him which is better than any monkey-gland for saving a man from getting old. He can be as serious as most people on occasion, but his joyous gifts for telling a droll anecdote or mimicking the voice, manner and peculiarities of an acquaintance are gifts not so commonly shared. He takes his art seriously, but unless you catch him in the right mood he is not ready to talk seriously about it. Some authors appear to be so in love with their work that they will tell you they are never happier than when they are driving the pen and putting their thoughts on paper, but Frank Swinnerton is not one of those. He protests that he writes slowly; with difficulty; that he does not like work; finds it irksome; that he finds pleasure in thinking out an idea, but once he has thought it out he has a feeling that it ought to be all done with, and puts off shaping it into words as long as he can, and then can only bring himself to do it by fits and starts or with intermittent bursts of energy. But if you took him too literally in this I think you would misunderstand him. It would be truer to say of him, as he has said of Gissing, “Conscientiousness was the note of his artistic character.... The books are full of steady and sincere work. Only when they were written with joy (which does not signify gaiety) they were of original value.” For if his own books were not written with that same joy in creation (which may co-exist with a dislike of the mechanical act of writing) they could not be so intensely alive as they are.

You might almost guess from his novels that Swinnerton was a Londoner, or at least, like Dickens, had been made a naturalized citizen of the “dear, damned, delightful, dirty” town when he was a child. He was born at Wood Green, no such ideally rural suburb as its name suggests, and has lived in London all his life. A severe illness when he was eight years old made going to school out of the question for some time, and continued delicate health and recurring break-downs rendered any education so fragmentary as to be pretty well negligible. But he was all the while, without knowing it, educating himself in ways that were fitting him for the career he was to follow. Books were his teachers, and his literary ambitions took an active form so early that at the age of ten he was running an amateur magazine--one of the kind that years ago (and probably still) used to circulate in manuscript among subscribers who were all contributors and usefully, and sometimes mercilessly, criticized each other’s effort.

He was about fourteen when he turned his hand to real business and became a clerk in the London office of some Glasgow newspaper publishers. After an interval, he worked for a few years in the publishing house of J. M. Dent & Co.; then transferred himself to the firm of Chatto & Windus, whose literary adviser he has since remained, dividing his time between writing books of his own and reading and passing judgment on the books of others, to say nothing of his doings as a reviewer or as the writer for an American magazine of one of the best monthly literary letters that go out of London.

At twenty he wrote his first novel, and it was rejected by every publisher to whom it was offered. Two more novels shared the same discouraging fate, and I believe their author has now destroyed all three. But a happier fate was reserved for his fourth, “The Merry Heart,” which was promptly accepted and published; and if neither in story nor in characterization this buoyant, quietly humorous romance of a London clerk will compare with his maturer fiction, it has a charm and morning freshness of feeling and outlook to atone for what it may lack in finish.

“The Young Idea” marks a great advance in his mastery of the type of novel to which he was particularly devoting himself. This “comedy of environment,” traces with a wonderfully sympathetic understanding the mental and moral development of Hilda Vernon, who is a clerk in a London office. She shares a flat with her boorish brother and delightful younger sister, and disillusioned and disheartened by her everyday experiences of the meanness and squalor of the life around her, longing still to believe “in the beauty of something, in the purity of some idea, or the integrity of some individual,” but giving up hope, she meets with a man, a clerk like herself, who by his clean, courageous personality and strength of character saves her from despair and revives her old faith in humankind.

The novel is remarkable for its insight and subtle analysis of character no less than for the interest of its story; but henceforth in Swinnerton’s work the analysis of character grows and the story itself declines in importance. It is so in “The Casement,” “The Happy Family,” “On the Staircase,” “The Chaste Wife,” “Nocturne,” until with “The Three Lovers,” the story begins to reassert itself. I have seen “The Chaste Wife” described as his one failure, but to me it seems one of the ablest and most poignant of his books and Priscilla Evandine one of the most gracious, finely simple women he has ever drawn. “Shops and Houses” is perhaps less satisfactory, though it follows his favorite method and studies very skillfully and with a shrewd irony the various members of a middle-class family. It is in “September,” a brilliant handling of the marriage of incompatible temperaments, in “The Happy Family,” “The Casement,” “On the Staircase,” and, more than all, in “Nocturne” that Swinnerton’s art is at its surest and highest. There are only five characters in “Nocturne,” and from the time when Jenny Blanchard is riding home in the tram to her going out and returning from a covert visit to her lover in his yacht on the Thames, the action occupies less than six hours. Jenny, her sister Emily, their pitiful, tiresome, amusing old father, and the homely, dull Alf Rylett, who pursues Jenny with unwelcome attentions--they and their whole environment are revealed with a most graphic and intimate realism, and Jenny’s impetuous rebellion against the squalor and narrowness of her lot, the spiritual tragedy of her brief, passionate self-surrender are touched with an emotional power and sense of pity that make a story which easily might have been drab and gross a thing strangely beautiful. Few who read it will wonder that H. G. Wells should have declared it is a book “that will not die. It is perfect, authentic, and alive.”

One of his American critics (and his vogue is larger in America than in this country) has described Swinnerton as “the analyst of lovers.” He is that in most of his books, but he is a good deal more than that. It is loosely said that he is a disciple of Gissing, but so far as I can see he is one of the most original of living novelists and derives less from his predecessors than do most of his contemporaries. He deals with the gray, swarming London streets, and with middle and lower class London life, but that life has changed radically since Gissing’s day, and Swinnerton is true to its modern developments. Moreover, he is no pessimist; he writes with a genial sympathy of the people whom Gissing despised, and there is a prevailing sense of humor in his pages that is never in Gissing’s. His mental attitude, his style, his realistic art are altogether different.

In his book on Gissing (I have not read his book on Stevenson, which they tell me is unorthodox, and gave offence to Stevenson’s admirers) he says that in Gissing’s time realism was regarded as “something very repulsive and unimaginative ... he did not see in realism very much more than laborious technical method. We are all realists today, trying very hard to see without falsity and to reproduce our vision with exactitude. Realism, I think, is no longer associated with the foot-rule and a stupid purposeless reproduction of detail.” It is not so associated in the reticent, imaginative realism he practises himself. I fancy, too, that he is getting back to his earlier manner--to the making of the story as important as the study of psychology. “The Three Lovers,” as I have said, moves in that direction, and if it goes so far as to be occasionally melodramatic there is no falsity in that, for life itself is full of melodrama. He recognized in “The Casement” that love is not the whole of life, that “work of any kind seems to absorb the faculties, and some business men do, I suppose, live for their work”; and recently he has owned to a feeling that in its next development the novel will be a definite and plain tale, that there will be a revival of realistic romance which will pay less attention to men’s intermittent amorous adventures and more to the business and general affairs that preoccupy most of the time of the majority. And the signs are that he is of those who are beginning to travel on those lines.

HUGH WALPOLE

Without reading anything of an author’s works, or anything that was written about them, you might form a practical notion of his value and follow his progress along the path to glory by merely watching the growth of his reviews and the extent to which they climbed up from the obscurer into the more prominent parts of the papers. Unless he breaks the precedents and is a roaring success from the first, and that seldom happens, he will start by receiving short, inconspicuous notices some weeks or months after his book is issued, or be grouped with four or five others in a collective article, on the sardine principle. Perhaps he will never escape out of that limbo; but if he is destined for success, you will presently note that he is promoted to the dignity of long reviews with a special heading to himself; and when you find him topping a column, discussed at considerable length, with a breathless announcement bracketed under the title, “Published Today,” you may be sure that, if you have not yet started to read him, it is time you began.

Hugh Walpole has been through all those stages; he went through more rapidly than most authors do, and has gone beyond them, for he was still three or four years short of forty when a leading London publisher sealed him of the elect by producing a collected edition of his works. So as far as I can recall, he is the youngest novelist who ever had that mark of distinction bestowed upon him. And, by way of corroborating the significance of this, a selection of passages from his books has been published in a special “Hugh Walpole Anthology,” and two years in succession, with “The Secret City” and “The Captives,” he has taken the Tait Black Prize awarded by the University of Edinburgh for the best novel of the year.

His father was vicar of a church at Auckland, New Zealand, in 1884, when Hugh Walpole was born. In 1887 the family removed to New York, where Dr. Walpole had accepted an appointment as Professor in a Theological College; and seven years later they migrated to England, where, in the fulness of time, the son was to become a famous novelist, and the father Bishop of Edinburgh. After completing his education at King’s School, Canterbury, and Emanuel College, Cambridge, Hugh Walpole worked for a year or so as teacher at a boy’s school in the provinces. Then he went to London, settled in cheap lodgings at Chelsea, and reviewed books for the newspapers, to provide for his present needs, and wrote novels with an eye on the future.

He had written his first, “The Wooden Horse,” while he was at Cambridge, but discouraged by the friend to whose judgment he submitted it, laid it aside for about five years, and only offered it for publication and had it accepted in 1909, after he had taken the plunge and entered on that journalistic career in London. It was well enough received and put a little money into his purse, and “Maradick at Forty,” a much maturer work which followed within a year, met with a reception from critics and public that made it clear he had found his vocation; then with “Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill,” a brilliant, somewhat bitter, study of the boys and masters at a dreary, lonely school in Cornwall (reminiscent, no doubt, of his own teaching days) he fairly established himself. That was in 1911, and thence-forward his story is the story of the successive books he wrote, until the War came to interrupt his career.

In the earlier days of the war he worked with the Red Cross on the Russian front; later, he was put in charge of British propaganda at Petrograd, and lived there throughout the chaos of the first Revolution, keeping a full diary of his experiences which has never been published. People he met, things he did and saw while he was serving with the Red Cross went into “The Dark Forest,” the sombrest and one of the most ably written of his books. It came out in 1916, while he was in Petrograd. He made a finely sympathetic study of the soul of the Slav, and pictured Petrograd in the days of the Revolution, in “The Secret City,” which has been described as the truest novel of Russian life ever written by an alien, and was published toward the close of the war, when he was home again and working here in the Ministry of Information.

But these two books, though they rank with his best, are not representative. Hugh Walpole is probably as near to being a typical Englishman as any man can be, and of his dozen other novels, “The Golden Scarecrow” and “Jeremy” show how wonderfully he can enter into the minds of children, and the rest are stories of lower-middle, middle and higher English society in town and country. “The Duchess of Wrexe,” with its vividly realistic drawing of the dreadful old Duchess, enshrines an essentially English _grande dame_ of the old-school that is rapidly becoming extinct; there are no better pictures of English family life than the pictures of the Trenchards in “The Green Mirror,” and a later novel; and you guess that personal observation and experience have gone into “The Captives,” “The Cathedral,” and other of his stories concerned with the clergy and schoolmasters, and into the narrative in “Fortitude” of how Peter Westcott ran away from his Cornish home to face poverty in London and embark on a successful career as a novelist; for though Walpole has stated that he never draws his characters from living models, he owns that living persons suggest themes and characteristics to him.

He reveals an English trait, I think, by his confession of faith in the outlook and methods of Anthony Trollope, the most thoroughly English of all our novelists. It is curious how in writing of present-day fiction I am continually coming up against Trollope. His style is easygoing, undistinguished, often slipshod; he did not pretend to be an artist; rarely troubled much for a plot, never worried about psychology, never heard of psychoanalysis, but wrote simply of people as he saw and knew them, put them into a loose sort of story of things that were happening round about him, and now we are more and more recognizing that in his unassuming tales of the social, political and business life of his period he was a closer observer, a greater realist than were some of his contemporaries who surpassed him in humor, imagination and in literary genius. I come up against him so often that I suspect his quiet influence is growing more potent with our younger writers than that of Dickens, or Thackeray, or Meredith.

Not long ago, both W. L. George and Douglas Goldring announced that they would write no more psychological novels; they had arrived at a conclusion that the novelist’s real business was to tell a plain tale in which his characters should be left to express themselves in action. Compton Mackenzie had preceded them with a declaration that the novelist’s function was not to analyse states of mind and emotions but to dramatize them, that the novelist should before everything else be an entertainer, a teller of tales; and since the war Hugh Walpole has laid down his own views on this subject in a statement that was published by Meredith Starr in his book on “The Future of the Novel.”

“A novel seems to me,” says Walpole, “quite simply a business of telling a story about certain people whom the writer attempts to make as living as possible. Probably behind the lines of these people there would be some philosophy of life either stated definitely or implied in the attitude of the author.... If I were to make any prophesy about the future of the novel, I would say that many of us are growing tired of the thirst for novelty and are turning back with relief to any simple presentment of real people in a real way. A good instance of this is the wonderful recrudescence of Anthony Trollope, who cared nothing about form or technique or style, and had, indeed, the smallest pretensions of himself as a novelist. But he kept his eyes fixed on the characters about whom he was writing and tried to tell the truth about them as he saw them. He was indeed too deeply interested in their adventures to think about anything else. And I believe that it is this kind of simplicity of interest on the part of the narrator to which we will return.”

The Trenchards are a kind of family Trollope might have created had he been living now; “The Cathedral” is a kind of story he might have told, with its realistic melodrama and its clerical atmosphere, but Walpole tells it with a subtler art in the writing and the construction, with a conciseness and charm of style that are outside the range of the earlier novelist. Trollope was fat, ponderous, bewhiskered; Walpole is tall, well-knit, clean-shaven, looks even younger than his years, is nimble-witted and modern-minded; and the two do not differ more in personality than in their manner of telling a tale. The tale, and the truth of it, may be the law for both, but though they row in the same boat, to apply the pun to Douglas Jerrold, it is with very different skulls.

Most of Walpole’s work is done at his cottage by the sea in Cornwall; he retires to that seclusion when a new idea has taken hold upon him, stays there for some months at a stretch, then, with another novel completed, returns to London for recreation, and is a very familiar figure again at all manner of social functions, and one of the cleverest and most popular of after-dinner speakers. “We love him out yonder,” an American assured me; “none of your author-lecturers who come over to us has larger or more delighted audiences.” A cousin of the Earl of Orford, I have seen it said that he indirectly inherits no little of the wit and shrewd worldly wisdom of his distant kinsman Horace Walpole; but the realism and haunting mysticism of “The Dark Forest” have nothing in common with the crudely romantic terrors of “The Castle of Otranto,” and his wit and perspicacity are mitigated by a genial human kindness that is no part of that conjectural inheritance.

HERBERT GEORGE WELLS

H. G. Wells made one of his mistakes--even the wisest of us have to make a few--when, during a controversy with Henry James, he breezily denied that he was an artist and proclaimed himself a journalist. I think he must have said it with his tongue in his cheek; anyhow, it was a mistake to put that opinion into anybody’s mind and those words into anybody’s mouth, for there are always critics and artists, mainly of the lesser breeds, ready enough, without such prompting, to belittle any greatness that gets in their way.

Undoubtedly, Wells is a journalist, and a mightily efficient one; but he is also as subtle and fine an artist as you shall find among our living men of letters, and something of an authentic prophet, to boot. I hope his ideal state will never be realized; it is too dreadfully efficient, too exactly organized, so all mechanical, with human beings clicking in as part of the machinery that, if it ever came to pass, life in it would be reduced to such monotony that I am quite certain he would himself be one of the first to emigrate. You may say the journalist is uppermost in his social and economic gospels, such as “A Modern Utopia” and “New Worlds for Old,” in those wonderful imaginative, inventive scientific romances, “The First Men in the Moon,” “The War of the Worlds,” “The War in the Air,” “Men Like Gods,” and in novels so given over to problems of religion, morals, sex, education and general contemporary life and conduct as are “God the Invisible King,” “Joan and Peter,” “Ann Veronica,” “The Soul of a Bishop,” “The Undying Fire,” and “The Secret Places of the Heart,” yet in all these it could be demonstrated that the artist and the prophet collaborated with the journalist. It has been said that when in those early romances he foresaw the coming of the Great War and the part the aeroplane would play in it he was no prophet but a clever prognosticator who had followed the progress of invention, noted certain tendencies and calculated their developments as one might work out a problem in mathematics, and that a prophet needs no such guides to knowledge but speaks by inspiration and is concerned only with the things of the spirit. However that may be, it is with the things of the spirit that he is mostly preoccupied in at least three of the six later novels I have just mentioned and, to name but one, his vision of “God the Invisible King” is more like prophetic utterance than any we have had in our time.

But he is before all else an artist in the greatest of his novels--in “The Wheels of Chance,” “Love and Mr. Lewisham,” “Kipps,” “The History of Mr. Polly,” “Tono Bungay” and “The New Machiavelli,” in “The Country of the Blind” and nearly all the other short stories in the same volume. That book epitomises Wells’s versatile genius; its stories represent in little nearly every variety of his work. They are by turns fantastic, humorous, supernatural, visionary, grimly terrible and sternly or sympathetically realistic. Personally, I like him best here, as in his larger works, when his stories are all of ordinary men and women living average human lives in the light of common day; but his bizarre studies in psychology, his short tales of the eerie, nightmare order and those that grow out of surprising scientific discoveries are fashioned with an art as sure and as strong and as finished. If the author of “The Country of the Blind” and “Kipps” is not an artist but a journalist the sooner our other writers of fiction take to journalism the better, both for them and for us.

He is one of those exceptional authors who are in themselves exactly what they seem to be in their books. Unaffected, alive with energy, sociable, genially talkative, it is an amusing object lesson to see him seated at a public dinner next to some distinguished but orthodox philosopher of less learning than himself, younger but looking older, with none of his imaginary power, his far-seeing vision, his originality and suggestiveness as a thinker, who is yet clothed in the gravity, reticence, aloofness that are supposed to denote superior wisdom. There is nothing so impressive in Wells’s manner, his quick gestures, his high, not unpleasant voice; but his keen gray eyes, with a humorous twinkle in the depths of them, look out from under a broad, massive forehead that prevents his appearance from being commonplace. Sidney Dark has called him “The Superman-in-the-Street.” He is a great deal more than that, but he owes his deep knowledge of humanity, his broad sympathy with its sufferings and aspirations to the fact that he did at the outset share the homely satisfactions, the limitations and disadvantages that are the lot of the man-in-the-street, grew wise in those experiences, and carried the memory of them with him into the study. A far more profitable proceeding than to arrive in the study ignorant and learn of the outer world from hearsay or from what others have written.

Socialist, scientist, practical idealist, immensely interested in men and affairs, insatiably curious about all life, its origins, implications, possibilities, restlessly delving into the history and mystery of the past for truths that would light his guesses at the darker mystery of the future, it was natural for Wells to put his latest interests into each new book that he wrote, whether it was a matter-of-fact philosophical treatise or romantic or realistic fiction. If this habit of using as material for his work whatever was readiest to hand led to his scandalizing friends and acquaintance by putting even them, under thin disguises, into certain of his novels, he has, at least, put himself into them also and no little of his autobiography. You may trace the growth of his mind, the development of his ideas through his successive books. He has been accused of inconsistency by those who fancied his opinion had changed because it had matured, that he had acquired a new root when he had merely grown new branches. All his life, as somebody once said, he has been thus educating himself in the public eye, but he was educating himself strenuously and in face of many difficulties long before the eye of the public became aware of him.