Arthur St. John Adcock

“ Even through those three weeks when they were retreating before the enemy, the whole spirit of the British troops was the spirit of men who are fighting to win. There is no hint of doubt or despondency in any of their letters home. They talk lightly of their hardest, most terrible experiences; they greet the unseen with a cheer; you hear of them cracking jokes, boyishly guying each other, singing songs as they march and as they lie in the trenches with shells bursting and shots screaming close over their heads. ”

“ One can think of no other present-day author who might have handled successfully so outre a theme; yet the whole conception is as natural to de la Mare’s peculiar genius as it would be alien to that of any of his contemporaries, and he fashions his story of the little lady, mature and sane in mind and perfect in body, but so small that she could stand in the palm of an average hand, into a novel, a fable, a romance—call it what you will—of rare charm and interest. ”

“ When the full story of the Great War comes, at last, to be written, no part of it will thrill our children or our children's children more, or make them prouder of their race, than the chapters which shall tell of how men of England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, and India fought stubbornly side by side, and side by side with our gallant French allies, on those hills and plains of Gallipoli. ”

“ For me, three of the loveliest and most strangely touching sights of London are the stars shining very high in the blue and very quietly when you look up at them from the roaring depths of a crowded, naphtha-flaring, poverty-stricken market street; a sunrise brightening over the Thames below London Bridge, while the barges are still asleep with the gleam of [Pg 25] their lamps showing pale in the dawn; and the blurred lights and ghostly buildings of a long city road that is clothed in mystery and transfigured by a brooding, dream-haunted fog. ”

“ You cannot imagine how complete the Germans are in the matter of rapid transport. Large automobiles, such as the railway companies have for towns round Harrogate and Scarborough, built like char-à-bancs, carry the soldiers in batches of fifty, so that they are as fresh as paint when they get to the front. But in point of numbers I think one of our side is a fair match for four of the enemy. I hope that the British public are beginning to understand what this war means. The German is not a toy terrier, but a bloodhound absolutely thirsty for blood. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I am more famed in heaven for my works than I could well conceive. In my brain are studies and chambers filled with books and pictures of old, which I wrote and painted in ages of eternity before my mortal life; and these works are the delight and study of archangels. Why then should I be anxious about the riches and fame of mortality? The Lord our Father will do for us and with us according to His divine will, for our good.
“You, O dear Flaxman, are a sublime archangel—my friend and companion from eternity. In the divine bosom is our dwelling-place. ”

“ The land lay almost invisible in the black depths of the night; no sound came out to them, and no light glimmered anywhere. Silently and shrouded in the shadows the warships took up their appointed positions in readiness, at the right moment, to cover the landing with a hail of shell-fire; the steam pinnaces, with their strings of boats loaded to the gunwale with eager troops, glided past them towards the coast; and after a brief interval a flotilla of destroyers crept on their track, packed with more men to be rushed ashore as soon as the covering parties had obtained a footing. ”

“ The same passion for truth at all costs underlies his stark, uncompromising realism and his gospel of disillusion, his vision of men as puppets working out a destiny they cannot control. If he has, therefore, little faith in humanity, he has infinite compassion for it, and infinite pardon. The irony of his stories is the irony he finds in life itself, and as true to human experience as are the humor and the pathos of them. ”

“ They are not out for territory, they are not out for conquest; they are the vanguard of the new democracy, and they are out in the place that is theirs, in the forefront of the battle, fighting and dying for the highest ideals of the human race, for the freedom and natural rights of our common humanity. The German junkerdom, the Prussian militarism and out-of-date war-lust that is abhorrent to us, is ten times more abhorrent to them, for in their ideas of freedom and equal human brotherhood they have outstripped us. ”

“ On all hands I heard all too much to show that the battle of Mons was a desperate affair. Two regiments suffered badly, but there was no marked disposition on the part of any of the soldiers with whom I chatted to enlarge upon the happenings of last week-end. Rather would they talk more freely of the awful atrocities perpetrated by the Germans.
“Too awful for words,” one said. “Their treatment of women will remain as a scandal as long as the world lasts. We shall never forget; we shall never forgive. ”

“ And to the thousands of us who know the people and the world that he created he is still ubiquitous in London here, even though he has his place for ever, [Pg 327] as Swinburne says, among the stars and suns that we behold not:
“Where stars and suns that we behold not burn,
Higher even than here, though highest was here thy place,
Love sees thy spirit laugh and speak and shine
With Shakespeare and the soft bright soul of Sterne,
And Fielding’s kindliest might and Goldsmith’s grace;
Scarce one more loved or worthier love than thine.” ”

“ The magic of his genius has enriched the hundred and forty square miles of Wessex, which stretches from the Bristol Channel across Somerset, Devon, Dorset, Wilts and Hampshire to the English Channel, with imaginary associations that are as living and abiding, as inevitably part of it now, as are the facts of its authentic history.
A grim, stoical philosophy of life is implicit alike in Hardy’s poetry and stories, giving a strange consistency to all he has written, so that his books are joined each to each by a religion of nature that is in itself a natural piety. ”

“ When we are all at peace again–when the Great War is a thing of yesterday and tales of its thousand fights have passed into the history and folk-lore of the nations that took part in it–then, I think, perhaps Germany may be glad to forget about the hundreds of women and children slaughtered by her runaway warships in bombarding defenceless English coast towns without warning, by her midnight Zeppelins with bombs that were dropped on peaceful villages and unfortified towns, by the torpedoes fired by her dishonoured submarines into helpless passenger steamers ”

“ I had no sooner got bandaged up when a chap came galloping up and said the Germans were in sight. I was the second last man to leave the hospital, and ten minutes later it was blown up. You cannot imagine what things were like. The women and children of England can think themselves lucky, for the poor women here had to walk from village to village, young children in their arms. It touched my heart to see the sight. The Germans did not use rifles, but big guns, against our infantry’s rifles. They are most brutal, killing all wounded in a most horrible fashion. ”

“ No need to hunt after topics when you are writing about London; they come to you. The air is full of them. The very names of the streets are cabalistic words. Once you know London, myriads of great spirits may be called from the vasty deep by sight or sound of such names as Fleet Street, Strand, Whitehall, Drury Lane, The Temple, Newgate Street, Aldersgate, Lombard Street, Cloth Fair, Paternoster Row, Holborn, Bishopsgate, and a hundred others. ”

“ No author can take the public by surprise a second time. A novel that has some freshness of fable or style, though it be in some ways crude and in no way great, may do the trick once; but if an author follows this with a succession of books in a too-similar vein, showing no ripening of his mind, no growth of knowledge or invention, nothing but a sprightly repetition of that same morning freshness, which was well enough when the day was new, his public begins to yawn and go away. ”

“ The surest way to end war is to strip it of its glamour, treat it as the blackguardly crime it is, and punish the criminals. The German savages have not even stopped short at murder on the field of battle, and I for one shall lose some faith in the democracies of the world if, in due season, von Bissing does not take his stand in the dock of an international police-court and undergo his trial and sentence for the assassination of Edith Cavell, as any common butcher would for any common murder ”

“ We could hear the shells crashing against the side of the ship or shrieking overhead as they passed harmlessly into the water, and we knew that at any moment one might strike us in a vital part, and send us below never to come up again. It is ten times harder on the men whose duty is in the engine-room than for those on deck taking part in the fighting, for they at least have the excitement of the fight, and if the ship is struck they have more than a sporting chance of escape. ”

“ Dear Sculptor of Eternity,—We are safe arrived at our cottage, which is more beautiful than I thought it, and more convenient.... Mr. Hayley received us with his usual brotherly affection. I have begun to work. Felpham is a sweet place for study, because it is more spiritual than London. Heaven opens here on all sides her golden gates; her windows are not obstructed by vapours; voices of celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard, and their forms more distinctly seen; and my cottage is also a shadow of their houses. ”

“ I mention the circumstance by way of showing to what a pass some of our critics and poets have come.
If Noyes has any theories of poetry, I gather they are that the poet is essentially one endowed with the gift of song; that all the great poets, from Homer downward, have been great singers; and that when he utters himself in meter and rhyme he is but putting himself in tune with the infinite order of the universe—with the rhythm of the tides, of the seasons, the recurring chime of day and night, the harmonious movement of the stars in their orbits. ”

“ It is our duty to make it clear, in this enlightened age, that no State is above morality; that there are natural, human laws which cannot be broken with impunity, and are not to be set aside by any the most self-important State that ever reared itself under heaven. This feeling is growing in intensity in the hearts and minds of Britain and her Allies, and nowhere is it held with a more passionate conviction than among the great democratic peoples of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You cannot stir the ground of London anywhere but straightway it flowers into romance. Read the inscriptions on the crumbling tombs of our early merchant princes and adventurers in some of the old City churches, and it glimmers upon you that if ever the history of London’s commercial rise and progress gets adequately written it will read like a series of stories out of the Arabian Nights. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Between the attacks there were endless bomb-throwing, tempests of shells from big guns and howitzers, sniping, withering outbursts of machine gun fire, subtle sapping and mining, in which now one side, then the other successfully blew up trenches, and, dashing for the breach, made grim onslaughts that had to be held off and beaten and cleared out of the way before the shattered defences could be repaired. ”

“ Davies’s shop is kept nowadays by a Covent Garden salesman. Instead of being lined with books, it is filled with baskets of fruit and sacks of potatoes, and the parlour wall and that glass-panelled parlour door are thrown down, and parlour and shop are all one. But the upper part of the house remains practically unaltered, and with a little imagining you can restore the lower to what it was when these walls held the gruff rumbling of the Doctor’s voice, and looked down on the humiliation of Boswell under the roguish eyes of Davies and his pretty wife. ”

“ His vivid, dominating personality seems to have made itself felt among his young contemporaries there as it has since made itself felt in the larger worlds of literature and politics; though in those larger worlds his recognition and his achievements have never, so far, been quite commensurate with his extraordinary abilities or the tradition of power that has gathered about his name. In literature, high as he stands, his fame is less than that of men who have not a tithe of his capacity, and in politics he remains a voice crying in the wilderness, a leader with no effective following. ”

“ If it were otherwise–if we were the cravens that a few of our noisy, irresponsible journalists would make us out to be–do you imagine that the manhood of those new countries, sons of the great men who were our fathers also, would have risen so spontaneously to save from destruction the Empire of a generation so unworthy of their past, and the civilisation for which we and our Allies stand? ”

“ As a rule, the Londoner born has a sneaking regard for his city and cannot be long away from it without feeling its intangible human hands plucking at his heart and its multitudinous voices calling him back, but in spite of the fact that he is a true-blue Cockney, born, in 1864, at Belsize Park, on the skirts of Hampstead, Merrick tells you he does not love London. It is the most comfortable of cities, he admits, but he finds it uninspiring and can work better and more easily when he is almost anywhere away from it—especially when he is in Paris. ”

“ No longer daring to press an attack home, the Turks devoted much of their energy to persistent firing from caves and sheltering holes on the hill-sides, to crawling out into the scrub and, lying low in the plentiful cover of that uneven country, sniping the Australians and New Zealanders in their shelter trenches. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Perhaps what is true concerning fathers is not so true about mothers. Nobody now reads the once popular novels of Mrs. Frances Trollope, mother of the greater Anthony; Gilbert Frankau, to come at once to our own times, looks like outshining that clever novelist, his mother, “Frank Danby”; Shaw has gone far beyond his mother’s fame as an operatic star; the novels of W. B. Maxwell surpass those of his mother, M. E. Braddon, in literary art, and though he is not so enormously popular in his day as she was in hers, he is widely read now when she is scarcely read at all. ”

“ Beginning in the decadent world of the late ’nineties and the dawn of the century, the story comes down, or goes up, into the miraculously new world that the war made, and glances optimistically into the future. Most of its characters are drawn from the higher classes of society, and the love romance of Sonia and David O’Rane, the most charming and glowingly human hero McKenna has ever given us, has the social and political history of the period for its setting. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ While other scholars are toiling laboriously to write the record of a single nation, or a single reign, Wells sandwiches between novel and novel that stupendous survey, “The Outline of History,” which is not only a scholarly and vastly comprehensive chronicle of the evolution of man and the progress of humanity the world over from the dawn of time to the day before yesterday, but is, as Macaulay rightly said all history ought to be, as easy and fascinating reading as any work of fiction. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They are journalists, novelists, poets, essayists, critics, dramatists, writers of books for children and editors of all manner of books. They have no settled reputation, the public does not know where to have them; they are all sorts of things to all sorts of readers and nothing in particular to any. They win some vague popularity, perhaps, and an income, but not fame. Fame comes to the man who concentrates on the one kind of work for which he has special gifts, puts all his heart and all his skill into the doing of that. ”

“ It has been said that he has affinities with Anatole France. He has none of Anatole’s daring irreverencies; nor his passionate revolt against the existing order of society, nor his power in social satire; but he has the sure touch that is at once light and scholarly, an abounding sense of fantasy, and a tolerant, worldly-wise philosophy that he edges with an irony often as delicately shrewd though never so bitter, so devastating as that of the great French master.
But we are going ahead too fast. When Locke quitted Cambridge he was still a long way from the beginning of his literary career. ”

“ From a training vessel, he went to sea in the merchant service, knocked about the world on sailing-ships and has put some of his old shipmates into his ballads and some of them and some of their yarns into “A Mainsail Haul” and his first novel, “Captain Margaret.” Quitting the sea, he went tramping in America, picking up a livelihood by casual work on farms, and after a while settled down to serve behind a bar in New York, escaping from the noise and squalor and drudgery of it at night to solace himself with the “Morte d’Arthur” after he had gone up to his garret to bed. ”

“ But Mason was never one of the authors who are all authors; he is not of the sedentary breed who are contented to study life in books or from their study windows; the noise and business of it have always appealed to him irresistibly; he has roamed the world rubbing shoulders with all sorts and conditions of humanity everywhere, and his later books mirror much of his personal experience and the countries and people he has known. ”

“ 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. ”