Arthur St. John Adcock

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 is a chronicle play, but attempts none of the beauty and harmony of poetry that clothes the chronicle plays of Shakespeare in magnificence, nor is it alive with incident as his, nor even knitted up into a continuing story. It is a chronicle play in the barest meaning of the term; the dialogue is pieced out, where possible, with Lincoln’s recorded sayings; each scene presents an event in his career; there are more committee and cabinet meetings than exciting episodes, far more talk than action throughout. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The author who is reared in an artistic atmosphere, free from monetary embarrassments, with social influence enough to smooth his road and open doors to him, seldom acquires any profound knowledge of life or develops any remarkable quality. But Bennett had none of these disadvantages. Nor was he an infant phenomenon, rushing into print before he was out of his teens; he took his time, and lived awhile before he began to write about life, and did not adopt literature as a means of livelihood until he had sensibly made up his mind what he wanted to do and that he could do it. ”

“ There are plenty of signs of the potential dramatist in the pre-war essays—in their easy and natural use of dialogue, and their deft, vivid handling of incidents: and there is a bite of realism in their genial satire and burlesque irony, which foreshadows the keener, riper irony and satire of “Bladys.” For instance, there is the sketch of “The Newspaper Proprietor,” that “lord of journalism,” Hector Strong, who, to oblige a lady, saves her play from failure and forces it into a raging success by the adroitness with which he booms it in his numerous newspapers. ”

“ From the peace and fantasy of that beginning in the Ulster hills, from an unsympathetic mother and his two quaint, lovable uncles, Shane, at his own ardent desire, goes to knock about the world as a seafarer, and, always with the simplicity and idealism of his boyhood to lead and mislead him, is by-and-by tricked into marrying the cold southern Irish girl who dies after a year or so, and, his love for her having died before, he can feel no grief but only a strange dumb wonder. ”

“ Not a few authors have been cradled into literature by the Law, Medicine and the Army, but as a literary incubator no profession can vie with the Church. If it has produced no poet of the highest rank, it gave us Donne, Herrick, Herbert, Crashaw, Young, Crabbe, and a multitude of lesser note, and if it has yielded no greater novelists than Sterne and Kingsley, it has fostered a vast number that have, in their day, made up in popularity for what they lacked in genius. ”

“ Moreau,” came the most charmingly humorous, realistic-idyllic of his novels, “The Wheels of Chance.”
No man with a serious purpose should, in this country, retain a sense of humor. If nature has afflicted him with one, he should do his best to have it removed; it is more inimical to his well-being than an appendix. But Wells seems to be incurable, and that he has carelessly broken through all manner of prejudices to almost universal acceptance, in spite of his handicap of humor, is in itself a testimony to the power and quality of his work. ”

“ I fancy the public are not particularly interested in the artist; they prefer to read about people more like themselves—people with whom and whose ways they are more familiar. Or if they are to be told of the artist, they want him to be a hero—they want to be told how he struggled through thrilling trials and difficulties to happiness and prosperity at last—they don’t want to be saddened by a tale of his failure ”

“ 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. ”