CHAPTER XXII

MY NOVELIST FRIENDS: PART II

W. B. MAXWELL I hardly knew in those days, though I had met him years before, and, in the long and elaborate review which I wrote of his _Vivien_, had hailed him as a novelist who would rise to the very head of his craft.

Maxwell, of course, had heredity and atmosphere in his favour. His mother, the famous Miss Braddon, had written novels which took the world by storm long before he was born—it is more than half a century ago since an astonishing girl founded a new school of fiction with _Lady Audley’s Secret_ and _Aurora Floyd_—and he and his wife live with his mother in a stately old Queen Anne mansion in the Sheen Road at Richmond. Maxwell, who looks like a youthful judge—he is clean-shaven, and has a calm, judicial face, with an illuminating smile—has a judge’s gift of scrutiny in reviewing life in his books. He is ruthlessly just with his characters; they cannot deceive him. His sentences are not too severe. But whatever their sentences are, the criminals leave the court moral wrecks. He is obliged to mete out just sentences, but he is ruthless in his summing up. His last novel, _The Devil’s Garden_, is an excellent example of his great impeachments of wrong. His books have the Até—the Nemesis—tracking down their victims as ruthlessly as the Œdipus is tracked down in the tragedies of ancient Greece.

Another writer whose novels I admire immensely, and I have had to review a good many of them, is H. B. Marriott Watson, the New Zealander. He has a large public, and, in my opinion, ought to have a far larger one. As a writer of novels of adventure, I think he has no superior among the novelists of the day. For his adventures are most romantic, and his writing is so good—so delicate where it ought to be delicate, so strong where it ought to be strong. Added to which, he is scrupulous about getting his local colour and “properties” correct. In appearance he is a typical colonist—a huge man, with a dark, resolute face. When he first became prominent in the literary world, you might have thought that he was captain of the famous “All Black” football team, rather than a writer. Apart from his success as a novelist, he has been a power in journalism.

Charles Garvice, whose novels have a greater circulation than those of any other living writer, is now my neighbour. We live exactly opposite each other, with the breadth of Richmond Green between, with its old lawns, and tall elms planted by dead kings. He lives in one of the Maids of Honour houses, built a couple of centuries ago, abutting on the wall of the Old Palace of the Tudors, in which Queen Elizabeth died, and those Maids of Honour served. It has some beautiful eighteenth-century painted panelling. I look out on its mellow brickwork, pointed with white stone, and the fantastic Georgian ironwork of its gate, half-buried in a tangle of swaying roses, from my study windows, just as I look out on the crenellated wall and old perpendicular archway of King Henry VII’s palace on the other side of the clipped yew and the great stone-pine.

When I first knew Garvice, twenty years ago, he was farming his own lands in Devonshire, and just beginning to find his public on this side, though he had long enjoyed an enormous public in America. He used to pay frequent visits to the Authors’ Club, where, since he had rooms in Whitehall Court, he was more of a habitué than many men who lived in London, and became extremely popular for his genuine good-fellowship. A few years ago, when the Club was rather languishing, he became chairman of the committee which undertook its reconstruction, and though he had in the interval become one of the most popular and hard-worked novelists of the day, lavished his time and energies with happy results, so that now it has even more members than the Athenæum, and far more than any other literary club. He is the central figure at its great dinners.

He wrote a delightful book about farming—not a literary exercise, but as the outcome of many years’ practical work. Garvice, undoubtedly, has the largest sale of any novelist in the world. I have seen the figures. Last year’s sales alone amounted to 1,750,000 copies—books of all prices. His romantic love-stories are conspicuous not only for their thrilling plots—Garvice is a born story-writer—but for their freedom from all deleterious influence. There is nothing goody-goody about them; they are just wholesome, straight-forward romances—an almost lost art. He is only the length of the Palace away from the river, where he keeps a sailing-boat, and he is fond of riding in Richmond Park. He needs recreations, for he is a very hard worker. Every morning he goes up to his office in London, where he spends the business day in dictating his novels, and he gives many of his evenings up to the Authors’ Club, which, under his chairmanship, and the tireless secretaryship of Algernon Rose, has now a membership of 1,600. Garvice is a great reader of his brother-authors’ books.

Feeling that the public would like to know the secret of one of the most remarkable literary successes on record—more than six millions of his books have been sold—one night when I had run in to see him, I got him to tell me his story over a pipe—he smokes hard all the time he dictates his stories, and cannot go on when his pipe goes out till it is refilled. This is what he told me.

“My first novel, though I had written a number of short stories before this, was about the last of the three-deckers. When it was revised and re-written quite recently, for a cheap edition, I understood fully why, in its first form, it was not the brilliant success I, a youth of nineteen, expected it to be. Quite early in my literary career I made the acquaintance, which grew into a warm friendship, of the proprietor of a weekly fiction periodical which had attained an enormous circulation. He was a clever editor, with a keen nose for good stuff; and he would buy nothing else, for he had hit upon the excellent idea that, if you gave the masses good stuff at a low price, they would jump at it. They jumped. I wrote the leading story for this paper for many years, and was well paid. The serials attracted the attention of George Munro, the famous American publisher, who was running a similar paper in New York. He arranged for me to send advance sheets for it, and he afterwards published the serial in cheap book form. They had an enormous—to me a fabulous—sale, and are still selling.

“Munro started a sevenpenny magazine, asking me to edit the English part of it, and to write a serial and a series of short stories. I worked nearly day and night, and was so fully occupied and contented that, absurd as it may sound, I never gave a thought to publishing the serials in book form here in England; notwithstanding that the books were so popular in America that one of George Munro’s rivals hit upon the extremely ingenious idea of waiting until half a novel of mine was published in serial form, getting some one else to finish it, and issuing it in volume form before I had finished the story. Of course, this was before the International Copyright Act. Blessings on its name!

“One day, my friend, that brilliant journalist, Robert Harborough Sherard, while sitting at my writing-desk, took up the American edition of _Just a Girl_. When I told him it was not published in volume form in England, he asked my permission to take it away and try to place it. He took it to Mr. Coulson Kernahan, who recommended it to the publisher for whom he was reading. It came out, and, to my surprise and delight, proved a success. The review that, more than any other, helped me, was a very kind one in the _Queen_.[9] Then, again, the books were so fortunate as to win the approval of Dr. (now Sir) William Robertson Nicoll; and when he likes a book he does not fail to say so.

Footnote 9:

Written by myself.—D. S.

“The rest of my literary career, if the phrase may be permitted me, is public property. I may add that, in my early days, I sold the copyrights of my stories. Later on, I got them back by the simple expedient of buying the periodical, lock, stock and barrel, in which they had appeared; and I am glad to be able to state that I hold now the copyright of everything I have written. Some of the books have been dramatised, and others are on their way to the stage; indeed, at an early age, I made a dramatic essay with a little play in two acts, which was produced at the Royalty Theatre, and obtained a success chiefly, if not entirely, owing to the splendid cast; amongst others, I was fortunate enough to have such actors as Richard Mansfield, who afterwards became so famous in America, that sterling player, Charles Denny, and Fred Everill, of the Haymarket. It would be a poor play such men as these could not pull through. Encouraged by my first effort, I might have directed all my attention to the stage, but fiction had got a firm hold upon me; it was safe and regular—and there you are! But I am making a new start, and ‘you never can tell,’ as Mr. Shaw says.

“The story of my lecturing is soon told. I gave a lecture, consisting of recitals linked together by biographical notes, for a Bideford debating society. An agent who happened to hear it, thought it good enough for the general public, and for some years past I have, during the winter months, appeared on the lecture platform. It is a change of work, which is good; and it is lucrative, which is also good, if not better.

“I have just been elected President of the Institute of Lecturers. The duties of this office will fill in my spare time—when I get it.”

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (“Q”), another admirable writer, not only of novels, but of poems and essays, I have seen hardly at all since he left Oxford, where, sometime after me, he occupied my old panelled set of rooms at Trinity (of which he was a Scholar like myself, and A. E. W. Mason an Exhibitioner some years later), attracted probably by the fact that they had been Cardinal Newman’s rooms when he was an undergraduate. Couch was a splendid example of the _mens sana in corpore sano_. He was stroke of the College boat, as well as the most brilliant Trinity man of his time intellectually, and he looked it. He had a lithe, active figure, and a humorous, self-reliant face, with light eyes—the type which takes so much beating. For a brief time he had a very successful journalistic career in London, but he quickly decided that it was not worth while to live in London unless you were rich enough to do all the nice things which came along, and returned to his native Cornwall to devote himself to literature. In Cornwall he not only wrote delightful books, but went in for sailing, and became a power in local Liberal politics, and was knighted. Recently he has become Professor of Poetry in the University of Cambridge—a post he was admirably fitted to fill, since the mantle of Francis Turner Palgrave fell upon him as an anthologist. His _Oxford Book of Verse_ is simply delightful.

Couch had from the first been a stylist. When congratulated early in his career on the exquisite writing of a short story, he deprecated its importance, because it was too conscious an imitation of De Maupassant. “My great difficulty is not to imitate my models,” he said. In the light of this saying, it is interesting to recall the fact that in 1897 he was chosen for the high honour of completing Robert Louis Stevenson’s _St. Ives_, which he did with absolute success. Stevenson must have been one of the models he was trying not to imitate. There is no reason why he should, for no one could want a more delightful style than his own. _Hetty Wesley_ is an exquisite book.

Sir Henry Rider Haggard I ought to have mentioned long before this, since he has been one of the recognised heads of the novelists’ profession for many years. Haggard had the good fortune for an imaginative man to go out to South Africa when he and the South African question were young. He was on the staff of Sir Theophilus Shepstone, the Official Commissioner in the Transvaal, and actually assisted in hoisting the British Flag over the Republic in 1887. His first book, published in 1882, was about South African politics, but in 1884 he began as a novelist, with _Dawn_, and in 1886 he achieved world-wide fame with _King Solomon’s Mines_, one of the finest romances ever written. _She_ came out a year later, and confirmed the success. He has written many other famous novels. For years he was always quoted as the most successful novelist—but that was before the days of “booming,” a practice against which Haggard has steadily set his face. He told his agent that he would not ever write to order, unless he was driven to it—that the bare fact of having signed a contract to produce a given thing by a given time paralysed his pen. Besides writing novels of increasing seriousness, Haggard, like Doyle, has proved himself a patriot, with the deepest sense of his responsibilities as a citizen. He has twice tried to get into Parliament, with a view to legislation for restoring agriculture in England, and he has given his time lavishly, both to the investigation of the agricultural question and to serving on various Commissions, as well as to writing books on various subjects connected with the land. He came back from South Africa and went to live in his native Norfolk many years ago, but in spite of this he has done his duty in attending literary gatherings. His active figure, and close-trimmed beard, give him the cut of a naval officer.

His brother, Major Arthur Haggard, who has seen much service in Africa, and written well-known books, has done patriotic service for his country in another way by organising the Union Jack Club and the Veterans’ Club for soldiers and sailors.

Another visitor to Addison Mansions in latter days was William Romaine Paterson, better known as “Benjamin Swift”—a man of extraordinary ability, whom I should not be surprised to see in a Radical Cabinet. The moment you meet him you are aware that you are in the presence of an intellect of the first rank, and an uncompromising personality. A deep reader and thinker, he has the gift of clear expression and glittering sarcasm. I have seldom heard a more effective speaker. He has already written a number of remarkable novels. He is a born leader, and he looks it, with his commanding figure, his face, of the eagle type, and his burning eye.

I ought to have mentioned Morley Roberts before, because he was a man of whom I saw much in those days. He was often at our at-homes, and nearly always in the Authors’ Club when I went there. He was the greatest personality there in those days—not only as an author whose books every one in the Club admired, long before the public took them at their true value, but for his wide and deep knowledge, and for the adventures he had successfully concluded with his splendid physique. We always felt that Morley Roberts was essentially a man, that the strength of his books was due to the daring life he had led. I have very seldom heard Morley Roberts make a speech, but I have seen him hold a whole room of brilliant men from his easy-chair beside the fire, while he unfolded some curious piece of knowledge with surprising power and interestingness. It was he who said that books of adventure are generally written by sedentary cowards for sedentary cowards.

I met Morley Roberts first at a garden-party given by Rosamund Marriott Watson, the poetess, whose husband I have for many years considered one of the finest novelists of the day. She introduced us to each other because we had both been to Australia, and I rather think that she accused him as well as myself of having wooed the Muse of Poetry (though there was no Muse of Poetry among the immortal nine). After that he came a good many times to our house, though he never was fond of at-homes, and I don’t remember his ever coming back after his long illness. A very strong man, six feet high, or thereabouts, with a commanding face, and flashing dark eyes, he was always one of the most conspicuous figures in the room. He had been a sailor before the mast, a navvy out west, a hand on a ranch, and I don’t know what all in his adventurous youth.

It seems incredible to think that Somerset Maugham, who is barely forty, should have been a long time coming into his own, yet ten years elapsed between the publication of _Liza of Lambeth_ and the production of _Lady Frederick_, and in the interval he had written those delightful books _The Merry-go-Round_ and _The Bishop’s Apron_. He came to us with a mutual friend in the year 1897, when he had just written _Liza_. I remember, when I read it, venturing, as an old reviewer, to prophesy that such a writer must leap into fame forthwith. I was sure of it when I read _The Merry-go-Round_, but the public did not quite answer to my expectations. I have always heard that _Liza of Lambeth_ was inspired by the gruesome sights and sounds which were his environment when he was at St. Thomas’ Hospital, that he lodged in some street where, from his back windows, he could see the she-hooligans hitting each other with their babies. He is, a rare thing for an author, an admirable dancer.

Another man born in the same year, 1874, who came to his own through plays, and was even longer in doing it, is Edward Knoblauch, the author of _Kismet_, and joint author of _Milestones_. Knoblauch, who is an American, born in New York, and educated at Harvard, and his sister, came to us with Lena Ashwell a good many years ago. Knoblauch was Lena’s reader at the Kingsway, and collaborated with the Askews in _The Shulamite_, in which she created such a splendid character. He had already adapted _The Partikler Pet_ for Cyril Maude. But he was writing plays for years before he had a single one accepted, and it was not until 1911 that he sprang into general fame with _Kismet_, quickly followed by _Milestones_.

Louis Napoleon Parker, another old member of the Authors’ Club, is a very old friend of mine. I think it was Adrian Ross who introduced us, when he first came up from Sherborne School, where he was appointed Director of Music upon leaving the Royal Academy of Music. Strangely enough, one who has composed such delightful music is extremely deaf. For many years, of course, he has been one of our leading and most prolific playwrights, and only a short while ago he composed the incidental music for his drama, _Drake_. Parker, who was born in France, and might almost pass for a Frenchman, has been the translator of some of the most celebrated French plays which have been “Englished” for our stage—_Chanticleer_, _L’Aiglon_ and _Cyrano de Bergerac_ among them. He has had yet another sphere of activity in producing the series of splendid masques which are associated with his name. He is, indeed, practically the inventor of the masque in its present form, such as the Sherborne pageant, the Warwick pageant and the York pageant.