ALAN ALEXANDER MILNE
Alan Alexander Milne
The tradition that the Scot has no humor still lingers among old-fashioned people who don’t like changes, but of recent years Barrie, Neil Munro (as Hugh Foulis), J. J. Bell, Ian Hay, A. A. Milne, and some others have shaken it to such an extent that only the incurably obstinate now attempt to maintain it.
But while the humor of the others smack finely of the north of the Tweed, the humor of Milne seems to indicate that his spiritual home is a much more frivolous place. There is something Irish or English about its airy gaiety, its blithe, amusing flippancy. Dr. Johnson once spoke slightingly about the art of carving faces on cherry-stones, but if he had tried his hand at that work he would have realized that to accomplish it successfully one must be born with a gift that is as rare as the more impressive gift for writing serious prose. Our ancestors, as a whole, realized that, and would exclaim with admiration at the marvelous facility of Swift who could write you an essay off-hand on anything or nothing. I remember how, when I was a small boy, a bookish old gentleman informed me of this in his library and went on to tell with bated breath the familiar yarn of how, to test the Dean’s limitless capacity, a lady challenged him to write an essay on a broomstick, and he at once sat down and did it. But we should think little of that nowadays. Milne would not need so much as a broomstick; he could do it on one of the bristles.
So could E. V. Lucas or Chesterton, or Belloc. But in the matter of slightness of theme and the capacity for writing charmingly and humorously on next to nothing at all Milne has closer affinities with Lucas; they not only can do it but make a habit of doing it. Both write light verse as well as light prose; both contributed to Punch (Lucas contributes to it still), and as Anstey and many another, in various forms, had practiced the same volatile literature in those pages, it seems possible that the influence of Punch may have been more or less responsible for developing likewise in them a delightfully neat and sprightly vein of humor.
However that may be, Milne had begun to exercise his characteristic style while he was at Cambridge, where he was made editor of the Granta. He came to London in 1903, and settled down, first in Temple Chambers, afterwards at Chelsea (where he still resides, but not in his original two rooms) to make a living as a free-lance author and journalist. His earnings through the first two years were far below the income-tax level, but in the third year he was appointed assistant-editor of Punch, to which he had already been contributing largely, and the world in general began to be aware of him from seeing the initials A. A. M. appearing in that periodical with significant regularity. It not only saw them, but looked out for them, and was soon betraying curiosity in public places as to the identity of the person who owned them; an infallible sign that a writer is giving the public what it wants as well as what it ought to want.
Between 1910 and 1914 he collected his Punch contributions into three volumes, “The Day’s Play,” “The Holiday Round,” and “Once a Week,” but was no sooner so established as an entertaining and popular essayist than the War intervened to take him to fresh woods and pastures that were new but not desirable. It is impossible to unfold the record of any of our younger and few of our older contemporary authors without coming up against the War. Milne promptly withdrew from Punch, joined the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, and was sent out to France. Here, in odds and ends of leisure from military occupations, he found opportunity and the moods for writing that quaint, whimsical story “Once on a Time,” which was published in 1917; and then, too, he made a first experiment as a dramatist with his shrewdly, cleverly satirical comedy of “Wurzel-Flummery.” There is a new depth and maturity under the humor of these things, and he said that in writing the story he for the first time wrote in earnest.
By-and-by, after a breakdown which had put him in hospital for a while, when he was sent to act as signaling instructor at a fort on Portsdown Hill, he had an impulse to continue playwriting, and would spend a long day at the fort teaching his class how to signal, then go home to the cottage where he and his wife were living, a couple of miles away, and dictate to her, until he had produced in succession, “Belinda,” “The Boy Comes Home” and “The Lucky One.” These were in due course presented on the London stage, and if they had no success comparable with his later plays, they were successful enough before the footlights, and in the book into which he gathered them in 1919, to demonstrate that a new dramatist had arisen, and one to be reckoned with.
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. It may seem ridiculous, and Milne may have invented it all, but take away a few farcial details from his narrative, and there are those behind the scenes who will assure you that this deed was actually done. As for “A Breath of Life,” in which the actor who plays the young hero falls really in love with the actress who plays the heroine and on a passionate impulse finishes the play triumphantly at the end of the third act to such thunders of applause from the audience that the fourth is cut away for good—ask any dramatist and he will tell you that his own plays suffered worse than that at the hands of their producers until he became successful and important enough to insist on the piece being acted exactly as it was written.
Always there was this germ of truth in Milne’s earlier trifles and flippancies. “A Trunk Call” is by no means such an irresponsible farce as some may think it. Here, the dainty Celia buys a fancy knocker and puts it on the door of her husband’s study, in order that she may give him warning at any time before she comes to interrupt him. He wants her to try it forthwith, but she demurs:
“‘Not now. I’ll try later on, when you aren’t expecting it. Besides, you must begin your work. Good-bye. Work hard.’ She pushed me in and shut the door.
“I began to work.
“I work best on the sofa; I think most clearly in what appears to the hasty observer to be an attitude of rest. But I am not sure that Celia really understands this yet. Accordingly, when a knock comes at the door I jump to my feet, ruffle my hair, and stride up and down the room with one hand on my brow. ‘Come in,’ I call impatiently, and Celia finds me absolutely in the throes. If there should chance to be a second knock later on, I make a sprint for the writing-desk, seize pen and paper, upset the ink or not as it happens, and present to any one coming in at the door the most thoroughly engrossed back in London.
“But that was in the good old days of knuckle-knocking. On this particular morning I had hardly written more than a couple of thousand words—I mean I had hardly got the cushions at the back of my head comfortably settled when Celia came in.
“‘Well?’ she said eagerly.
“I struggled out of the sofa.
“‘What is it?’ I asked sternly.
“‘Did you hear it all right?’
“‘I didn’t hear anything.’
“‘Oh!’ she said in great disappointment. ‘But perhaps you were asleep,’ she went on hopefully.
“‘Certainly not. I was working.’
“‘Did I interrupt you?’
“‘You did rather; but it doesn’t matter.’
“‘Oh, well, I won’t do it again—unless I really have to. Goodbye, and good luck.’”
The knocker may be an effort of the imagination, otherwise this reads as if it were taken from life. It may even be true about Milne himself, for he has said in print that his work comes easy to him; and if you show the complete sketch to the wife of any literary man of your acquaintance the chances are she will wonder how Milne got to know so much about her husband. But his trim figure and alert, clean-shaven face, apart from the quantity of work he has placed to his credit, belie any suggestion that since he finds his work easy he takes his ease, except when it is finished. He is restlessly alive, and gives you the impression of being something of an out-door man, a golfer probably, perhaps a cricketer, though you need not believe he looks forward to the opening of the cricket season quite so enthusiastically as he suggests in “The First Game”—
“It is the day that I watch for yearly,
Never before has it come so late;
But now I’ve only a month—no, merely
A couple of fortnights left to wait;
And then (to make the matter plain)
I hold—at last!—a bat again:
Dear Hobbs! the weeks this summer—think! the weeks I’ve lived in vain.”
When he was demobilized, his old post of assistant-editor of Punch was waiting for him, but he had formed other plans for his future during the war, and arranged not to go back. He did not just then intend to abandon the light essay, and in “If I may” (1920) his hand for it is as cunning as ever; but the theater had got into his blood, his ambition was taking higher flights, and “Mr. Pim Passes By” (he wrote it also into a novel as quaintly humorous and sentimental as the play) and the mordantly ironic “Truth About Bladys” soared at once and almost simultaneously to such heights of popularity that if the dramatist has not presently absorbed the essayist altogether, it won’t be for want of an excellent excuse.