ALFRED EDWARD WOODLEY MASON
Alfred Edward Woodley Mason
It is interesting, and a little saddening, to look through a list of living novelists and pick out the names of those who were well in the first flight of popularity ten or fifteen years ago but have since fallen back steadily, year after year, into the second, third and fourth flights, until now they are almost absorbed into the multitudinous rearward ranks where the unpopular and the mediocre rub shoulders with survivors who still ruffle it obscurely on the strength of a past reputation. For it is easier to become popular than to remain so. 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. A juggler, when he has exhausted his little repertoire and finds the plate coming back to him almost empty, can roll up his scrap of carpet, walk around the corner, and in another street collect a different crowd to whom all his old conjurings are new; but no writer can attract a fresh public for each fresh book he produces—his only way is to keep sure hold on his first readers and add to them, and this he cannot do unless he matures in his books as he does, or should do, in himself. His public is all the while growing older, and the pathos and humor and general outlook on life that satisfy a young man or a young woman will rarely make the same appeal to them when they arrive at maturity. The humor that tickles you to-day will scarcely move you to a smile when you have lived, enjoyed, worked and suffered for another decade or so in such a world as this; the pathos that once melted you to pleasant tears jars upon you when you re-read it now and seems but shallow, youthful sentimentality; what you had used to think a dashingly romantic incident or character bores you now and seems tinsel unreality. You have been growing up, and if the growth of your favorite novelist does not at least keep pace with your own, you naturally pass on and leave him behind. Had “David Copperfield” been simply another “Oliver Twist,” Dickens would have been but the novelist for an age, and that not the middle-age.
Largely, I think, because he went on with a broadening vision of life, a ripening knowledge of the world, a deepening sympathy with human character, the books of A. E. W. Mason have retained for him the popularity he won about a quarter of a century ago with “The Courtship of Morrice Buckler.” Read “Morrice Buckler” again, and then “The Four Feathers” and “The Broken Road,” and you will recognize how he grew up with his readers. You can still take delight in “Morrice Buckler,” but the later books yield you a fuller enjoyment—they have put off the careless glamor and reckless gallantries of gay romance, and have put on the soberer, more enduring garb of more familiar humanity, that does not wear its romance upon its sleeve, but more poignantly, more wonderfully, at the troubled heart of it.
Born in 1865, Mason is an old Dulwich College boy, and took his B. A. degree at Oxford. At Oxford, too, he showed a strong predilection for the drama, and was one of that University’s notable amateur actors. Later, he took to the stage in earnest, and toured the provinces with the Benson Company and the Compton Comedy Company, and played in London as one of the soldiers in Shaw’s “Arms and the Man.” But the ambition that called him on to the stage presently called him off, and in 1895 he commenced his career as a novelist.
It was not a very promising beginning. His first novel, “A Romance of Wastdale,” was well enough received by the critics, but the public did not rise to it, and Mason seems to have suppressed it with unnecessary rigor. Competent judges have assured me it was a story of more than ordinary distinction and merited a better fate. However, its author had not long to wait for his due meed. A year after, in 1896, “The Courtship of Morrice Buckler” was published, and its publication gave Mason his place forthwith as an extraordinarily popular novelist. It was the novel of the day; it was read and talked about everywhere, ran through I don’t know how many thousands, and still goes as a safe seller into any series of popular reprints.
“The Philanderers” appeared in 1897, and in quick succession came “Laurence Clavering,” “Parson Kelley” (written in collaboration with Andrew Lang), “Miranda of the Balcony,” “The Watchers,” “Clementina,” that has all the dash and headlong movement of Dumas and a grace and pathos that Dumas had not, “The Four Feathers,” “The Truants,” “Running Water,” “The Broken Road,” “At the Villa Rose,” “The Turnstile,” and “The Summons.”
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. He blends the appearance of a writer of romance with the restless energy of a man of action, and in 1906, his superabundant energies seeking a new outlet or a new ambition prompting him, he turned his attention to politics, threw for Parliamentary honors, and was elected M. P. for Coventry. He signalized his advent in the House with a notable maiden speech; did not speak there often but proved himself shrewd and eloquent in debate, and if he had not escaped we might have been the richer by a sagacious, sympathetic Cabinet Minister and one brilliant novelist the poorer. Fortunately, however, the fascinations of the Mother of Parliaments could not subdue him, and after some three years under her shadow he did not offer himself for election again.
Fortunately, because the air of the House of Commons is not healthful breathing for poets or novelists. For them it is a soporific and suffocating air. You may note that when a writer of imaginative literature has sat in the House for more than a limited period his spirit puts on flesh, dulness settles on his faculties and communicates itself to his pen. What plays did Sheridan write after he took his seat there? And who shall say that Lytton might not have written with fewer capital letters and less of the manner of the big bow-wow if he had never ventured into that fatal atmosphere? Mason’s sojourn in the House had no influence on his fiction, unless it was his stay there that turned his thoughts toward India and the grave problem of the education of its native Princes in England and so resulted in his writing one of the most powerful of his books, “The Broken Road”; in which case he has brought more good out of it than any novelist who ever went into it, except Disraeli, and Disraeli was really a politician in his romances and a romancist in his politics, so he can hardly be counted.
I could never imagine the author of “Miranda of the Balcony” sitting out interminable debates, or trooping with his party into the voting lobby. He must have felt much more at home in uniform when he became in the first days of the war a Captain of the Manchester Regiment, and later, a Major on the General Staff. If he wrote no more romance for a time (his only book through those years was a collection of short stories, “The Four Corners of the World,” in 1917) it was because he was too busy living it. For with all its squalors and horrors and agonies, the Great War is beginning, in remembrance, to take on the color of romance by comparison with the tameness and monotony of ordinary everyday life.
You would gather from his stories that Mason was much given to boating, traveling and mountaineering, for a love of the open air blows through nearly all of them. The Alps and the enormous shadow of them dominate “Running Water”; and the skies and landscapes and peoples of present-day Egypt, Italy, India fill the pages of “The Four Feathers,” “The Broken Road,” and “At the Villa Rose.” Latterly, too, his new novels have become few and far between and he has given himself again, more and more, to the stage. He never quite severed himself from it. Soon after the novel appeared, he dramatized “Morrice Buckler,” in collaboration with Miss Isabel Bateman, and it was very successfully produced at the Grand, Islington, and had a long run in the provinces; 1901 saw a dramatic version of “Miranda of the Balcony” staged in New York; in 1909 he produced two comedies, not founded on his books “Colonel Smith” and “Marjorie Strode”; and in 1911 the most successful of all his dramatic ventures, “The Witness for the Defence.”
Since then, we have had “Open Windows,” and dramatized versions of “At the Villa Rose” and “Running Water,” and one hears rumors of other plays that he has in preparation. The indications are that in future he will appear more often on the boards than between them, and nobody need regret this if he only offers us as much pleasure in the stalls and the pit as we have had from him in our arm-chairs at home.