ARTHUR STUART MENTETH HUTCHINSON
Arthur Stuart Menteth Hutchinson
Success is good for people, when they do not get too much of it too soon. Failure is even better for them, when they do not get more than enough of it for too many years. Hardship, difficulty, failure—these knock the nonsense out of a man and teach him his art or his business; there is something lacking from the character and work of one who has never known them. Many authors recover at last from their failures, but an instant and early success is generally fatal; it makes them take themselves too seriously and their work not seriously enough; their vogue dwindles, in consequence, and the publishers who began to run after them begin to run away from them. There is little more difference between a too triumphant beginning and an unending failure than between a drought and a deluge.
The two extremes are equally devastating, and A. S. M. Hutchinson is among the luckier ones who have been destined to a middle course. He has not won his pearl without diving for it; but he has not had to dive and come up empty-handed.
Those who imagine, as some do, that, with “If Winter Comes,” he simply came, and saw, and conquered, imagine a vain thing. He had come three times before that, and had, moreover, toiled at the oar as a very miscellaneous journalist, a writer of articles and short stories that editors too frequently rejected. If he never exactly lived in Grub Street, he sojourned for a few years in a turning out of it.
He had no literary or journalistic ancestry, and was originally dedicated to another profession, but he did not “drift into journalism”—that not being his way; he walked into it deliberately, having made up his mind to go there. His father is a General in the Indian Army, and A. S. M. was born in India, in 1880. But his grandfather was a doctor of medicine, and at an early age Hutchinson was settled in London, beginning a career of his own as a Medical student. To this day, he has a quiet, kindly, sympathetic bearing that would have served him as an excellent bedside manner, if he had taken his M. D. and put up a brass plate. But he is one of the shyest, most retiring of men; you cannot associate him with any sort of brass; and even while he was trying a ’prentice hand in medicine and surgery at St. Thomas’s Hospital a private ambition was drawing him in another direction.
“I always intended to earn my living with my pen,” he told me, some years ago. “I was writing then in my leisure, sending out all kinds of MSS. and getting most of them back, and at length I took the plunge when I had about one short story accepted by a magazine, two articles by Punch and some verses by Scraps. I did not know a soul who had the remotest connection with literary work, but I chanced it.”
And threw physic to the dogs. He did not limit himself to any working hours, but by writing hard all day contrived to pick up a regular five shillings a week from Scraps for comic verse, and, augmenting this from a precarious sale of articles and tales to various publications, compiled a weekly income of about one pound sterling. He had done this for three months or so, when a letter came from Pearson’s accepting a story and asking for more; and he has related how this sent him crazy all day with excitement. A few days later he was asked to call at the office and undertake a small, special job, and, one thing leading to another, was presently engaged on the staff at £2 10s. a week. By the time he had gained experience as assistant editor of the Royal Magazine and been made co-editor of the Rapid Review, he felt the hour had come for another plunge.
A friend of those days describes him as “a slight, almost boyish young man of middle-height, who gazed at you with intense concentration through the powerful lenses of his glasses.” This still describes him, if you touch in an elusive twinkle of genial humor about the mouth and eyes, and add that his slightness, despite something of a stoop, gives him an appearance of being actually tall. Already he had started on his first novel, “Once Aboard the Lugger,” and wanted to cut adrift from too much editing and escape into other fields. He resigned from Pearson’s and hearing that the Daily Graphic was looking for a leader-note writer, posted specimens, and secured the appointment as a stand-by. In 1907 he was sub-editing that paper, and edited it from 1912 to 1916.
Meanwhile, “Once Aboard the Lugger” being finished, he offered it to one publisher who declined it, because “humor was not in his line,” and to another who published it, in 1908; and it scored what counts for a considerable success, if you do not compare its sales with those of his fourth and fifth books. That out of hand, he commenced “The Happy Warrior,” but when it was done, was dissatisfied with it, and being, as he confesses, “an appallingly, vilely conscientious” worker, he did it all over again. 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. It was as successful as its predecessors, and I am not sure that they are wrong who hold that it is the best of all Hutchinson’s work; but the War overshadowed it and left it no chance of anticipating the phenomenal popularity that was waiting for his later books.
For nine years he published no more. He was serving as a lieutenant of the Royal Engineers, attached to the Canadian forces, and, after the peace, went as a Captain of the R. E., with the Army of Occupation, into Germany. Before he was demobilized he had planned his fourth novel, and when he could, at length, return to civilian life, he decided not to hamper himself again with journalism but to stake his prospects on his new book, and in 1921 “If Winter Comes” more than amply justified him of his decision. Not more than one or two novels within my remembrance have leaped into such instant and enormous popularity. For a few weeks it was praised by the reviews, but there was no particular stirring of the waters till a “boom” broke out in America. The noise of it soon woke us over here, and the story got rapidly into its stride; Hutchinson suddenly found himself famous as a best-seller of half a million copies in America and half as many in his own country. The furore it created had scarcely showed signs of subsiding when “This Freedom” followed in its wake and brewed another storm. A storm of mingled eulogy and censure; for the critics this time were largely hostile. The story handled the problem of woman’s emancipation, and Hutchinson stood for the old ideals of femininity, the sanctities and traditional duties of womanhood; he believed that a mother has positive and inalienable responsibilities, and set himself to demonstrate that she could not put them by and arrogate to herself a share of what is known as man’s work in the world without neglecting her children, losing their affection, and bringing tragic disaster on them and on her husband. He was accused of exaggeration; of being out of sympathy with the modern spirit; but if, instead of giving the novel this general application, you take it, as a work of imagination should be taken—as a story of what happened when one woman strove to break away from conventions and be herself at all risks—it is a powerful and poignantly suggestive narrative and one that may well be temperamentally true of such a woman and of such a family.
Here, as in his other books, Hutchinson is so in earnest and realizes his characters so intensely, that he becomes, as it were, this character and that in succession, slips involuntarily into writing from their standpoints as if he personally felt the wrong, hope, pain or passion each experienced, and this misleads some of his critics into taking for mannerisms what are nothing but his intimate realization of his people and the outcome of his complete sincerity. He is so closely interested in them himself that he cannot play the showman and stand apart exhibiting his puppets; to him they are not puppets but have burgeoned and become living realities and their emotions are his no less than theirs.
On the stage “If Winter Comes” did not capture the public so completely as it did in the book, but it ran well in London and the provinces and here and in America still keeps its place on tour. It has got on to the films, of course and “This Freedom” is following in its footsteps.
Hutchinson took his first successes with a tranquillity that seemed like indifference, and his later and larger triumphs and the denunciations he has endured, have I think, moved him as little. He has aimed at doing his own work in his own way, and his popularity is an accident; he is not the sort of man that finds success, but the sort of man that success finds.