COMPTON MACKENZIE
Compton Mackenzie
From a literary and dramatic point of view, Compton Mackenzie may almost be said to have been born in the purple. Even a quite modest minor prophet who had stood by his cradle at West Hartlepool, in January, 1883, might have ventured to predict a future for him. For his father was the well-known actor Edward Compton, author of several plays and founder of the Compton Comedy Company, and his aunt was “Leah” Bateman, one of the most famous Lady Macbeth’s who ever walked the stage; his uncle C. G. Compton was a novelist of parts; and he numbers among his distant relations the poet and critic John Addington Symonds and that brilliant and, nowadays, too little appreciated novelist and playwright “George Paston” (Miss E. M. Symonds). Nor did he absorb all the gifts of the family, for that distinguished actress Miss Fay Compton is his sister.
From St. Paul’s School, Mackenzie went to Oxford in the early years of this century, and if he did not break any scholarship records at Magdalen, he edited “The Oxford Point of View,” which he helped to found, and became business manager of the Oxford Union Dramatic Society, and on occasion showed himself an actor of distinction. After leaving Oxford he married and withdrew into the wilds of Cornwall, where he seems to have written industriously for some years with no immediate results, beyond the publication of a book of verse in 1907, and a play, “The Gentleman in Grey,” which was produced at the Lyceum Theater, Edinburgh, but did not stay there long enough to matter. Also in his Cornish retirement he wrote his first novel, “The Passionate Elopement,” but it took him longer to get it published than to write it. When it had been up to London and back again three or four times it began to look so worthless and he grew so indifferent toward it that he would not waste more money than necessary on it but let it go wandering unregistered up and down and take its chance of being lost in the post. Seven publishers had rejected it before, in a happy hour, he sent it to Martin Secker, who was then about setting up in business, and when he published it, early in 1911, it sold so well that within three weeks it had to be reprinted. The story is of the eighteenth century; the scene is laid at Curtain Wells, a gay and fashionable spa, where Beau Ripple reigned supreme as Beau Nash used to reign at Bath. The characters are as gracefully artificial as if they had walked out of an eighteenth century pastoral—the pretty blue-eyed Phyllida, the chivalrous Charles Lovely, who loves her in vain, and the dashing, rascally card-sharper, Vernon, who wins her and carries her off in the end—they live gracefully, and their tale is all told, and they smile and sigh and mince and bow their ways through it, with the charm and fragile daintiness that belongs to old minuets and Dresden china shepherds and shepherdesses. Mackenzie has never done another such light and exquisite caprice though he had every encouragement to repeat the experiment, for “The Passionate Elopement” pleased the public as well as the critics and had run through four editions by the end of the year.
Just before or immediately after this success, he came from his Cornish fastness up to London, settled in Westminster, and turned his hand to potting plays, writing lyrics and reviews for Pelissier, whose “Follies” were then at the height of their popularity. But in spite of these distracting employments he found time for a good deal of more important work during the brief period that Westminster’s staid, old-world North street numbered him among its tenants. There he wrote his second novel, “Carnival,” and had prepared a dramatic version of it before it was published in 1912; he collected a second volume of his verse, “Kensington Rhymes” (since when he has done no other) and it appeared in the same year; and he had begun on the writing of “Sinister Street,” but had to lay it aside to cross the water and superintend the production of “Carnival” at a New York theater.
He never set up his tent again in London; partly, I believe, because its atmosphere had affected his health unfavorably; partly, I suspect, because the social interruptions to which a town-dweller is subject interfered too much with his working arrangements. Anyhow, he transported himself to the Gulf of Naples and discovered an ideal retreat in a delightful villa on the Isle of Capri. In these latter days, as if the love of solitude had grown upon him, he has acquired one of the smaller of the Channel Islands and made himself lord of Herm, and now divides his year between that remote and rocky islet and his villa at Capri.
At Capri he finished “Sinister Street,” one of the longest of modern novels and much the longest of his own. Some of De Morgan’s were nearly as long, and some by Dickens and Thackeray were longer, but a book of two hundred and fifty thousand words is apt to daunt the degenerate reader of to-day so “Sinister Street” was published in two volumes with half a year’s interval between, and nobody was daunted. No book of Mackenzie’s had a more enthusiastic reception. His readers are uncertain whether this or “Guy and Pauline” is his highest, most artistic achievement, and I am with those who give first place to “Sinister Street.” If there has ever been a more revealing study of the heart and mind and every-day life of a boy than that of Michael Fane, I have never read it. He and his sister Stella, the Carthew family and the miscellaneous characters gathered about them in their early years are drawn with such sympathy and insight, such a sense of actuality, that not a few have professed to identify living originals from whom certain of them were modeled.
The War had broken out between the appearance of “Sinister Street” and “Guy and Pauline” and Mackenzie had gone on the Dardanelles Expedition as a Lieutenant (shortly to be promoted to a captaincy) in the Royal Marines. He was invalided out of this business and presently made successively, Military Control Officer at Athens, and Director of an Intelligence Department at Syria, and in due course received various honors for his War services. There is little or no trace of the War in his subsequent books, unless you ascribe to its disturbing influences the facts that neither “The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett” nor “Sylvia and Michael,” admirable and vivid picturesque stories as they are, will compare, either in subtlety of characterization or in grace and strength of style, with the best of his pre-war work. Neither “Rich Relatives” nor “Poor Relations” marked much of a recovery, and “The Vanity Girl,” in which he uses the war for the purpose of getting rid of a bad character, is not saved by occasional flashes of narrative power and brilliant descriptive passages from being an essay in picturesque and rather cheap melodrama. But with “The Altar Steps” in 1922, he returned to higher levels—his hand was never more cunning in the portrayal of character, and there is enough in this story of the growth of Mark Lidderdale’s soul and his progress toward the religious life to indicate that the author of “Sinister Street” and “Guy and Pauline” is not yet to be put aside with those whose future is behind them.
I have seen it said that two or three of Mackenzie’s novels are largely autobiographical. Certainly he puts into them scenes and places that were associated with his youth and early manhood, life at Oxford, Cornwall, the theater and theatrical people, and goes on handling, developing three or four of his characters in successive novels, bringing them into this, that and the other story as if he were giving them their proper place in episodes that had really happened. Sylvia Scarlett reappears in “The Vanity Girl”; Maurice Avery of “Carnival” flits through “Sinister Street,” and Guy Hazlewood, who is at Oxford in that novel, is the hero of “Guy and Pauline,” in which also, Michael Fane, the principal figure in “Sinister Street,” plays a very minor part. Thackeray, Trollope and others practised the same device, and there is no reliable significance in it, except that it helps the reader, and probably the author himself, to an easier sense of the reality of such persons. Something of Mackenzie’s childhood has gone, no doubt, into his “Kensington Rhymes”; and he, like Michael Fane, spent his boyhood at Kensington, attended a big public school in London, and, like Michael, went to Oxford, and may have given Michael throughout some of his own experiences. You may fancy resemblances between his withdrawing into Cornwall and publishing a book of verse, and Guy Hazlewood going, as his father has it, “to bury yourself in a remote village where, having saddled yourself with the responsibilities of a house, you announce your intention of living by poetry!” There may be personal touches in this, and in Guy’s effort to find a publisher for his book of poems, but who shall say where autobiography ends and fiction begins? Naturally, every novelist works with his experience as a potter works with clay, but he usually transfigures that raw material and moulds it into new shapes of his own invention. The truest, most living characters in fiction are those that draw their vitality from the author’s self. No doubt if we knew enough about him, we could find a good deal of Shakespeare in his most masterly characterizations.
There is a lot of solemn and pretentious nonsense talked in the name of psychology. It is possible to make shrewd guesses, but no man can positively analyse the mind of another.
When we think we are making a marvelous study of another’s motives, we are studying the motives that would have been ours in his circumstances. Professor Freud, with his doctrine of psychoanalysis, has turned the head and choked the narrative vein of many an otherwise capable novelist who has felt a spurious sense of superiority in trying to graft the art of medicine on the art of fiction.
There is truer psychology in Mackenzie’s novels than in the precious novels of most of our professed psychologists. He has done bigger work than theirs with a more modest conception of the novelist’s function. “I confess that I like a book to be readable,” he once wrote; “it seems to me that a capacity for entertaining a certain number of people is the chief justification for writing novels.” He deprecates this as “a low-browed ambition,” but it was high enough for the great novelists of the past, and the pseudo-medical methods of Freudism do not look like producing any that are greater.