WILLIAM BABINGTON MAXWELL
William Babington Maxwell
It has passed into a sort of proverb that famous men never have sons who equal them in fame. There are, of course, exceptions. Benjamin Disraeli has eclipsed that delightful bookworm, his father Isaac, who wrote the “Curiosities of Literature”; Henry James, having a father who was a distinguished novelist and theologian, used to describe himself on his earlier books as “Henry James, Junr.” but the use of “Junr.” as a means of identifying him has long ceased to be necessary. There are others; but half a dozen swallows do not make a summer, and a dozen such instances would not falsify the proverb.
Perhaps what is true concerning fathers is not so true about mothers. Nobody now reads the once popular novels of Mrs. Frances Trollope, mother of the greater Anthony; Gilbert Frankau, to come at once to our own times, looks like outshining that clever novelist, his mother, “Frank Danby”; Shaw has gone far beyond his mother’s fame as an operatic star; the novels of W. B. Maxwell surpass those of his mother, M. E. Braddon, in literary art, and though he is not so enormously popular in his day as she was in hers, he is widely read now when she is scarcely read at all.
He began to write while she was still writing; her vogue had declined, but remained considerable, and she was still writing as well as ever—in fact, in her two or three latest books, notably in “The Green Curtain,” I think she was writing better than ever. There were disadvantages for a young novelist, no doubt, in having a popular novelist for his mother; but there were also advantages. His father was the publisher, John Maxwell, whose business developed into that of Messrs. Hurst & Blackett. He grew up in a literary atmosphere; the very men who could open doors for a beginner, and make his way easier, were friends of the family; moreover, he had a critic on the hearth who could prompt his first steps and check his ’prentice errors with knowledge drawn from a long and very practical experience.
“Most of the knowledge I possess of how to write,” Maxwell once told Clive Holland, “and, indeed, the fact that I commenced to write at all, I owe to my mother. She was never too busy, or too immersed in her work to discuss my literary ambitions, or work of my own. She did not always know the way any story of mine was going, for I wished neither for it to be an imitation of hers nor in any way to trade upon her own great and worldwide reputation.” He confessed, however, to a frequent feeling that however difficult he might find it to master his art, he had an even more difficult task in the attempt to follow her and necessarily challenge comparison with her work and her unqualified success. “I remember,” he added, “the son of a great man saying in my hearing that the fact that he was so situated had, in a measure, spoiled his life. ‘People expect too much,’ he remarked pathetically, ‘and sometimes get so little. I might have been quite a success if I had not been overshadowed by my great father.’”
But he broke
“his birth’s invidious bar”
and without grasping either his mother’s skirts or those of happy chance (unless Grant Richards was wearing them on the occasion I will presently mention), he became a novelist in his own way and up built his own reputation. Considering the influences that must have been round him in his childhood, taking it that he inherited his literary gift from his mother and that she, as he tells us, taught his young idea how to shoot, if his stories had been more or less of the M. E. Braddon pattern, it would not have been surprising. But, unlike those, his novels are much less concerned with sensational happenings or plot of any kind than with intricacies of character and the mysteries of human psychology. Even from the beginning he struck out in independent line for himself, and his first book, published in 1901, when he was thirty-five, was (to give it its full title), “The Countess of Maybury: Being the Intimate Conversations of the Right Honorable the Countess of Maybury. Collected with Sedulous Care and Respectful Admiration by W. B. Maxwell,” a series of satirical, light comedy dialogues of high society which preceded the “Dolly Dialogues” by a year or two but did not, as they did, set a fashion. His second book, two years later, was a volume of short stories called “Fabulous Fancies,” and this revealed him as a realist—one not without idealism and a sensitive feeling for the romance of life, but a realist none the less, and that quality of realism predominates in all the novels and stories he has written since.
He was late in making this beginning, when he was over thirty, especially considering how his environment favored his development, but he was not hastened by the spur of necessity; he had found a sufficient outlet for his energies in a healthy love of hunting and outdoor sport, and traveled a good deal. Also he has said that he only turned to literature after he had failed in other directions. What those directions were I do not know, except that he was bitten with a young ambition to be a painter and studied on and off for some years at certain art schools in London. On the whole, and despite his ancestry, he thinks himself he might never have taken seriously to the writing of fiction if he had not happened to meet that enterprising publisher Grant Richards who, with characteristic courage and fore-sight, commissioned him to write him a novel, “an arresting novel,” of modern life. Not many publishers would have risked giving such a commission to an almost untried author, but the result amply justified the publisher’s prescience, and with “The Ragged Messenger,” in 1904, Maxwell scored the first and one of the biggest of his successes. Its success was the more remarkable in that it was a story of tragedy, and there is a tradition that the public shrinks from such, but it was its reality, the understanding and poignant truth to human experience with which its characters were drawn and their lives laid bare that caught the reader’s sympathy and gave the book its power of appeal.
“Vivian” was a readable successor to this, but “The Guarded Flame” (1906) rose to an altogether higher level. So far as my judgment goes, “The Guarded Flame” shares with the brilliant satirical story of the middle-class, self-reliant “Mrs. Thompson” and that grim and powerful study in degeneracy, “In Cotton Wool,” the distinction of representing the highest reach of Maxwell’s art, with not far below them “The Devil’s Garden” and “The Mirror and the Lamp.”
“The Devil’s Garden,” which was published in the year before the War burst upon us, brought Maxwell into trouble with our unofficial censorship and was banned by the libraries. I remember it as a vivid, uncompromising story of a self-made man whose life and the lives of his associates do not smack of the innocence of Arcadia and are portrayed with a conscientious exactitude, but the morality of the novel was implicit, and why any one should object when an artist faithfully pictures the unpleasant facts of life, why we should be shocked to find in a novel things that we go on tolerating in the world around us is one of those little eccentricities of the moral sense in man that I have left off trying to understand. The only effect of the ban was that “The Devil’s Garden” was more talked of and sold better than any other of his novels, and it is this perhaps that has led many to accept it as the best he has done; but I would rank it at most with his second best.
For five years after that event, from September 1914 till the end of the war, he turned his back on literature and served as subaltern and as Captain in the Royal Fusiliers. He says that during the war he felt that when peace came we should witness the uprising of “a new and vigorous school of romantic novelists”; that a world so long oppressed “by hideous realities must crave for the realm of pure imagination,” for gaiety, joyousness, for something more akin to the charm and happiness of the fairy-tale.
But when the war was over, he confesses, he soon found he was mistaken. No such complete change entered even into his own stories. A note of idealism is sounded in “The Mirror and the Lamp,” in “A Man and his Lesson” and “Spinster of this Parish,” but so it was in the books he wrote before the war, and otherwise, as in those, he still handles, with a subtle mastery of atmosphere and detail, the dark problems of character and temperament, the ugly but real facts of human experience that are still the spiritual inheritance and material environment of real men and women.
He did, in one of his post-war novels (“A Little More”), experiment in what was for him rather a new vein. It was the story of a once well-to-do family that was reduced to squalid poverty, and the father and one daughter faced their altered circumstances with more resolution than resignation, though the father had more courage than competence. I think Maxwell was trying his hand at the kind of grown-up fairy-tale toward which a reaction from the grim realities we had just come through inclined him; but the sentiment softened at times into sentimentality, his scenes and characters of poorer life were not so convincing as they are in some of his other novels. The spirit of the time had too thoroughly subdued him; but he made a quick recovery and with “Spinster of this Parish” triumphantly found himself again and proved that his hand had not lost its earlier cunning.