The dawn of the present century brought with it what critics, who like to have such matters neat and orderly, delight to call a romantic revival in fiction. As a matter of fact, it also brought with it a revival of realism, and both had really started before the century began, and have continued to advance together ever since on pretty equal terms. In the 1890’s Gissing was nearing the end of his career, but the torch of realism was being carried on by Hubert Crackanthorpe (who died too soon), by Arnold Bennett, Arthur Morrison, Pett Ridge, Edwin Pugh, George Moore, Oliver Onions, Kipling, Wells (who divided his allegiance between both movements), George Egerton, Elizabeth Robins, Mrs. W. K. Clifford, and many another.
The romantic revival, which had started earlier, was well afoot during the same period. Stevenson died in 1894. Rider Haggard’s best romances were out in the 1880’s; Doyle’s “Micah Clarke” and “The White Company” belong to 1888 and 1890; Sir Gilbert Parker came soon after; Stanley Weyman and Anthony Hope arrived in the movement together, when the century was still in its infancy. All these were in the same boat but, to adopt Douglas Jerrold’s pun, with very different skulls; how they are to take rank in the hierarchy of letters is not my concern at the moment—I am only saying they were all romantics. That Weyman might have been something else is indicated by the strong, quiet realism of his second book, “The New Rector,” and the much later novels he has written, after an inactive interval of ten years, “The Great House,” and “The Ovington Bank”; and that Anthony Hope Hawkins might have been something else is the inference you draw from nearly all his work after “The Intrusions of Peggy.”
His father was the Vicar of St. Bride’s, Fleet Street, and he was a nephew, or some other near relation, of the famous “hanging Judge,” Sir Henry Hawkins. From Marlborough he passed to Balliol, Oxford, where he took his M. A. degree and was president of the Oxford Union Society. He seems to have set out with an eye on a career at the Bar which should lead him into the House of Commons. But though he was, like Stanley Weyman, duly called to the Bar, like Weyman, he did not do anything much in the way of practising. Once he put up as a Parliamentary candidate, but was not elected; yet one can imagine him as an ideal Member—he has the distinguished presence, the urbane, genially courteous manner, the even temper and nimbleness of mind that ought to but do not always go to the making of an Attorney General and, as any who have heard him take part in after-dinner discussions will know, in addressing an audience he has all the gifts of clarity, ease and humor that make the successful public speaker.
But law and politics piped to him in vain, and his ambition took the right turning when he wrote his first novel, “A Man of Mark.” It was a deft and lively enough tale; it was read and talked about, and was considered promising, but caused no particular excitement. The excitement was waiting for his next book. When “The Prisoner of Zenda” burst upon the town, in 1894, it leaped into success at once. Stanley Weyman’s “Under the Red Robe” was issued almost simultaneously and the two ran a wild race for popularity and both won. Both were dramatized promptly, and repeated on the stage the dazzling success they had enjoyed between covers. Each inspired a large school of imitators, which increased and multiplied until the sword and cloak romance, and stories of imaginary kingdoms were, in a few years, almost as plentiful as blackberriers and began to become a drug in the market. But, meanwhile, the spirit of romance was awake and abroad, and any capable novelist who rode into the library lists wearing her favors was pretty sure of a welcome.
In the same bustling year, 1894, we had from Anthony Hope “The God in the Car,” a tale of a South African Company promoter, and “The Dolly Dialogues.” These were not in a direct line of descent from “The Prisoner of Zenda,” and were possibly written before that; they were, at all events, written before the enormous vogue of that could prompt the author to follow it with another of the same desirable brand. But “The Dolly Dialogues” soared to an independent success of their own. Those crisp, neat entertaining chats of that adroitest of flirts, Dolly Foster, with her husband, with Mr. Carter, and others of her fashionable circle, were not without a certain distant likeness to the bright, irresponsible talk of “Dodo,” and repeated the triumph that had been “Dodo’s” a decade earlier. The “Dialogues” set another fashion, and generated another school of imitators. Whether people ever talked with such consistent brilliance in real life was of no consequence; it was amusing, clever, it was often witty, and when it was not it was crisp and smart and so like wit that it could pass for it. And in so far as such acute remarks and repartee were too good to be true they only brought the book into line with the airy, impossible romance and inventive fantasy of “The Prisoner of Zenda.”
With “Rupert of Hentzau” Anthony Hope was back in his imaginary kingdom next year; if the sequel was not so good as “The Prisoner” it had as good a reception; and “The King’s Mirror,” and a romantic comedy, “The Adventure of Lady Ursula,” not dramatized from one of his books but specially written for the stage, followed in quick succession. For those were days when he was working strenuously and systematically at his art; to cultivate the habit of work he left home every morning, like any lawyer or stockbroker, and went to a room off the Strand—wasn’t it in Buckingham Street?—where he wrote steadily for a fixed number of hours without interruption. The notion that an author can only do his best by fits and starts as the mood takes him is a romantic convention dear to the dilettante, but Hope was never that; he kept his romance in his books as sedulously as Scott did and was as sensibly practical as Scott in his methods of making them.
But he had to pay for his first popular success, as most novelists do. Jerome has more than once complained that the public having accepted “Three Men in a Boat” with enthusiasm and labeled him a humorist would never after allow him to be anything else. His “Paul Kelver” is worth a dozen of the other book, but it has withdrawn into the background and “Three Men in a Boat” is still selling freely. “Quisante” (1900) marked a new departure, suggested that Hope was turning from romance to reality. That study of the political adventurer and the aristocratic wife who realizes she has made a mistake in marrying out of her order, is, as literature and as a story, a stronger, finer piece of work than any Hope had done before, but it was not what his readers had expected of him, and it did not win the new reputation it ought to have won for him, though the critics did not fail to recognize its quality. To the general world of readers he was the author of “The Prisoner of Zenda”; that was the type of novel they wanted from him; they continued to ask for it and would not willingly take any other. He humored them at intervals with “The Intrusions of Peggy,” and “Sophy of Kravonia,” but on the whole he had done with such light entertainments and settled down to the serious interpretation of modern life and character. Next to “Quisante,” I would place his poignant and dramatic handling of the marriage problem in “Double Harness,” the study, in “A Servant of the Public,” of a temperament that is only baffling by reason of its elemental simplicity; the masterly realistic presentment of a capable, courageous, unconventional, attractive woman in “The Great Miss Driver,” and the brilliant treatment again of the problem of marriage and disillusion in “Mrs. Maxon Protests.” These five—subtle in characterization and fashioned of the comedy and tragedy of actual human experience—these and not his more notorious trifles are the true measure of Anthony Hope’s achievement as a novelist.
But they are obscured by the flashier glory of “The Prisoner of Zenda” and “Rupert of Hentzau,” which are now renascent and appealing mightily on the films to the romantic susceptibilities of a new generation of admirers.
The novels he has written since the honor of knighthood was conferred upon him in 1918 are sufficient to show that his invention and skill in narrative are by no means failing him, though neither “Beaumaroy Home from the Wars” nor “Lucinda” reach the level of “Quisante” or “Mrs. Maxon Protests.” But “Beaumaroy” has touches of humor and character that are in his happiest vein, and if I say that “Lucinda” is an abler and more notable piece of work than is either of the dazzling fairy tales that established his position, it is not that I would belittle those delightful entertainments but would emphasize that so far from representing his capacity they misrepresent it; they stand in the way and prevent his better work from being seen in its just proportions, so that though at first they may have secured a prompt recognition for him, it looks as if, at last, they will, in a larger sense, prevent him from being recognized.