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.
SHEILA KAYE-SMITH
Sheila Kaye-Smith
Talking of Charlotte Bronte, in a novel of Sheila Kaye-Smith’s that goes back to mid-Victorian days, a hairy young man, with a mustache, in addition to the whiskers of the period, agrees that she is crude and outlandish, and adds, “That always comes when women write books. They’re so frightened of being called feminine that they bury what talent they may have under a mountain of manliness—and manliness for them consists entirely of oaths and violence and scarlet sin.”
Whether you agree or disagree with him, the hairy young critic was expressing an opinion that was common among his contemporaries, who have handed it down to a large number of their successors. It was probably half true, and is not so true now as it was. The women novelists now who specialise in scarlet sin have no particular use for oaths and violence. Moreover, though it would be easy to name several who have a tendency to color their pages with sin of all colors, there is nothing exclusively masculine in that and their novels remain essentially feminine. It would be easy to name others who are much addicted to violent scenes and characters, but I doubt whether that is any conscious attempt on their part to be manly—on the contrary, it arises from an inherent, very feminine admiration of that barbaric strength and muscular vigor which the average woman is supposed to find so splendid and so attractive in the average man. It is such an orthodox feminine conception of the ideal male that its presence in a story almost inevitably betrays the sex of the author.