Gods of Modern Grub Street: Impressions of Contemporary Authors

by Arthur St. John Adcock

William John Locke

You can account for almost every other sort of sudden outbreak, but why an author of W. J. Locke’s unquestionably popular appeal should have had to write eight novels in nine years and only achieve popularity all of a sudden with a ninth in the tenth is one of those mysteries that baffle even the wisest. There is no reason why any one out of six of those earlier books should not have done as much for him, for they have the same distinction of style, the same wit and humor, gay romance and charming sentiment that captivated the reader so effectively in “The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne”—indeed, I still think that its immediate predecessor, “Where Love Is,” at least equaled that novel in all those qualities, and in delicacy and finish of workmanship went beyond it. So I put the problem and make no pretence to offering a solution of it but cast myself for the safer, humbler role of the chronicler of facts.

The fact that nearly all his stories are sweetened with a gracious human kindness and a full allowance of love and sentiment might be traced by subtle psychologists to some benign influence that the place of his nativity had upon him, for he was born in British Guiana, at Georgetown on the Demarara, where the sugar comes from. There may or may not be something in such a theory; anyhow, that is where he was born in 1863 and after an interval in England, he was sent to school at Trinidad, where his father was a banker. Returning to England, when he was eighteen, he matriculated at Cambridge, took the Mathematical Tripos, and, having completed his education at St. John’s College, departed from it with his B. A. degree.

Thereafter, he lived for a while in France; he has lived there a good deal, from time to time, since then, and if you were not aware of this you would guess as much, and that he had a warm regard for the French people, and a wide acquaintance with the literature of France, from the sympathy and intimacy with which he draws the French characters in his stories, and from a certain airy, sparkling wit and laughing, good-humored cynicism that belong to him and are commonly accepted as peculiar to the Gallic temperament. It has been said that he has affinities with Anatole France. He has none of Anatole’s daring irreverencies; nor his passionate revolt against the existing order of society, nor his power in social satire; but he has the sure touch that is at once light and scholarly, an abounding sense of fantasy, and a tolerant, worldly-wise philosophy that he edges with an irony often as delicately shrewd though never so bitter, so devastating as that of the great French master.

But we are going ahead too fast. When Locke quitted Cambridge he was still a long way from the beginning of his literary career. I believe he was already writing stories in those days, and am told that he wrote at least one novel—one, moreover, of a highly melodramatic and sensational kind—but he was too severely self-critical to attempt to publish it and it remains hidden away in manuscript to this hour. Feeling it was time to turn to something for a livelihood, he put an end to holidaying in France and became for some years mathematical tutor at a school in the North Country. I have seen it suggested that his mastery of mathematics has been as valuable to him in the construction of his novels as Hardy’s practical knowledge of the principles of architecture has been to him, but you are at liberty to doubt this after reading the opinion of that science which he allows Marcus Ordeyne to express. “I earned my living at school-slavery,” says Marcus, “teaching children the most useless, the most disastrous, the most soul-cramping branch of knowledge wherewith pedagogues in their insensate folly have crippled the minds and blasted the lives of thousands of their fellow-creatures—elementary mathematics.” From which you may gather also that he took little joy in those years of labor in the school up North, and the wonder is that his native urbanity and gracious personal charm should have remained completely unruffled by those uncongenial experiences.

He had escaped from schoolmastering and published four novels before he was appointed secretary of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and he did not relinquish that post until after his two most successful novels had made him famous and his position in literature was more than secure.

Not as a precocious genius, but as a man of thirty-two who had seen enough of life to know something about it, Locke entered the publisher’s list in 1895 and challenged the world at large with his first book, “At the Gate of Samaria.” It was by way of being a problem novel, for the problem novel was then having a day out. It was done in rather somber, more realistic colors than he was going to use in his succeeding stories; has little of the gaiety, glancing fancy and idealistic sentiment that have now become characteristic of his work. But it was a sound, capable piece of craftsmanship, the critics were on the whole appreciative, the public interested, and the sales respectable without being exciting.

Following this in steady succession came “The Demagogue and Lady Phayre,” “A Study in Shadows,” “Derelicts,” “Idols,” “The Usurper,” “Where Love Is”—and the reviewers went on handing out laurels to him (most of them), his circle of readers remained loyal, and it began to look as if he were settling down among the many novelists whose unfailing public is large enough to make an author’s life worth while but has done growing. Yet by the time he had written “Derelicts” he had discovered the formula that was presently to carry him far beyond such quiet success into a roaring popularity; he had discovered his gift for transfiguring the commonplace world and its people, conjuring them into a fairy-tale and still making his men and women seem amazingly lifelike and his tale all true. Nor is there any hint of disparagement in saying this. Hasn’t Chesterton eulogistically declared that Mr. Pickwick is a fairy? Doesn’t he insist that all Dickens’ characters are fairies, gnomes and his scenes laid in a fairyland of his own invention? There is a sense in which this is simple truth; a sense in which it is the simplest truth of Locke. He is an idealist, and sees that soul of goodness in things evil which remains invisible to your superficial, short-sighted, unimaginative realist. He has the imagination that creates, and therefore is not contented merely to observe and describe what any of us can see for himself, but rightly treats the visible existences around him as raw material for his art, chooses his clay puppets and somewhat etherealizes them, touches them with ideal qualities that most of us have but only exercise in our dreams, as a magician might take a dull peasant and turn him into a prince, not making him less human but more finely human in the process.

For ten years he wove his spells adroitly and that circle of the faithful was susceptible to them; then he did it once again and, in 1905, with “The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne,” did it so triumphantly that Marcus was soon the talk of the town, the book of the year, and not only a special section but a wide world of all sorts and conditions was at his feet. Yet there is nothing in the story to justify the miracle. It is a typical Locke fantasy, and certainly not superior in theme or treatment to its immediate forerunner. Sir Marcus, you remember, meets on the Thames Embankment the lost, helpless, pretty Carlotta, who has been brought from a Turkish harem by a rescuer who has deserted her; he takes pity on the child, adopts her, devotes himself to her training and upbringing with, after many tribulations, the only ending that could have pleased everybody. Nothing here for which one would prophecy a “boom.” But the book was full of character; its various characters were all alive, such human traits were touched into them so subtly that you could not disbelieve in them while the author had his spell on you; and the whole thing was told with a wit and humor so lively and so delicate, a sentiment so irresistibly alluring that you surrendered yourself to the sheer delight of it without thinking what you were doing. I recollect how one critic began by saying the plot was crude and ridiculous, and ended by confessing his enjoyment, his admiration of the artistic finish with which even the slightest characters were drawn, and praising without stint the cleverness and brilliant ease of the narrative throughout. That was the kind of hold it took upon its readers. It gave Locke a vogue in America too, and being dramatized filled a London theater for many nights and toured the provinces for years.