Next year Locke clinched his success with the greatest of his books—“The Beloved Vagabond,” which eclipsed “The Morals of Marcus” as a novel if not as a play, and still remains the high-water mark of his achievement. It is the outstanding picaresque romance of our day. Mr. Locke has a special weakness for such delightful, irresponsible, romantic, golden-hearted rascals as Paragot, who could so easily have been a squalid, unmitigated bounder in the hands of a plodding realist. Sebastian Pasquale, in “The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne,” is a lesser member of the same family; so is that later, slighter, joyous heathen Aristide Pujol; and there are other such in other of his books.
The driving force behind his stories is their sincerity; their sympathy with the sins, follies, vanities, errors of the motley human multitude is his own; they are idealistic because he is himself an idealist and in some ways almost as quixotic as any of his favorite heroes. He puts himself into his books, and you find him there, scholarly, kindly, witty, unaffected, and so much a man of the world that he no more feels it necessary to write like one than a millionaire feels it necessary to prove he is rich by talking all the time about his money.
STEPHEN McKENNA
Stephen McKenna
You would think it should be easy—far easier than writing a novel—for any man of literary capacity to sit down and write the story of his own life, bring into it, instead of imaginary characters, the real men and women he has known, and so make a great Autobiography. Yet there are fewer great books in autobiography than in any other form of literature. Some years ago I was remarking on this to Keble Howard, and he accounted for the deficiency by laying it down that hardly any man started to write his memoirs till his memory was failing and he was getting too old to work. It is supposed to be presumptuous, a little self-conceited, for a celebrity of any sort to publish his private history until he is so far advanced in years that, even if he has done nothing else respectable, he can claim to be respected on account of his age. Howard contended, and I agree with him, that a man of seventy or so has generally forgotten as much of the earlier half of his life as he remembers, and often misinterprets what he does remember because he looks back on it from a wholly different standpoint, misses the importance of things that were important when they happened, feels for his young self now as he did not feel at the time, makes tragedies of what then seemed comedies, and comedies of what seemed tragedies, and gets the whole picture out of focus.
I have lived long enough since then to have been able to prove for myself that all this is accurate; for I have read divers memoirs of men whom I knew when they were middle-aged and I was youthful, noting how much they omitted, incidents they have warped in the telling, events to which they have given an emotional significance that never really belonged to them. To remedy such a state of things Keble Howard’s idea was that anybody who had done anything and meant to do more, should write the first volume of his autobiography when he was under thirty, while he was still near enough to his youth not to have lost all the freshness of its feelings, still near enough to his childhood to be able to revive in his thoughts the actual magic of its atmosphere; he should write his second volume when he was about fifty, and his third when he was so far from the beginning that the end could not be much farther on. That is the only way, I believe, to do the thing perfectly. We have so few great autobiographies because most of them are more or less imaginary, so few of them are true.
Possibly Stephen McKenna arrived independently at the same conclusion, for in 1921, when he was thirty-three, he published “While I Remember,” which is in effect the first volume of his autobiography. But he reveals less of himself in this than of his surroundings. He is too much of what is commonly described as a gentleman of the old school to indulge in personalities and give away unpleasant facts about his friends, or even about his enemies; he will criticize their public life with devastating wit and epigrammatic satire, but he betrays no intimacies, will have nothing to say of their private characters or conduct, and he is almost as reticent in talking of himself as of others. You gather from his first autobiographical fragment that before he went to Oxford, of which he gives some delightful impressionistic sketches, he went to Westminster School, and was for a while, a teacher there, and perhaps the most personal note in the book is in a greeting to some of his old pupils, which owns that he blushes to recall the lessons he taught them. “My incompetence was incurable,” he says. “I should be well pleased to think that your memories of me are a hundredth part as kindly as my memories of you. Does it comfort you to know that my awe of you continued for three terms? If ever the prayer-bell had not rung before I showed that I could not solve some diabolical equation! If you could have seen into my mind during the first week when I ranged you in alphabetical order and guided myself despairingly by the two red-heads in the form!”
If he does not fill his pages with careless and indiscreet gossip of all sorts of well-known people it is not for lack of material, but simply that he has a conscience and a strict code of honor that make such chatter impossible to him. He will tell you of his experience, during the War, in the Intelligence section of the War Trade Department, and, briefly, of his experiences with the Balfour Mission in America, but though he has mixed largely in modern society and the world of letters and, as nephew of one of the ablest of latter-day Chancellors of the Exchequer, has been a good deal behind the scenes in political circles, he does not, after the manner of the usual sensational Diaries and Memoirs, now-a-days, scarify individual members of any circle, but reserves his commentary and condemnation for the changes and degeneration that have come over our general social habits and behavior, limits his discussion of contemporary writers to their works, and his criticism of famous politicians, and this is drastic enough, to their doings and misdoings in the political scene.
All which reticences are natural to him and exactly characteristic. They seem to denote an austerity that is in keeping with his somewhat ascetic appearance. But if in profile, as somebody has suggested, he curiously resembles the portraits of Dante, there is more of the graciousness than of the gloom and bitterness of the somber Florentine in his composition. You may realize that if you read “Tex,” the charming memorial volume he produced after the death of Texiera de Mattos. It is a collection of his dead friend’s letters linked together with explanatory notes of his own, and in these letters, and indirectly in the notes, I think you get more intimate glimpses of the real McKenna than anywhere else, and find him, behind the polite mask and settled air of restraint, often irresponsibly outspoken, always sympathetic, warm-hearted, and with a very genius for friendship.