If he has studiously avoided personalities in his memoirs, he has, of course, drawn freely in his novels on his knowledge of political and social life and people, though even there nobody has, so far, pretended to recognize living originals of any of his characters. He began his career as a novelist with two artificial comedies. “The Reluctant Lover,” in 1912, and “Sheila Intervenes,” in 1913. They had some affinity with the romantic fantasies of W. J. Locke and the sparkling talk of “Dodo” and “The Dolly Dialogues.” The story in each was told with the lightest of light touches, and the conversations were punctuated with smart epigrams. Their cleverness was undeniable, and already, in “Sheila,” he was making play with his knowledge of political affairs. They were brilliantly clever, but ran entertainingly on the surface of things. He was learning to use his tools; feeling his way. In “The Sixth Sense” he was beginning to find it, and he found it triumphantly in “Sonia, or Between Two Worlds.”
“Sonia” is one of the notable things in fiction that came out of the War. It appeared in 1917, when we were all uplifted to high ideals and sustained by a fine belief that a new and nobler world was to rise, phœnix-like, out of the ashes and chaos into which the old world had been resolved. The atmosphere of that time, all its surge of altruistic emotion, are so sensitively and realistically preserved in the story that one cannot re-read it now without a sense of regret that we have forgotten so much of our near past and failed so meanly to realize the better state that, in those dark days, we were all so sincerely confident of building. Beginning in the decadent world of the late ’nineties and the dawn of the century, the story comes down, or goes up, into the miraculously new world that the war made, and glances optimistically into the future. Most of its characters are drawn from the higher classes of society, and the love romance of Sonia and David O’Rane, the most charming and glowingly human hero McKenna has ever given us, has the social and political history of the period for its setting. Never before or since has he shown himself so much of an idealist nor handled great issues with such mastery and imaginative insight. “Sonia” has been ranked with the great political novels of Disraeli, and I doubt whether Disraeli ever did anything so fine in poignancy of feeling and delicacy of style.
“Ninety-Six Hours’ Leave,” his other war novel, was a lively tale written for amusement only; and “Sonia Married” maintained the tradition attaching to sequels and did not rise to the level of “Sonia.” The biggest of his other novels are, I think, “Midas and Son,” a masterpiece of irony, a mordant satire on the vanity of riches; and that brilliant study of the snobbishness, shallowness, cynicism, social ambition of the unpleasant Lady Ann Spenworth, “The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman.” It blends a maturer philosophy of life with the vivacity and sparkle of his early conversational novels. It exposes without mercy the squalid little soul of a person who is or has been of importance in society, and if her self-revelations make her seem abhorrent it is because she herself seems so abhorrently alive and so minutely true to certain morbid, unlovely sides of human nature.
You would not guess from the abounding vitality he puts into his novels that McKenna was by no means of the robust kind. In winter he generally escapes from our unsatisfactory climate, and you hear of him voyaging to remote parts of Asia or South America, or somewhere where the sun shines. But when he is at home, there is an hour before lunch, at the end of the morning’s work, that is given over to any friends who may drop in at his pleasant Lincoln’s Inn chambers, to find him the most genial and interesting and interested of hosts, with as neat a hand for mixing a cocktail as any in London.
COMPTON MACKENZIE
Compton Mackenzie
From a literary and dramatic point of view, Compton Mackenzie may almost be said to have been born in the purple. Even a quite modest minor prophet who had stood by his cradle at West Hartlepool, in January, 1883, might have ventured to predict a future for him. For his father was the well-known actor Edward Compton, author of several plays and founder of the Compton Comedy Company, and his aunt was “Leah” Bateman, one of the most famous Lady Macbeth’s who ever walked the stage; his uncle C. G. Compton was a novelist of parts; and he numbers among his distant relations the poet and critic John Addington Symonds and that brilliant and, nowadays, too little appreciated novelist and playwright “George Paston” (Miss E. M. Symonds). Nor did he absorb all the gifts of the family, for that distinguished actress Miss Fay Compton is his sister.
From St. Paul’s School, Mackenzie went to Oxford in the early years of this century, and if he did not break any scholarship records at Magdalen, he edited “The Oxford Point of View,” which he helped to found, and became business manager of the Oxford Union Dramatic Society, and on occasion showed himself an actor of distinction. After leaving Oxford he married and withdrew into the wilds of Cornwall, where he seems to have written industriously for some years with no immediate results, beyond the publication of a book of verse in 1907, and a play, “The Gentleman in Grey,” which was produced at the Lyceum Theater, Edinburgh, but did not stay there long enough to matter. Also in his Cornish retirement he wrote his first novel, “The Passionate Elopement,” but it took him longer to get it published than to write it. When it had been up to London and back again three or four times it began to look so worthless and he grew so indifferent toward it that he would not waste more money than necessary on it but let it go wandering unregistered up and down and take its chance of being lost in the post. Seven publishers had rejected it before, in a happy hour, he sent it to Martin Secker, who was then about setting up in business, and when he published it, early in 1911, it sold so well that within three weeks it had to be reprinted. The story is of the eighteenth century; the scene is laid at Curtain Wells, a gay and fashionable spa, where Beau Ripple reigned supreme as Beau Nash used to reign at Bath. The characters are as gracefully artificial as if they had walked out of an eighteenth century pastoral—the pretty blue-eyed Phyllida, the chivalrous Charles Lovely, who loves her in vain, and the dashing, rascally card-sharper, Vernon, who wins her and carries her off in the end—they live gracefully, and their tale is all told, and they smile and sigh and mince and bow their ways through it, with the charm and fragile daintiness that belongs to old minuets and Dresden china shepherds and shepherdesses. Mackenzie has never done another such light and exquisite caprice though he had every encouragement to repeat the experiment, for “The Passionate Elopement” pleased the public as well as the critics and had run through four editions by the end of the year.
Just before or immediately after this success, he came from his Cornish fastness up to London, settled in Westminster, and turned his hand to potting plays, writing lyrics and reviews for Pelissier, whose “Follies” were then at the height of their popularity. But in spite of these distracting employments he found time for a good deal of more important work during the brief period that Westminster’s staid, old-world North street numbered him among its tenants. There he wrote his second novel, “Carnival,” and had prepared a dramatic version of it before it was published in 1912; he collected a second volume of his verse, “Kensington Rhymes” (since when he has done no other) and it appeared in the same year; and he had begun on the writing of “Sinister Street,” but had to lay it aside to cross the water and superintend the production of “Carnival” at a New York theater.