But Mason was never one of the authors who are all authors; he is not of the sedentary breed who are contented to study life in books or from their study windows; the noise and business of it have always appealed to him irresistibly; he has roamed the world rubbing shoulders with all sorts and conditions of humanity everywhere, and his later books mirror much of his personal experience and the countries and people he has known. He blends the appearance of a writer of romance with the restless energy of a man of action, and in 1906, his superabundant energies seeking a new outlet or a new ambition prompting him, he turned his attention to politics, threw for Parliamentary honors, and was elected M. P. for Coventry. He signalized his advent in the House with a notable maiden speech; did not speak there often but proved himself shrewd and eloquent in debate, and if he had not escaped we might have been the richer by a sagacious, sympathetic Cabinet Minister and one brilliant novelist the poorer. Fortunately, however, the fascinations of the Mother of Parliaments could not subdue him, and after some three years under her shadow he did not offer himself for election again.
Fortunately, because the air of the House of Commons is not healthful breathing for poets or novelists. For them it is a soporific and suffocating air. You may note that when a writer of imaginative literature has sat in the House for more than a limited period his spirit puts on flesh, dulness settles on his faculties and communicates itself to his pen. What plays did Sheridan write after he took his seat there? And who shall say that Lytton might not have written with fewer capital letters and less of the manner of the big bow-wow if he had never ventured into that fatal atmosphere? Mason’s sojourn in the House had no influence on his fiction, unless it was his stay there that turned his thoughts toward India and the grave problem of the education of its native Princes in England and so resulted in his writing one of the most powerful of his books, “The Broken Road”; in which case he has brought more good out of it than any novelist who ever went into it, except Disraeli, and Disraeli was really a politician in his romances and a romancist in his politics, so he can hardly be counted.
I could never imagine the author of “Miranda of the Balcony” sitting out interminable debates, or trooping with his party into the voting lobby. He must have felt much more at home in uniform when he became in the first days of the war a Captain of the Manchester Regiment, and later, a Major on the General Staff. If he wrote no more romance for a time (his only book through those years was a collection of short stories, “The Four Corners of the World,” in 1917) it was because he was too busy living it. For with all its squalors and horrors and agonies, the Great War is beginning, in remembrance, to take on the color of romance by comparison with the tameness and monotony of ordinary everyday life.
You would gather from his stories that Mason was much given to boating, traveling and mountaineering, for a love of the open air blows through nearly all of them. The Alps and the enormous shadow of them dominate “Running Water”; and the skies and landscapes and peoples of present-day Egypt, Italy, India fill the pages of “The Four Feathers,” “The Broken Road,” and “At the Villa Rose.” Latterly, too, his new novels have become few and far between and he has given himself again, more and more, to the stage. He never quite severed himself from it. Soon after the novel appeared, he dramatized “Morrice Buckler,” in collaboration with Miss Isabel Bateman, and it was very successfully produced at the Grand, Islington, and had a long run in the provinces; 1901 saw a dramatic version of “Miranda of the Balcony” staged in New York; in 1909 he produced two comedies, not founded on his books “Colonel Smith” and “Marjorie Strode”; and in 1911 the most successful of all his dramatic ventures, “The Witness for the Defence.”
Since then, we have had “Open Windows,” and dramatized versions of “At the Villa Rose” and “Running Water,” and one hears rumors of other plays that he has in preparation. The indications are that in future he will appear more often on the boards than between them, and nobody need regret this if he only offers us as much pleasure in the stalls and the pit as we have had from him in our arm-chairs at home.
WILLIAM SOMERSET MAUGHAM
William Somerset Maugham
On the whole, I incline to the orthodox belief that if an author wants to find a short way to success he should not be too versatile. Nearly all our famous writers have been contented to do one thing well—have seemed to say with Marvell,
“Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball.”