He was late in making this beginning, when he was over thirty, especially considering how his environment favored his development, but he was not hastened by the spur of necessity; he had found a sufficient outlet for his energies in a healthy love of hunting and outdoor sport, and traveled a good deal. Also he has said that he only turned to literature after he had failed in other directions. What those directions were I do not know, except that he was bitten with a young ambition to be a painter and studied on and off for some years at certain art schools in London. On the whole, and despite his ancestry, he thinks himself he might never have taken seriously to the writing of fiction if he had not happened to meet that enterprising publisher Grant Richards who, with characteristic courage and fore-sight, commissioned him to write him a novel, “an arresting novel,” of modern life. Not many publishers would have risked giving such a commission to an almost untried author, but the result amply justified the publisher’s prescience, and with “The Ragged Messenger,” in 1904, Maxwell scored the first and one of the biggest of his successes. Its success was the more remarkable in that it was a story of tragedy, and there is a tradition that the public shrinks from such, but it was its reality, the understanding and poignant truth to human experience with which its characters were drawn and their lives laid bare that caught the reader’s sympathy and gave the book its power of appeal.
“Vivian” was a readable successor to this, but “The Guarded Flame” (1906) rose to an altogether higher level. So far as my judgment goes, “The Guarded Flame” shares with the brilliant satirical story of the middle-class, self-reliant “Mrs. Thompson” and that grim and powerful study in degeneracy, “In Cotton Wool,” the distinction of representing the highest reach of Maxwell’s art, with not far below them “The Devil’s Garden” and “The Mirror and the Lamp.”
“The Devil’s Garden,” which was published in the year before the War burst upon us, brought Maxwell into trouble with our unofficial censorship and was banned by the libraries. I remember it as a vivid, uncompromising story of a self-made man whose life and the lives of his associates do not smack of the innocence of Arcadia and are portrayed with a conscientious exactitude, but the morality of the novel was implicit, and why any one should object when an artist faithfully pictures the unpleasant facts of life, why we should be shocked to find in a novel things that we go on tolerating in the world around us is one of those little eccentricities of the moral sense in man that I have left off trying to understand. The only effect of the ban was that “The Devil’s Garden” was more talked of and sold better than any other of his novels, and it is this perhaps that has led many to accept it as the best he has done; but I would rank it at most with his second best.
For five years after that event, from September 1914 till the end of the war, he turned his back on literature and served as subaltern and as Captain in the Royal Fusiliers. He says that during the war he felt that when peace came we should witness the uprising of “a new and vigorous school of romantic novelists”; that a world so long oppressed “by hideous realities must crave for the realm of pure imagination,” for gaiety, joyousness, for something more akin to the charm and happiness of the fairy-tale.
But when the war was over, he confesses, he soon found he was mistaken. No such complete change entered even into his own stories. A note of idealism is sounded in “The Mirror and the Lamp,” in “A Man and his Lesson” and “Spinster of this Parish,” but so it was in the books he wrote before the war, and otherwise, as in those, he still handles, with a subtle mastery of atmosphere and detail, the dark problems of character and temperament, the ugly but real facts of human experience that are still the spiritual inheritance and material environment of real men and women.
He did, in one of his post-war novels (“A Little More”), experiment in what was for him rather a new vein. It was the story of a once well-to-do family that was reduced to squalid poverty, and the father and one daughter faced their altered circumstances with more resolution than resignation, though the father had more courage than competence. I think Maxwell was trying his hand at the kind of grown-up fairy-tale toward which a reaction from the grim realities we had just come through inclined him; but the sentiment softened at times into sentimentality, his scenes and characters of poorer life were not so convincing as they are in some of his other novels. The spirit of the time had too thoroughly subdued him; but he made a quick recovery and with “Spinster of this Parish” triumphantly found himself again and proved that his hand had not lost its earlier cunning.
LEONARD MERRICK
Leonard Merrick
Until a collected edition of his novels and stories appeared in 1918, Leonard Merrick had been writing for thirty years without receiving a tithe of the recognition that was over-due to him. I doubt whether even now he has such popularity as is enjoyed by many novelists who have not half his capacity, his sure and delicate art, his supreme gift as a story-teller. I can only explain this with a theory I have sometimes played with that a book draws its life from its author, and most books that are immediately and noisily successful are written by men of robust and pushful personality; they impart these qualities to what they write and so give their books an impetus that carries them to success, makes them as pushful and aggressive in the reading world as the personality behind them is in the world at large.