“‘Did I interrupt you?’
“‘You did rather; but it doesn’t matter.’
“‘Oh, well, I won’t do it again—unless I really have to. Goodbye, and good luck.’”
The knocker may be an effort of the imagination, otherwise this reads as if it were taken from life. It may even be true about Milne himself, for he has said in print that his work comes easy to him; and if you show the complete sketch to the wife of any literary man of your acquaintance the chances are she will wonder how Milne got to know so much about her husband. But his trim figure and alert, clean-shaven face, apart from the quantity of work he has placed to his credit, belie any suggestion that since he finds his work easy he takes his ease, except when it is finished. He is restlessly alive, and gives you the impression of being something of an out-door man, a golfer probably, perhaps a cricketer, though you need not believe he looks forward to the opening of the cricket season quite so enthusiastically as he suggests in “The First Game”—
“It is the day that I watch for yearly,
Never before has it come so late;
But now I’ve only a month—no, merely
A couple of fortnights left to wait;
And then (to make the matter plain)
I hold—at last!—a bat again:
Dear Hobbs! the weeks this summer—think! the weeks I’ve lived in vain.”
When he was demobilized, his old post of assistant-editor of Punch was waiting for him, but he had formed other plans for his future during the war, and arranged not to go back. He did not just then intend to abandon the light essay, and in “If I may” (1920) his hand for it is as cunning as ever; but the theater had got into his blood, his ambition was taking higher flights, and “Mr. Pim Passes By” (he wrote it also into a novel as quaintly humorous and sentimental as the play) and the mordantly ironic “Truth About Bladys” soared at once and almost simultaneously to such heights of popularity that if the dramatist has not presently absorbed the essayist altogether, it won’t be for want of an excellent excuse.
ALFRED NOYES
Alfred Noyes
Early in his career, being rash as well as young, Alfred Noyes made the tactical mistake of writing poetry that became popular. He was crowned with eulogy by leading critics who, naturally, could not foresee that he would also win the applause of the multitude or, no doubt, they would have been more careful. Meredith helped to mislead them; he praised the beauty and finely restrained pathos of “Michael Oaktree,” a narrative poem in Noyes’s very first volume, “The Loom of Years.” But it was his third and fourth books, those exquisite fairy tales in verse, “The Flower of Old Japan” (1903) and “The Forest of Wild Thyme” (1905), that carried him right into the popularity which disillusioned those self-centered experts who cling to a narrow faith that poetry cannot be poetry if it makes a triumphant appeal to the large world that lives and works in outer darkness beyond the limits of their own select, small circle.