W. B. MAXWELL
Drawn by Yoshio Markino
CHAPTER XXII
MY NOVELIST FRIENDS: PART II
W. B. Maxwell I hardly knew in those days, though I had met him years before, and, in the long and elaborate review which I wrote of his Vivien, had hailed him as a novelist who would rise to the very head of his craft.
Maxwell, of course, had heredity and atmosphere in his favour. His mother, the famous Miss Braddon, had written novels which took the world by storm long before he was born—it is more than half a century ago since an astonishing girl founded a new school of fiction with Lady Audley’s Secret and Aurora Floyd—and he and his wife live with his mother in a stately old Queen Anne mansion in the Sheen Road at Richmond. Maxwell, who looks like a youthful judge—he is clean-shaven, and has a calm, judicial face, with an illuminating smile—has a judge’s gift of scrutiny in reviewing life in his books. He is ruthlessly just with his characters; they cannot deceive him. His sentences are not too severe. But whatever their sentences are, the criminals leave the court moral wrecks. He is obliged to mete out just sentences, but he is ruthless in his summing up. His last novel, The Devil’s Garden, is an excellent example of his great impeachments of wrong. His books have the Até—the Nemesis—tracking down their victims as ruthlessly as the Œdipus is tracked down in the tragedies of ancient Greece.
Another writer whose novels I admire immensely, and I have had to review a good many of them, is H. B. Marriott Watson, the New Zealander. He has a large public, and, in my opinion, ought to have a far larger one. As a writer of novels of adventure, I think he has no superior among the novelists of the day. For his adventures are most romantic, and his writing is so good—so delicate where it ought to be delicate, so strong where it ought to be strong. Added to which, he is scrupulous about getting his local colour and “properties” correct. In appearance he is a typical colonist—a huge man, with a dark, resolute face. When he first became prominent in the literary world, you might have thought that he was captain of the famous “All Black” football team, rather than a writer. Apart from his success as a novelist, he has been a power in journalism.
Charles Garvice, whose novels have a greater circulation than those of any other living writer, is now my neighbour. We live exactly opposite each other, with the breadth of Richmond Green between, with its old lawns, and tall elms planted by dead kings. He lives in one of the Maids of Honour houses, built a couple of centuries ago, abutting on the wall of the Old Palace of the Tudors, in which Queen Elizabeth died, and those Maids of Honour served. It has some beautiful eighteenth-century painted panelling. I look out on its mellow brickwork, pointed with white stone, and the fantastic Georgian ironwork of its gate, half-buried in a tangle of swaying roses, from my study windows, just as I look out on the crenellated wall and old perpendicular archway of King Henry VII’s palace on the other side of the clipped yew and the great stone-pine.
When I first knew Garvice, twenty years ago, he was farming his own lands in Devonshire, and just beginning to find his public on this side, though he had long enjoyed an enormous public in America. He used to pay frequent visits to the Authors’ Club, where, since he had rooms in Whitehall Court, he was more of a habitué than many men who lived in London, and became extremely popular for his genuine good-fellowship. A few years ago, when the Club was rather languishing, he became chairman of the committee which undertook its reconstruction, and though he had in the interval become one of the most popular and hard-worked novelists of the day, lavished his time and energies with happy results, so that now it has even more members than the Athenæum, and far more than any other literary club. He is the central figure at its great dinners.
He wrote a delightful book about farming—not a literary exercise, but as the outcome of many years’ practical work. Garvice, undoubtedly, has the largest sale of any novelist in the world. I have seen the figures. Last year’s sales alone amounted to 1,750,000 copies—books of all prices. His romantic love-stories are conspicuous not only for their thrilling plots—Garvice is a born story-writer—but for their freedom from all deleterious influence. There is nothing goody-goody about them; they are just wholesome, straight-forward romances—an almost lost art. He is only the length of the Palace away from the river, where he keeps a sailing-boat, and he is fond of riding in Richmond Park. He needs recreations, for he is a very hard worker. Every morning he goes up to his office in London, where he spends the business day in dictating his novels, and he gives many of his evenings up to the Authors’ Club, which, under his chairmanship, and the tireless secretaryship of Algernon Rose, has now a membership of 1,600. Garvice is a great reader of his brother-authors’ books.