Even now, on the borderland of middle age, I cannot pick up a new book of Belloc’s without a little thrill: he is so clean, so bravely prejudiced, so courageous. He is a lover of wine and beer, of literature, of the Sussex downs, of the great small things of life: a mystic, a man of affairs, a poet. What, indeed, is he not that is fine and noble and free?
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[267]
]In the musical world one is accustomed to infant prodigies; very rarely do they develop their powers. But in the literary world infant prodigies are rare, and at the moment I can recall among writers of the past the boy Chatterton and that not quite so remarkable but, nevertheless, very distinguished youth, Oliver Madox Brown. In our own days we have had two or three men of letters whose first work, written in their late teens or early twenties, promised more, I think, than their later books have fulfilled. I am thinking more particularly of Edwin Pugh and William Romaine Paterson, the latter of whom usually writes under the pseudonym of “Benjamin Swift.”
Many of us must remember Benjamin Swift’s Nancy Noon, a strange novel that jerked the literary world into excitement two decades ago. The writer of it was but a boy, and though a few critics declared that he “derived” from Meredith, it was almost universally acknowledged that, for sheer originality both in style and in its general outlook upon the world, the novel was head and shoulders above any contemporary literature. So we all kept a close watch upon Benjamin Swift, reading each fresh work (and there were many fresh works, for the new-comer was very productive) with an eager anticipation which, alas! was foiled again and again. I remember six or eight of his books, each lit with genius, but all a little crude and violent and not one of them indicating that the writer’s mind was becoming more mature. It was a vigorous, eruptive mind with which one was in contact, but it was also a mind in such incessant turmoil that one searched in vain in each of its products for that “point of rest” which Coventry Patmore maintains is a sine qua non of all fine works of art.
In some way that I forget Benjamin Swift and I got into correspondence, and I still possess a bundle of his letters, mostly about his work. I remember that in one [268] ]of my letters I ventured to indicate what I thought were some of his faults: I called in question his knowledge of music, I expressed disapproval of his violence, and I told him I feared that he was in danger of settling down to being a mere “eccentric” writer. My letter, as might have been expected, produced no effect, and though I have not read his latest works (in dug-outs and trenches one reads everything that comes to hand, but Benjamin Swift has to be sought), I am given to understand that they are in many ways like his first efforts—outré, violent, eruptive, yet distinguished and glowing here and there with a genius that is always hectic.
Years ago, Swift invited me to call on him whenever I should happen to be in town, and though I should very much like to meet him, I have never accepted his invitation. One is like that. One shrinks from satisfying one’s curiosity. I picture Benjamin Swift as bearing a resemblance to Strindberg, but in my mind’s eye his lips are thinner and straighter than Strindberg’s, and his eyes are more vehement.
What is it, I wonder, that prevents this writer from ranking among the great? His intellect is wide and deep enough, his literary talent is very considerable, and his experience of life has been exceptionally varied. There is a twist in his genius, a maggot in his brain. He sees life grotesquely; some of the people he creates are like the men and women one meets in nightmares.
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Sometimes I amuse myself by inventing conversations between people opposed in temperament—e.g. Sir Owen Seaman and Mr Hall Caine, Mr John Galsworthy and “Marmaduke,” Little Tich and Lord Morley, and I often wish a brain much brighter than my own (Mr Max Beerbohm’s, for example) would occupy its idle hours in writing a book of such conversations. I commend the idea to Mr E. V. Lucas, also, and to Messrs A. A.
Milne [269] ]and Bernard Shaw (only Shaw’s fun is apt to be so distressingly emphatic and double-fisted).