It was Morley who discovered William McFee. English sheets of that long and very fine novel, Casuals of the Sea, had been submitted to the firm for consideration and possible purchase. Ultimately it became necessary to set up type for the novel in America. “We were accustomed,” Mr. Doubleday explains, “to hold what we called a ‘book-meeting,’ when each member of the staff gave his suggestion about authors and books. For months when it came Christopher’s turn to speak he always began, ‘Now, about McFee—we don’t appreciate what a comer he is’ and so on for five minutes without taking a breath until finally it became the joke of the meeting that nothing could be done until Morley’s McFee speech had been made. Our jibes influenced him not at all. His only reply to our efforts in humour was to bring on a look of great seriousness and the eternal phrase, ‘Now, about McFee.’”
In leaving Garden City after a stay of nearly four years to become, in his own phrase, one of the “little group of wilful men who edit the Ladies’ Home Journal,” CDM departed from the well-established tradition under which so many men in the book publishing business have fallen. It is some kind of a tribute to Doubleday, Page & Company that the house has been the training-place of a considerable number of the heads in other publishing houses. In Philadelphia a term on the Ladies’ Home Journal was followed by work as a columnist on the Evening Public Ledger, the direct preliminary to Morley’s column on the editorial page of the New York Evening Post, with which he has been since 1920. The book, Travels in Philadelphia; the personal acquaintance of A. Edward Newton, author of The Amenities of Book Collecting and Kindred Affections; and a deepened interest in Walt Whitman, are some of the concomitants of the Philadelphia period. Also, I think, Morley’s gradual disillusionment began then. The collection of essays called Mince Pie was published late in 1919 and there were still to appear, in 1920, certain overflowings of the Morley of the first period—the story of an Oxford undergraduate prank, called Kathleen; a book of verse, Hide and Seek; and more essays in Pipefuls. But that was to be about all. Something very definite had happened to the young man who was so friendly with everybody, who was forever talking about William McFee, who wrote forty-leven letters and notes a day, who had made a cult of quaintness and who liked to be called Kit and to have the resemblance of his name to that of Christopher Marlowe’s stretched into a fanciful resemblance of personalities and writing. Some lone reviewer, speaking harshly; or some slight wound received in the house of one of his friends; or the shifts and vicissitudes of commercial enterprise—dissatisfaction with what he had already done, a thirtieth birthday, a wish to do something he had yet to do—together or singly may have been the agents of the change. Only the change itself matters. And what was that? It was not that Chris became less friendly, or autographed fewer dozens of copies of a new book of his, or loved the Elizabethans less or the work of Theodore Dreiser more. But a retractation took place, an alteration of ideas went on ... aided, it may be, by the uniformity with which American magazine editors rejected a short story called “Referred to the Author,” one of the contents of Morley’s book Tales from a Rolltop Desk—a story which Morley himself thinks marks the definite line between his old work and new.
v
Those who care for the poet of “households of two or more” will find him most readily now in the volume called Chimneysmoke (1921), which is a representative selection from the earlier books of verse, Songs for a Little House, The Rocking Horse, and Hide and Seek. Vincent O’Sullivan has said that the Morley here represented belongs with “the English intimists, Herrick, George Herbert, Cowper, Crabbe.” Writing an introduction for the English edition of Chimneysmoke, E. V. Lucas remarked: “Domesticity has had many celebrants, but I cannot remember any one work in which such a number of the expressions of Everyman, in his capacity as householder, husband and father, have been touched upon, and touched upon so happily and with such deep and simple sincerity. The poet of ‘The Angel in the House’ was, I suppose, a predecessor; but Coventry Patmore was a mystic and a rhapsodist, whereas Mr. Morley keeps on a more normal plane and puts in verse, thoughts and feelings and excitements that most of us have known but have lacked the skill or will to epigrammatise. If we are to look in literature for a kindred spirit to Mr. Morley’s we find it rather in the author of ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night.’”
Morley’s new book of essays, The Powder of Sympathy, shows the man changed and changing. It would be impossible to detect any loss of humour or cheerfulness in such papers as those on Sir Kenelm Digby or the Morley automobile, Dame Quickly (to be succeeded some day by the more impressive Dean Swift). But the satire in “The Story of Ginger Cubes” is not less complete or sharp for being throughout good-natured; and in his piece on “The Unknown Citizen” Morley seems to me to strike a single magnificent chord in which satire and humour are simply notes underlain by the deep bass of pathos and truth. The new book of poems, Parson’s Pleasure, shows that where there was so much Chimneysmoke a fire burns also. This book has an inspiring and inspiriting essay for preface—one far too quotable; I must resist it. Instead, let me give the first sonnet in the “Memoranda for a Sonnet Sequence”:
The herb Lunaria, old books aver,
If gathered thus and so, in moony patches,
Has property of mystic opener
When laid upon the fastest locks and latches.
In this respect, the moonplant duly matches