The author of Carnival, Sinister Street, Plasher’s Mead; of those highly comedic novels, Poor Relations and Rich Relatives; of other and still more diverse fiction, Compton Mackenzie, has turned to a new task. His fine novel, The Altar Steps, concerns itself with a young priest of the Church of England. We live in the England of Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria—the England of 1880 to the close of the Boer War—as we follow Mark Lidderdale from boyhood to his ordination. The Altar Steps, it is known will be followed by a novel probably to be called The Parson’s Progress. Evidently Mr. Mackenzie is bent upon a fictional study of the whole problem of the Church of England in relation to our times, and particularly the position of the Catholic party in the Church.
“Simon Pure,” who writes the monthly letter from London appearing in The Bookman (and whose identity is a well-known secret!) thus describes, in The Bookman for September, 1922, a visit to Mr. Mackenzie:
“I have recently seen the author of The Altar Steps upon his native heath. The Altar Steps is the latest work of Compton Mackenzie, and it has done something to rehabilitate him with the critics. The press has been less fiercely adverse than usual to the author. He is supposed to have come back to the fold of the ‘serious’ writers, and so the fatted calf has been slain for him. We shall see. My own impression is that Mackenzie is a humorous writer, and that the wiseacres who want the novel to be ‘serious’ are barking up the wrong tree. At any rate, there the book is, and it is admitted to be a good book by all who have been condemning Mackenzie as a trifler; and Mackenzie is going on with his sequel to it in the pleasant land of Italy. I did not see him in Italy, but in Herm, one of the minor Channel Islands. It took me a night to reach the place—a night of fog and fog-signals—a night of mystery, with the moon full and the water shrouded—and morning found the fog abruptly lifted, and the islands before our eyes. They glittered under a brilliant sun. There came hurried disembarking, a transference (for me, and after breakfast) to a small boat called, by the owner’s pleasantry, ‘Watch Me’ (Compton Mackenzie), and then a fine sail (per motor) to Herm. I said to the skipper that I supposed there must be many dangerous submerged rocks. ‘My dear fellow!’ exclaimed the skipper, driven to familiarity by my naïveté. And with that we reached the island. Upon the end of a pier stood a tall figure, solitary. ‘My host!’ thought I. Not so. Merely an advance guard: his engineer. We greeted—my reception being that of some foreign potentate—and I was led up a fine winding road that made me think of Samoa and Vailima and all the beauties of the South Seas. Upon the road came another figure—this time a young man who made a friend of me at a glance. He now took me in hand. Together we made the rest of the journey along this beautiful road, and to the cottage of residence. I entered. There was a scramble. At last I met my host, who leapt from bed to welcome me!
“From that moment my holiday was delightful. The island is really magnificent. Short of a stream, it has everything one could wish for in such a place. It has cliffs, a wood, a common fields under cultivation, fields used as pasture, caves, shell beaches, several empty cottages. Its bird life is wealthy in cuckoos and other magic-bringers; its flowers have extraordinary interest; dogs and cattle and horses give domestic life, and a boat or two may be used for excursions to Jethou, a smaller island near by. And Mackenzie has this ideal place to live in for as much of the year as he likes. None may gather there without his permission. He is the lord of the manor, and his boundaries are the sea and the sky. We walked about the islands, and saw their beauties, accompanied by a big dog—a Great Dane—which coursed rabbits and lay like a dead fish in the bottom of a small boat. And as each marvel of the little paradise presented itself, I became more and more filled with that wicked thing, envy. But I believe envy does not make much progress when the owner of the desired object so evidently appreciates it with more gusto even than the envious one. Reason is against envy in such a case. To have said, ‘He doesn’t appreciate it’ would have been a lie so manifest that it did not even occur to me. He does. That is the secret of Mackenzie’s personal ability to charm. He is filled with vitality, but he is also filled with the power to take extreme delight in the delight of others and to better it. Moreover, he gives one the impression of understanding islands. Herm has been in his possession for something more than a year, and he has lived there continuously all that time (except for two or three visits to London, of short duration). It has been in all his thoughts. He has seen it as a whole. He knows it from end to end, its rocks, its birds, its trees and flowers and paths. What wonder that his health is magnificent, his spirits high! What wonder the critics have seen fit to praise The Altar Steps as they have not praised anything of Mackenzie’s for years? If they had seen Herm, they could have done nothing at all but praise without reserve.”
Chapter XVII
THE HETEROGENEOUS MAGIC OF MAUGHAM
i
Now, I don’t know where to begin. Probably I shall not know where to leave off, either. That is my usual misfortune, to write a chapter at both ends. It is a fatal thing, like the doubly-consuming candle. Perhaps I might start with the sapience of Hector MacQuarrie, author of Tahiti Days. I am tempted to, because so many people think of W. Somerset Maugham as the author of The Moon and Sixpence. The day will come, however, when people will think of him as the man who wrote Of Human Bondage.