Rev. T. E. Brown—A. R. Orage—Norman Angell—St John Ervine—Charles Marriott—Max Beerbohm—Israel Zangwill—Alphonse Courlander—Ivan Heald—Dixon Scott—Barry Pain—Cunninghame Graham
I wonder how many readers turn nowadays to the poetical works of Thomas Edward Brown, the Manx poet. Not a great number, I think. Indeed, I doubt if he ever had a large audience, though he had the power of exciting almost unlimited enthusiasm in the breasts of those whom he did attract. He was praised whole-heartedly by George Eliot, George Meredith, W. E. Henley and other famous writers, and the publication of his Letters a year or two after his death made a great stir.
In my boyhood’s days I was one of Brown’s most devoted disciples. He had a charming trick of infusing scholarship with the real “stuff” of humanity, that appealed to me irresistibly, and I liked the honest sensuality of his Roman Women and the pathos of such poems as Aber Stations and Epistola ad Dakyns. Perhaps I could not read his poems now, for, truth to tell, they “gush” almost indecently. However, he remains the most distinguished literary figure that the little Isle of Man has produced, and two or three of his lyrics will persist far into the future.
I met him at Greeba Castle, Mr Hall Caine’s Manx residence, when I was still a schoolboy. It was just a few months before Brown’s death, and a rather sad incident marked his visit to Hall Caine.
129We were at lunch when he arrived: a rather solemn lunch: a lunch at which the guests were ill assorted. A ponderous scholar from Scotland insisted upon discussing the authorship of Homer—a subject about which our host evidently knew little and cared less. In the middle of a rather painful silence, Brown was ushered into the dining-room; he was carrying a little book of Laurence Binyon’s that had just been published. His burly figure, his genial face, his ready tongue soon lifted us out of the atmosphere of black boredom that had settled upon us. In five minutes he had disposed of the Scottish scholar, had drunk a whisky and soda, and had combated Hall Caine’s opinion that Binyon “had entirely missed the point” in one of the poems he (Binyon) had written.
All afternoon we talked. Brown had come all the way from Ramsey (some twenty-four miles, four of which had to be walked) to spend a few hours with his friend, and, as he was a man greedy of enjoyment, not a single moment was wasted. It soon appeared that Brown was a great admirer of Hall Caine’s—it should be mentioned that Mr Caine had not then written The Prodigal Son or The Eternal City—and the novelist basked in the tactful praise that was bestowed upon him.
As we were talking, a servant came with the news that eleven Americans had arrived and had been shown into the library. Hall Caine left the room to give them tea. An hour later, he came back, exhausted but not displeased.
“One of the penalties of fame,” he said, with a sigh.
“But you are not the only one who suffers from your own fame,” observed Brown. “I am constantly besieged by American journalists, who come to me for private information about yourself. A very persistent lady from New York came only the other day and wished to know if you were educated.”
Hall Caine laughed.
“What did you say?” he asked.
130“Well, I asked her what she meant by ‘education,’ and she replied: ‘Is he at all like Matthew Arnold?’”
Towards evening, Brown departed.
Next morning, a note arrived from him, evidently written immediately on his return home the previous evening. The note expressed the writer’s regret that he had been unable to visit Greeba Castle that day; he had fully intended coming, but had been prevented at the last moment. This letter disturbed Hall Caine enormously.
“His mind is going,” he said; “I have noticed several other signs of vanishing memory, if not of something worse, during the last few months.”
There was, indeed, I have always thought, a streak of morbid eccentricity in Brown’s intellectual make-up. A careful reader of his letters will notice many moods of fierce exaltation engendered by wholly inadequate and inexplicable causes. His sudden death was perhaps a blessing in disguise.
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There are in London two or three men, not known to the general public, whose influence on modern thought is most profound and most disturbing. Of these men A. R. Orage, the editor of The New Age, is quite the most distinguished. What circulation his paper enjoys, I do not know; it cannot be large; probably it is not more than two or three thousand; perhaps it is not even so much as that. But the men and women who read it are men and women who count—people who welcome daring and original thought, who hold important positions in the civic, social, political and artistic worlds, and who eagerly disseminate the seeds of thought they pick up from the study of The New Age. Tens of thousands of people have been influenced by this paper who have never even heard its name. It does not educate the masses directly: it reaches them through the medium of its few but exceedingly able readers.
131The New Age is professedly a Socialist organ, but the promulgation of socialistic doctrines is only a part of its policy and work. Its literary, artistic and musical criticism is the sanest, the bravest and the most brilliant that can be read in England. It reverences neither power nor reputation; it is subtle and unsparing; and, if it is sometimes cruel, it is cruel with a purpose. All sleek money-makers in Art have reason to fear Orage, for his rapier wit may at any moment glance and slide between their ribs and release the hot air that is at once the inspiration and the material of all their works.
Orage has more than a touch of genius. It was Baudelaire (wasn’t it?) who said that genius was the power to look upon the world with the eyes of a child. Well, Orage has the all-seeing, non-rejecting eyes of a child. He has also the eternal spirit of youth. One cannot imagine him growing old. Perhaps his most interesting characteristic is his power of attracting and holding friends; he is the most hero-worshipped of men. Having once given his friendship, however, he exacts the utmost loyalty; treachery is the one sin that can never be forgiven.
I knew Orage years ago, when he was still in Leeds teaching the young idea how to shoot. He was then a prominent member of the Theosophical Society and lectured a good deal—and rather dangerously, I think—on Nietzsche. His gospel, always preached with his tongue in his cheek, that every man and woman should do precisely what he or she desires, acted like heady wine on the gasping and enthusiastic young ladies who used to sit in rows worshipping him. They wanted to do all kinds of terrible things, and as Orage, backed by “that great German,” Nietzsche, had sanctioned their most secret desires, they were resolved to begin at once their career of licence. They used to “stay behind” when the lectures were over, and question Orage with their lips and 132invite him with their eyes, and it used to be most amusing and a little pathetic to listen to the gay and half-veiled insults with which Orage at once thwarted and bewildered his silly devotees.
He had in those days a wonderful gift of talking a most divine nonsense—a spurious wisdom that ran closely along the border-line of rank absurdity. The “cosmic consciousness” of Walt Whitman was a great theme of his, and Orage, in his subtle, devilishly clever way, would lead his listeners on to the very threshold of occult knowledge—and leave them there, wide-eyed and wonder-struck.
I have never known an editor more jealous of the reputation of his paper than Orage is of The New Age. No consideration of friendship would induce him to print a dull article, however sound, and when one of his contributors becomes sententious, or slack, or banal—out he goes, neck and crop. Among the contributors to The New Age I remember writers as different in mental calibre as John Davidson and Edward Carpenter, Frank Harris and Cecil Chesterton, Arnold Bennett and Janet Achurch. These and scores of equally distinguished people have written for Orage. Why? For money? Well, scarcely; The New Age’s rates of pay must be very modest. For what, then? They have written because in The New Age they can tell the unadulterated truth and because they are proud to see their work in that paper.
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To many people Norman Angell is a rather sinister figure, and the people who attack him most violently to-day are precisely those who praised him most when he wrote his first book. He has been overpraised and spoilt. His intellectual attainments are not greatly above the average, and his thinking is not always honest. In the early days of the war it used to be amusing to see him working among his spectacled and yellow-skinned 133assistants; he was small but magisterial, and he was always tucking sheets of foolscap into long envelopes and looking very important as he did so. I really believe that in those days of August, 1914, he had a vague idea that he and his helpers could stop the war at any moment they chose. Certainly, he was very cross with the war. Europe was behaving in her old, mad way without having previously consulted him.
“But it will soon be over,” he assured me. “You see——”
He stopped and waved his hand vaguely in the direction of a typewriter, smothered in documents.
“Quite,” said I uncomprehendingly. “You mean——?”
“Yes; that’s it. Exhaustion. It can’t go on for ever. It must stop some time.”
A smile that came from nowhere straggled into his face. I felt vaguely discomfited.
“You see, we are hard at it,” he said, and, as he spoke, be indicated a pale, ill-shaven youth who was wandering aimlessly about the office, his hands full of papers.
A queer little chap, Angell. Very much in earnest, of course, very sure of himself, very pushing, very “idealistic.”
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St John Ervine is a writer who already counts for much but who, a few years hence, will count for a good deal more. He is by way of being a protégé of Bernard Shaw, and earnest young Fabians have already learned to reverence him.
We worked together on The Daily Citizen, he being dramatic critic. He was not enormously popular with the rest of the staff, for he was very “high-brow”; his face was smooth, sleek and superior, and he had a habit of being friendly with a man one day and scarcely recognising him the next. My own relations with him were of the most disagreeable. A play of his was given at the Court 134Theatre, and I was sent to criticise it. I did criticise it: the play was ugly, clever and sordid.
“But,” protested Ervine, pale with vexation, the next time he met me, “but you have entirely misunderstood my play. You can’t have stayed till the end.”
“It was very painful for me, Ervine,” said I, “but I really did stick it out to the finish. Why do you young fellows write so depressingly? You look happy enough, Ervine——”
“The close of my play is the part that matters. Bernard Shaw said so....”
We parted: he, with a look of successful hauteur; I, broken and crushed.
A week or so later I met him at one of Herbert Hughes’s jolly Sunday evenings in Chelsea.
“You know Gerald Cumberland, of course,” said someone who was introducing him to people.
He drew himself up with great dignity and stared at me through his pince-nez.
“I think,” said he, “yes, I believe we have met before somewhere. Where was it, Mr ... er ... Cumberland?”
Shortly after, he left The Daily Citizen, and I was given the position which he had occupied with so much conscious distinction. I somehow think that when the war is over and we meet, he will not know me. Ervine is very much like that.
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Fifteen years is a long time in the literary world, and Charles Marriott’s The Column, which threw everybody into fever-heat somewhere about 1902, is, I suppose, forgotten. It was a “first” novel. Uncritical Ouida loved it; W. E. Henley unbent and wrote a Meredithian letter to its author; W. L. Courtney seized some of his short stories for The Fortnightly Review; and I suppose (though I really don’t know this) The Spectator wrote five lines of disapproval. It was a brilliant book; fresh, 135original, provocative. It promised a lot: it promised too much; the author has since written many distinguished books, but none of them is as good as The Column said they would be.
Marriott was living at Lamorna, a tiny cove in Cornwall, when I first knew him. He was tall, lantern-jawed and spectacled. He was interested in everything, but it appeared to me even then that he was a little inhuman. He lacked vulgarity; rude things repelled him enormously, unnaturally; he had no literary delight—or else his delight was too literary: I don’t know—in coarseness. Fastidious to the finger-tips, he would rather go without dinner than split an infinitive. Since those days Marriott has gone on refining himself until there is very little Marriott left. Even the longest and the thickest pencil may be sharpened too frequently.
Many years after I met him at an exhibition of pictures in Bond Street. He was then almost old, tired, preoccupied. He is quite the last man to be a journalist; his art criticism is wonderfully fine, but a life standing on the polished floors of galleries between Bond Street and Leicester Square is soul-corroding and heart-breaking. Marriott’s mind no longer darts and leaps. It moves gently, very gently.
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