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The Spike: or, Victoria University College Review, June 1922

Henry Harland

page 65

Henry Harland.

An American, born in St. Petersburg, educated at Rome and Paris, whey did most of his work in England! That is as near to the cosmopolist as it is given a man to be unless he were married in Greece and murdered in Germany. Henry Harland, no inconsiderable figure himself, was the man who fought failure with the "Yellow Book" in the "naughty nineties." Not lightly must we approach this man who numbered amongst his contributors Henry James and Arthur Symons Dowson and Yeats, Beardsley and Beerbohm. His name is the peg upon which was hung the literary ambitions of the reactionary young realists;'gallicists, decadents and dilettantes who clustered round his chair. He was early in the field of letters, his first novels dealing with Jewish American life, before the days of Zangwill, and "As It Was Written," the story of a Jewish musician, saw 'the press in 1885, when Harland was not twenty four years of age. In this book and its successors he was sensational without being successful.

His early writings were under the name of Sidney Luska; in 1890 he came to conqueq London and published under his own name "Two Women or One" and "Mea Culpa." Neither of these could be called inspiring; but Harland, like Oliver Wendell Holmes, was simply making the public pay him while learning how to write, and he was as ready .as Bennett to write "shockers" for sale. In 1893, his preliminary over, he came out with "Madamoiselle Miss and Other Stories," which revealed the real Harland, and in the'year following he was appointed editor of the "Yellow Book."

"Madamoiselle Miss" contains five short stories all of which exhibit, for the first time, the grace, charm and airy treatment which are associated with'his name. Harland had come under the French influence early in life, and in his fourth volume are to be seen memories of Maupassant. The sketches are typical of the French conte, and in their humour and happiness are not to be bettered, even by that most gallic of gentlemen Leonard Merrick. The two finest tales, indeed, are French in their setting; the title story tells of a little English governess who finds herself in a cheap hotel and is thrown into the company of some of the most disreputable denizens of the Quartier, while "The Funeral March of a, Marionette" is typical of the pathos which Harland can command, and which is so closely linked with laughter. Harland was a master of the conte; like Tchekoff and the later Russians his stories lead to nothing; they are airy trifles spun round the moment, real pictures, of life in which there is no continuity and no climax. He should never have essayed tho novel, for his invention was not strong and he was incapable of sustained effort.

In "Grey Roses," a collection which followed in 1895, he repeats scenes and sentences again and again. Like Wilde, when he wrote a good thing it did not stale for him in the resetting. But he was doomed to be a popular success, and it was with "The Cardinal's Snuff Box" and "The Lady Paramount," published at the beginning of this century and a'few years before his death, that he at length "set the great silly public by the ears." These stories are page 66 sensitive and sentimental, gracefully written and relieved by Hashes of brilliant wit. The unreality of their atmosphere is rivalled only by their slenderness of subjectmatter. They are, in other words, excellent essays in decorative art. They rival those other novels of an era "when life was lived by candlelight and etiquette replaced ethics," "Vanity Fair" and "The Passionate Elopement." But they rival them only in unreality.

Harland seems to have been, to some extent, conscious of his limitations. Or, perhaps I should say, he was sure of his strength He remained content with his craft, he was an etcher of instants and he did not yearn towards the crowded canvas or the painting of an acre of academy theme. We turn to him with relief after the novels of Wells, Bennett, Cannan and other younger novelists whose number of characters outdoes Dickens. From our modern atmosphere of argument and incident he stands apart. He is a stylist and we can recognise the learning behind his language. His work is not ambitions; but when did the dry point needle build a battleship? In "Mercedes," "The Broken Looking Glass," "When I am King," "A Responsibility" and other of the stories contributed by him to the first halfdozen'numbers of the "Yellow Book" his art is seen at its finest. He was the first of our prose impressionists, the precursor of a movement which will be long in the land.

—C. Q. P.