Nine Englishmen

PROPHETS AND POETS--Andre Maurois --Harper ($3).

Among modern French journalists and biographers, Andre Maurois has the distinction of being more English than most Englishmen. His real name is Emile Hcrzog. He was born in 1885 in the small French city of Elbeuf, son of a family of textile manufacturers. His father compelled him to manage the family mills despite his early literary ambitions, his youthful mastery of English, his desire to fit into pre-War literary circles in Paris. Assigned to British Headquarters during the War, he wrote Les Silences du Colonel Bramble in 1918, found that his publisher did not believe a novel about the English would sell. More than 75.000 copies of the book were sold, and after a similar success with Ariel, his biography of Shelley, Maurois became recognized as an interpreter of the English to the French public.

Readers who note the comments on the English spirit, English genius, character, history which run through Maurois' books may feel that he says things that most Englishmen would like to hear, but which their own writers seldom point out. With a great gift for simplification, Maurois makes complex individuals seem transparent, reduces difficult and obscure periods in their lives, over which scholars still debate, to matter-of-fact and readily understandable situations. In Prophets and Poets he has written of nine English writers, beginning with Kipling and ending with Katherine Mansfield. In an attempt to reveal the underlying philosophy of their writing, he succeeds in skimming the surface of fierce English intellectual quarrels as if unaware of their existence. Despite this tendency to linger over the elementary aspects of a writer's career, to pass over bitter political and cultural disputes, Prophets and Poets is an informative and handy book, contains occasional insights of the sort that reveal the freshness of a foreign approach to familiar material.

Maurois considers Kipling "the greatest writer of our time and one of the greatest of any time," but offers little evidence to support his view. Kipling's merit in Maurois' eyes is that he championed an heroic conception of life from the time, as a 21-year-old newspaper man in India, he published his first works, celebrating the stiff-upper-lip theory of the Englishman's duty to the Empire. Born only eight years after the Bengal Mutiny of 1857, Kipling lived in a period when English control of India was seriously threatened. Sent to England when he was 5, returning to India at 17, he developed a glamorous picture of colonial service, was shocked to discover officers doing unheroic things, such as making love to brother officers' wives, angling for good jobs, or seeing to it that subordinates with pretty brides received "useful patronage."

Kipling's first stories and poems were received with detestation in official London circles, but were great popular successes. Although Andre Maurois writes admiringly of Kipling's political and social ideas, which he defines as Liberal-Fascist, the quotations he gives from Kipling's tales and parables are apt to sound funny to modern ears.

Admiring Shaw much less wholeheartedly, Maurois nevertheless makes him more human and entertaining than the other characters discussed in the book, while his essays on Wells and Conrad are uniformly dolorous and give little life to either. It may be news to most readers that a strong factor in Wells's social thought was the organization of the Boy Scouts; that in 1909 Conrad's earnings from his 13 published works amounted to less than -L-5. Among English writers who took themselves, their ideas and art with great solemnity, the young Shaw appeared as a wild man, a 27-year-old Irishman who "had nailed the Red Flag to his chin," and who made a name for himself merely by asking "the most unusual questions" at stodgy public discussions. Maurois briefly recounts the major events of Shaw's career, does not point out the significance of his victories over one after another of his rivals. When William Archer agreed to collaborate with him on a play, Shaw wrote the dialog, then dispensed with Archer's part. When Wells, accusing the Fabian Society of aping Shaw and failing in its duties, offered a program for changing it. Shaw delivered a speech so vigorous that Wells "was left stricken on the field" and resigned from the Fabians.

Since Maurois has frequently been hailed as the carrier of the tradition of Lytton Strachey, his portrait of that biographer is the most revealing in Prophets and Poets. He quotes enough of Strachey's witty and unexpected prose to establish convincingly the difference between the master's light touch and his own methodical, hard-working style. The sketch ends with an account of Maurois' meeting with Strachey: "On the first day we were alarmed by his tall, lanky frame, his long beard, his immobility, his silence; but when he spoke ... it was in delightful, economical epigrams. He listened to our daily discussions with a politely scornful indulgence. . . . Looking at him there, we had an impression of almost infinite disdain. . . . And yet. . . . And yet. . . ."

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