[In the following essay, Webster examines Douglas's reputation and the reception of his works by critics and the general reading public. He concludes that the autobiographical nature of Douglas's work accounts for its abiding energy and vibrancy.]

In the burgeoning of the 1920's, when every publisher's list seemed to make literary history, few writers enjoyed a greater succès d'estime than Norman Douglas. Everybody who thought of himself as belonging to the cognoscenti, the intelligentsia, the sophisticates, or even the intelligent minority, admired South Wind. For the American tourist-third bound for Europe this book must have been almost the familiar traveling companion that Joyce's Ulysses was on the return voyage. Less temperate Douglas devotees read all of his books and bought them too—often in expensive limited editions. As one satisfied purchaser of Birds and Beasts of the Greek Anthology remarked: "I believe he could write a book about the alphabet and make it interesting." These words adequately sum up the initial reaction to Douglas of many aging admirers. They suggest exceptional virtues, for even the best authors are usually guilty of longueurs that the most appreciative reader must meet with resignation. But Norman Douglas's early scientific writings became valued collectors' items, and his casual review articles were reprinted in anticipation of the scholar's gleanings.

The 1940's have seen a good many reputations, dazzling a couple of decades ago, fade into the light of common day. Yet Norman Douglas appears to have suffered an unreasonably drastic eclipse of fame. A generation has reached maturity that knows of South Wind only by hearsay. This was to be expected. But Mr. Douglas's most recent book, Late Harvest (London, 1946), did not even find a publisher in this country, which seems a little hard on a person who once counted Joseph Conrad and Lytton Strachey among his admirers. Worst of all, the literary historian, who has among his duties that of keeping alive the names of eminent authors that nobody reads, has demoted Douglas from a complimentary line or two in Légouis and Cazamian's revised History of English Literature (1935) to a dismal footnote in the new and authoritative Literary History of England edited by Professor Albert C. Baugh in 1948. In a short outline history composed by Professor Bernard Grebanier, Douglas's name is not mentioned. Thus, his writing is at present officially considered inconsequential beside that of Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and R. B. Cunninghame Graham, to mention the names of a few esteemed figures who seemed at best no more than his peers a few years ago. On the whole this is rather cavalier treatment of a man whose position in English literature was lately regarded as assured by a discriminating public and distinguished fellow craftsmen. It is a state of affairs which provokes comments and can hardly be expected to persist. Meanwhile, a near octogenarian, Douglas in Late Harvest makes a brief appearance before the curtain, and he is almost better than ever.

There can be little doubt that the present neglect of Douglas arises in part from the fact that the basic appeal of his work cannot be described in the critical terminology it has suggested. Most of the critics and historians who have tackled him have done so with a slightly puzzled air, and Douglas has remained a controversial figure, not so much because his literary merits are disputed, as because they have been given no satisfactory definition. Meanwhile, his more enthusiastic readers sense virtues which the critics have not clarified.

It was inevitable in an age which associates major literary activity with the novel that he would be known and judged chiefly by South Wind. What can the literary historian say of such a book? That it is a twentieth-century version of the fantastic discussion novel, resembling Peacock and foreshadowing Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh? This hardly constitutes a recommendation. Peacock is today little more than a literary curiosity, and people who are reading Huxley and Waugh are not likely to turn back to a precursor. Besides, the scholar may well contest the historic importance of South Wind as a refurbishing of the discussion novel. Anatole France, Remy de Gourmont, and Maurice Barrés had produced a variety of modern examples of it which anticipated much of the form and ideational character of South Wind. Clearly, the literary historian, following his usual grooves of thought and comment, will fail to describe South Wind adequately even if he likes it. The more philosophic commentator, attempting to define the book's immediate appeal in the days of its first popularity, will hardly do better. In the perspective of thirty years, he might observe that it provided an escape of fantasy more robust than Mr. Cabell's Poictesme for a generation that found escape fantasies one way to deal with a reality which seemed crass when it was not dreary; that it gave actuality and body to the confused Hellenism which had been set even in Matthew Arnold's time as a corrective to the rigors of the Puritans; that it offered the Anglo-American reader an initiation into the Mediterranean viewpoint as Madame de Staél's Corinne, ou L'Italie and Stendhal's Rôme, Naples et Florence had done for the French a hundred years before. Still, no great recommendation for South Wind; still nothing to distinguish it from a hundred volumes that most of us feel no vocation to read.

Perhaps the luxuriance of wit and sophistication with which South Wind is embellished has encouraged an oversophisticated view of it, which blinds us to cruder and more fundamental virtues. At any rate, Mr. Douglas suggests a more naïve approach in Late Harvest. It seems to require little critical penetration to note that South Wind is an uproariously funny book, one of the few in the language that can reasonably be expected to shake people with laughter when it is read aloud. Yet in all the more intellectualized claims made for it, critics have characteristically overlooked this simple and basic one. Few writers have the genuine comic vocation. For comedy in the grand style, irrepressible high spirits must survive wide worldly experience, erudition, and a literary technic that must usually be acquired laboriously. In the perspective of thirty-odd years we may now suspect that Mr. Douglas belongs among the comic writers in the grand style. The ideas that he advanced in his novel were never as original as they appeared to be to early readers, but Mr. Freddy Parker, Miss Wilberforce, Signor Malipizzo, and a host of other genial burlesques are as peculiarly Douglas's figures as Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman and Mr. Pickwick are figures of their creators. Moreover, Douglas's comic characters are classic types, likely to be recognizable in any foreseeable future. Time may change the terms in which a pompous, incompetent fraud like Mr. Freddy Parker and a rancorous man like Signor Malipizzo express themselves, but future readers will still see Freddy Parkers and Signor Malipizzos around them. Nor is the humor of South Wind that of character alone. No author has turned erudition to better purpose of comedy. Ben Jonson, Samuel Butler, and even Sterne puzzle us with obscurities of learning, but Douglas sticks to the highways most of us travel, and his travesty of the renaissance autocrat in the Good Duke Alfred, of more extravagant saints legends in Saint Dodekanus, and of the very geology of Nepenthe in the account of the mineral springs are not likely to need the illumination of footnotes in the future.

South Wind, then, seems to have a very good chance of taking its place in literature as a masterpiece of English comic writing rather than as the tendential presentation of a point of view, which has been the quality most noted in it to date. Perhaps we may even have future scholarly monographs on the Shandean delicacy of the Cave of Mercury episodes, the slapstick note of Mr. Keith's misfortune with the lime receptacle, the transatlantic touch in Cornelius van Koppen's adventure with the overgrown peas, the Caledonian absurdity of Mr. Keith and the committee to restrict Miss Wilberforce, the Mediterranean local color of the "nice old mans" and the "dam' fool foreigner." The scholar might want to compare the alcoholic festivities at the club with inebriate incidents in Pickwick or Shirley's Lady of Pleasure or Congreve's Love for Love. Such matters can be carried pretty far afield, but it is sufficient in the present article to observe that Douglas's humor is robust enough to bear such handling.

If South Wind introduced Douglas to a wide reading public, it also helped to distort the critical appreciation of his other books. An author, like an actor, is likely to pay for popular success by being "typed" in the minds of his readers. Douglas's critics and admirers approached his later works with the hope that these would resemble South Wind. Though new South Wind's were forthcoming in due course, they were not from the pen of Norman Douglas. There can be no doubt that the failure to do another South Wind cost him immediate popularity. In Looking Back he included two chapters of a discarded novel, almost as though to demonstrate how easily he could have gratified his public's wishes, but for better or worse he did not himself fall a victim to the sirocco worship which prevailed at the time. Instead, he departed into new territory.

His two later novels, They Went and In the Beginning, were puzzling and not entirely successful excursions into the sort of anthropological fiction which Thomas Mann has recently written in a more solemn vein. If such imaginative recreations of the dawn of civilization become a recognized literary type, these books may retain some historic importance. In the Beginning certainly has enough artistic vitality to hold a few future readers, as does Vathek, a remotely comparable example. Yet both novels promise more than they perform, and Douglas would deserve to be demoted to the footnotes of literary history if he had nothing less eccentric to recommend him. Other books, nonfiction these, did little to clarify his position. Together, Alone, and Experiments were clearly not very much like earlier travel books such as Siren Land and Old Calabria, and in fact, taken out of the context of the rest of Douglas's work, they are hard to label at all. Yet when they were published, they continued to attract a small but faithful and discriminating public to their author.

The precipitous decline of Douglas's reputation dates from the volume called How About Europe? in England and Goodbye to Western Culture in America. This book on its publication seemed like a long and tedious coda to South Wind and out of date as well. In 1930 even the newspapers were printing more discouraging reports of Western civilization than anything Mr. Douglas had to record. Possibly a few traveled Americans could not resist a smile at the splenetic summary of the discomforts of the tourist in England, but this is about the best that can be said for it. When Looking Back, Douglas's autobiography, was published in 1933, the murk of depression and war already enveloped us, and the author seemed to be speaking from a different planet. In the early 1930's Douglas was thus the victim not so much of a critical revaluation as of a lapse in that special sort of appeal writers occasionally have for the public when they are in the favored position of putting into the reader's mouth exactly what the reader himself wants to say. Books like South Wind and Old Calabria could hardly have been better designed to anticipate and ingratiatingly express the distaste for the sanctioned values of an Anglo-American way of life, which began to turn the stomachs of rebels on both sides of the Atlantic in the next decade.

Professor Samuel C. Chew speaks of "the boldness of Douglas's assault upon conventional moral standards" (A Literary History of England, 1948). Needless to say, most authors of that period who still interest us were holding these same moral standards up to critical scrutiny. The scrutiny had really begun as far back as Matthew Arnold, who first raised the problem. Douglas's attack on conventions was bold in the sense that it was uncompromising and showed none of that ambivalence of sympathy which characterized certain of his generation, but it delighted its early readers more by its skilful flanking tactics than by its impetuosity. While H. L. Mencken abused the evangelists, Douglas suavely cajoled his Bishop of Bampopo into approving a well-justified murder. There was a marked difference in social tone and literary skill. Douglas may very well have been the most effective of this iconoclastic generation. He marshaled an enormous amount of erudition, wit, worldly experience, and common sense against Philistia's whole way of life and even managed to persuade good manners to turn traitor in the enemy's camp. He had the advantage that he really meant his assault. One had the uneasy suspicion that many of his brothers-in-arms were seeing only the reverse of the medal, but it was clear that Douglas had no lingering emotional attachment to the things he ridiculed. Moreover, alone among the critics of the puritan-industrial way of life in the 1920's, he had an understandable set of positive values to offer his reader. It was an age of misty and somewhat ridiculous Utopias, in which D. H. Lawrence's almost occult instinctivism vied with Eliot's mannered attachment to church, king, and John Dryden, and Hemingway's cult of blood and courage was strikingly contrasted with Ronald Firbank's perfumed fairyland. Small wonder that for the more balanced sort of reader Douglas's tempered epicureanism with his savor of the past and present, his delight in a visible world of flora and fauna, his wholehearted acceptance of empiric science in all its implications, and all this in a brilliantly colored Mediterranean setting, seemed by far the best answer to the more dreary actualities of the Anglo-American scene.

The way of life Douglas exemplified and recommended had the disadvantage that to be lived successfully it required some of his own genius and something of a private income, but neither of these things seemed insuperable obstacles to malcontents in those days. As an ideal, it had been quite capable of being realized in many periods of human history. The cosmopolitan sage that Douglas typified came to be at an awkward disadvantage in the 1930's and still is today. Nevertheless, Norman Douglas remains as the yea-sayer of a dispirited generation, pointing out the many blessings of this life which we perversely make unavailable to ourselves. The first ten pages of Late Harvest alone should assure his literary immortality as a moving expression of the by no means solemn serenity of extreme old age. "How have I spent my days?" asks Mr. Douglas as a preface to retrospective notes on his books. Most people who know something of his books will answer—enviably.

While a literary artist is never a formal philosopher, Norman Douglas's work represents a clear enough pattern of ideas which still have their bearing on a troubled present, though the bearing is a little obscured by the complexity of our problems, and also by our author's frequent eccentricities of opinion. Douglas bristles with these, but as with Samuel Johnson they often generate a sort of affection. Perhaps it flatters the reader's self-esteem to find such gifted figures so harmlessly wrong. But with Douglas, as with Samuel Johnson, common sense is likely to triumph in any real pinch. If he gets ridiculously excited about the suggestive fashion with which the canaille of the French customs finger the lingerie of genuine British ladies, we find him again on firm ground when he writes of the inhumanity of French orphan asylums. Better still, in his famous controversy with D. H. Lawrence about Maurice Magnus and other matters we note that though Douglas appears to be the touchy eccentric, stirred in his shell by the luminous common sense of Lawrence, it is also Douglas who maintains the principle that authors have no right lightly to expose recognizable people to contempt on the basis of personal dislike. The principle is admitted in general practice and should be, though Douglas's own Looking Back would be almost better without it. In spite of a battle-scarred career, he treats nearly everyone except a few anonymous magistrates with a forbearance which increases one's admiration for the man and occasionally detracts from the interest of the book.

Lawrence himself is let off with the spirited and nettled account of a personal relationship, which Douglas does not confuse with Lawrence's undoubted genius. Such things as this give one confidence in the balance of a very individual and sometimes wayward personality.

Douglas's personality: The words bring us to a new and very important facet of his work. Few writers are personally as interesting as their creations. No one would expect Shakespeare to be as fascinating as Hamlet or Falstaff, or Dickens to be half as funny as Sam Weller. Perhaps this abnegation of the author in the character is the final expression of genius. But most of Douglas's readers have suspected that the author is personally more interesting than his creations. In Late Harvest he encourages us to look on the whole canon of his work as an autobiography. "Now, having reached nearly twice the age at which Platen died, I no longer complain of how I squandered my days; my one regret is that I have not many more of them to squander. If one has enjoyed life and contrived to extract matter of mirth even out of its not infrequent mishaps, one cannot be said to have squandered one's days.… And there is this advantage in the writing of books when they are in some measure autobiographical, describing events from early childhood onwards; instead of being confused memories they are authentic documents which allow a man to live his life over again.… For Platen's exclamation point I substitute a question mark. How have you spent your days?"

So Mr. Douglas puts the word autobiographical into our mouths. It is the obvious term which no one thought to apply to Together and Alone when they were published, and which also would have explained satisfactorily the basic literary impulse in Siren Land and Old Calabria. It brings his work into new perspective and even accounts for his wish to preserve such trivial things as the review articles which he reprints in Experiments and Late Harvest. These are inconsequential in themselves but an important record of a period in their author's life and of his war with Mrs. Grundy. There is indeed an almost organic relationship between all of Douglas's books which gives the whole canon an unusual degree of unity. The early Capri pamphlets are recapitulated in Siren Land and to some extent in Old Calabria; Summer Islands furnishes a good part of the topography of South Wind. Together fills in the background of the early zoological pamphlets. Alone anticipates the more candid autobiographic note of Looking Back, and the privately published book of limericks amplifies it with some bawdry which is dull unless one likes limericks, but still a characteristic expression of the man who compiled them. London Street Games gives an account of its author's period of poverty in London, which is not amplified in Looking Back. Even Birds and Beasts of the Greek Anthology is prefaced by Will Percy's biographical sketch, showing the subject in a pose which he neglects in the self-portrait. Except for the three novels, there is no book from Douglas's pen in which interest in the material is not shared in an exceptional degree with interest in the writer himself. This essentially is autobiographic writing, as Mr. Douglas himself suggests.

It was interest in following the threads of his complex and fascinating personality that led people to collect his early scientific pamphlets, to read him on the fauna of antiquity, on old aphrodisiacs, on the iniquities of modern Europe. His essential appeal was obscured even from his most affectionate readers as much by the unprecedented form his autobiography assumed as by the fact that a writer who had produced a novel of high merit was inescapably labeled a novelist in an age which thought of the novel as the literary norm. He is still classed as a novelist by our literary historians, which means that most of his work is thrown out of consideration. The unexpected and puzzling nature of his autobiographic writing may readily be illustrated by Looking Back, the most conventionally autobiographic book he has written, which, proceeding in no chronological order, is thus, among other things, the random associations called up by many years' accumulation of calling cards.

Norman Douglas may thus be seen as a sort of twentieth-century Samuel Johnson, who is also his own Boswell. If the essentially autobiographic nature of his work is accepted, and I think it must be by those who know it well, Looking Back lies at the center of it; the lines of interest radiate through Douglas's own books and into such works as D. H. Lawrence's Aaron's Rod and A Portrait of M. M., Muriel Draper's Music at Midnight, G. Orioli's Adventures of a Bookseller, Compton Mackenzie's Vestal Fire, Louis Golding's Sunward, and other bits of Douglasiana, which booksellers used to recommend to enthusiasts.

A multi-volumed autobiography which has attracted such devoted readers is sure to have something out of the ordinary to recommend it. The mere facts of Douglas's life, as distinct from his literary genius, would guarantee an interesting record, though he tantalizes us with reticences about them as much as he nourishes our curiosity with revelations. However, the main outlines of an unusual career can be pieced together readily enough. It yields a sketch something like this: A Scotch county-family father and a German mother; a cosmopolitan education on the Continent, mainly in Karlsruhe; early scientific and musical interests; a period in London as a young gentleman of well-gloved and tailored leisure; a brief period in the diplomatic service in Russia; wide and observant travel, to Greece, to Turkey, to India; marriage and the purchase of a villa in Capri; an absorption with the present and past of the Mediterranean world; then a period of bankruptcy and privation (the marriage was evidently dissolved); from the elegant and accomplished amateur, G. Norman Douglass, had emerged Norman Douglas, professional man of letters, assistant editor of the English Review, and a minor figure in London literary circles. World War I and a new personal cataclysm of some sort turned Douglas into the picturesque expatriate bohemian described in Aaron's Rod and more glowingly painted in Alone. A few years later, and the bohemian had become the sage and esteemed literary artist. A strange, improbable sort of life, veiled by inexplicable obscurities; illuminated by unexpected bits of picaresque candor, most striking of all in the satisfaction it gave the man who lived it. It offers enough "problems" to keep a dozen scholars happy. One hopes that before very many years someone informed of these matters will tell us how Norman Douglas happened to go broke—a significant fact in his literary career. And how about certain "emotional difficulties" which J. H. Retinger refers to in Joseph Conrad and his Friends? We have occasional hints of such things in Douglas's books, but they would seem to have been by no means the decisive force in his life that they were in Gide's or Proust's, which is fortunate from the point of view of his larger public. Then it would be interesting to trace his financial affairs as co-publisher with Signor Orioli. And how about his relations with various literary celebrities?

The facts in Douglas's life are interesting, quite as interesting as those of Stendhal's, who might serve as an understandable parallel, as a man whose work also has a strong autobiographic motive. But facts alone can never make great biographic writing. Perhaps the root of Douglas's charm lies in an irrepressible, youthful éelan, which in Late Harvest hardly seems wearied by the weight of eight decades. This quality gives coherence to the many-sided and perplexing individuality which emerges in his own books and those of other men. Douglas, the not-too-earnest gentleman, giving Mrs. Conrad a courtly arm to lead her away from the unspeakable Frank Harris; Douglas, the pedant grumbling about footnotes; Douglas, the shady bohemian swindling a tailor; Douglas, the amateur scientist, impassioned about tree conservation; Douglas, the bon vivant approving or abusing the vintage; Douglas, the Hellenist, recapturing the past Mediterranean world in its brightly colored present; Douglas, the controversialist, denouncing a bad manner. And all this, with a vigor and copiousness of experience, bookish and otherwise, that belongs to the heroic scale. Where other men write their books, Douglas seems to live his. What is more, he makes his reader live them too, with a vividness and intimacy that eludes our "stripped style" and "immediate impact" experts, who are already beginning to seem a little dated.

What should the uninitiated reader do about this situation? He can start with the justly popular South Wind. If he likes it and wishes to know his author better, he might turn to Old Calabria, London Street Games, and Looking Back. When he has read these, he will know a man who has lived a favored life and one quite largely of his own contriving. This is a considerable feat, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century, when the more articulate people too often give the impression that they have wasted their time, not spent it. Douglas has no such regrets. "Externalize yourself," Count Caloveglia tells the youthful Dennis in South Wind. Douglas externalized himself. His life is a record of interest in the past and present, in such diverse human activities as street games and hagiology, in the visible surface of the earth and the animal and vegetable life it bears. He seems to have lived with a minimum of family ties. As for friends, "I like to taste my friends, not to eat them." His behavior has been independent of any group. In an age when we reject old social values and distrust new ones, Douglas has left the account of a bold individual experiment in living, which by no means answers all human aspirations, but which assuredly has much to teach a generation that is still seeking new bearings. Those readers who come to this conclusion will probably abandon escorted tours of the author for a personal exploration, which they can hardly fail to find rewarding.