HAROLD BEGBIE.

Otago Witness, Issue 3957, 14 January 1930, Page 68

HAROLD BEGBIE.

Harold Begbie died a few weeks ifgo, mid his most intimate friend, Arthur Alee, writes in the Bookman a tribute to his memory that is worth waiting for. “ Harold' Begbie. who died peacefully in his library one October morning as a rainbow shone over the field outside his window, was of that race whom Wordsworth called the Brave, the Alighty. and the A\ ise. He has left a mass of joyous work behind him.

“It has often been said of him that lie wrote too much, and that his best was always yet to come. As far as writing too much i< concerned, it is true of every journalist, and Harold Begbie was above all a journalist. As far as his best is concerned, it may be that his very versatility—-the facility with which he could write anywhere any time on anything—was the enemy of his best.

“ It is a great thing to say of any man writing hard for more than a generation that he rarely failed his publisher or his editor, that nothing he wrote was bad. that most of it" was good, that much of it was fine, and that some of it will endure.

“ There were many Begbies. There was the poet, with a voice that rang true. There was the story teller, with the power of gripping his reader and holding him. There was the biographer, who was not to be beaten in his way of setting out a life. There was the essayist, who knew exactly what to say and how to say it. There was the humorist, sparkling and bubbling over. There was the journalist, with an intimate and vivid touch that made his writing live. “ Every one of these Begbies was above the average; in any one of these capacities Harold Begbie could have made a great name had he left the others alone. As it was, we may be thankful that all through this century he was working at papers and books, a bright and intimate and joyous worker at everything he touched, one of the entertainers and inspirers of our time.

“He has left behind more than fiftv hooks, but even that impressive fact does less than justice to his output, for his work reached millions of homes through such channels as the Children’s Encyclopedia. and its weekly companion.' the Children's Newspaper. And even if we take his books alone, they must have sold well over a million copies, perhaps

nearer two millions than one. It is a considerable achievement.

“ If we take a long list of his novels from ‘ The Diverting History of Sir John Sparrow,’ which came out rippling with merriment in 1902, to ‘ Plain Sailing,’ which ran through three editions as he lay on his death-bed, we are compelled to pause while we wonder at the brilliant gifts and the serious purpose of their author.

“ He hated narrowness and cant, and he once wrote to a friend that ‘ if I write of religion it is to make people love life and love beauty.’ Of one of his novels appearing during the war (‘Mrs O’H.’) Sir Conan Doyle wrote that it was a noble piece of work. His most popidar story was ‘ A London Girl,’ but critics praised even more ‘ The Rainy Day ’ and ‘ Closed Doors,’ comparing them with Balzac.

“ But it is probable that, by some curious and mysterious circumstance, the best work that he did was done in other names. H e will always be remembered as ’ A Gentleman with a Duster.’ Few people know the romantic chapter of a man's life that lies behind this name so long kept secret from the world. It is the story of a great adventure in itself. Harold Begbie loved the country; he knew every part of it. and he lived in manp counties. But he would do astonishing things, and after the war he surprised his friends by selling the house he had built on the verge of Ashdown Forest and taking a house in Kensington.

“V\ hat his friends expected to happen did happen: he was weary of London in a week or two, and the new note paper had hardly arrived when his daughter was writing to a friend, ‘lf you want to see Rosary Gardens come soon, for he has found a labourer's cottage with a little stream running past the door.’ In a month or two he had shaken the dust of the London summer oil his feet, and the family was installed in the labourer’s cottage on the Yorkshire moors. ‘ Ever since we got in the train,’ he wrote back to London, ‘we have been singing Hosannah and Alleluia. I have been all my life a seeker, and now I have found.’

“ Truly he hail found himself. He had left London in a fit of gloom. Despair had possession of him. and he looked forward to a simple life away from the world of men and the excitement of affairs. Then it was that he wrote “ Th.! Alirrors of Downing Street." It was from the labourer's cottage on the Yorkshire moors that this book came into every library and club, into every section of intellectual and political society, on both sides of the Atlantic.

“It is curious to look back and remember the guessing of the identity of the “ Gentleman With a Duster.” Not a soul but the publisher knew outside that cottage; but a friendly editor in London who handled more Begbie manuscripts than any other man, was able to penetrate behind the veil by an oddity of style, which nobody else perhaps would ever guess; and he wrote a letter conveying the profound secret that he himself had written “ The Alirrors of Downing Street!” “’the letter reached Harold Begbie one morning when he was at his wits’ end to know how to answer persistent assertions of his authorship of the book, and he was able at last to invent the perfectly truthful formula that he had heard in confidence from an acquaintance in London that he had written the book. 'AA ill you come,’ he wrote very wittilv to the friend, ‘ and write my name in your book ?’

* One of his earlier books surpassed even this in circulation, for it is said that Broken Earthenware ” has reached the vast total of three-quarters of a million copies. It is ; book of human wreckage reclaimed, and its raw material came from the Salvation Army. Harold Begbie. a crusader if he was anything, gave the Salvation Army the best book it has ever had.

“It is a very great pity that Mr Begbies poems have never been brought together. Only a month or two ago Mr Kipling admitted that Harold Begbie s South African War poetrv was better than his own. It was Harold Begbie who gave the British sailor the far-famed name of Handy Man; it was in a poem written of Ladysmith exactly thirty years ago; perhaps we may recall one verse:

He keeps to himself does the Handy Man, when the clouds are packed for a squall, But he comes with his gun from the ends of the earth when the bugle gives him a call ; And the babe sleeps sound in her cot o’ nights, and the trader may plot and plan. For under the stars on the rolling deep stands the vigilant Handy Man. . . He would like to be remembered as having believed in all his tvriting that ‘the key of everything is sympathy.’ He would say that again and again.”