d he has lived there continuously all
that time (except for two or three visits to London, of short duration).
It has been in all his thoughts. He has seen it as a whole. He knows it
from end to end, its rocks, its birds, its trees and flowers and paths.
What wonder that his health is magnificent, his spirits high! What wonder
the critics have seen fit to praise _The Altar Steps_ as they have not
praised anything of Mackenzie's for years? If they had seen Herm, they
could have done nothing at all but praise without reserve."

CHAPTER XVII

THE HETEROGENEOUS MAGIC OF MAUGHAM

=i=

Now, I don't know where to begin. Probably I shall not know where to leave
off, either. That is my usual misfortune, to write a chapter at both ends.
It is a fatal thing, like the doubly-consuming candle. Perhaps I might
start with the sapience of Hector MacQuarrie, author of _Tahiti Days_. I
am tempted to, because so many people think of W. Somerset Maugham as the
author of _The Moon and Sixpence_. The day will come, however, when people
will think of him as the man who wrote _Of Human Bondage_.

This novel does not need praise. All it needs, like the grand work it is,
is attention; and that it increasingly gets.

[Illustration: W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM]

=ii=

Theodore Dreiser reviewed _Of Human Bondage_ for the New Republic. I
reprint part of what he said:

"Sometimes in retrospect of a great book the mind falters, confused by the
multitude and yet the harmony of the detail, the strangeness of the
frettings, the brooding, musing intelligence that has foreseen, loved,
created, elaborated, perfected, until, in the middle ground which we call
life, somewhere between nothing and nothing, hangs the perfect thing which
we love and cannot understand, but which we are compelled to confess a
work of art. It is at once something and nothing, a dream of happy memory,
a song, a benediction. In viewing it one finds nothing to criticise or to
regret. The thing sings, it has colour. It has rapture. You wonder at the
loving, patient care which has evolved it.

"Here is a novel or biography or autobiography or social transcript of the
utmost importance. To begin with, it is unmoral, as a novel of this kind
must necessarily be. The hero is born with a club foot, and in
consequence, and because of a temperament delicately attuned to the
miseries of life, suffers all the pains, recessions, and involute self
tortures which only those who have stri