A. A. Milne: Sources of His Creativity*

A Victorian child, an Edwardian blade and a Georgian parent and writer, A. A. Milne was quite decidedly out of step with the leading twentieth-century figures in literature and the arts. The Jugendstil and art nouveau movements were crumbling away before the dark and imperious legions of expressionism; Eliot's Wasteland brooded over a new and disheartened Europe while Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and Aldous Huxley strove to sweep away what were perceived as the flaccid banalities of nineteenth-century English mentality. In their ferocious wake, Milne bobbed happily along, his visions on gimbals, safely tucked away in the nursery and parlor. George Jean Nathan, the prominent theatrical critic, tendered a special disdain for Milne's offerings on the stage, plays reminiscent of Victorian “society dramas”:

Mr. Milne has another weakness and that is what amounts at times almost to a girlish cuteness. In almost every one of his plays there come moments when he goes tootsie-wootsie to such a violent degree that it is all even his admirers can do to keep from jumping onto their seats and shouting, “Come on, now, baby, take that thumb out of your mouth!”1

Milne was not by virtue of his novels, plays and essays, a great artist who touched a nerve deep within mankind through his creations. His inability and unwillingness to deal with human ambivalence, hatred and rage allowed him only the most superficial of characterizations and the most timid of social critiques. The restrained Victorian family environment which provided the inspiration for and content of Milne's art was reflected in his own character and intensified by his immersion