Chapter VII: Front Matter (7)

Charles Hitchcock Sherrill’s _The Purple or the Red_, based on personal interviews with Mussolini of Italy, Horthy of Hungary, Primo de Riveira of Spain and other statesmen, as well as most of the surviving European monarchs, contains much interesting material about after-war Europe. It is ultra-conservative in its political attitude, but General Sherrill makes an effective case for his idea that the Crown, in European countries, has served as a rallying point for patriotism and by its place above factions has been a bulwark against revolution with bloodshed.

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Two very exceptional autobiographies are Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s _Memories and Adventures_ and Constantin Stanislavsky’s _My Life in Art_. Both are ample, lavishly illustrated volumes; and far apart as are the lives they record, I hesitate to say that either exceeds the other in charm.

The creator of Sherlock Holmes is a big, amiable man, a person of great simplicity of manner and almost naïve in his enjoyment of people, places and events. His book is inevitably one of a very wide popular appeal, the more so as Sir Arthur is entirely without conceit. In _Memories and Adventures_ he tells of his education at Stoneyhurst, in Germany, and in Edinburgh, where he got his doctor’s degree. He relates his early medical experiences and tells of his first attempts at writing. A memorable voyage to West Africa as a ship’s surgeon, his earlier religious ideas and beliefs and the changes they underwent, and his marriage are all dealt with.

Then comes the story of his first real success as an author, made with the novel, _A Study in Scarlet_. He had resounding subsequent successes with _Micah Clarke_, _The Sign of the Four_, and _The White Company_. The creation of Sherlock Holmes was a great milestone in Conan Doyle’s life. This is without question the most famous character in English fiction. Visits to America and Egypt and political adventures are chronicled. There are reminiscences and anecdotes of Roosevelt, George Meredith, Kitchener, Lloyd George, Balfour, Mr. Asquith, Henry Irving, Kipling, Bernard Shaw, Barrie and many others, living and dead, sprinkled through these extremely readable chapters. The closing chapter is devoted to the author’s amazing experiences in psychical research; and it must be said for him that he writes more persuasively of his experiences and beliefs in this affair than anyone else has ever managed to do. Altogether _Memories and Adventures_ will engross anyone who opens it.

Very different, with its own style and an accent of enthusiasm throughout, is Constantin Stanislavsky’s _My Life in Art_. This man has been the stage director of the Moscow Art Theater since its establishment in 1898; and although that theater is now known throughout the world, and is frequently hailed as the world’s foremost playhouse, Stanislavsky’s reputation outside Russia has naturally been confined to the circles of dramatic art. His autobiography depended for its American publication wholly on the intrinsic interest of what he had to tell. You may infer that that interest is considerable. It is.

I spoke of the book’s style. It is peculiar, individual; sincere and unskilled, awkward and yet masterful; admirable because so evidently a part of the author. Born in 1863, the son of a wealthy Russian merchant family and the grandson of a French actress, Stanislavsky as a boy showed stage talents in family theatricals; and though he later slaved over accounts in his father’s counting-house, his nights were nights of feverish absorption in the theater. His birth placed him in the thick of the social and intellectual life of Moscow, for he belonged to the class which has created the arts of Russia. At twenty-five he became director of the Society of Art and Literature, a group of young people with serious ideas about the stage and a great dissatisfaction with the current Russian theater. When Stanislavsky met Nemirovich-Danchenko, the Moscow Art Theater was founded.

The first half of _My Life in Art_ is therefore chiefly personal, a rich slice of Russian life with plum-like impressions and reminiscences of Rubinstein, Tolstoy, Tommaso Salvini the elder and other great artists of that time. The second half deals with the Moscow Art Theater, in which Stanislavsky made for himself a reputation as one of Russia’s greatest actors, particularly in the rôles of Othello, Brutus, and Ivan the Terrible. This part of _My Life in Art_ is crammed with material of interest and value not only to those who follow the theater but to all whose great interest is art. Chekhov, Tolstoy, Maeterlinck and others in person are delightfully mixed with interpretative experience in their plays and in the plays of Shakespeare, Molière, Pushkin and other immortals. The book closes with a description of the present work of the Moscow Art Theater, including the Soviet régime in Russia and the visit to America.

At last we have a biography of Clyde Fitch, achieved in that most satisfactory of ways, by means of his letters. Mr. Montrose J. Moses and Miss Virginia Gerson, who edited the memorial edition of Clyde Fitch’s plays, have been engaged for some time in collecting the Fitch letters and the result of their labor is now published in one volume. _Clyde Fitch and His Letters_ reflects well a personality which people never forgot, since meeting him was, as some one said, like meeting a figure in fiction. Fitch had a genius for friendship. His letters were always unstudied, without pretension to literary style, and brimful of a strongly impressionist reaction to the place or the event. He dashed them off as the spirit prompted—on board ship, by an open window of a Continental hotel, on the terraces of his country house; notes of appreciation, notes of invitation, long, impulsive descriptions of European festivities (some processional in Spain or some picturesque account of Venetian gondoliering). They breathe, these letters, of his warm association with the novelist, Robert Herrick; they show a light-hearted friendship with Maude Adams and Kate Douglas Wiggin; they show interchanges of appreciation between Fitch and William Dean Howells. Again, the reader sees the evidence of the personal concern and interest Fitch showed in the actors and actresses engaged for his plays. From the incipient idea of a plot for a play to the play’s first night, the letters enable the reader to follow breathlessly the climb of Clyde Fitch to the position of America’s most successful playwright. But he remained a simple, unaffected sort of person.

One cannot say more, I suppose, than that from the day when Richard Mansfield asked him to write “Beau Brummell” to the day of Clyde Fitch’s death, when he had taken “The City” abroad for a final polishing which death prevented, _Clyde Fitch and His Letters_ is full of the live rush of the man. A very sane and fundamentally enthusiastic attitude was his toward American life, and those who read the book will not miss that part of it.

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Of two books by women, one, _Sunlight and Song_, by Maria Jeritza, is the great singer’s autobiography; while Frances Parkinson Keyes’s _Letters from a Senator’s Wife_ is autobiographical only incidentally.

Mme. Jeritza is not only the foremost feminine personality in grand opera in America today, but by her concert tours she has become known throughout the United States. Her _Sunlight and Song_ is a book pretty certain to interest everyone who has heard her—or heard of her. It is written with directness, in a thoroughly popular vein, and is utterly free from affectations or pose. An Austrian by birth, she sang in Olmütz while in her teens, living on the hope of an engagement in Vienna. At length she came to the capital and waited her turn in the trying-out of voices. She was engaged for the municipal opera and afterward for the Court Opera House. Her rôles from operas by Richard Strauss and Puccini were rehearsed under the personal direction of the composers; she met Caruso and dozens of other musical celebrities; she sang before and met the Emperor; and in 1921 she came to America. One of the most interesting bits of her book concerns a rehearsal of “Tosca” at which she slipped and fell. She sang “Vissi d’arte” where she lay, exciting Puccini’s enthusiasm. He exclaimed that always he had needed something to make the aria stand out and command attention; and this did it! When it was announced that Jeritza was to sing in “Tosca” in New York, there was a noticeable wave of hostility from those who associated the rôle exclusively with Geraldine Farrar. It vanished after she had appeared.

Among the photographs with which Jeritza’s book is illustrated are many extremely beautiful pictures of the singer in her various rôles. The chapters on “How an Opera Singer Really Lives,” “Studying with Sembrich,” “Singing for the Phonograph,” and “Some Guest Performances” will especially repay students of the voice.

The book by Mrs. Keyes, wife of the United States Senator from New Hampshire, is in a class by itself. _Letters from a Senator’s Wife_ consists entirely of actual letters written to old friends who were some distance away from Washington and who had a full feminine curiosity about life there. Taken as they stand, Mrs. Keyes’s letters form a pretty complete record of social and political life in the capital as seen from the inner official circle. Beginning with her first impressions of Washington, Mrs. Keyes goes on to describe the Harding inauguration, the burial of the Unknown Soldier, the arms conference, the agricultural conference in 1922 and the industrial conference in 1923; the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial; the presentation of a gram of radium to Madame Curie; the diplomatic and New Year’s receptions at the White House; the convention of women’s organizations at which Lady Astor was conspicuous; dinners, teas, an afternoon cruise as Mrs. Harding’s guest on the Mayflower and social affairs innumerable.

The result is a picture of Washington exactly as a woman in Mrs. Keyes’s place would be privileged to see it; women readers will have a sense of participating in the things described. It is, I should say, exclusively a woman’s book; but no one who appreciates the average woman’s enjoyment of social detail will underestimate what Mrs. Keyes has accomplished. But in addition to telling the reader what she would have to do, whom she would meet, and what functions she would attend if she were in the Washington circle, the book does really constitute an attractive record of current history in the making and as made. Women who read it can scarcely fail to become more intelligent than before.

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Fortunately Maurice Francis Egan, one of the most beloved of Americans, lived to complete for us his _Recollections of a Happy Life_. The author of _Everybody’s St. Francis_, _Ten Years Near the German Frontier_, _Confessions of a Book-Lover_ and other volumes had a scroll of memories which began in Philadelphia in the 1850s and which included political and social Washington in the Civil War period. In _Recollections of a Happy Life_ the New York of the Henry George era is touched in with delightful anecdotes of Richard Watson Gilder and the group that surrounded him; there is a crisp picture of Indiana where Dr. Egan was professor of English at Notre Dame; and the book fairly launches itself with a full record of life in Washington and of the author’s close association with Presidents McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson, under the last three of whom Dr. Egan held the post of Minister to Denmark. Scholar, poet, critic, and most winning of companions, Dr. Egan’s autobiography reflects a good deal of America in the past half-century as well as his own varied experiences here and abroad.

Of even more definitely literary interest is _C. K. S. An Autobiography_, by Clement K. Shorter. An indefatigable book collector whose library is rich in first editions, original manuscripts, and autograph letters, Mr. Shorter is probably best known as an editor and dramatic critic. He has had thirty years in each rôle, and still writes weekly causeries which carry, on occasion, a provocative sting. George Meredith, Stevenson, Andrew Lang, Thomas Hardy, and Gissing each are the subject of a chapter founded primarily on personal impressions of the man.

Such personal impressions, mixed with estimates of the writer’s work, form the substance of _The Literary Spotlight_, edited, with an introduction, by John Farrar, editor of The Bookman. These anonymous literary portraits have been aptly called “Mirrors of Literature.” The anonymity has made possible a great deal of frankness, humor, and penetration worth having, and Mr. Farrar has added bibliographies, biographical facts and such data as make the volume handy for reference. Edna Ferber, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Floyd Dell, Mary Johnston, Edwin Arlington Robinson and others of high contemporary interest are presented.

THE TRUTH AT LAST!

_Robert Louis Stevenson: A Critical Biography_, by John A. Steuart. Two volumes. This new biography, by an English writer, will throw much new light on Stevenson. From unpublished documents in Edinburgh and elsewhere, and from several people who knew Stevenson, Mr. Steuart has obtained facts never before printed—so the portrait he draws is somewhat different from those which have already appeared. This biography will be of much interest to the many admirers of Stevenson’s work who are not afraid to see the man as he actually was in his strength and his weakness, his gaiety and his gloom. Photogravure frontispieces.

_The Truth at Last_, by Charles Hawtrey, edited, with an introduction, by W. Somerset Maugham. The amusing, frankly self-revealing memoirs of a famous English actor, well remembered in America for his tours in “A Message from Mars” and “The Man from Blankley’s.” Illustrated.

_Forty Years in Washington_, by David S. Barry. Reminiscences of Presidents, Cabinet members, Senators and Congressmen, by the Sergeant-at-Arms of the Senate, who was Washington correspondent of The Sun, New York, when Charles A. Dana was its editor. Illustrated.

_The Life of Olive Schreiner_, by S. C. Cronwright-Schreiner. The biography, by her husband, of the brilliant author of _Dreams_ and _The Story of an African Farm_, a woman of extraordinary personality who was not only a writer of genius but a pioneer advocate of woman’s freedom. Illustrated.

_Remembered Yesterdays_, by Robert Underwood Johnson. Mr. Johnson’s reminiscences are unusually entertaining and novel, and their diversity is exceptional. As a stripling he went to New York to join the staff of Scribner’s Monthly, afterward known as the Century Magazine, with which he was connected for forty years, as associate editor and as editor-in-chief. Highly interesting are his touch-and-go reminiscences of famous Americans and foreign visitors, his anecdotes of travel abroad, and the account of his service as Ambassador to Italy in Wilson’s second term. The portraits of American men of letters from the Civil War to the present are vividly drawn. No recent volume of American recollections keeps the reader in a more tolerant and gracious atmosphere. Illustrated.

_Three Generations_, by Maud Howe Elliott. A charming book of reminiscences by the daughter of Julia Ward Howe, covering the life and events of the past six decades. After her marriage to John Elliott, the artist, she lived for long periods in Rome, and to her salon came hosts of travelers and world-famous celebrities. It is a volume of memoirs of international interest and a fascinating account of the most interesting people in the world, in literature, art, drama, diplomacy and society, covering sixty years of “glorious life.” Illustrated.

_Poincaré: The Man of the Ruhr_, by Sisley Huddleston. Raymond Poincaré, twice French Prime Minister and wartime President of the French Republic, has been the storm center of Continental politics in connection with the French occupation of the Ruhr. The author gives a vivid account of his career, his strength and his limitations, brightly written, with a considerable spice of wit. Frontispiece.

_A Woman’s Quest: The Life of Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D._, edited by Agnes C. Vietor. The story of a woman whose courage and perseverance probably did more than was accomplished by any other single person to open the medical profession to women. Dr. Zakrzewska was born in 1829, of Polish-German ancestry, and came to America when she was twenty-four. She had already, in Germany, made her way against bitter and unceasing opposition; in America she was to find herself without any standing at all. After a period of struggle she met Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell who gave her encouragement and in the face of every imaginable difficulty, Marie Zakrzewska studied medicine at Cleveland. She was refused admission at Harvard, but met Emerson, William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Parker and other noted men and women. Eventually she founded the New England Hospital for Women and Children. Her autobiography is of profound interest and considerable historical importance.

_The Life of Anne Boleyn_, by Philip W. Sergeant. A full and carefully documented biography of the mother of Queen Elizabeth, written with charm of style and sincerity, and constituting a vindication of Anne. Its view of her is therefore exactly antithetical to the one advanced in the first essay in _Post Mortem: Essays, Historical and Medical_, by C. MacLaurin.

_Robert Owen_, by Frank Podmore. The incomparable story of the shop boy who became a rich and famous inventor of machines that revolutionized the cotton mills, a mill owner, and a business builder—but whose eager spirit caused him to found an Utopia in America, to work for labor betterment and world peace, to question religious creeds and to become a spiritualist. Few lives show so well the industrial and intellectual transformation that went on in the nineteenth century.

_The Truth About My Father_, by Count Leon L. Tolstoi. By the one son who sympathized with his father to the extent of accepting his doctrines and endeavoring to work them out. The author says that his mother was the source of his father’s greatest happiness and the real author of his greatness; in old age, a will, secretly made under the influence of Tchertkoff, came between the parents (more as a matter of deceit than of the alienation of property).

_The Manuscript of St. Helena_, translated by Willard Parker. This is the document mentioned in Napoleon’s will. He disavowed it as his work. It must, however, have been inspired if not dictated by him. It reads like a private diary, telling of Napoleon’s life and achievements in a terse, clear style and showing him as he saw and judged himself. The document was published in French in 1817 but has never before been translated into English.

_The Letters of Madame, 1661-1708_, by Elizabeth-Charlotte of Bavaria, edited and translated by Gertrude Scott Stevenson. “Madame” was the usual way of referring to Elizabeth-Charlotte, Princess Palatine, a sturdy, outspoken German girl who, at nineteen, was married to Philippe, Duc d’Orleans, only brother of Louis XIV. of France. Philippe was thirty-one, effeminate, extravagant, and debauched; suspected of complicity in the supposed poisoning of his first wife. “Madame” was the most prodigious letter writer of an age fond of correspondence, a keen observer, and much franker than most others dared to be. Her letters are not only a great source for historians but breath-taking reading in themselves. The picture of the court of Louis XIV. is unmatched except in the pages of Saint-Simon.

_David Wilmot, Free Soiler_, by Charles Buxton Going. At last we have an adequate account of the author of the Wilmot Proviso, offered in 1846 and barring slavery in territory acquired from Mexico—the chief political issue from then to the Civil War, and the chief instrument in creating the Republican Party. Lincoln wrote that he had voted for the Wilmot Proviso more than forty times while he was in Congress, and on becoming President he offered Wilmot a place in his Cabinet.

_Servant of Sahibs_, by Ghulam Rassul Galwan, with an introduction by Sir Francis Younghusband. Written in quaint English by a man who accompanied Younghusband and who has worked for many years in the service of English and American travelers in the Himalayas, Central Asia, and Tibet. An adventurous and novel book which will delight everyone who cares for Kipling’s fiction or for tales of India.

_Nell Gwyn_, by Lewis Melville. Her career from orange girl to King’s favorite; her youthful troubles, her lovers, her stage success, her rivals in royal favor, her vast popularity and later years in Pall Mall. Illustrated in color.

13. That Literary Wanderer, E. V. Lucas

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For a man whose air is so leisurely—whose literary air, that is, gives every aspect of leisure—Edward Verrall Lucas has written a perplexingly large number of books. Perhaps he is the living witness of the efficacy of making haste slowly. If one were a murderer, for example, one would do well to move away without haste (circumstances at all permitting) from the scene of his crime. How often is haste, or even the appearance of haste, fatal! In the unchanging words of the changing Fire Commissioners of the City of New York, in case of murder, walk, do not run, to the nearest exit.

Mr. Lucas’s murder was committed at the outset of his career and he has been traveling from it by easy stages ever since. After close on thirty years, the dark moment may be said to be below the horizon. But in his literary youth he called in and slew his first book, a volume of poems. And although the number and variety of his books since is such that he has had to put them, for the reader’s guidance, under eight classifications, he has still to give us a book of his own verse.

What, then, has he given us? What not were more quickly answered. His ten novels, being of a special character, he very fittingly designates as ENTERTAINMENTS, his thirteen volumes of ESSAYS slightly outnumber his books in any other class; he has compiled eight ANTHOLOGIES and written eight BOOKS FOR CHILDREN; has four collections of SELECTED WRITINGS, two EDITED WORKS and five works of BIOGRAPHY to his account; and is the author of seven books of TRAVEL, the well-known “Wanderer” series. The most scholarly of his fifty-seven books—total as above—is _The Life of Charles Lamb_, which is definitive. The most popular must be _A Wanderer in London_ and _More Wanderings in London_, unless it be his first published book of all, the anthology called _The Open Road_, put forth in 1899 and republished in England and America in 1923. The most amusing—? There could be no agreement, though it is possible that later a majority might decide upon his newest novel, _Advisory Ben_.

(Something is wrong with the reckoning. For the total of fifty-seven and the eight classes do not contain the little treatise on _Vermeer of Delft_, with its charming reproductions of paintings by Vermeer. There is, besides, no way at hand of accounting for at least fifty-seven more books in which Mr. Lucas has had some hand[64]—as, for one instance, the English edition of Christopher Morley’s _Chimneysmoke_, where Lucas provided the striking preface. However!)

Very evidently the work of E. V. Lucas must be examined in categories and by considering one or two examples under several of the heads; and then, perhaps, the glimpse of his personality afforded us may be lit from within as well as without. It will perhaps clear the ground if we point out in preliminary that Mr. Lucas is one of the editors of Punch and has for long been a publisher’s reader and adviser for the English publishing firm of Methuen & Company, Ltd.—a house of much distinction. He has done much journalistic work. As would be inferred from _Vermeer of Delft_, he is something of a connoisseur of painting, and as will be shown he is much more distinctly a connoisseur of literary curiosities.

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In providing his “entertainments,” as he terms his novels, Mr. Lucas has had in mind a structure always consistent, always graceful, generally amusing but of very real strength. His fictions may be compared to trellises set up with care to support as a rule no more serious burden than rambler roses or some other innocent vine. But it has occasionally happened that the trellis has been climbed upon by a plant of more rugged growth and heavier weight, and the trellis has never failed to sustain the spreading story. It might be apter to say that the plant has sometimes put forth an unexpected flower—instead of the unpretending rambler blossom a rose more disdainful—and still the frame has seemed eminently in keeping with the whole design. For there is this about such brightly elaborated, cheerfully artificial story structures: like the trellis they are never concealed, though completely hid, their outline or form remains exposed to every eye; yet both the eye and the mind receive them naturally. The truth is, of course, that their absence or apparent absence would throw us off. A climbing vine unsupported and unformed, its tendrils thrown about distractedly and frozen in mid-air, would freeze us with repulsion. And an ingenious, expanding, flowering tale without its evident slight pretexts, its amiable excuse of ingenuity, would be an equal monstrosity. Even artifice may be an art.

Characteristic is the device employed by Mr. Lucas in his most recent book of this sort, _Advisory Ben_. Benita Stavely is an attractive girl who struggles with cooks and other domestic matters until her father remarries, when she finds herself free to select an occupation. She starts an advisory bureau to assist harassed householders. The Beck and Call, as her office is styled, soon justifies Ben’s venture by its popularity. It is approached through a bookshop below and to it come all manner of persons for counsel as to dogs, cooks, birthday presents and matrimony. The bookshop is kept by two young men. Ben’s crowning performance before she says “Yes” to one of the young men in the bookshop is the finding and furnishing in three weeks of a large house for a rich American. Now there are present in this engaging novel the two requisites of Mr. Lucas’s art as a fictioner: first, the amiable pretext or excuse for the tale, the slight but bright invention, which is of course the notion of The Beck and Call itself, and second, the strength, erectile, tensile and otherwise in the elaborated structure. For although the scheme of the story is slender and the design of a gay simplicity, the situations developed by Ben’s venture sometimes enable the author to touch considerable depths of human feeling. But the airy scheme, the graceful trellis, does not break. I do not mean that no strength is due to the character portrayal; much is due to it. Obviously, if Ben were a flitter-brain, if Mr. Lucas could give her no depth of feeling or not enough personal sincerity, his story would crash. But Ben without The Beck and Call would be Ben without opportunities to enable us to realize her quality. An idea is at the bottom of all.

The same virtue of idea or scheme is the technical triumph of _The Vermilion Box_, in which Mr. Lucas uses the familiar red letter box of England as his device. He says, secretly, Open Sesame, and the mail box opens to give us a series of letters between friends, acquaintances, lovers, relatives who are all entangled in the web of the World War. “Through these documents we meet the boy who will falsify his age, so eager is he to serve his country; the ‘slacker’ who is eager to serve his country by staying at home and drawing a salary for being secretary to a league to enforce economy—but finds the office routine very irksome to his artistic spirit. We meet the unoccupied clubman who has nothing to do but listen to rumors of spies in the Cabinet and disaffection in the field—and who writes of his discoveries to the papers; the old ladies who work and save, and who wait for war office telegrams telling the fate of the sons they have given to England. And then we meet the young English officer who, jokingly, ran an advertisement asking women to correspond with him: who realized the bad taste of his joke when a bereaved mother sent him the letter she had partly written to her soldier son when the news of his death came, but who thanked the fates for his folly when it brought the acquaintance of Portia Grey.... But this is much more than a love tale told in letters; behind that and behind the often occurring and charming humor of the book there is a seriously conceived and accurately painted picture of public opinion and feeling. A correspondent has been telling of a clergyman friend who has enlisted as a combatant, but who intends to resume his clerical duties after the war is over. The writer has composed some verses satirizing the view that Christianity is something thus to be put off or on, as circumstances dictate:

“‘Three or four men to whom I have shown these verses have complimented me on the effort which they make to get at the truth. But none of these men would sign a document calling for a close time for the creeds until the war is over, or suggesting that our archbishops were not at the moment earning their not inconsiderable salaries. That is one of the odd things about England—that private conscience and the public conscience are so different. In France a typical private individual’s view of things is, when multiplied indefinitely, also the view of the State. Not so here, where as individuals we practice or subscribe to many liberties which would not be good for the general public.’”[65]

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_Verena in the Midst_ also employed effectively the device of interchanged letters to develop the tale, and surely not even the expedient of The Beck and Call in _Advisory Ben_ is more well-conceived than the tale of the adventures of Uncle Cavanagh in giving away his wife’s property (_Genevra’s Money_). There are bits about the Barbizon school of painting and there is a surprising deal about religious concepts in _Genevra’s Money_, but I have yet to hear it said that this informative and speculative matter obtrudes itself or overweights the book. It dwells comfortably alongside the high comedy of Uncle Giles (whose sole intellectual accomplishment is the verdict, general and specific, upon persons he doesn’t understand: “He’s a nasty feller”) because Mr. Lucas had the courage, not of his convictions but of his ingenuity.

That he has convictions can scarcely be doubted by the careful reader; the nature of them can scarcely be missed by the thoughtful one. They may now and then be stated more plainly in his books of essays, for the nature of the essay exacts that, but they cannot be put with more poignancy. In the excellent Introduction to his _Essays of To-Day: An Anthology_, (itself a worthy essay), Mr. F. H. Pritchard reminds us of Montaigne’s instruction that an essay must be “consubstantial” with its author, of Mr. Gosse’s dictum that its style must be “confidential,” and adds—what is true and striking—that the lyric and the essay are both “the most intimate revelations of personality that we have in literature.” He adds: “The difference, indeed, is one of temperature.”[66] But the material, or at least its base, is identical.

It would not be difficult—it would, in fact, be ignobly easy—to indicate this essay of Mr. Lucas’s as typical of his power of pathos, that one as showing the exercise of comedy, another as the evidence of a controlled irony which is his. So one might make a swift and triumphant recapitulation of the gifts and qualities of a literary personality among the most rounded of its time. But I had rather not be facile, for the sake, if possible, of going more surely. “Most of the other essays are exceedingly light in texture,” observes Arnold Bennett, in a comment on _One Day and Another_. “They leave no loophole for criticism, for their accomplishment is always at least as high as their ambition. They are serenely well done.” But—“it could not have been without intention that he put first in this new book an essay describing the manufacture of a professional criminal.”[67] Nor, I think, was it without intention that _Giving and Receiving_ closes with that quietly-expressed but piercing account of a bullfight, “Whenever I See a Grey Horse....” The word “whimsical” has come to have a connotation exclusively buoyant or cheerful, although the habit of fancy—it is far more habit than gift—may be indulged in any direction congenial to one’s nature. Mr. Lucas is whimsical enough in the series of tiny fables (“Once Upon a Time”) composing the last section of _Cloud and Silver_. But one of his “whimsies” is savage in its scorn of the hunters of pheasants, another calmly reckons the totals of five years’ expenditure on cloak-room fees for a hat and stick, and a third of the twenty, called “Progress,” is so brief it is better quoted than characterized:

“Once upon a time there was a little boy who asked his father if Nero was a bad man.

“‘Thoroughly bad,’ said his father.

“Once upon a time, many years later, there was another little boy who asked his father if Nero was a bad man.

“‘I don’t know that one should exactly say that,’ replied his father: ‘we ought not to be quite so sweeping. But he certainly had his less felicitous moments.’”

This, like much of Mr. Lucas’s expression in the essay, is far too perfect to be spoiled by an embroidery of analytical adjectives. Mr. Llewellyn Jones very properly cites the opening paragraph of the essay, “Of Plans for One More Spring” (_Cloud and Silver_) as a fine illustration of “what an emotional effect Mr. Lucas can achieve from the simplest materials.”[68] The essay was written in February, 1915:

“It is much on my mind just now that I must not waste a minute of the spring that is coming. We have waited for it longer than for any before, and the world has grown so strange and unlovely since spring was here last. Life has become so cheap, human nature has become so cruel and wanton, that all sense of security has gone. Hence this spring must be lived, every moment of it.”

It will be found that in his moments of most entire abandonment to comedy Mr. Lucas is clearly engrossed in the problem of human nature. “The Battle of the Mothers,” in _Giving and Receiving_, is laughable throughout; but the recollection is deepened by the very gentleness of the satire. An Archdeacon enters a Club and explains to friends that he has been on a motor tour with his mother, who is ninety-one and “in the pink of condition” and delights in motoring.

“‘Well,’ said the testy man, ‘you needn’t be so conceited about it. You are not the only person with an elderly mother. I have a mother too.’

“We switched round to this new center of surprise. It was even more incredible that this man should have a mother than the Archdeacon. No one had ever suspected him of anything so extreme, for he had a long white beard and hobbled with a stick.”

The highly diverting dialogue ensuing would be forgotten as quickly as read were it not the quintessence of that amiable self-conceit common to us all. A similar effect is the secret of “The Snowball,” in _Luck of the Year_, where a man wonders what to do with a good luck chain letter—pooh-poohs it, figures its rapid and enormous multiplication in a week, ponders the letter’s promise of good fortune, begins to jot down the names of nine friends, reaches toward the wastebasket, draws back his hand—. Occasionally, indeed, these essays of Mr. Lucas’s compose themselves perfectly as short stories; if, as I suppose, the work of Katherine Mansfield and others has taught us that a short story need not be the jack-in-box plot. Such, in _Luck of the Year_, is “The Human Touch,” which deals with a single horse cab driver among the battalions of taxicabs. “When the express arrived he galvanized his horse and began to make alluring signs and sounds as the passengers emerged; but one and all repulsed him.” Equally a short story, and a very good one, is “A Study in Symmetry,” in _Adventures and Enthusiasms_, where the conceit of a painter of portraits is gently punctured.

I suppose such pieces as “Scents,” in _Luck of the Year_; “Davy Jones,” in _Adventures and Enthusiasms_; and “Signs and Avoirdupois,” in _Giving and Receiving_ are essays in the strict sense of Mr. Pritchard’s definition that I have quoted. Certainly the catalogue at the close of “Scents” is an “intimate revelation of personality” and it borders on the lyrical:

“What are the most delicious scents? Every one could make a list. Rupert Brooke made one in one of his poems; but it was not exhaustive. I know what mine would contain, even if it failed to include all. Sweet-briar in the air, so vague and elusive that search cannot trace the source. Pine trees in the air on a hot day. Lime blossoms in the air. (‘Such a noisy smell!’ as a small child said, thinking of the murmur of bees that always accompanies it.) Brake fern crushed. Walnut leaves crushed. Mint sauce. Newly split wood in a copse. Any kind of gardener’s rubbish fire. An unsmoked brier pipe. Cinnamon. Ripe apples. Tea just opened. Coffee just ground. A racing stable. A dairy farm. A shrubbery of box. Cedar pencils. Cigars in the box. A hot day on the South Downs when a light wind brings the thyme with it. The under side of a turf. A circus.

“And I have said nothing of flowers!”

iv

Taste. It is underlying quality with Lucas, after all. I do not say “catholicity of taste,” for it seems to me redundant. A taste which should allow itself to be fenced in would soon shrivel and die for lack of exercise; for what is taste but the faculty of selection constantly exerted and how can one have it except by its unremitting use? Like all other qualities abstracted into words, such as honor, integrity, virtue, and the rest, taste itself is no abstraction. A man cannot have honor, except as he shows he has it, nor virtue except as he behaves virtuously in this or that situation; and his possession of taste must depend upon what he chooses in thoughts, words, actions and objects. I say _what_ he chooses, and leave the _how_ to the psychologists, who have still a few years, or perhaps centuries, to spend on investigation of this very nice problem.

His taste, then, distinguishes Mr. Lucas as a connoisseur of literary curiosities, which, when taste is shown, become also human concerns. “The Innocent’s Progress,” in _Adventures and Enthusiasms_, a description of an obsolete book of manners for the young, is a lesser example of Mr. Lucas’s taste; his candid rejection of English slang, because it is undescriptive, and acceptance of American slang because it applies and illustrates is the application of excellent taste to a strictly contemporary point.[69]—and no test of taste is more exacting. The essays on “Breguet,” the great French watch-maker, in _Giving and Receiving_, and on Hans Christian Andersen[70] and John Leech[71] are to many readers of more importance than a modern topic, like “Telephonics.”[72] For while taste must choose, and help us to choose, among the things of the hour, its service in the rescue of the past is an education in taste as well as an enrichment of the present.

Mr. Lucas (to illustrate) never practised his literary connoisseurship to a more humane and generous end than when he gave us, in 1916, _The Hausfrau Rampant_. This, like his edition of Charles and Mary Lamb, is an edited work. Julius Stinde (1841-1905), a native of Holstein, Germany, was originally a chemist and the author of an elaborate treatise on _Wasser und Seife (Water and Soap)_, to which he affixed the name of his charwoman, Frau Wilhelmine Buchholz, as author. Later it occurred to Stinde to write a satire on the typical middle-class Berlin family with marriageable daughters; he elevated Frau Wilhelmine to the ranks of the bourgeoisie and began a book, or rather a series of books, which became as popular in Germany as Dickens in England. England, France and America all uttered praise of _The Buchholz Family_ in the 1880s, and with good reason. The work, outside of Germany, had been lost sight of for nearly thirty years when Lucas, rendered sleepless by a struggle with mosquitoes one night in Venice, came upon the first volume of the English translation in his landlord’s library. The quality was such as to make him hunt up the other three English volumes; and from the work as a whole he selected the most entertaining passages, “joining them together with some explanatory cement.” This is _The Hausfrau Rampant_. It was, of course, with a purpose that Mr. Lucas published _The Hausfrau Rampant_ at a time when feeling in England and America ran high against the country of Stinde. The purpose will be obvious to anyone reading Lucas’s Introduction to the book. No imaginable eloquence could be so effective as the word portrait of Herr Stinde there presented. The possession of taste carries its own courage with it.

v

One could go on, as it were, indefinitely, but with Mr. Lucas as guide never indefinably. Such an anthology as _The Open Road_ knows what many an anthology never knows—readers who return to it again and again because it is inclusive without being indiscriminate. The impressions of India, Japan, and America in _Roving East and Roving West_ are among the most valuable any traveler has put down because they are single impressions and because, with Mr. Lucas, to see is to choose, as with a painter. It is when he comes to consider work where a fine talent has already seen and chosen, as in his _Vermeer of Delft_, that he becomes singularly luminous; with the ground cleared, he can give his enthusiasm rein. His _Wanderer_ books on London, Paris, Venice, Florence and Holland are digressive in the sense that the longest way ’round is the shortest way home—in other words, the associations of a scene are the shortest cut to enabling us really to see it. And now Mr. Lucas has united his taste for fine painting with his Wanderer’s talent: _Little Wanderings Among the Great Masters_, in six illustrated volumes, and _A Wanderer Among Pictures: A Guide to the Great Galleries of Europe_, with its many reproductions of famous masterpieces, are his new volumes. The set of six, dealing with Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Frans Hals, Murillo, Chardin and Rembrandt, are the best brief popular accounts I know, blending as they do essential biographical facts and the elements of esthetic enjoyment of the artists’ work. One hopes the little volumes may be added to by a similar treatment of other great painters. _A Wanderer Among Pictures_ is, of course, a thing far more ambitious, a compact treasure delicately plundered from collections in fifteen of Europe’s chief cities. But how delicious to have these great paintings described by one who knows how to write and who has a gift for conveying such beauty with literary art and verbal simplicity!

But a few words must be said about E. V. Lucas, the man.

“A youngish fifty, perhaps,” wrote Robert Cortes Holliday, meeting him in 1919 or 1920 in Chicago. “Rather tall. A good weight, not over heavy. Light on his feet, like a man who has taken his share in active field games. Something of a stoop. A smile, good, natural, but sly. Dark hair, shot with gray. Noble prow of a nose. Most striking note of all, that ruddy complexion, ruddy to a degree which (as I reflect upon the matter) seems to be peculiar to a certain type of Englishman.”[73] Mr. Lucas spent several days in Chicago on this visit, but only about four persons knew it at the time. Mr. Holliday noted that Lucas studied his menu card “with deep attention” and was particular about the service of the dinner when it came. He was not on a lecture tour and inquired about recent literary visitors from England, appearing to be “much amused at the number of them.” He punned twice, badly, spoke admiringly of American humor and especially of the work of Don Marquis,[74] and spoke of the number of American words “which mean so much, and mean nothing at all, like ‘cave-man’ and ‘mother love.’” It also appeared that Lucas could do no writing in a hotel room.

Like nearly all authors, he has an inexhaustible store of gossip about other authors.

His biographical sketch in _Who’s Who_ (the information for which is supplied by the subject) omits all the usual personal data, such as the date and place of birth, parentage, schooling, etc. It even omits his recreations, which most Englishmen are careful to give. There are his name and his occupations—“writer and publisher’s reader”—followed by a partial list of his books, his address in London and the rich array of his clubs, which include the Athenæum, the Garrick, the Burlington Fine Arts and the National Sporting Club. This outdoes Mr. Galsworthy, who mentions the year of his birth, though the Athenæum is his only club.

“He has a kind of mischievous cruelty in his dissection of humanity,” a distinguished novelist once remarked, speaking of Lucas’s conversation. “But he is extremely good company,” came in the next breath. This observer added: “I always think that the best picture of Lucas’s character is to be found in Bennett’s _Books and Persons_.” Here it is:

“Mr. Lucas is a highly mysterious man. On the surface he might be mistaken for a mere cricket enthusiast. Dig down, and you will come, with not too much difficulty, to the simple man of letters. Dig further, and, with somewhat more difficulty, you will come to an agreeably ironic critic of human foibles. Try to dig still further, and you will probably encounter rock. Only here and there in his two novels does Mr. Lucas allow us to glimpse a certain powerful and sardonic harshness in him, indicative of a mind that has seen the world and irrevocably judged it in most of its manifestations. I could believe that Mr. Lucas is an ardent politician, who, however, would not deign to mention his passionately held views save with a pencil on a ballot-paper—if then!... Immanent in the book is the calm assurance of a man perfectly aware that it will be a passing hard task to get change out of _him_!”[75]

And here is more testimony, to the same general effect:

“E. V. Lucas always reminds me of Kipling’s ‘cat that walked by itself.’ He knows everybody, but I have often wondered whether anybody really knows him. He is an amazingly busy man—the assistant editor of Punch, the literary director of Methuen’s, the writer of almost countless charming and distinguished essays, to say nothing of novels and travel books. As a writer he has the appealing urbanity of Charles Lamb, of whom he has written far and away the best biography in the language. But I do not think that there is much of Lamb’s urbanity in E. V. Lucas the man, the gentle-voiced, modern, rather weary man of the world. The humor of the Lucas essays is sunny and kindly. The humor of Lucas himself is cynically tolerant.

“I have said that Lucas knows everybody. The only circles into which he never goes are literary circles. Where professional writers are gathered together, there you will never find E. V. Lucas. He prefers actors and prize-fighters. There is a story that Lucas once gave a dinner party at the Athenæum Club to which he invited Georges Carpentier and Harry Tate. I do not altogether disbelieve that story, but a bishop ought to have been included in the dinner party to make it complete.

“Lucas loves cricket, and is a good man to dine with. His talk is stimulating and his taste in wine perfection.”[76]

Possibly E. V. Lucas’s closest personal friends among writers in America—certainly his closest temperamental affinities—are Don Marquis and Christopher Morley. Occupationally, as the sociologist would say, he is allied with such fellow editors as E. T. Raymond and A. A. Milne and with such publishers’ literary advisers as—not to go back to George Meredith, who read for Chapman and Hall—Frank Swinnerton, who reads for Chatto & Windus, and J. D. Beresford, reader for Collins.

BOOKS BY E. V. LUCAS

For a full list of books written, compiled, edited by and contributed to by Mr. Lucas, write to Methuen & Co., Ltd., 36 Essex Street, London, W.C. 2. About 130 titles are comprised.

ANTHOLOGIES:

1899 _The Open Road_
1903 _The Friendly Town_
1907 _The Gentlest Art_
1908 _Her Infinite Variety_
1909 _Good Company_
1910 _The Second Post_
1914 _Remember Louvain_
1923 _The Best of Lamb_

BIOGRAPHY:

1905 _The Life of Charles Lamb_
1907 _A Swan and Her Friends_
1907 _The Hambledon Men_
1913 _The British School_
1921 _The Life and Work of E. A. Abbey, R.A._
1922 _Vermeer of Delft_
1924 _Little Wanderings Among the Great Masters._ Six volumes

BOOKS FOR CHILDREN:

1897 _A Book of Verses for Children_
1903 _The “Original Verses” of Ann and Jane Taylor_
1906 _Forgotten Tales of Long Ago_
1907 _Another Book of Verses for Children_
1908 _Runaways and Castaways_
1908 _Anne’s Terrible Good-Nature_
1910 _The Slowcoach_
—— _More Forgotten Stories_

EDITED WORKS:

1903 _The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb_
1916 _The Hausfrau Rampant_

ENTERTAINMENTS:

1906 _Listener’s Lure_
1908 _Over Bemerton’s_
1910 _Mr. Ingleside_
1912 _London Lavender_
1914 _Landmarks_
1916 _The Vermilion Box_
1920 _Verena in the Midst_
1921 _Rose and Rose_
1922 _Genevra’s Money_
1924 _Advisory Ben_

ESSAYS:

1906 _Fireside and Sunshine_
1907 _Character and Comedy_
1909 _One Day and Another_
1911 _Old Lamps for New_
1913 _Loiterer’s Harvest_
1916 _Cloud and Silver_
1917 _A Boswell of Baghdad_
1918 _Twixt Eagle and Dove_
1919 _The Phantom Journal_
1920 _Adventures and Enthusiasms_
1921 _Roving East and Roving West_
1922 _Giving and Receiving_
1923 _Luck of the Year_

SELECTED WRITINGS:

1911 _A Little of Everything_
1911 _Harvest Home_
1916 _Variety Lane_
1919 _Mixed Vintages_

TRAVEL:

1904 _Highways and Byways in Sussex_
1905 _A Wanderer in Holland_
1906 _A Wanderer in London_
1909 _A Wanderer in Paris_
1912 _A Wanderer in Florence_
1914 _A Wanderer in Venice_
1916 _More Wanderings in London_
In England: London Revisited
1924 _A Wanderer Among Pictures: A Guide to the Great Galleries
of Europe_

AND ALSO (WRITTEN WITH C. L. GRAVES):

1903 _Wisdom While You Wait_

SOURCES ON E. V. LUCAS

“Unless my judgment is much at fault, there has written in English, since the death of R. L. Stevenson, no one so proficient in the pure art of the essayist as Mr. E. V. Lucas,” says Edmund Gosse at the beginning of his “The Essays of Mr. Lucas,” in his volume, _Books on the Table_. This essay on an essayist should be consulted either in Mr. Gosse’s own volume (page 105) or in F. H. Pritchard’s _Essays of To-Day: An Anthology_, in which it is included (page 249). No more authoritative or more charmingly stated estimate of Mr. Lucas as an essayist is known to me.

In addition to the sources referred to in the text of the chapter or in footnotes, the reader should consult the READER’S GUIDE TO PERIODICAL LITERATURE for the years since 1913 and the files of The Bookman (London) for the years since 1908.

14. American History in Fiction

The use of history in fiction is at once an aid and a handicap to the writer. Where he is using historical persons, he may count upon a certain delight of recognition from some or all of his readers; offset by disappointment if the portrait doesn’t closely resemble a preconceived ideal. The use of an historical period is on the whole far more satisfactory, and an exact setting is the most satisfactory of all. For fiction is written to express a sense of meaning and to convey a feeling. Like all forms of faith, it creates its own facts. And, as in some other types of illumination, the most effective treatment of historical figures and occurrences by the fictioner is often—indirect lighting.

The three writers I am going to talk principally about in this chapter have certain resemblances and a marked divergence. Although two of them are no longer alive, their audiences were never greater than now. All three belong to the South and West, and two of them wrote novels which have been transformed into motion pictures of enormous influence and success. The third is usually spoken of as a writer for boys, although the boys who read him are, many of them, long past their teens. Both Emerson Hough and Thomas Dixon wrote books which are partly or mainly propaganda. Joseph A. Altsheler, avoiding any suggestion of such a thing, was remarkable for the accuracy of historical detail in his stories. Perhaps the most striking quality in common among these three writers—I won’t undertake to give it a name—is the fact that each, on more than one occasion, has had his huge audience waiting in line to get his book.