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.
v
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
i
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.
ii
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]
iii
_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.