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.
[Illustration: E. V. LUCAS]
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.
I. EMERSON HOUGH
The author of _The Covered Wagon_ was born in Newton, Iowa, 28 June
1857, and died 30 April 1923, when the motion picture fashioned from his
novel was the sensation of Broadway—indeed, of America. The first class
graduated from the little Iowa high school had three members, Hough
being one. (It is perhaps not out of place to say that he pronounced his
surname “Huff”). After a brief experience teaching a country school,
the boy entered Iowa State University and was graduated with the class
of 1880. “I had a university education, perfectly good and perfectly
worthless,” he said in later years. His father, Joseph Bond Hough, had
been a Virginia schoolmaster, and saw education in terms of a classical
course leading to one of the professions. The young man read law in
Newton and was admitted to the bar there.
Life began for him then. He went to White Oaks, New Mexico, half a cow
town and half a mining camp, about eighty miles west of Socorro in the
mountain region between the Rio Grande and the Pecos Rivers. Mr. Hough’s
_North of 36_ has been attacked as lacking in authenticity because,
when he came to White Oaks, “the frontier epoch had ended.” To which
the novelist William MacLeod Raine has made reply: “Interesting, if
true. Particularly interesting to me, because it was in 1881 that my
father brought his family into the Southwest from England and went into
the cattle business (with side lines of tie-making and lumbering). The
nearest village was 30 miles away. I and my small brothers used to ride
twenty miles to get the mail once a week. That outpost of civilization
my memory can make the setting of a score of dramatic incidents. The
frontier was not a hard and fast condition which can be defined as having
vanished on a specific date. Civilization lapped forward here and there,
leaving pockets which did not yield to its influence for many years.” And
Hough himself said simply: “In this rugged field, among these splendid
and sterling men, in an atmosphere not too law-abiding, but always just
and broad, I got my first actual impression of life; learned to respect a
man for what he really is.”
He became a sportsman from the first—the practice of law in White Oaks
was not exacting—and all his life he was a great hunter and traveler. His
father failed in business and something had to be done to make a living
for the family. Journalism seemed to be Emerson Hough’s only chance;
he had already sold fugitive pieces. After a little time in Des Moines
and work on a newspaper in Sandusky, Ohio, he got, in 1889, the job of
looking after the Chicago office of Forest and Stream. The job paid $15
a week. But he combined with it work for daily newspapers and for a
newspaper syndicate. Most of his writing had to do with sport.