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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.