ii
To leave the poets for the moment but to keep in the sense of an exquisite color and form: Echo de Paris, by Laurence Housman, is a bit of severely ornamented reminiscence which I think of first when now I think of decorative prose—not so much because of its own brief perfection as because of its subject. Oscar Wilde’s influence is not a negligible thing in a contemporary literature which embraces Cabell, Hergesheimer, Elinor Wylie, Carl Van Vechten, and others, both American and English, who value words somewhat as James Huneker valued them, for their sound, shape, smell and taste. I take from the London Times a description of Echo de Paris:
“At the end of September, 1899, three friends are sitting in a café near the Place de l’Opera. They are awaiting a guest for luncheon, and from their amicable chatter we learn that it is Wilde who is expected. Presently he appears, and while they take their aperitifs holds his audience with that marvelous conversation which long before had made him legendary. It is substantially the record of an actual conversation, Mr. Housman tells us, for he was the host on this occasion. Apart from the actuality of the setting, he has imagined a dramatic incident which he believes, though symbolical, will represent the existing emotional situation. As Wilde talks, with an apparent indifference to his personal disaster, another man is seen coming along the street. He advances toward the group, all of whom he knows well, especially Wilde, who befriended him before his imprisonment, but, after clearly recognizing them, passes on without a sign. Wilde continues to weave his unwritten stories; but he has been deeply hurt and gracefully disentangles himself from a luncheon which, faced with the spectators of his pain, would have been more than even he could bear.
“The difficulty of producing a reasonable imitation of Wilde’s conversation has been overcome so successfully that we sometimes feel that one of his essays is being read by one of the characters in his comedies—there is that combination of verbal wit and bold intellectual paradox. In these pages we are made to feel something of the reality on which his reputation was built.”
Judges so diverse as Sinclair Lewis, James Branch Cabell, and Carl Van Vechten have uttered words of extreme praise for Elinor Wylie’s Jennifer Lorn. I don’t know of a recent work before which one feels an equal impotence of the descriptive faculty. This novel of an eighteenth century exquisite and his bride is as brightly enameled as the period it deals with; every paragraph is lacquered. You have perhaps stood long before some Eastern carpet with old rose, cream, ivory and dark blue in enigmatical patterns, your eye delighting in its intricacy. Have you tried afterward to tell someone about it? Then, precisely, you know the difficulty of reporting Jennifer Lorn. It is worth noting, though, that the novel does not merely purvey an eighteenth century story; it seeks to purvey it, with delicate, inner irony in the eighteenth century manner. The adroit printing and binding in simulation of an eighteenth century format was inevitable, perhaps; but it was not so inevitable that it should be so delightfully well-done.
An autobiography would seem to belong in Chapter 12 of this book; I saved out Thomas Burke’s autobiographical volume because the spirit of it, and the color of his writing, seemed to place it here. He calls it The Wind and the Rain; it is the most intimate book he has ever written, and the best since Limehouse Nights (from some standpoints it is better than that work). In The Wind and the Rain, Thomas Burke returns to Limehouse, telling of his boyhood and youth, of the squalor of his early years, of the loneliness and hunger of his City days, of the moments of spiritual exaltation that came to him at night in London streets. He recalls his friendship with old Quong Lee, a storekeeper in the Causeway; his one-room house with an Uncle; his adventures in the kitchen of the Big House at Greenwich where his Uncle worked; his rapturous hours in the street; his four wretched years in an orphanage; his running away and being sheltered by the queer woman in the queer house; his first job; his friendship with a girl of thirteen and its abrupt end; his discovery of literature and pictures and music; his first short story accepted when he was still an office-boy; and then his first success. This somewhat long recitation speaks for itself and will kindle the imagination of anyone who ever read Thomas Burke or saw Griffith’s film, “Broken Blossoms.”
Hugh Walpole’s critical study of Anthony Trollope is welcome both because a good account of Trollope is needed and because Walpole’s own work used to be likened to that of the author of Barchester Towers. I believe the comparison is pretty well obsolete—Mr. Walpole is now rather the object than the subject of comparisons—but those who know Walpole best have long known of his very definite interest in Trollope and his gradual acquisition of materials for a survey of Trollope’s work. The Anthony Trollope by Walpole is a book to set beside Frank Swinnerton’s Gissing and R. L. Stevenson; we have a right to hope that the fashion will spread among the novelists; and I should like nothing better than to record a similar book by Arnold Bennett, even if, as is very probable, he would consent to do one only on a French subject—in which case he would probably select Stendhal.
But this leads directly to the whole subject of literary discussions. It is too big to deal with here, and yet I can’t drop it without some reference to the two most provocative books of the sort in recent memory. Dr. Joseph Collins is a well-known New York neurologist whose literary hobby has been cultivated in private during a number of years. It was the rich pungency of his conversation which first led to insistences that he write a book about authors. He did. The Doctor Looks at Literature, with its praise of Proust and its incisiveness regarding D. H. Lawrence, its appreciation of Katherine Mansfield and its penetrating study of James Joyce, was something new, sparkling, resonant and simply not to be missed. Dr. Collins’s second book, Taking the Literary Pulse, is as strongly brewed and as well-flavored. I find it even more interesting because it deals to a much greater extent with American writers—Sherwood Anderson, Edith Wharton, Amy Lowell and others—and because of the uncompromised utterance in the first chapter on literary censorship, a subject which most discussion merely muddles.