Maeterlinck writes that the first Grierson volume (in French) influenced him more than any book he had ever read. There are four letters from the Belgian mystic.
This album is filled with expressions from the most authoritative minds in literature and art, as well as statesmen, soldiers and diplomats, such as Jules Simon, the Duc de Broglie, Lord Lytton, British ambassador at Paris; Lord Reading, British ambassador at Washington; Field Marshall Lord Wolseley, General B. H. Grierson, U.S.A., leading members of the Bonaparte family in Paris, Prince Henri of Orleans (son of Louis Philippe), Princess Eulalia of Spain, and crowned heads who gave receptions in Mr. Grierson’s honor during the past thirty years. There are letters from distinguished Americans, such as Col. Henry Watterson (who wrote two long editorials on Mr. Grierson in the Louisville “Courier Journal”), Henry Mills Alden, editor of “Harper’s Monthly,” Prof. William James, Marion Reedy, Edwin Markham, Edith Thomas, Mary Austin, and many leading professors of Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, the Universities of Illinois, Wisconsin and California.
Edwin Bjorkman says, in his “Voices of Tomorrow”:—
“To Francis Grierson belongs the honor of having first attained to prophetic vision of the common goal. In his first volume, published in Paris in 1889, he suggested every idea which since then has become recognized as essential not only to Bergson and Maeterlinck but to the constantly increasing number of writers engaged in making the time conscious of its own spirit. As we read essay after essay it is as if we beheld the globe of life revolving slowly between us and some unknown source of light.”
The following remarks from the London “Outlook” seem to me pertinent to the subject:—
“Grierson is an Englishman, for he was born in Cheshire; Scotland may justly claim him in that he is a direct descendent of Sir Robert Grierson, the famous Laird of Lag, who is the hero of Scott’s novel, ‘The Red Gauntlet’; that America has had a part in the making of him all readers of that wonderful book, ‘The Valley of Shadows,’ know; France can claim him since he began his musical career in Paris and published his first book in French; but no special country can claim to have developed his genius—that is cosmopolitan.”
As “Current Opinion” says, in a long study: “He presents a unique combination of thinker, writer, artist and musician who owes nothing to any school or any master or system of training; and his experience is without a parallel in the intellectual world of our day.”
LAWRENCE WALDEMAR TONNER,
245½ So. Spring St.
Los Angeles, California.