Cargoes for Crusoes

by Grant M. Overton

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: