“‘Three or four men to whom I have shown these verses have complimented me on the effort which they make to get at the truth. But none of these men would sign a document calling for a close time for the creeds until the war is over, or suggesting that our archbishops were not at the moment earning their not inconsiderable salaries. That is one of the odd things about England—that private conscience and the public conscience are so different. In France a typical private individual’s view of things is, when multiplied indefinitely, also the view of the State. Not so here, where as individuals we practice or subscribe to many liberties which would not be good for the general public.’”[65]
iii
Verena in the Midst also employed effectively the device of interchanged letters to develop the tale, and surely not even the expedient of The Beck and Call in Advisory Ben is more well-conceived than the tale of the adventures of Uncle Cavanagh in giving away his wife’s property (Genevra’s Money). There are bits about the Barbizon school of painting and there is a surprising deal about religious concepts in Genevra’s Money, but I have yet to hear it said that this informative and speculative matter obtrudes itself or overweights the book. It dwells comfortably alongside the high comedy of Uncle Giles (whose sole intellectual accomplishment is the verdict, general and specific, upon persons he doesn’t understand: “He’s a nasty feller”) because Mr. Lucas had the courage, not of his convictions but of his ingenuity.
That he has convictions can scarcely be doubted by the careful reader; the nature of them can scarcely be missed by the thoughtful one. They may now and then be stated more plainly in his books of essays, for the nature of the essay exacts that, but they cannot be put with more poignancy. In the excellent Introduction to his Essays of To-Day: An Anthology, (itself a worthy essay), Mr. F. H. Pritchard reminds us of Montaigne’s instruction that an essay must be “consubstantial” with its author, of Mr. Gosse’s dictum that its style must be “confidential,” and adds—what is true and striking—that the lyric and the essay are both “the most intimate revelations of personality that we have in literature.” He adds: “The difference, indeed, is one of temperature.”[66] But the material, or at least its base, is identical.
It would not be difficult—it would, in fact, be ignobly easy—to indicate 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: