“With such a quest a man must not be in a hurry, and he does best to linger in company with the great men whose work he wishes to understand, and to postpone criticism to intimacy. This book comes in the end to be a record of personal acquaintances and of enjoyment. But one is never done with knowing the greatest men or the greatest works of art—they carry you on and on, and at the last you feel you are only beginning. That is my experience. I would not say that I know these men, of whom I have written, thoroughly—a man of sense would hardly say that, but I can say that I have enjoyed my work, and that, whatever other people may find it, to me it has been a delight and an illumination.”
Another welcome book is E. V. Lucas’s Giving and Receiving, a new volume of essays. Since the appearance of Roving East and Roving West, Mr. Lucas has been looking back at America from London with its fogs and (yes!) its sunshine. The audience for his new book will include not only those readers he has had for such volumes in the past but all those personal friends that he made in a visit that took him from California to the Battery.
Chapter XIX
ROBERT W. CHAMBERS AND THE WHOLE TRUTH
i
Once a man came to Robert W. Chambers and said words to this effect:
“You had a great gift as a literary artist and you spoiled it. For some reason or other, I don’t know what, but I suppose there was more money in the other thing, you wrote down to a big audience. Don’t you think, yourself, that your earlier work—those stories of Paris and those novels of the American revolution—had something that you have sacrificed in your novels of our modern day?”
Mr. Chambers listened politely and attentively. When the man had finished, Chambers said to him words to this effect: