Not only was he a painter but Chambers has preserved his interest in art, and is a welcome visitor in the offices of curators and directors of museums because he is one of the few who can talk intelligently about paintings.
He knows enough about Chinese and Japanese antiques to enable him to detect forgeries. He knows more about armour than anyone, perhaps, except the man who made the marvellous collection of mediæval armour for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
One of his varieties of knowledge, observable by any reader of his novels, is lepidoptery—the science of butterflies. He collects butterflies with exceeding ardour. But then, he is a good deal of an outdoor man. He knows horses and books; he has been known to hunt; he has been seen with a fishing rod in his hand.
His knowledge of out-of-the-way places in different parts of the world—Paris, Petrograd—is not usual.
Will you believe me if I add that he is something of an expert on rare rugs?
Of course, I am, to some extent, taking Rupert Hughes’s word for these accomplishments; and yet they are visible in the written work of Robert W. Chambers where, as a rule, they appear without extrusion.
ii
And here is the newest Robert W. Chambers novel, Eris. Mr. Chambers’s The Flaming Jewel, a melodrama of the maddest character, was published last spring. Eris is really a story of the movie world, and reaches its most definite conclusion, possibly, in a passage where the hero says to Eris Odell:
“Whether they are financing a picture, directing it, releasing it, exhibiting it, or acting in it, these vermin are likely to do it to death. Your profession is crawling with them. It needs delousing.”