Once only this admirable Crichton was stumped, and the experience shows how easy it is to trip a god when he is off guard. Once the house in which he was sleeping in London took fire. He was clad in his blue kimono which bore three huge white fishes on its surface. The temperature was twelve degrees below zero and the icy winds did blow. He watched the efforts of the fire-fighters “with the utmost concern and in attempting to keep the kimono well round me, as there were ladies present, the longitudinal seam behind, which had deteriorated in the laundry, suddenly split from head to foot. This compelled me to remain with my back against a wall until it would please the conflagration to stop.” A wholly unnecessary tarry or turn on the part of Mr. Landor. There probably is not a lady in his native land, or yet even in the whole world, who would not admire him from the soles of his feet to the top of his head.
Mr. A. H. Savage Landor is a modest violet and the various photographs of himself which adorn his book testify it. But the world is in his debt; he discovered General Pershing. When we erect a national monument to our great General, it is to be hoped that we shall not neglect his discoverer. In the meantime he is handed the immodesty medal.
The refrain of a song popular a few years ago was “Everybody’s doing it....” Were it sung to-day, “it” would mean writing biography. It is a good sign. The more we learn about others, the less repulsive is our thought, the less enigmatic our conduct. We should particularly encourage those who see us full-face and at short range, like valets, maids, nurses, secretaries, doctors, to write about us. M. Brousson throws more light on Anatole France’s personality than everything that has been written about him.
If What the Butler Winked At was not written by a butler, the author had butler ancestors. Eric Horne does what he set out to do and he states his thesis clearly in the first sentence:
“Now that old England is cracking up, as far as the Nobility is concerned, who are selling their estates, castles and large houses, which are being turned into schools, museums, hospitals, homes for weak-minded—things entirely different from what they were built for—it seems a pity that the old usages and traditions of gentlemen’s service should die with the old places, where so many high jinks and junketings have been carried on in the old days, now gone for ever.”
He gives a picture of the “gentry” that is of real value. But the sentence quoted is more than sufficient cause for digression. It is a marvel. Who but a butler could be so ample and so involved. It is a fair sample of the book in many ways. The man can’t write any more than a babbling child, but he does it all so unconsciously and yet so purposefully that he arrives somehow. He gets things said—plenty of them, and that is more than many professional writers do.
His descriptions of the life he knows are real, but more real than anything else is Eric Horne. He does not try to “reveal himself,” but his book is a genuine self-revelation—or perhaps a dead give-away. Probably this man knows more of the form of living than most Americans dream of—no slight slip in etiquette would have evaded his trained eye. And yet if there is such a thing as a “middle class” mind, he has it. Nothing could have made him equal to an exalted position in the world. Not that he had not brains; he had, and real executive ability, but it was the texture of his thinking which marked him for his job. You can’t make chiffon from a meal sack.
Eric Horne was probably what generations of service and of strong class distinction made him. He was cast in a butler mould. No one thought of him in any other way. He himself did not aspire very high or long. The mould was too confining to permit of much moving around. In a thousand ways the quality of his mind is revealed. His jokes are cheap and flat and obvious. They are decidedly “back door” humour. He has absolutely no continuity of thought. He lived between door bells, telephones, electric buzzers. He thinks that way—jumps all over the place. He has no sense of getting to the point; he has to pack his master’s dress clothes first and instruct the under footman. The book shows a continuous dissatisfaction with the manner of living that the “gentry” imposed upon their servitors. At the same time, it displays a scorn of the modern democracy of England. The butler can not think through his problem or even at it. He knows he does not like them as they are, but can not reconcile himself to a change. It is all curiously contradictory, like the thinking of a child.
Yet the Butler is no child. He has a kind of precocious astuteness, all out of harmony with the general fibre of his mind. He is keen and clever at times in his writing, though one wonders if he knows it. His descriptions are enviable. This about a fellow butler: “A 'mongrel’ I called him. We had to be very careful not to let him see or hear anything we did not wish to go farther. He put me in mind of a fellow behind a draper’s counter who measures out yards of elastic.” This last sentence is as vivid as Sherwood Anderson, only Anderson would have done it with conscious art; with Eric Horne it was spontaneous.