Part 16

Mr. Lucas (to illustrate) never practised his literary connoisseurship to a more humane and generous end than when he gave us, in 1916, _The Hausfrau Rampant_. This, like his edition of Charles and Mary Lamb, is an edited work. Julius Stinde (1841-1905), a native of Holstein, Germany, was originally a chemist and the author of an elaborate treatise on _Wasser und Seife (Water and Soap)_, to which he affixed the name of his charwoman, Frau Wilhelmine Buchholz, as author. Later it occurred to Stinde to write a satire on the typical middle-class Berlin family with marriageable daughters; he elevated Frau Wilhelmine to the ranks of the bourgeoisie and began a book, or rather a series of books, which became as popular in Germany as Dickens in England. England, France and America all uttered praise of _The Buchholz Family_ in the 1880s, and with good reason. The work, outside of Germany, had been lost sight of for nearly thirty years when Lucas, rendered sleepless by a struggle with mosquitoes one night in Venice, came upon the first volume of the English translation in his landlord’s library. The quality was such as to make him hunt up the other three English volumes; and from the work as a whole he selected the most entertaining passages, “joining them together with some explanatory cement.” This is _The Hausfrau Rampant_. It was, of course, with a purpose that Mr. Lucas published _The Hausfrau Rampant_ at a time when feeling in England and America ran high against the country of Stinde. The purpose will be obvious to anyone reading Lucas’s Introduction to the book. No imaginable eloquence could be so effective as the word portrait of Herr Stinde there presented. The possession of taste carries its own courage with it.

v

One could go on, as it were, indefinitely, but with Mr. Lucas as guide never indefinably. Such an anthology as _The Open Road_ knows what many an anthology never knows—readers who return to it again and again because it is inclusive without being indiscriminate. The impressions of India, Japan, and America in _Roving East and Roving West_ are among the most valuable any traveler has put down because they are single impressions and because, with Mr. Lucas, to see is to choose, as with a painter. It is when he comes to consider work where a fine talent has already seen and chosen, as in his _Vermeer of Delft_, that he becomes singularly luminous; with the ground cleared, he can give his enthusiasm rein. His _Wanderer_ books on London, Paris, Venice, Florence and Holland are digressive in the sense that the longest way ’round is the shortest way home—in other words, the associations of a scene are the shortest cut to enabling us really to see it. And now Mr. Lucas has united his taste for fine painting with his Wanderer’s talent: _Little Wanderings Among the Great Masters_, in six illustrated volumes, and _A Wanderer Among Pictures: A Guide to the Great Galleries of Europe_, with its many reproductions of famous masterpieces, are his new volumes. The set of six, dealing with Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Frans Hals, Murillo, Chardin and Rembrandt, are the best brief popular accounts I know, blending as they do essential biographical facts and the elements of esthetic enjoyment of the artists’ work. One hopes the little volumes may be added to by a similar treatment of other great painters. _A Wanderer Among Pictures_ is, of course, a thing far more ambitious, a compact treasure delicately plundered from collections in fifteen of Europe’s chief cities. But how delicious to have these great paintings described by one who knows how to write and who has a gift for conveying such beauty with literary art and verbal simplicity!

But a few words must be said about E. V. Lucas, the man.

“A youngish fifty, perhaps,” wrote Robert Cortes Holliday, meeting him in 1919 or 1920 in Chicago. “Rather tall. A good weight, not over heavy. Light on his feet, like a man who has taken his share in active field games. Something of a stoop. A smile, good, natural, but sly. Dark hair, shot with gray. Noble prow of a nose. Most striking note of all, that ruddy complexion, ruddy to a degree which (as I reflect upon the matter) seems to be peculiar to a certain type of Englishman.”[73] Mr. Lucas spent several days in Chicago on this visit, but only about four persons knew it at the time. Mr. Holliday noted that Lucas studied his menu card “with deep attention” and was particular about the service of the dinner when it came. He was not on a lecture tour and inquired about recent literary visitors from England, appearing to be “much amused at the number of them.” He punned twice, badly, spoke admiringly of American humor and especially of the work of Don Marquis,[74] and spoke of the number of American words “which mean so much, and mean nothing at all, like ‘cave-man’ and ‘mother love.’” It also appeared that Lucas could do no writing in a hotel room.

Like nearly all authors, he has an inexhaustible store of gossip about other authors.

His biographical sketch in _Who’s Who_ (the information for which is supplied by the subject) omits all the usual personal data, such as the date and place of birth, parentage, schooling, etc. It even omits his recreations, which most Englishmen are careful to give. There are his name and his occupations—“writer and publisher’s reader”—followed by a partial list of his books, his address in London and the rich array of his clubs, which include the Athenæum, the Garrick, the Burlington Fine Arts and the National Sporting Club. This outdoes Mr. Galsworthy, who mentions the year of his birth, though the Athenæum is his only club.

“He has a kind of mischievous cruelty in his dissection of humanity,” a distinguished novelist once remarked, speaking of Lucas’s conversation. “But he is extremely good company,” came in the next breath. This observer added: “I always think that the best picture of Lucas’s character is to be found in Bennett’s _Books and Persons_.” Here it is:

“Mr. Lucas is a highly mysterious man. On the surface he might be mistaken for a mere cricket enthusiast. Dig down, and you will come, with not too much difficulty, to the simple man of letters. Dig further, and, with somewhat more difficulty, you will come to an agreeably ironic critic of human foibles. Try to dig still further, and you will probably encounter rock. Only here and there in his two novels does Mr. Lucas allow us to glimpse a certain powerful and sardonic harshness in him, indicative of a mind that has seen the world and irrevocably judged it in most of its manifestations. I could believe that Mr. Lucas is an ardent politician, who, however, would not deign to mention his passionately held views save with a pencil on a ballot-paper—if then!... Immanent in the book is the calm assurance of a man perfectly aware that it will be a passing hard task to get change out of _him_!”[75]

And here is more testimony, to the same general effect:

“E. V. Lucas always reminds me of Kipling’s ‘cat that walked by itself.’ He knows everybody, but I have often wondered whether anybody really knows him. He is an amazingly busy man—the assistant editor of Punch, the literary director of Methuen’s, the writer of almost countless charming and distinguished essays, to say nothing of novels and travel books. As a writer he has the appealing urbanity of Charles Lamb, of whom he has written far and away the best biography in the language. But I do not think that there is much of Lamb’s urbanity in E. V. Lucas the man, the gentle-voiced, modern, rather weary man of the world. The humor of the Lucas essays is sunny and kindly. The humor of Lucas himself is cynically tolerant.

“I have said that Lucas knows everybody. The only circles into which he never goes are literary circles. Where professional writers are gathered together, there you will never find E. V. Lucas. He prefers actors and prize-fighters. There is a story that Lucas once gave a dinner party at the Athenæum Club to which he invited Georges Carpentier and Harry Tate. I do not altogether disbelieve that story, but a bishop ought to have been included in the dinner party to make it complete.

“Lucas loves cricket, and is a good man to dine with. His talk is stimulating and his taste in wine perfection.”[76]

Possibly E. V. Lucas’s closest personal friends among writers in America—certainly his closest temperamental affinities—are Don Marquis and Christopher Morley. Occupationally, as the sociologist would say, he is allied with such fellow editors as E. T. Raymond and A. A. Milne and with such publishers’ literary advisers as—not to go back to George Meredith, who read for Chapman and Hall—Frank Swinnerton, who reads for Chatto & Windus, and J. D. Beresford, reader for Collins.

BOOKS BY E. V. LUCAS

For a full list of books written, compiled, edited by and contributed to by Mr. Lucas, write to Methuen & Co., Ltd., 36 Essex Street, London, W.C. 2. About 130 titles are comprised.

ANTHOLOGIES:

1899 _The Open Road_ 1903 _The Friendly Town_ 1907 _The Gentlest Art_ 1908 _Her Infinite Variety_ 1909 _Good Company_ 1910 _The Second Post_ 1914 _Remember Louvain_ 1923 _The Best of Lamb_

BIOGRAPHY:

1905 _The Life of Charles Lamb_ 1907 _A Swan and Her Friends_ 1907 _The Hambledon Men_ 1913 _The British School_ 1921 _The Life and Work of E. A. Abbey, R.A._ 1922 _Vermeer of Delft_ 1924 _Little Wanderings Among the Great Masters._ Six volumes

BOOKS FOR CHILDREN:

1897 _A Book of Verses for Children_ 1903 _The “Original Verses” of Ann and Jane Taylor_ 1906 _Forgotten Tales of Long Ago_ 1907 _Another Book of Verses for Children_ 1908 _Runaways and Castaways_ 1908 _Anne’s Terrible Good-Nature_ 1910 _The Slowcoach_ —— _More Forgotten Stories_

EDITED WORKS:

1903 _The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb_ 1916 _The Hausfrau Rampant_

ENTERTAINMENTS:

1906 _Listener’s Lure_ 1908 _Over Bemerton’s_ 1910 _Mr. Ingleside_ 1912 _London Lavender_ 1914 _Landmarks_ 1916 _The Vermilion Box_ 1920 _Verena in the Midst_ 1921 _Rose and Rose_ 1922 _Genevra’s Money_ 1924 _Advisory Ben_

ESSAYS:

1906 _Fireside and Sunshine_ 1907 _Character and Comedy_ 1909 _One Day and Another_ 1911 _Old Lamps for New_ 1913 _Loiterer’s Harvest_ 1916 _Cloud and Silver_ 1917 _A Boswell of Baghdad_ 1918 _Twixt Eagle and Dove_ 1919 _The Phantom Journal_ 1920 _Adventures and Enthusiasms_ 1921 _Roving East and Roving West_ 1922 _Giving and Receiving_ 1923 _Luck of the Year_

SELECTED WRITINGS:

1911 _A Little of Everything_ 1911 _Harvest Home_ 1916 _Variety Lane_ 1919 _Mixed Vintages_

TRAVEL:

1904 _Highways and Byways in Sussex_ 1905 _A Wanderer in Holland_ 1906 _A Wanderer in London_ 1909 _A Wanderer in Paris_ 1912 _A Wanderer in Florence_ 1914 _A Wanderer in Venice_ 1916 _More Wanderings in London_ In England: London Revisited 1924 _A Wanderer Among Pictures: A Guide to the Great Galleries of Europe_

AND ALSO (WRITTEN WITH C. L. GRAVES):

1903 _Wisdom While You Wait_

SOURCES ON E. V. LUCAS

“Unless my judgment is much at fault, there has written in English, since the death of R. L. Stevenson, no one so proficient in the pure art of the essayist as Mr. E. V. Lucas,” says Edmund Gosse at the beginning of his “The Essays of Mr. Lucas,” in his volume, _Books on the Table_. This essay on an essayist should be consulted either in Mr. Gosse’s own volume (page 105) or in F. H. Pritchard’s _Essays of To-Day: An Anthology_, in which it is included (page 249). No more authoritative or more charmingly stated estimate of Mr. Lucas as an essayist is known to me.

In addition to the sources referred to in the text of the chapter or in footnotes, the reader should consult the READER’S GUIDE TO PERIODICAL LITERATURE for the years since 1913 and the files of The Bookman (London) for the years since 1908.

14. American History in Fiction

The use of history in fiction is at once an aid and a handicap to the writer. Where he is using historical persons, he may count upon a certain delight of recognition from some or all of his readers; offset by disappointment if the portrait doesn’t closely resemble a preconceived ideal. The use of an historical period is on the whole far more satisfactory, and an exact setting is the most satisfactory of all. For fiction is written to express a sense of meaning and to convey a feeling. Like all forms of faith, it creates its own facts. And, as in some other types of illumination, the most effective treatment of historical figures and occurrences by the fictioner is often—indirect lighting.

The three writers I am going to talk principally about in this chapter have certain resemblances and a marked divergence. Although two of them are no longer alive, their audiences were never greater than now. All three belong to the South and West, and two of them wrote novels which have been transformed into motion pictures of enormous influence and success. The third is usually spoken of as a writer for boys, although the boys who read him are, many of them, long past their teens. Both Emerson Hough and Thomas Dixon wrote books which are partly or mainly propaganda. Joseph A. Altsheler, avoiding any suggestion of such a thing, was remarkable for the accuracy of historical detail in his stories. Perhaps the most striking quality in common among these three writers—I won’t undertake to give it a name—is the fact that each, on more than one occasion, has had his huge audience waiting in line to get his book.

I. EMERSON HOUGH

The author of _The Covered Wagon_ was born in Newton, Iowa, 28 June 1857, and died 30 April 1923, when the motion picture fashioned from his novel was the sensation of Broadway—indeed, of America. The first class graduated from the little Iowa high school had three members, Hough being one. (It is perhaps not out of place to say that he pronounced his surname “Huff”). After a brief experience teaching a country school, the boy entered Iowa State University and was graduated with the class of 1880. “I had a university education, perfectly good and perfectly worthless,” he said in later years. His father, Joseph Bond Hough, had been a Virginia schoolmaster, and saw education in terms of a classical course leading to one of the professions. The young man read law in Newton and was admitted to the bar there.

Life began for him then. He went to White Oaks, New Mexico, half a cow town and half a mining camp, about eighty miles west of Socorro in the mountain region between the Rio Grande and the Pecos Rivers. Mr. Hough’s _North of 36_ has been attacked as lacking in authenticity because, when he came to White Oaks, “the frontier epoch had ended.” To which the novelist William MacLeod Raine has made reply: “Interesting, if true. Particularly interesting to me, because it was in 1881 that my father brought his family into the Southwest from England and went into the cattle business (with side lines of tie-making and lumbering). The nearest village was 30 miles away. I and my small brothers used to ride twenty miles to get the mail once a week. That outpost of civilization my memory can make the setting of a score of dramatic incidents. The frontier was not a hard and fast condition which can be defined as having vanished on a specific date. Civilization lapped forward here and there, leaving pockets which did not yield to its influence for many years.” And Hough himself said simply: “In this rugged field, among these splendid and sterling men, in an atmosphere not too law-abiding, but always just and broad, I got my first actual impression of life; learned to respect a man for what he really is.”

He became a sportsman from the first—the practice of law in White Oaks was not exacting—and all his life he was a great hunter and traveler. His father failed in business and something had to be done to make a living for the family. Journalism seemed to be Emerson Hough’s only chance; he had already sold fugitive pieces. After a little time in Des Moines and work on a newspaper in Sandusky, Ohio, he got, in 1889, the job of looking after the Chicago office of Forest and Stream. The job paid $15 a week. But he combined with it work for daily newspapers and for a newspaper syndicate. Most of his writing had to do with sport.

There were some bitter times. But, in fact, nearly all his life until within a few years of his death was to be a mixture of hardships and happiness. The hardships concerned money, except those physical hardships he endured out of doors in what were undoubtedly the happiest hours of his life. Out of doors journalism took him into almost every State of the Union and almost every Province of Canada; to Alaska, also. Sometimes he used to wonder if he had ever slept thirty consecutive nights under one roof. Desperately worried at times, he would say with a sigh of relief: “It is impossible to fret over things when you are wading a trout stream, following a good dog, or riding a good horse.” Within five years of his death intimate friends saw him, suffering from ill health, in tears over uncertainties regarding his work and discouraging certainties regarding his income; yet he lived through the swift, dramatic turn of his fortunes to taste the satisfaction of his very great ambition and to reap a substantial part of the money reward.

In 1895 he explored the Yellowstone Park in winter, going on skis, and an Act of Congress protecting the Park buffalo was due to this adventure. By speech and by his writings he did much all his life to aid the protection and study of wild life and to support the system of national parks. The America he had known in the flush of his youth was really a passion with him. One day after he had finished a series of short stories on the old trails for his out of doors department in the Saturday Evening Post the editor, George Horace Lorimer, suggested that he take either the Overland or the Oregon trail as the subject of a novel. The suggestion was in itself the most magnificent of trails to such a mind as Hough’s. He wrote, then, _The Covered Wagon_.

His first book, _The Singing Mouse Stories_, which had to do with out of doors, appeared when he was 38; he was forty when, in 1897, he married Charlotte A. Cheesbro, of Chicago, and published _The Story of the Cowboy_, praised by Theodore Roosevelt. His first novel came three years later, and with his second, _The Mississippi Bubble_ (1902), he attracted nation-wide attention. It is amusing to recall that he made five copies of _The Mississippi Bubble_ and despatched them simultaneously to five publishers, each of whom sent an acceptance.

When he died, Mr. Hough left several completed books. Three of them were novels and the first of these, _Mother of Gold_, has just been published. A story of the present day, woven around the old legend of the lost mine of Montezuma, it has to a curious degree the pioneer zest and spirit of Hough’s romances of earlier times.

Of his earlier novels, _The Mississippi Bubble_ and _Fifty-four Forty or Fight_ are the ones that seem likely to be read longest; of his later novels probably _The Magnificent Adventure_ (1915), dealing with the Lewis and Clark expedition and with Aaron Burr’s daughter as its heroine, _The Covered Wagon_, and _North of 36_, the story of the Texas cattle trail, have the best chance of permanence—always premising that work as yet unpublished may take its place with these.

II. JOSEPH A. ALTSHELER

To Anne Carroll Moore, supervisor of work with children in the New York Public Library, I am indebted for the best picture of what Joseph A. Altsheler’s work signifies. Both at the time of his death and since, he was and has been and is the most popular author of books for boys in America. He is more popular than James Fenimore Cooper, to whose work his own is probably most closely allied. He wrote over again, as Miss Moore has pointed out, the tales of our pioneer life and struggle “with a fresh sense of their reality.” His “deep love of nature, the ability to select from historical sources subjects of strong human interest, a natural gift for storytelling, and great modesty” were other qualities which the youthful reader senses and appreciates. “Boys who clamor for Altsheler,” says Miss Moore, “read history and biography as a natural and necessary accompaniment. Nor do they neglect _Tom Sawyer_ and _Huckleberry Finn_, or _The Boys’ Life of Mark Twain_. Never in the history of writing for boys has an author attained universal popularity on so broad a foundation of allied interests in reading.”[77]

Cooper wrote when American history was brief; another century and the breadth of a continent unrolled itself before Altsheler, who set about in quiet patience to make all that spaciousness and all those crowding events intelligible for the American boy. And because in modesty and patience he had gone far to achieve just that—taking the average boy into the wilderness, as Miss Moore says, “so that he may realize his heritage in the history of his country and take his place there more intelligently”—his death is a sharp loss. Miss Moore has told how, on 7 June 1919, boys came all day long to the New York Public Library, some with clippings from the newspapers telling of their favorite’s death. There they could look upon a full set of all his works, and his picture. Said a 17-year-old:

“He looks young in that picture but he could have lived all through American history—he makes it so true. You couldn’t do better than to read his books. You can even answer some of the Regents’ questions out of Altsheler’s books. I read every one of them and I got an A-1 mark for history.”

Eyes roved along the shelves over the volumes of the Young Trailers’ Series, the Texan Series, the French and Indian War Series, the Civil War Series, and the rest. They picked out individual titles—always simple and always touched with the imagination of a man who knew supremely how to kindle the youthful mind. Altsheler, indeed, surpassed himself in the titles of the eight books of his Civil War Series, a beautiful crescendo:

_The Guns of Bull Run_ _The Guns of Shiloh_ _The Scouts of Stonewall_ _The Sword of Antietam_ _The Star of Gettysburg_

and then the point of rest, on a great chord, followed by a resolution and a final cadence:

_The Rock of Chickamauga_ _The Shades of the Wilderness_ _The Tree of Appomattox_

—guns, scouts, sword, star, rock! The words sing. Then the shades of anguish, weariness, impending defeat, and at last the peace of the spreading tree....

Joseph Alexander Altsheler was born at Three Springs, Kentucky, 29 April 1862. As a boy he would lie on his back in the woods of the Daniel Boone country and dream of the pioneers until they came to have as strong a fascination for him as the myths of Greece have had for other minds. There were not many books, but he heard over and over again the stories of woodsmen and fighters, for he was descended on his mother’s side from Virginia and Kentucky borderers. And as a boy he knew personally Civil War veterans, both blue and gray, such as General Simon Bolivar Buckner, General Don Carlos Buell, and General Frank Wolford. The one writer who captivated him completely and to whom he afterward said he owed the most was Francis Parkman.

He was educated at Liberty College, Glasgow, Kentucky, and at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee. Then he went to work on the Louisville Evening Post. A year later he moved over to Henry Watterson’s Courier-Journal, for which he became the political reporter and legislative correspondent at Frankfort, the State capital.