SOURCE: "E. V. Lucas," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. 42, April, 1940, pp. 221-35.

[In the following essay, Smith offers a reservedly positive assessment of Lucas.]

In these hectic days, when the attitudinizing writer has invaded the pages of even the most conservative of our American magazines, it is a pleasure to find among the L's on the shelf of the public library a half dozen loose-leaved, dog's-eared volumes, essay novels or, as he himself styled them, "entertainments" from the pen of E. V. Lucas. A fashion more than a quarter of a century out of use, and staled by the great publishing houses, he still holds his own in quiet reading rooms, where middle-aged librarians mention him with respect. It is difficult to account for a popularity, moderate though it undoubtedly is, which continues to defy the laws of probability. Lucas, downright Quaker and unswerving democrat that he was, never called to his aid any kind of art to catch the public eye. He never even advertised. Henry James, as in The Wings of the Dove, might challenge attention by an all-star cast moving in aristocratic circles; his background might be rich (he himself would have said "stupendous") and his pages no stranger to the risqué situation. E. V. Lucas, on the other hand, introduced middle-class people in ordinary surroundings into books which could be read aloud in mixed company without fear of bringing the blush to the cheek of Podsnap's young person. Everyday objects, such as a mouse, a dog, a cup of tea, a flower seed catalogue, served as inspiration for his essays. The plots of his "entertainments" were negligible. To read him is like fishing in pleasant weather by a quiet stream without catching anything. Yet Henry James remained "poor and lonely" and "insurmountably unsalable" while Lucas, subscribing to half a dozen London clubs, and with wealthy friends in both hemispheres, was involved in no worse financial difficulty than that of how best to dispose of his property after death.

But, though the "sterilized" pages of Lucas are still read, they do not appear to be read by the kind of reader who writes books about books, and keeps before the public eye the waning popularity that is in danger of being eclipsed by newer literary fashions. Though Lucas edited much and wrote more, being responsible, in all, for about a hundred and twelve books, he seems to have left no finger prints. Eminently readable, he is read without being remembered; unusually quotable, he was never quoted much and seems never to be quoted any more; interested in the problems of wealth and poverty, he has left no solution except the old-fashioned and unpopular one of personal responsibility for one's own well-being; largely preoccupied in his later years with art, he has bequeathed no body of valuable criticism, his rare moments of insight being buried in the shallow minutiae of a commentary adapted to reading aloud from notes by club-women in pursuit of culture. Inevitably, when his well-thumbed and, for the most part, cheaply printed volumes are judged by the librarian to be past mending, they will be replaced by fewer copies and finally by none at all. In view of the present dearth of safe and sane literature to put into the hands of the young, the passing of E. V. Lucas's heaped-up wealth of information, his simple but workable philosophy of life, and his fund of quiet good humor and contentment with common things is much to be deplored.

Edward Verrall Lucas, journalist, editor, rhymester, children's writer, essayist, novelist, publisher's reader, publisher, art critic, traveler, and reputed London wit had in 1910 the reputation of being a "highly mysterious man". He was "the cat that walked by itself". He dodged reporters; avoided literary circles, preferring the society of actors and prize-fighters; frequented the democratic cricket game while resenting the "insulence" of the golfer, "his caste of Vere de Vere"; rode about in shabby old cabs till their disappearance from the London streets compelled him to resort to the taxi; and inevitably, almost in spite of himself, set about securing the wealth and influence he deprecated in others. He was by instinct and religious training a leveler, and, because he was extremely shy, was probably more at ease in the company of his inferiors. Having acquired the status of a kind of literary Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, he seems in later years to have cherished mystery as an asset. At sixty-four he wrote, "To blurt all is to have no secrets, and secrets are mystery, and mystery is one of the great possessions."

There appears to have been much that was drab and something that was sordid behind the veil. Born in 1868, the second son of Alfred Lucas of Brighton, the boy was ushered into the household of middle-class dissenters, Quakers, who had pushed self-denial and prudence to the point where these virtues become vices. Although they kept four servants, they did the marketing themselves and put everything away under lock and key. The rigor of their economy seems to have left an indelible impression on the mind of Lucas; in an essay, "On Finding Things" published when he was fifty, probably as a jesting reply to the ridicule of some of his friends, he speaks of the quickened heartbeat with which he pounces on a stray sixpence, a pencil, or a safety pin. At the age of eight, he began to question the scheme of the universe, the first step in his ultimate religious "unbottoming". It seems that he had been almost betrayed into praying for two crippled boys, till, seeing them in a comfortable hospital surrounded by wonderful toys, he realized that they were far more fortunate than he. At ten, as he confesses long years afterward, he stole a pair of boots from his father's closet and sold them to buy a small brass cannon. If we are to accept The Barber's Clock as autobiographical (and it dovetails into everything we know of Lucas) the atmosphere of the home was clouded by a monthly row over the bills, a perennial grouch about the income tax, and an annual upheaval whenever school bills were sent in with "extras" for whooping cough or measles—an upheaval which culminated in the child's withdrawal from school altogether. Thereafter he was to be educated at home.

But the youth of Lucas was not altogether overshadowed by the paternal tantrums. His mother, a woman of literary tastes, filled the gap left by the Scottish master at Redhill School, that never-to-be-forgotten master who had secured quiet in his classroom by reading aloud from Shakespeare and Ouida. A kind of Rip van Winkle art-collector, whose swans, in the light of expert criticism, had a way of proving to be geese, and who seems to have been the boy's uncle, gave him companionship, occasional pocket money, and, most memorable of all, a little bow and arrow. One outing seems to have enlivened these dull years. While staying at a farmhouse one summer, he was taken to a picnic at Hughenden, the country place of the "Prince of Evil, Dizzy, of the dark, long face, bounded on the south by an imperial and on the north by a curl". There were peacocks on the terrace and a hedgehog, which had blundered fortuitously up out of its hole, Then came the hours in the portrait galleries of the great house, the first of many to be spent in later life among the famous art collections both of Europe and of America.

Thrown mainly on his own resources for amusement, the young Lucas spent much of his leisure in memorizing verses from the great poets and from his favorites, Matthew Arnold and William Cory. These he used to recite to himself in a droning sing-song, the protest of the melodiously inclined Quaker against the ban put on music by the founders of his faith. His bleak Sabbaths, or Seventh Days, as the Quakers insist on calling them, were largely devoted to memorizing psalms; and what the classics were in the way of allusion and illustration to Mr. Max Beerbohm and other Oxonians of the period, the Bible became to him. In English, the only language he ever mastered, his reading was wide, ranging through some three centuries from Shakespeare down to his own time. At seventeen, when he caught that memorable glimpse of William Black on the Brighton beach—William Black, then, for a day, the darling of the English speaking people on both sides of the Atlantic—he not only cherished an ambition to write but had acquired a vocabulary rich in the Saxon oak which, in later years, he was to hew and shape in a manner as rapid as it was competent.

And so, from the time when his mother read to him "in that gentle monotone almost the whole of Dickens", he grew to be six feet of sturdy young Quaker, secretly romantic, ambitious to write and to travel, strongly individualistic, at once shy and self-assertive, and, if the truth must be told, of the Epicurean tastes which later were to result in the triple chin and the capacious waistcoat portrayed by Mr. Beerbohm in Things New and Old. Religiously, he might be said to have been largely the product of the school of Moody and Sankey, whose evangelistic meetings left a lasting impression on his memory. The idea of charity, of the brotherhood of man, of service due from the individual to humanity, seems to have obsessed his leisure moments. The most striking poem he has permitted to remain in print treats of charity carried to its logical end—the extinction of the devotee. His experiments in brotherhood, indeed, appear to have been unfortunate, and he was never, even in his youth, the man to pursue a losing game. Superficially good-humored, a delightfully whimsical companion, schooled in the demure half equivocation by which the Quaker is able to convey his sense of the absurdities of life without laying himself open to the charge of undue levity, he had, as the foundation of his character, that "certain powerful and sardonic harshness", glimpsed by Arnold Bennett, "that awareness that it would be a passing hard task to get change out of him".

With a tenacity inherited from his dissenting ancestors, Lucas was to cherish the obloquies of his faith long after its tenets had ceased to mean anything to him. Shy as he was, he refused to take oath in court, claiming his right as a Quaker to testify on affirmation. Unaccustomed to the usages of society, he was never at any pains to acquire polish. He came of a sect which had made a point of refusing to uncover in the presence of royalty, and he was firmly convinced that his "betters" did not exist in England. If society came to him on his own terms (as, in the end, it did) well and good; if not, so much the worse for society. Even when he was in his sixties, it was said of him that, if there was a social faux pas to be made, he would make it. As an illustration of this last trait may be cited Mr. A. Edward Newton's account, published in the November Atlantic of 1938, of how Lucas, when toasted at a meeting of the Johnson Club, rose and left the table, sending, however, a somewhat equivocal note of apology the next morning. "I could not bear to sit still and hear myself so bepraised—or it might have been the fish."

Even could the young Lucas have overcome his distrust of the "insulence" of Oxford, a course there, for one lacking Latin, was out of the question. His want of training in mathematics made University College, London, a utilitarian school founded by dissenters, equally impossible. He dropped his course there, whatever it was, defeated in the first round, but with the elements of success inherent in him. He was a man who could not digest defeat. In his attitude toward work, he was clean, down-right, and unquestioning as an early Victorian tract. His economic views were, and remained, those of the middle-class capitalist. As he later expressed it, he "hated the Trade Union's fixed hours, fixed to please the slacker rather than the worker". He was "appalled by the slovenliness that has come upon us, the tendency to scamp work and to break promises, the craze for recreation". Trained in habits of rigid economy; gifted with unusual business acumen, an unlimited capacity for hard work, and an iron constitution inherited from ancestors who had avoided drink, tobacco, late hours, and ostentation in dress as snares of the devil, he could no more fail in any walk of life which he thought it worth his while to pursue than he could avoid growing rich.

At twenty, when most young men designed for professions are still in scholastic leading strings, Lucas received his first check for literary work. From the time when two weeks as supply on the Sussex Daily News gave him a foothold, he was, like his model Hazlitt, "steeped in ink". At twenty-four he was already in London on the staff of the Globe; three years later he was on that of the Academy without relinquishing his connection with the Globe. In what might have been his leisure hours, he busied himself in compiling to please the Quaker palate two rather large volumes consisting of collections of letters strung together by a trickle of biography; bringing out at the age of twenty-five Bernard Barton and His Friends; at thirty, Charles Lamb and the Lloyds, a publication which obtained for him the commission from Methuen & Co. to prepare for the press The Life and Letters of Charles Lamb. This truly monumental work, which he finished at the age of thirty-seven, opened up for him a new market on this side of the Atlantic, a market which he somewhat too busily endeavored to fill while taking up additional duties as a member of the editorial staff of Punch. This position he held at the time of his death in 1938, together with the chairmanship of the house of Methuen & Co.

His fecundity was amazing. From 1903 to 1927 there was no year in which he did not publish a book, usually two, and often three or four. In the same year in which The Life and Letters of Charles Lamb appeared with its elaborate and scholarly index, he published A Wanderer in Holland. The previous year he had produced Highways and Byways in Sussex. In his late twenties or his early thirties he had somehow found time to marry and to write a volume of essays called Domesticities, most of which, like his first volume of poems, he later suppressed. There is a record of a book, What Shall We Do Now? in which he collaborated with Mrs. Lucas, and his home life, like Browning's Italian dwelling house, which an earthquake revealed to be pretty much all shop, must have been more or less strictly devoted to business.

It has been said that Lucas cherished a deep and abiding sense of the brotherhood of man, an impulse to give that was held in check only by his keen realization of the futility of pouring costly liquids into leaky vessels. Having early arrived at the conclusion that the greatest happiness is to be found in an absorbing interest in work, coupled with a love of innocent and educative pleasures, he seems to have consciously set about showing the poor how to make life not only tolerable but pleasant, rich in the cultural opportunities that lie open to all. He sings the praises of the cricket field, the music hall, the zoological garden, the art museum, the curious book, the vacation in the tramp steamer, and, above all, the treasures of architectural beauty and of historic interest that challenge the attention of the loiterer in the street. His gift to charity was unique; he unveiled a world of ever-increasing pleasure to be enjoyed by the poorest in return for the effort of opening the eyes. Lucas was an enthusiast rather than a critic; his usual method was to display a work of art for a moment in the warm light of his own appreciation, and then to pass on to the next—and the next, with apparently inexhaustible superlatives. He had, no doubt, a touch of the smugness of the average citizen in the contemplation of the costly and hideous, but, after all, his kind of comment is more productive of interest in art than the blight often cast upon budding enthusiasm by the able criticism of Mr. Max Beerbohm.

Lucas has said of Murillo that he painted for the poor. With no ambitious eye on posterity, with no sidelong glance at the social ladder, he himself wrote frankly for the man in the street. Music halls, not opera; cricket, not golf. Is poverty a bar to a flower garden? There is the seedsman's catalogue! Are you too poor to own a dog? Would you, by chance, consider a mouse? Those superannuated omnibuses, gaily painted and set up on stilts in the coastal marshes, cheap and gaudy imitations of the seaside villa which affected Mr. Beerbohm with a distaste amounting to nausea, how these would have delighted the heart of Lucas! For years, when he was free to go and come, he lived at Sparks Haw, Froghole. The force of democracy could no further go.

But Murillo's paintings came to be the exclusive property of the rich, and, just as the model tenement block is always preempted by the prosperous as soon as erected, so Lucas, ironically enough, became the property of the well-to-do Quaker and the exclusive Congregationalist. To persons of the leisured class who are denied, through age, invalidism, or lack of funds, the delights of travel, there can be no pleasanter "adventure" (in the Lucasian sense of the word) than an extended course of this most unaffected of essayists. One should not read him alone any more than one should travel alone. His English was designed, as the writer has been at pains to hint, for reading aloud. His humor, sly as the twinkle of an eye half-hid under the broad brim of a Quaker hat, is more or less lost on the silent reader. But, imbibed through oral channels and well digested, it becomes a household word. You soon begin to allude to your much-married neighbor as a "widow three-deep", a blundering puppy is "an absurd creature with one foot in the cradle", the town bore is "a great performer on the monologue", ministers whose theology you dislike are "trimming God to their own dimensions", and you endeavor to train your rose "nose-high". Your good humor and your contentment with life grow with your growing interest in common things, and, as the "adventure" draws to a close, you will probably enjoy a clearer conception of London and pastoral England than if personally conducted by any other than E. V. Lucas.

The novels of Lucas appear to be the most popular of his essays, having, as they do, a slender plot to sustain interest, and usually containing a good deal of out-of-the-way information, together with some amusing character drawing. By the riotous Jack Cades of our own period they might be termed feloniously small beer, but to the few milk-fed adolescents our country affords, they fizz with the unaccustomed wickedness of ice cream soda. What safer ideal for a girl to cherish in her teens than the young American "sin buster" in Genevra's Money! Advisory Ben and Anne Ingleside are especially calculated to stimulate the ambitions of the American girl, for these Lucasian heroines are of the type of modern womanhood who direct their fresh and abundant energies into the channels of profitable and intersting work. No adult lover of the well-written and quietly persuasive will be disappointed in Advisory Ben, Mr. Ingleside, London Lavender, Over Bernerions, or Genevra's Money. These, as the habit grows, will be followed by the essays, Fireside and Sunshine (one of the first and freshest of his collections), Specially Selected, Adventures and Enthusiasms, Giving and Receiving, and Loiterer's Harvest. One of the most fascinating of biographies is The Life and Letters of Charles Lamb. Though Lucas lacks the critical insight and the dramatic instinct of Strachey and Maurois, still, to the loiterer in literary by-ways, his work is all the more charming because of its very leisureliness, which adapts it to desultory reading over a long period of time. Of the Wanderer series, A Wanderer in London is, in my opinion, the best, both because of the author's being on familiar ground and because of his greater discursiveness. In this "adventure" the children must not be forgotten, and The Slowcoach, with its background of pastoral England, will delight both old and young.

I am inclined to think with Dogberry that "comparisons are odorous". To one fresh from the Lucasian adventure, a whisper that Lucas is in any way inferior to those two great contemporary rivals in his field, Mr. Max Beerbohm and Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith, is likely to act as a damper on what is, doubtless, a very natural preference. But Lucas, though invaluable in the family gathering as he is in the sick room, has his limitations. The fact that he was a self-made man, whereas Mr. Beerbohm and Mr. Smith are scholars and men of leisure, is beside the point. Lucas was not the output of mass production; he had the advantage of an opportunity to develop himself along original lines. The fact that he observed the world without too many preconceived ideas about what he was expected to think should have given to his criticism of life and art a unique value. But that was not the case. One reason why he might be considered inferior to these other two is that, whereas he thought little and wrote much, they thought much and wrote little. He did not make the most of his material. All but a few of the best of his essays are like lively preliminary sketches of some more detailed work to follow. The added richness which long reflection gives, detail by slow detail, is seldom theirs.

It was not for lack of understanding of the process whereby a writer enriches, rounds out, and polishes his work that Lucas produced, for the most part, essays so attenuated. In his Life and Letters of Charles Lamb he has taken the pains to illustrate and to analyze the method of Elia. The fact was that he disliked Lamb's style, and, as to elaboration of his subjects, he had tried that in his youth with no great degree of success; it was a sore spot with him. His sense of business values, too, rejected the uneconomical methods of Elia, this little, weazened, dawdling, eccentric "amateur", frittering away time worth pounds, shillings, and pence, with printers' devils clamoring at his door for copy which no pecuniary inducement could persuade him to begin—or, having begun, to finish. He reserved his admiration for Hazlitt. "To try to write like Lamb," he assures us, "is perhaps the surest road to literary disaster; to try to write like Hazlitt is one of the best things a young man can do." But here again he falls short. Whereas Hazlitt thought much and read little, Lucas thought little and read much. Under the spur of the time limit, his method was to develop his subject along simple and economical lines and then stop when his time was up. What he wrote was new wine, thrown on the market without any of the mellowing that comes with age.

If with Lucas authorship was more or less of a rapid and mechanical process, with Mr. Beerbohm it was the work of silence and slow time. So unready was he, even in stereotyped forms of composition, that he confesses to miserable failure as the secretary of his brother, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. "To seem to write with ease and delight", he explains, "is one of the duties which a writer owes to his art. And to contrive that effect involves very great skill and care." In selecting essays for republication in book form, he is not only fastidious in his choice, but is loath to send any of "these little creatures" out into the world again without great "scrutiny and titivation". Such fond lingering touches, bespeaking the very sublimation of literary parenthood, seem to be quite outside the method of Lucas, and they produced essays which, if in the outset somewhat dandiacal, yet seem to sparkle with a vitality all their own. The best work of Mr. Smith, too, has perhaps even more the air of being the product of natural development rather than of deliberate planning. It has the asymmetry of a lush growth sprung from that heap of incredibly rich compost of past ages which constitutes his mind. Even the dry philological treatise, in his hands, seems to be not so much organized as organic, to develop according to natural law, as roots follow a drain.

Not only was Lucas, for the most part, too rapid and mechanical in his method, but he approached his art with a reservation which no writer can afford to make, the reservation of his private life. The biographer in search of material has a dry and thankless task in reading his familiar essays, to say nothing of the rest of his work. Thoroughgoing artists, to quote Mr. Smith, "must have models, they must live on the living and often, like Tolstoy and Scott and Dickens, they may be counted as members of those tribes who cook and eat their own parents." In the case of Mr. Beerbohm, a tragedy which touched him more nearly perhaps than could any other has brought out his most gently humorous and wholly delightful essay, From a Brother's Standpoint. Mr. Smith, for his part, appears to have no reservations whatever. The casual air with which he pegs down his nearest and dearest for vivisection and demonstration is to be equaled only by the engaging candor with which he himself steps forward to serve as his own guinea pig. But Lucas was shy; "so shy," he wrote, "that I can be daunted by the smile of a perfect stranger in the street—and he thinking of something else." He suppressed his early volume of poems and some of his early and probably self-revealing essays. In his "entertainments" he suppressed all but the superficial characteristics of the persons in his stories. He subjected them to none of the stresses which stir human nature to its depths. In short, he suppressed all of himself but the easy, entertaining, informational Lucas.

Generalizations, like boomerangs, often return to plague their author, but I venture the assertion that a writer is always unfortunate in having a Puritanical audience, readers strict in point of the proprieties but not overnice in matters of art. Let it be admitted that the Elizabethan audience, as Mr. Smith has pointed out, produced but one Shakespeare; and that, on the other hand, the unlettered servingmaids of eighteenth century London stimulated Richardson to the production of a series of psychological studies which found imitators on the continent, and which are still capable of engrossing the minds of scholars. But, take it by and large, a writer must ask permission of his audience to be great; he lives up to their expectations—or down to them. Mr. Beerbohm wrote for the perusal of scholars and critics; he was forced not only to make his strokes tell but to polish his rapier and to fence with the grace and abandon which alone can win the applause of experts. Mr. Smith professes to write to please himself, an able critic with abundant leisure for the task. "When," he writes in After-thoughts, "by sips of champagne and a few oysters they can no longer keep me from fading away into the infinite azure, 'you cannot', I shall whisper my last faint message to the world, 'be too fastidious'." At the outset of his career Lucas accepted without question the standards of the Victorian dissenters of whom he was one. These standards demanded of a writer that he should be preferably placid and pleasant, and undoubtedly "proper"; and that, in order to conserve time, he should convey information. Now the informational essay, of the popular sort, being by far the easiest thing an author can do, is apt to be habit forming. Lucas became an addict. With the passing of time, his output took on more and more of the stenographic quality of notes jotted down on the spot, transcribed, and sent to the press without further alteration. At its best, his style was lucid and pleasing, so free from mannerisms that that incorrigible mimic, Max Beerbohm, never, so far as I know, attempted to make it the subject of caricature. At its worst, it might be mistaken for the style of a school girl. The following stereo-typed enthusiasms, quoted from his Leonardo da Vinci, may serve to illustrate: "the glorious equestrian statue", "the delicious little boy with a dolphin", "a marvel never to be repeated", "the lovely central spire", "one of the most wonderful careers in the history of mankind". This is criticism reduced to its lowest terms, intellectual dead-lock.

It is possible that Lucas was less abundantly gifted by nature than the other two. The precocious artistry, the almost uncanny critical insight, and the Puckish freaks of fancy which characterize Mr. Beerbohm put him in a class by himself, while Mr. Smith, for all the incredible awkwardness of some of his passages, is able to wing his way in a pure serene where Lucas cannot follow. But, after all, it was probably by choice that he was more of an artisan than of an artist. To him it was enough that a thing should be neatly joined and smoothly finished—as Arnold Bennett puts it, "serenely well done". Perhaps, to his Quaker taste, everything beyond the utmost economy and simplicity of treatment savored of the rococo. Luther-like, he would have hurled Mr. Smith's "purple inkpot" in the face of any Devil who had prompted him to use it. From a business point of view, he was right: his writing gave him a comfortable living, whereas Mr. Smith's comfortable living gives him leisure to write.

The question of the immortality of these three rests on the knees of the gods. If we are able to believe some of the recent rose-hued press notices of Mr. Smith, he will be hailed by future generations with delight, but then critics were saying of Mr. Beerbohm and of Lucas in the dawn of the twentieth century what they are now saying of Mr. Smith. In respect to Mr. Beerbohm, he is a slender classic, bearing indeed a kind of resemblance to his own "Savonarola" Brown, who, after seven years' devotion to the composition of a tragedy in blank verse, died with only the first act completed. But he is, in my opinion, essential to any study of the literature of his time both because of the validity of his criticism and of the fact that he is in the main stream with Hardy, James, Shaw, and the rest. As long as Swinburne and Whistler are remembered, essays like No. 2, The Pines will be read. In any case, he deserves at least as much space in the library catalogues of 1992 as he prophesied for himself in his inimitable story of Enoch Soames.

Mr. Smith is another matter, a century plant of a man who has burst into curious and highly colored inflorescence after nearly sixty years of leisurely development. Sad if his "fine writing" should disappear without imitators, his silver cadences die away without an echo. But he is not in the main stream—in the backwaters rather, and we predict for him that, in ages to come, he will be occasionally re-discovered by readers of discrimination, and enthusiastically brought before the public as he himself has brought Taylor and Donne.

As to Lucas, he might almost be said to be in a stream by himself. He reflects no tendency; he exemplifies no trend of thought. In a day of ever increasing subtlety and license in the portrayal of human passions, he continued to regard the creatures of his imagination as superficial acquaintances. He needs some one to do for him what he has neglected to do for himself, to pick out for preservation, from the mass of floating debris he has left behind him, the things he wrote when he lost himself, forgetting that he was losing time and money. Yet, since the kind of reader who likes him best often finds it difficult to orient himself in any time but his own, I am inclined to believe that in the future Lucas will be known only to a few widely read scholars, and classed as one of those second- or third-rate essayists who, like Southey and Cowley, afford pleasanter reading than their superiors. Yet, whatever the fate of his essays, what a gold mine his Wanderer series, should it survive our modern methods of warfare, would prove to the antiquary of the year 2939!

"But art in a writer", says Mr. Beerbohm, "is not every-thing—… writers of enormous vitality never are artistic." And it must be said that, beside Mr. Beerbohm, the self-confessed "dilettante" and "petit maitre", as beside Mr. Smith, the leisurely etcher of finely pointed aphorisms, Lucas looms up, a titanic figure. "What an excellent golf player Sir Willoughby Patterne would have made!" he cries contemptuously, and walks off to hobnob with the Booths at Salvation Army headquarters. He cares nothing for scroll borders and shell patterns; he secures his effects by large, economical, and masterly strokes. His ever recurring theme is that in work lies the redemption of the world—work, work, and then more work. In his reverence for work lies the secret of the Pharisaical stone he flung in A Wanderer in London at "A Lost Girl with a Sweet Face." The last stanza may have been softened by a touch of pity, but his judgment is not affected. She refused the advice of her elders, and look at her now! Why didn't she get a job? "Happiness", he says in The Barber's Clock, which seems to embody his final conclusions about life, "or the human approximation to happiness comes from having a little too much to do."

Facile criticism might be tempted to regard Lucas as the slave of a hopper which ground out faster than he could pour in; to regret that he never enjoyed the leisure to round out, retouch, perfect his work. If he had had that leisure, he would probably not have so employed it. Like the fresco painter, he made his strokes once for all. And how good many of these strokes were! What is struck off in the heat of conversation by a Johnson, a Whistler, or a Shaw needs no revision, and Lucas was his own Boswell, recording day by day the movements of an unusual mind. The vocabulary he employed was the simplest to be found for his purpose; he wished to be understood rather than admired, and he hated literary dandyism. If his essays and novels were cheaply printed, he knew that books were made to be read, not looked at. He did more than his share of the work of the world, and he acknowledged no criterion but his own conscience. Refusing to pander to what he must have regarded as a depraved taste, he did his utmost to cultivate in his readers the virtues of industry, purity, serenity, and open-mindedness. It can hardly be said that he left the verdict to posterity; he himself, in a model epitaph, has already pronounced it.

         Here Lies
  (In No Expectation of Immortality)
           Thomas Brown
    He Was No Friend of the Church
            But He Paid His Way
Interfering with None of His Neighbors
   And His Word Was His Bond