[In the following essay, Adcock gives a laudatory overview of Lucas's career.]

For the last half-hour I have been sitting with a sheet of paper in front of me urging myself to start writing about E. V. Lucas, but quite unable to make up my mind where I ought to begin or when and where I ought to leave off. For he has written fifty or sixty books—of travel, of stories, of art criticism, of essays, of biography, one play and half a dozen books for children; and this says nothing of six anthologies he has compiled, nor of books he has edited. Also there is his very first book, a book of verses all about cricket, called Songs of the Bat, which I fancy he must have called in and suppressed, for it no longer appears in lists of his works. How many of his miscellaneous contributions to Punch, and of those charming little essays he has for some years past been writing every week for the Sunday Times, still remain uncollected I do not know. On top of all these and other activities, he was for many years reader and adviser to the publishing house of Methuen & Co., and is now Chairman of its board of directors.

I have met him only twice: once when we were both of a small party that dined at the house of Thomas Seccombe, long since; and more recently when the Elian club was founded and its indefatigable secretary, F. A. Downing, induced him to attend one of its dinners at Middle Temple Hall, but has never succeeded in luring him to another. Lucas loves neither public speaking nor literary society. Not that he is anything of a recluse, but that he prefers to go out and about into all sorts of unliterary society where he can find material to his hand which he could not have found by staying at home or by passing his time in clubs and places where only his fellow craftsmen congregate. He knows London as thoroughly as if he had been a born Cockney, and has put the results of his explorings and researches into A Wanderer in London, and other books. He has gone farther afield for the gossipy history and topography of Highways and Byways of Sussex, and farther still for the sketches, impressions and miscellaneous lore in those admirable chronicles of "A Wanderer" in Paris, in Venice, in Florence, in Holland, in Rome, in Roving East and Roving West and A Wanderer Among Pictures. His roving West took him to America about eight years ago, not on a lecture tour but to see the country and the people, and Robert Cortes Holliday, who met him in Chicago, gives this capital pen portrait of him in his "Men and Books and Cities". Holliday describes him as looking—

"A youngish fifty, perhaps. 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 grey. 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."

Holliday's guess at his age was, at that date, not far out, for Lucas was born in 1868; he was just twenty when he sent some satirical verses to the Globe and made his first appearance in print. A little later, while he was a student at University College, London, he began contributing "By the Way" paragraphs to the same paper, and, like so many young authors of that day, served his apprenticeship as an essayist by contributing to it also his tale of Globe turnovers, so called because they filled the last column on the front page and continued for half a column overleaf. A modest fee of a guinea was paid for each of those essays, and the literary free lance lost one of his readiest markets when the Globe discontinued that feature shortly before its death. Presently he took a regular engagement on the Globe's staff, and remained there I believe for several years, but already he was making progress in other directions, and journalism was not to be his goal.

In his leisure from journalistic work he had written a book about certain of Charles Lamb's circle, Bernard Barton and His Friends, to be followed, after an interval of a few years, by Charles Lamb and the Lloyds; these preluding his complete edition of Lamb's works and that Life of Charles Lamb which have ranked Lucas with the ablest and most brilliant of contemporary editors and biographers. He has left nothing for future editors of Lamb to do. Never, surely, was an author more interestingly or exhaustively annotated and interpreted than Elia is in Lucas's illuminating notes to the essays, letters, poems and plays and miscellaneous writings; they add appreciably to your knowledge of Lamb, his friends and his times, to a more intimate understanding of much that he has written, and are, in short, neither less nor more than such notes ought to be but too seldom are.

But we have gone ahead too quickly, if we are to have any respect for chronology. Somewhere about 1897 Lucas had adventured, with the success that seems to wait upon all his doings, into a very different field and published A Book of Verses for Children, which was in due season succeeded by Another Book of Verses for Children, and by other delightful books written for the little people, such as Anne's Terrible Good Nature, The Slowcoach and The Flamp. And in between these, in 1899 came the first of his anthologies, The Open Road, and this and The Friendly Town, Good Company, and four more have won such laurels for him in this line that most other anthologists now toil after him in vain, and the praise the critics give them is generally diluted with a hint that unfortunately they have not got the Lucas touch—a kind of admonition to "go to the Lucas, thou dullard, consider his ways and be wiser". And the Lucas touch is something too elusive to be defined. You feel it in these anthologies, as you do in his essays, but you cannot pin it down and give it a definition. It may be he is so sensitive to the joy of life—and, by the way, The Joy of Life is the title of the latest of his anthologies (1927)—that, in making his choice, he is drawn to the beautifully joyous as well as to the serenely beautiful things in literature, and has read so widely, with a taste so finely catholic that he instinctively gathers every variety of loveliness into his collection, mignonette and the daisy no less than roses and orchids, and has the art of ranging them in a pattern where the homeliest are as perfectly in keeping as are the most exotic. No man who is only a scholar should try to compose an anthology. Anthologies are not meant for scholars but for the general reader who is human enough to find pleasure in every degree of worthy prose and verse that, in old Samuel Daniel's phrase, can "give delight and move and sway the affections of men", and unless a man's scholarship is mitigated with as large an interest in life as in literature, with an easy knowledge of his fellows, their tastes and their needs, as well as of books, he is wasting his time in compiling an anthology—to do it properly is beyond his capacity. Those old Elizabethan anthologies, the first in the language, are recognised by the best judges as the true models; half the things in them have long been dead and were never great, but even in their embalmed condition they are fragrant with the spirit of their time and, you may depend, would not have been saved among greater, less mortal verse if they had not chimed with contemporary taste and made some sure appeal to contemporary thought and emotion. It is not the anthologist's business to assume that there can be no good taste except his own; it is his business to realise that he is working for readers of diverse tastes and temperaments, and if his conception of what is good is hopelessly narrowed to what is good for himself he has mistaken his vocation. As an anthologist, E. V. Lucas emphatically knows his business, being gifted with the breadth of sympathy essential to that knowledge, and in the result his anthologies are not only among the best of their kind, but they are popular—as any anthology, to fulfil its object, must be.

While The Open Road was in the first bloom of its popularity he won another reputation with that whimsical, farcical, blithely satirical skit on a number of topical things and people (written in collaboration with C. L. Graves) Wisdom While You Wait. This had all the town laughing, and set a fashion which other humorists followed, but none of them quite recaptured the fine careless rapture of merriment that gave Wisdom While You Wait such a vogue that you could scarcely go anywhere without seeing people reading it or without meeting somebody who was thirsting to tell you some of its jokes.

Then, though it came, I fancy, much later (for I am lost among the dates of all these books) there is that book beloved by cricketers, The Hambledon Men; there is a biography of E. A. Abbey; studies of Constable and Vermeer of Delft, and the series of excellent little books on great painters. And before and after and in between all these came the thirty or so volumes of novels and essays that, with his work on Lamb, will, perhaps, in the long run remain as his most characteristic and enduring achievement.

I cannot be certain whether Listener's Lure was the first of his stories, or novels, or "entertainments" as I seem to remember he once labelled them himself, but it was certainly one of the earliest. It arrived so long ago as 1906 and introduced a fresh and refreshing note into the fiction of its period. It adopted the old, well-worn method of telling a story in a collection of letters; but no method is too old in the hands of one who knows how to make it new again, and Lucas had the secret of doing that. Here, as in all his novels, the essayist and the novelist work in collaboration; the characters—Lynn Haberton, the literary man, his ward, Edith Graham, who is also his secretary, the delicate Albourne, the talkative, agnostic, Mrs. Pink, and the rest of the men and women, married and single, of their acquaintance—reveal themselves, or are revealed, and carry on the story in their correspondence; a story with no lack of love interests, abounding in humour, but with moods of deep seriousness, the letters digressing now and then into literary criticism, into gravely or whimsically shrewd comments on life and death and social and moral questions with which everybody is more or less concerned. These cunningly blended elements, and the skill and subtly humorous truthfulness with which the characters are drawn disguise the slightness of the story itself so that it keeps you as closely interested as if it were unravelling a powerful plot, and moves you to repeated chucklings of quiet enjoyment.

This same blend of delightful humour and occasional seriousness of thought, the same blend of essay and story, in varying proportions, the same deftness and lightness of touch and realistic art in characterisation are the irresistible lure of the witty and charming Over Bembertons, of Advisory Ben, Genevra's Money, Verena in the Midst, The Vermilion Box (another tale told in letters, the vermilion box being the familiar pillar-box), Mr. Ingleside, Landmarks (which has a good deal of autobiography in it), and of the Lucas novel in general. Some have more fantasy, or more sentiment, a more everyday homeliness or a more settled plot than others, but the same gracious Lucasian whimsicality and philosophy, acute and sympathetic understanding of men and women and charm of style link them each to each, and would seal them as distinctively his even if no name were printed on their title pages.

As for the essays, their very number and infinite variety reduces me to despair of saying anything of them in the space that remains to me that shall be sufficiently comprehensive. They have all the airy magic of the novels, sometimes are a compromise between tale and essay, and whether they take a theme that drifts into thought that is deep enough for tears, or is lively with burlesque laughter, or lighter in idea than thistledown or almost as intangible as the air, they are as delicately done as any filagree carving in ivory, but have a genial, friendly, companionable warmth of humanity in them that makes the comparison with ivory inadequate. His admirers used to be amazed that Swift could sit down and write an essay on a broomstick; but Lucas does not require a broomstick, he can write a delightfully quaint, witty or wise essay on nothing at all. He has not been contented to travel the great highways of literature, but has an extensive and peculiar acquaintance with its byways, and a special weakness for oddities of literary character, and can fascinate a reader with his cunning recreations of them. I remember his Boswell of Baghdad, and, for example, his "Philosopher that Failed" (in Character and Comedy)—which takes that old Barnard's Inn solicitor, Oliver Edwards, who had been at Pembroke College with Dr. Johnson and is a transitory figure in Boswell's Life, and reconstructs his character, his one meeting with Johnson when they were both old, and by sly little deductions and reasonable amplifications makes the man and the scene more vivid and intimately alive than Boswell himself has made it.

See how the manner and tone, the geniality, and variableness of the essays get into their very titles—Urbanities, Fireside and Sunshine, One Day and Another, Loiterers' Harvest, Giving and Receiving, Luck of the Year, Encounters and Diversions, Events and Embroideries—you know what to expect as soon as you read the names on the covers, and they do not disappoint you. Probably because of his association with Elia, Lucas is occasionally spoken of as if he had chosen Lamb for his model, but he is no more an imitator of Lamb than Lamb was of Addison and Steele; he is his own man, his humour, fantasy, pathos, and general outlook on men and things are his own, his subjects his own and his manner of treating them, and if he has affinities with Lamb, Leigh Hunt, Addison and Steele, it is simply because, as an essayist, he is in the legitimate line of descent from them. But to put this opinion on broader, more responsible shoulders than mine, I will leave the last word with the late Sir Edmund Gosse, who has said in one of his essays: "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. … There have not been many true essayists, even in English, but Mr. Lucas is one of them."