SOURCE: "E. V. Lucas: Prince of Essayists," in Calcutta Review, Vol. 1ll , No. 4, April-June, 1972, pp. 315-20.

[In the following essay, Chatterjee describes Lucas's style as an essayist]

As Virginia Woolf truly says, the essayist must know—that is the first essential—how to write. 'There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay. Somehow or other, by dint of labour or bounty of nature, or both combined, the essay must be pure—pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter.' ('The Modern Essay', The Common Reader, First Series). The essays of E. V. Lucas have this purity about them, for he knows, if any-body does, how to write.

'Essay' comes from the French word for 'attempt' and is, by its very nature, tentative. It has a certain kind of incompleteness about it. But what it lacks in finality is more than compensated by the charm of the essayist. E. V. Lucas is an essayist of great charm and is distinguished for his graceful style and quiet humour.

Edward Verrall Lucas was born at Eltham in Kent on 12th June, 1868. He and the classical scholar, A. W. Verrall, belonged to the same Quaker family. After various schools at Brighton Lucas was apprenticed to a local bookseller. From 1889 to 1892 Lucas was a reporter on the Sussex Daily News. Then he was at University College, London, for some time, writing meanwhile for the Globe. Lucas had wide interests, a versatile mind, and a facile pen, and it is no wonder that he was a voluminous writer. He compiled a large number of anthologies, of which The Open Road and The Friendly Town were the most successful. Lucas wrote about a dozen novels, of which Over Bremerton's is perhaps the best. He also published many travel books, including Highways and Byways in Sussex and A Wanderer in London. He was a contributor to Punch and was its assistant editor in its most palmy days. Lucas became head of a well-known publishing house, Methuen & Co. Ltd. But, apart from his delightful essays, Lucas is remembered best of all as an authority on Charles Lamb, of whose essays and letters he published the standard edition and whose biography he wrote in 1905. Of Lucas's essays, there are about thirty volumes, including Character and Comedy, One Day and Another, Good Company, Old Lamps for New, Loiterer's Harvest, Mixed Vintage, Giving and Receiving, Encounters and Diversions, and Pleasure Trove. Lucas died on 26th June, 1938. He had already been made a Companion of Honour.

The twentieth century may be described as the golden age of the essay. It is one of the aspects of literary individualism which dominates our century. Both the earlier centuries, eighteenth and nineteenth, had periods when the essay flourished as a literary form, and the achievement of the Romantic Revival in this particular genre can hardly be surpassed. But though there is not a single modern writer who can rise to the level of a Lamb or Hazlitt, there are about half a dozen modern essayists whose level is very high and E. V. Lucas is undoubtedly one of them. He may not have the sophistication of Max Beerbohm or the brilliance of Chesterton or the intimacy of Robert Lynd, but he has an inimitable quality of his own. That is the reason why no less a critic than Sir Edmund Gosse writes: "Unless 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." ('The Essays of Mr. Lucas', Books on the Table).

The literary essay is better known as the personal or familiar essay. As Bacon's essays are generally impersonal, it is difficult to regard them as essays proper, though in their own way they are masterpieces. The origin of the essays as a literary type goes back to the Renaissance, when the sixteenth century French writer Montaigne wrote down his reflections on various topics and published them under the title of Essais. In the preface of the book Montaigne explained his purpose. Since he and his friends must part company one day, he wrote his essays so that 'when they have lost me, which they must do before long, they might find in it some characteristic touches of my temperament and mood for it is myself I am painting.' It is true of every good essayist. It is himself that he paints.

Lucas also is painting himself in his essays. What else would we expect of a man who has learned so much from his 'long and intimate communion with the text of Charles Lamb'? But Lucas knew that it would be unwise to play the 'sedulous ape' to Elia. So we find in Lucas a disciple rather than an imitator of Lamb. And the essays of Lucas, no less than those of Lamb, resemble fire-side conversations. Lamb wrote about his Elian writings: "The Essays want no Preface: they are all Preface. A preface is nothing but a talk with the reader; and they do nothing else." This is true of the essays of Lucas as well. They are marked by the fluence and ease characteristic of a good conversationalist. Frank Swinnertons' description of the literary essayist as 'a writer in his slippers' fits Lucas like a glove. Take this passage, for instance: 'At this minute somewhere there is a walking-stick whose one wish in life is to leave its present user and get back to me, its rightful owner; but what can it do? A mere voiceless piece of wood, what can it do? Yet all its thoughts I know are with me.' This is the casual way in which Lucas begins his essay 'The Lost Stick.' Incidentally, it is in this essay that our wanderer-essayist makes the stick speak out nostalgically about its experiences of travelling with its master:

I was with him in Bombay, where, however, we walked little; and in Delhi, where in the early morning we walked much; and in Lucknow, where we went to the races and didn't do so badly; and in the stifling streets of Benares among pilgrims and cows; and in Calcutta, where we went to the races again and lost all that Lucknow had provided, and more. Every evening just before sunset he took me to the Maidan and walked across the grass to the fort and back through the spicy golden haze.

Lucas is immensely interested in the people around him, especially in picturesque or quaint people. Some of them are described under the general title, 'Simple Souls'. There is Lucas's barber, a Pole by birth and a cosmopolitan by chance, who wanted to be a millionaire but ended up by missing the oysters during Christmas. Then there is the story of Lucas's neighbour, a young amateur farmer who was an art enthusiast, and his latest find:

When I told him that it was certainly not a Thomas Sidney Cooper (in spite of the artist's name in full upon it) his face fell, it is true, for a moment, but he bravely pulled himself together the minute after, and said with feeling, 'Well, they're damned good cows anyway, and I like 'em'. Cooper wasn't the only painter.'

Grapes are indeed not the only fruits.'

Lucas is no less interested in places, imbued as he has always been with wanderlust. Even ordinary scenes he can invest with glamour. In his essay, 'The Windmill', he waxes eloquent on its beauty. He pleads as eloquently for a revival of the windmill as Stevenson in his plea for gas-lamps:

. … the living windmill is not only beautiful but romantic top: a willing, man-serving creature, yoked to the elements, a whirling monster, often a thing of terror. … the only thing more beautiful in a landscape than a mill that is still is a mill that is active.

The 'gentleness' of Lucas is perhaps best revealed in his love of birds and animals. One of his finest essays is 'Birds and Their Enemies.' He tells us in this essay how he has been watching, for a fortnight, two nests in the garden—a thrush's and a long-tailed tit's. The thrush built quietly and unobserved in a box tree and the long-tailed tit worked entirely in the open. But the well-laid plans of birds and men go equally awry. 'Fate does not seem to think much of birds.' Some village boys in a plunderous mood tore the tit's nest bodily from the hedge, and a cat destroyed the thrush's nest. 'Two tragedies in as many days, two families destroyed, two beautiful natural processes brought to nothing.' And then the essayist indulges in a little moralizing (a vein not very common in our writer): 'We all prey on one another, and all in turn are preyed upon.' I think Lucas might have in mind Keats's 'Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds':

.… Still do I that most fierce destruction see,—
The shark at savage prey,—the Hawk at
  pounce,—
The gentle Robin, like Pard or Dunce,
Ravening a worm, ………..

There are, in 'Birds and Their Enemies', excellent observations on rabbits, squirrels (those brilliant aeronauts, poems in red fur), bats, and cuckoos (they sing the same song so many times over that one is ashamed of them). For a moment at least Lucas thinks that he is tired of cats:

Their rapacity is too continual, their cruelty too hideous, their beauty too superficial. Give me a plain, blundering, faithful-hearted, and true-eyed dog—a mongrel, even, if you will—before all the Persians of the Orient, or so I say today.

The Elian echo in the passage is unmistakable.

It is not cattiness alone that leads Lucas to canine affection. That he is a genuine dog-lover we can see from many of his essays, including 'A Mother's Counsel', but nowhere is this fact revealed so significantly as in the essay, 'The Lord of Life'. Lucas calls a puppy the Lord of Life because he cannot conceive of a more complete embodiment of vitality, curiosity, success and tyranny.

Lucas is interested in games and sports, especially in cricket, and his gusto is as intense as that of Hazlitt. We have only to think of essays like 'Winter Solace' and 'A Rhapsodist at Lord's'. He quotes approvingly from the poet Francis Thompson's cricket prose: 'To be a fielder like Vernon Royle is as much worth any youth's endeavours as to be a batsman like Ranjitsinhji, or a bowler like Richardson'. ('A Rhapsodist at Lord's').

Lucas is a connoisseur of art and a bibliophile as well. This is illustrated most effectively in his essays like 'On Reading Aloud' and 'Other People's Books'. Though, unlike Lamb and Hazlitt, he uses quotations sparingly, he uses them sometimes with tremendous effect: 'No matter of what the breakfast consists, marmalade is the coping-stone of the meal. Without marmalade the finest breakfast in incomplete, a broken are. Only with marmalade can it be a perfect round.' ('Concerning Breakfast') There is, however, no lack of literary allusions in his essays: 'The mill one day—some score years ago—was full of life; the next, and ever after, mute and lifeless, like a stream frozen in a night or the palace in Tennyson's ballad of the "Sleeping Beauty". ('The Windmill') A more striking example is Lucas's remark in connexion with a bat which he has sheltered:

It was rescued and turned out to be of extraordinary friendliness, neither scratching nor biting, as tradition alleges of it, but drinking milk, and crawling over our hands and across the table in its velvet cloak like a burlesque Hamlet ('Birds and their Enemies').

The allusion is to the famous Play Scene (Act III, Sc. ii) in Shakespeare's Hamlet where the Prince of Denmark is shown to be stretched first of all at Ophelia's feet, but later on as crawling over the stage the better to observe whether he has been able 'to catch the conscience of the King'. Hamlet is also traditionally robed in black velvet.

Humour is one of the most attractive features of the essays of Lucas. Sometimes he will write an entirely humorous essay, as, for instance, 'Of the Best Stories'. It is in this essay that he recounts for us that amusing story associated with Lamb. Lamb's India House superior once reproached him: 'You always come late to the office.' Lamb's retort was devastating: 'Yes, but see how early I leave.' The essays of Lucas are full of such anecdotes. His humour would often come out in a well-chosen epithet or a stray phrase or an odd coinage, but it is best illustrated perhaps in certain striking remarks like the following:

A chrysanthemum show is a temptation to Providence anyway, and Providence rarely has enough fortitude to resist temptation. ('The Enfranchised Reviewer', III).

I wonder if this is something that Lucas's Providence has in common with Oscar Wilde's Lord Darlington who can resist everything except temptation.

The reference to Sir Edmund's alleged remark in 'The Perfect Widow' is no less humorous:

Rather, Mr. Gosse seemed to say—I have difficulty in giving his words accurately, for he wrote in a periodical (now in Heaven) that cost a guinea—rather than that widows should continue to practise biography on these lines, he would vote for the immediate acclimatisation of suttee.

Then there is the tirade against Tuesday in 'The Town Week', one of the most frequently anthologized of Lucas's essays:

But Tuesday has the sheer essential flatness of non-entity; Tuesday is nothing On Tuesday you touch the depths. . … Tuesday is also very difficult to spell, many otherwise cultured ladies putting the e before the u; and why not? What right has Tuesday to any preference?

Much virtue in that 'otherwise':

The humour of Lucas does not have the rainbow-quality of Elian humour, which is often closely linked with pathos. Nevertheless, sadness does occasionally creep in. There is a touching note of pathos in the essay 'A Funeral'. This essay gives us an unforgettable sketch of the old Shakespearean scholar, W. J. Craig (1843-1906), editor of The Oxford Shakespeare and of King Lear in the Arden Shakespeare, who had 'the heart of a child'. The sketch is drawn with genuine personal sympathy which has lent a poignancy to the entire essay.

Arnold Bennett sums up his impressions of the character of E. V. Lucas in memorable words:

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.

(Books and Persons)

The rock is there, no doubt, and that is one of the reasons why the essays of Lucas, unlike the essays of Elia, are only a partial revelation of the essayist's character. But the virtues that Lucas found in the essays of Lamb—charm, prodigality of fancy and literary artifice—are all there in the essays of Lucas himself, and in a degree which is perhaps unsurpassed by any other contemporary essayist. Would it be going too far to take the cue from the words of Spenser's epitaph and describe E. V. Lucas as 'the Prince of Essayists in his Time'?