Autobiographies
Reading, Writing, and Remembering. A Literary Record. By E. V. Lucas. (Methuen. 18s.)
AN autobiography is the record of a personality in contact with environment, and it is apt to take one or other of three common forms, in accordance with the temperament and capacity of the recorder. There is, in the first place, the superficial record of environment alone, the sort of auto- biography which anyone can, and most people do, write the trivial hotch-potch of anecdotes, out of which gossip- mongers refresh their jaded columns, here to-day and gone to-morrow. And then there is the esoteric, analytical auto- biography, in which a sensitive (and perhaps self-conscious) temperament lays itself bare to sympathy and interpretation. Its appeal is mainly personal, and confined to the friends who are interested in the writer's disposition. And, finally, there is the fully orbed and ordered autobiography in which environment and personality are seen reacting upon one another, until a portrait of the man is set in the background of his period. This is the sort of book that is for all waters and all tastes ; " but it needs heaven-sent moments for this skill."
To Mr. E. V. Lucas such heaven-sent moments are daily gifts, and inevitably he chooses the completed form of auto- : biography, and " brings it to an excellent work." But in the present volume, which, it is to be hoped, may prove only a first instalment of his many glowing memories, he sets a = strict limit to his confidences. " As this is only a record of a writing career," he premises, " I have said little about personal affairs." Too little, some of his readers may be tempted to reply ; for, though the book affords a fascinating, sincere, and often critical panorama of a bookman's life among books and writers, it is only in broken flashes that it reveals any secret of the personality which underlies it, and • which has made its author the enviable centre of so many • friends and intimates. Two stray passages, however, bear the appearance of signposts :
" All my life " (lie writes) " I have been without belief in any guiding purpose behind the veil, and with too quick a consciousness of the world's inequality, injustice, cruelty, and of the waste and
• frustration that are continually evident. This is why almost all my writing has boon concerned with the pleasant things, and why I have laid so much emphasis on what I found to be beautiful or worthy of honour. Perhaps I was thus concentrating for fear that I might weep."
And, in another context :
" I still want books to be cheerful and amusing. Authors may be as satirical and ironical as they please, but directly they become pathological, I drop them."
There is certainly nothing pathological about Mr. Lucas' " literary record " ; like the sundial in the garden, he counts no hours but bright ones, and remembers little that is not kindly. From his childhood he picks out the memory of books absorbed upon the nursery window-seat ; his boyhood furnishes glimpses of an old second-hand bookshop in Brighton ; his literary work started on a Sussex newspaper, and carried him through cheery vicissitudes in Fleet Street. Wherever he transports his reader, he fills the scene with the sunlight of geniality. If he knew his hard days (and there are veiled hints that some of them were hard enough), he prefers to recall now the friendships and the recompenses which flowed from the day's work. Every chapter is infused with the ripe and mellow colouring of a fruitful autumn, and the little character sketches by the way are vividly concise, models, indeed, of their elusive art. We see Alice Meynell, " not a child, set in the midst of elders, but a priestess set in the midst of children, sharing their nonsense, but thinking her own thoughts " ; Conrad, " smilingly inscrutable, and no matter in what company, living behind his mask, and always so polite as almost to terrify " ; and William De Morgan, " the perfect example of the humorist, who brings to this life the whimsicality of his own, and a desire to discover it in . others, and who never, under any condition, however serious, loses either the gift or the desire." There are personality and environment in perfect reaction, and the result is the literary 'portrait which stands the test of time. Mr. Romilly John's reminiscences of childhood and youth are entirely different in complexion, for they are concentrated upon the writer's own personality. " This is merely a book about myself," he says, " and other figures must be looked upon as what they are meant to be, a dim background." Since the figures closest to the camera form the family of . Mr. Augustus John, of whom the author is the seventh child, they decline-to remain uniformly dim or undefined, and there are some sufficiently illuminating glimpses of a highly attractive, if somewhat disorganized, household. Still, it is for its picture of an oversensitive, strained, and acutely observant childhood that this appealing little book will make most friends. Visions, landscapes, lights and shades, swift movement of a life unrealized, and " a subconscious fear of being left behind "—it is out of such evanescent material as this that the author's temperament rounds itself into shape. His imagination feeds on " the half-conscious malignance in the form of trees " ; his character is buffeted by " the exclusive rites and humours which prevail in a large family of children "; he winces under his schoolfellows' ridicule of " the Penny Dolls," as the little Johns were nicknamed, and rebels against the French boys' contempt for " les sales Anglais." A queer, incoherent, but intensely vivid sequence of experiences gradually shapes itself into the pattern of a map. It is so that lonely personality emerges into its relationship with life ; and so, perhaps, simply and naively, that its self-realization is best recorded.
We come, finally, to Mrs. Gertrude Atherton, who, as a popular and successful novelist, has a varied tale to tell, and a craftsman's art with which to tell it, and whose book, in scope and construction, comes nearest of the three to the methods of the well-made and exhaustive autobiography. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that the book is not a comfortable one. Without accepting unreservedly Mr. Lucas' suggestion that literature should always turn its face to the sunlight, one may agree that there are some tales that good manners refrain from telling, and some opinions that taste declines to register. Unfortunately, Mrs. Atherton does not always discriminate. Her book is full of highly coloured life and character ; it ranges from West to East, from drift to comfort, from struggle to achievement. It bristles with anecdote, and is decorated with festoons of miniature portraits. But its offences against good taste are innumerable, and it is likely to leave many readers with an unpleasant impression. The author describes herself as " hard-hearted and soft-hearted in streaks " ; in the nursery, she says, she had the appearance of an " angel-child " and the manners of " a little fiend," which is scarcely surprising since her father used to stand her on the table, when he was giving a dinner-party, and encourage her to kick the plates into the laps of the guests. Figuratively she repeats these acrobatics at intervals in her reminiscences. The frankness with which she describes a step-father who was " rotten to the core," her marriage to an ill-matched husband, whose dead body finally reached her, encased in a barrel of rum, and many other similar family misadventures, is reflected, later on, in her comments upon her literary contemporaries, with the eminent lady-novelist who " looked like a housemaid in a temper " ; her principal publisher who reminded her of " a fat, white frog," and the well-known critic, " a little, bowed, snuffy, shabby, rather dirty old man," who, she hopes, " is now frying on a grid-iron in hell." A little of this sort goes a long way, and there is a great deal of it in these closely packed Adventures of a Novelist, " hard-hearted and soft-hearted in streaks," and always apparently ready, under encouragement, to kick the plates off the literary dinner-table, for the entertainment of such readers as have a relish for the
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