Robert Neilson Stephens.
ROBERT NEILSON STEPHENS.
Aswe write this sketch, we have in mind the familiar picture of Robert Louis Stevenson, stretched out on a couch in his Samoan home, ailing, working. There is a sad sweetness in the sharpened face, and in the eyes is a gleam of bravery or determination. The Scot whom the entire reading world still loves so dearly, and will continue to love, it seems, when the babes of to-day are trembling graybeards, knew the strenuous life much more intimately than most of its new advocates; but it was a part of his art, and the artist conceals his art. Stevenson's sentences glitter, for they are gems of literature; but the glitter was given them at the expense of sublime patience and infinite pains. Unconsciously he presented an exampleof heroism; consciously he showed the young writers of his day that anything approaching perfection must be the product of scrupulous industry. Like the diamond polisher, he was never satisfied with a merely smooth facet: the facet dazzled or he was not content.
We have Stevenson in mind at this time for many reasons. In the first place, the subject of this chapter, Robert Neilson Stephens, may know of the letter of congratulation which, when he was writing for thePhiladelphia Press, some of the young men of that journal sent to the distinguished writer on the Pacific island; and possibly he may have seen the answer that Stevenson sent—an answer filled with modest thanks and sound advice and sincere good wishes. The letter ended with the remark that if the young Philadelphians labored skillfully and ambitiously theywould surely make their mark. If Stevenson had lived he would have congratulated Robert Neilson Stephens four years ago.
You will notice that there is a certain similarity between the features of the author of "The Master of Ballantrae" and the author of "Philip Winwood"—the same delicacy, the same lurking kindness, the same suggestion of indomitable intellectuality. And the resemblance extends beyond the features, also. Stevenson, in his youth, suffered from poverty; so did Stephens. The Scotchman for a long time dipped his pen in water, making no impression, receiving no encouragement, entertaining no luck; so, also, did the American. It is a story almost as old as the world, a story illustrated occasionally in the skies. Astronomers tells us that light, fast as it travels, takes years upon years to come to us. Often it is the same with men ofgenius: they blaze long before our narrow vision gives any sign of recognition.
Someone, by the way, once sympathized with Stephens on his ill health. Yes, he was far from strong, he admitted; "but," he said, "they may say what they please—those who have never been poor—I would rather be ill and well-to-do, as I am, than poor and in good health, as I was for many years. I have had many sorrows, but hardly a sorrow that was not aggravated, if not caused, by poverty, or that very moderate wealth would not have ameliorated or prevented. The difference between pecuniary ease and poverty is oftentimes simply as the difference between heaven and hell."
We may not all agree with the sentiment suggested, that riches in most circumstances or under most conditions are preferable to poverty with good health, but no one can fail to discern in the sentiment the bittermemory of a man who has been acquainted with great distress. At any rate, his is a philosophy based on experience. To experience, also, we may ascribe Stephens's animadversion regarding friendship.
"When a man makes any kind of success, however small," he says, "he finds that his old friends resolve themselves into three classes. The first class turn sullen, and show their envy in many mean ways. The second class wax more friendly than ever, and come showering their attentions. The third class show a reasonable pleasure at your success, and remain just as they were before. God bless the last kind! God mend the second! and God pity the first!"
Before generalizing farther it might be better to reveal some of Stephens's career. Robert Neilson Stephens, a descendant of the Jacobite fugitive who was grandfather of Alexander H. Stephens, of Georgia, wasborn on July 22, 1867, in New Bloomfield, a little town in Central Pennsylvania. The house in which he was born lay a stone's throw from the academy founded by his grandfather and conducted by his father.
The first distressful event came into Robert's life when, at the age of nine, some seven years after the family had moved from New Bloomfield to Huntingdon, on the Juniata River, his father died. His mother, to support her children, took a position as a school teacher. Notwithstanding the lack of wealth, however, Robert went through the public high school. After leaving school he went to work, for three dollars and a half a week, in a bookstore connected with a stationery factory. Aside from his pride and his poverty, which seem to have influenced him to no small extent, he was a delicate youth, and his steadiest companions were books. Besides, he cultivatedassiduously the faculty of observation. This cultivation shows itself in his books. He is unsurpassed among the novelists of the day for mastery of the life of bygone periods.
The work in the bookstore was distasteful to him in many ways. The narrowness and the ignorance of the factory hands chafed his delicate sensibilities; the nature of the work itself jarred on his always strengthening mental equipment. He looked about him for a means of escape from this sort of prison, incarceration in which was little sweetened by the fact that in the second year his salary was raised to four dollars and a half. One of the modes of escape which he attempted was stenography. By assiduous practice he acquired such facility in this branch of writing that the Hon. John Scott, solicitor-general of the Pennsylvania Railroad, aided by Mr. WilliamB. Wilson, an old friend of the boy's father, before long secured him a position in the railroad company's office in Philadelphia. When settled down, Robert brought his mother and brother to the city on the Delaware.
But, pleasant as its environment was, the young stenographer saw in his new position no very rosy future. It was not—as it is not to-day—his disposition to confound mere comfort with success. We have quoted his remark that he would rather be rich and sick than poor and well; but we venture to think that the riches of Mr. Rockefeller would fail to give him absolute satisfaction so long as the feeling of professional success were absent from him. At any rate, we judge by his present pursuits and aims that his ideal is nearer to the revered and affluent workman, like Zola, for example, than like to a man whose sole objectis the enjoyment and disbursement of dollars and cents.
From the Pennsylvania road he went to thePhiladelphia Press, which in those days was a veritable cradle of authors. Here his literary instinct took hold of him. It had taken hold of him once before, in Huntingdon, one vacation, when he had worked as printer's devil in the office of a weekly newspaper, and, as often happens to "devils," had been stricken down with what may be called typographical fever. The great are not alone in the enjoyment of authorship. We believe that Mr. Stephens's first literary offering, an article describing the joys and woes of budding printers, appeared in that Huntingdon weekly.
That, however, was a mere juvenile spasm, It was nothing like the powerful impulse that came to him just previous to his début as a writer of theatrical notices for thePress. He showed so marked an aptitude for this employment that within a year he was virtually in full charge of the paper's important dramatic column. Stephens's career on thePresswas as varied as that of the average newspaper man, and, consequently, as interesting and precious. For the patience that, like the steam-drill, bores its way through every obstacle; for accumulative industry, for tireless zeal, for unaffected modesty dashed with power, for knowledge of the overt and covert ways of men—for such a unique mixture of crude virtue and wisdom combined commend us to the enthusiastic journalist.
Stephens unconsciously heeded Stevenson's caution and retired from journalism before its hypnotic spell had taken complete possession of him. One of the reasons for his retirement from journalism was the singular rule made by thePressthat membersof its staff must not write for any other periodical. Stephens had been fortunate in placing his extra work, and naturally he felt that the rule shut out promising opportunities.
Besides, in 1889, he had married—Mrs. Stephens was, before her marriage, Miss Maude Helfenstein, of Chicago—and there were other reasons for his practical view of the situation. There was no risk in the retirement, for he had made many friends while on thePress, especially among the inhabitants of the theatrical world. He received and accepted, in 1893, an offer to become general agent for a firm of theatrical managers.
Incidentally he was required to write cheap plays—plays for the vulgar public that Gautier despised and ridiculed. These dutiful efforts are hardly noteworthy, but we must mention "On the Bowery," a melodramawhich afforded the picturesque and withal good-hearted Steve Brodie a chance to be heroic some sixty-four times a week. But although this grade of work was uncongenial to the author, it opened the way to a better field, and, in September, 1896, his play, "An Enemy to the King," written during the winter of 1894-95, was produced in New York by E. H. Sothern. As this was his first ambitious production, the author displayed some lack of nerve. Instead of accompanying his wife to the theatre, he shrank back to a nearby comfortable refuge, whither, between the acts, a friend brought him tidings of the performance. The call for him was led by Richard Harding Davis and DeWolf Hopper, who, running across him outside the theatre, half suffocated him with congratulatory embraces. By and by Mr. Sothern took the successful play to Boston; and there happenedthe circumstance which established the author's fame.
The play was seen in Boston by Mr. L. Coues Page, the Boston publisher, who, recognizing in it the elements which constitute a popular semi-historical romance, and foreseeing the extensive demand for that branch of literature, sought the author and proposed that he should make a novel out of his play. The proposal was readily accepted; in fact the contract was signed twenty-four hours after the author and publisher had first met.
The instantaneous popularity of the book, which was published in the fall of 1897, had a two-sided effect: it induced the author to abandon hack-work entirely and devote his best energy and proficiency to fiction.
It is deeply to be regretted that Stephens's health declined simultaneously with his procession to the seats of the famous, yetthese distressing conditions are hardly discernible in either the quantity or the quality of his work. In April, 1898, his second novel, "The Continental Dragoon," appeared, and in the following June the latest of his plays, "The Ragged Regiment," was produced at the Herald Square Theatre, New York. In October of that year appeared his third novel, "The Road to Paris"; in May, 1899, "A Gentleman Player"; in May, 1900, his highly popular Revolutionary romance, "Philip Winwood," written almost entirely in England, and published on the same day in England, Canada, and the United States. His latest novel, "Captain Ravenshaw," in which he returns to the scene of "A Gentleman Player"—Elizabethan London—has just reached the public.
Shortly after the publication of "A Gentleman Player," the novelist, in theassurance of a handsome income and of consequent ease, went abroad with his wife. Abroad he has lived ever since. This fall, we understand, he will spend traveling on the Continent. The first part of the winter he plans to pass in Italy or in Sicily, the second part on the Riviera. The spring of 1902 will find him in Paris, whence, by the end of spring, he expects to start for home. We say "home" purposely, for we are told that his protracted residence abroad has served if anything to deepen and enliven his loyalty to his native land.
We have been privileged to read the preface to "Captain Ravenshaw." The main part of it is a spirited and well-pointed defence of the neo-romanticists against the eccentric assault of Mr. William Dean Howells. Then, referring to the book itself, Stephens goes on to say:
"Now, as to this little attempt at romance in a certain kind, I wish merely to say, for the benefit of those who turn over the first leaves of a novel in a bookstore or library, before deciding whether to take it or leave it, that it differs from the usual adventure story in being concerned merely with private life and unimportant people. Though it has incidents enough, and perils enough, it deals neither with war nor with state affairs. It contains no royal person; not even a lord—nor a baronet, indeed, for baronets had not yet been invented at the period of the tale. The characters are every-day people of the London of the time, and the scenes in which they move are the street, the tavern, the citizen's house and garden, the shop, the river, the public resort—such places as the ordinary reader would see if a miracle turned back time and transported him to London in the closing part of Elizabeth's reign. The atmosphereof that place and time, as one may find it best in the less known and more realistic comedies of Shakespeare's contemporaries, in prose narratives and anecdotes, and in the records left of actual transactions, strike us of the twentieth century as a little strange, somewhat of a world which we can hardly take to be real. If I have succeeded in putting a breath of this strangeness, this (to us) seeming unreality, into this busy tale, and yet have kept the tale vital with a human nature the same then as now, I have done something not altogether bad. Bad or good, I have been a long time about it, for I have grown to believe that though novel-reading properly comes under the head of play, novel-writing properly comes under the head of work. My work herein has not gone to attain the preciosity of style which distracts attention from the story, or the brilliancy of dialoguewhich—as the author of 'John Inglesant' says, 'declares the glory of the author more pregnantly than it increases reality of effect.' My work has gone, very much, to the avoidance of anachronisms. This is a virtue possessed by few novels which deal with the past, as only the writers of such novels know. It may be a virtue not worth achieving, but it was a whim of mine to achieve it. Ill health forbade fast writing, the success of my last previous work permitted slow writing, and I resolved to utilize the occasion by achieving one merit which, as it required neither genius nor talent, but merely care, was within my powers. The result of my care must appear as much in what the story omits as in what it contains. The reader may be assured at the outset, if it matters a straw to him, that the author of this romance of Elizabethan London (and itsneighborhood) is himself at home in Elizabethan London; if he fails to make the reader also a little at home there in the course of the story, it is only because he lacks the gift, or skill of imparting."
Months ago the demand for "Captain Ravenshaw" was so great that the publishers were forced to issue an unprecedentedly large first edition. The present circumstance is an eloquent commentary on the increase of the author's power and popularity.
That power and that popularity seem destined to grow larger book by book. The master of a most graceful style and of diction unsurpassed for simplicity and clearness; a trained observer, as every successful writer must be; a diligent and uncommonly perspicacious student of the periods from which he takes his characters, the author of "Captain Ravenshaw" promisesably to sustain his already high reputation. As the fulfilment of this promise depends largely on the state of his health, we wish him well, confident that in expressing the wish we but echo the sentiment of his wide circle of admirers.
Charles G. D. Roberts.
CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS.
"Professor" Roberts he is still called by his old friends in New Brunswick, and, so far as we know, "Old Man" he is still called by his literary companions. "The 'Old Man,'" said Richard Hovey a few years ago, "he is fondly called by the poets who are his companions, not that he is so much the elder of the group, but perhaps because he had already achieved a certain measure of reputation and was a full-fledged man of letters when the others were just beginning their callow boy-bows to the Muse. And the name, given at the outset in a comic, mock-filial mood, has stuck to him as a term of endearment."
Hovey—may he rest in peace!—loved and admired Roberts. He said so in writing;he said so o' nights in the company of his old friends in Boston. Hovey had a manner that would remind one of the rivers branching off Roberts's familiar Bay of Fundy. At first, a stranger, you found it empty; in a few moments, if he offered you the right hand of fellowship, it was flooding with a warm tide.
We could readily go on for a page or two speaking of the lamented singer, and of what it meant to know him as a friend—to share his hospitality and his sympathy. But it occurs to us that some reader may be inquiring why the professor from New Brunswick has been brought into a book on American authors. We might answer, with a smile, to incite him to become as loyal an American as General Wallace or Mark Twain. Or we might repeat as an answer a statement made to us not long ago by an observant inhabitant of this part of the literaryworld—"Professor Roberts is quite as good an American as Henry James." But, using American in its fullest sense, Roberts easily comes in under that head. The shadow of the Stars and Stripes falls near his birthplace. His public is largely a purely American public. His residence for the last four years has been New York City. He is perhaps the most gifted author reared in late decades by our lovely neighbor, the Dominion of Canada, his alma mater—
O child of nations, giant-limbed,Who stand'st among the nations nowUnheeded, unadored, unhymned,With unanointed brow!
O child of nations, giant-limbed,Who stand'st among the nations nowUnheeded, unadored, unhymned,With unanointed brow!
Speaking of Roberts inThe Writeronce, his friend Hovey said: "All his excursions include a return ticket to the Maritime Provinces, and 'Up and Away in the Morning' is always for the sake of 'Home,Home in the Evening.'" This statement has been contradicted by Roberts's life during the last few years. He is to be found in New York winter and summer.
At the same time we should be stultifying ourselves to deny his loyalty to his native land. It lives in many of his pages; it is kept aflame by ties of family and of friendship. The beautiful part of the world northeast of New England has been to him nursery, academy and studio. Indeed, one who knew him well has said: "He is neither Briton nor American, but assertively Canadian; and, if history ever make his dream a reality, his own poems will not have been an entirely negligible factor in bringing it to pass."
Charles George Douglass Roberts, M.A., F.R.S.C., F.R.S.L., was born in Douglas, at the mouth of the Keswick River, near Fredericton, New Brunswick, on January10, 1860. His father, the Rev. G. Goodridge Roberts, M.A., the son of Professor George Roberts, Ph.D., is the rector of the English church in Fredericton, and also the canon of Christ Church Cathedral. His mother, Emma Wetmore Bliss Roberts, comes of what used to be known as United Empire Loyalist stock—the same stock, by the way, that Emerson's mother came of. Her ancestors left the colonies for the provinces at the outbreak of the American Revolution. There were many influential families among the Loyalists, and, on the whole, their headstrong flight has been beneficial to the land 'way down East. The novelist's mother, it should be said, is a sister of Bliss Carman's mother, which makes the two young writers, Roberts and Carman, cousins by blood as well as brothers by profession. A strong intellectual ancestry has Roberts, it will be seen, an ancestrythat fully accounts for the circumstance that his sister and his two younger brothers are skillful at versification.
The first fourteen years of Roberts's life were spent in Woodstock, of which parish his father was then the rector, and up to the end of these fourteen years Charles's education had been personally supervised by his father. Fortunate conditions!—as they who have missed such supervision can most eloquently testify. Ideal conditions, if we are to accept the well-digested opinion of scholastic as well as of medical experts.
The Robertses moved from Woodstock to Fredericton in 1874. At Fredericton, Charles attended the Collegiate School. Chief among those who fitted the boy for college was Dr. George R. Parkin, who, although now the head of Upper Canada College, Toronto, has perhaps been most prominent as an Imperial Federationist advocate.In 1876 young Roberts was matriculated at the University of New Brunswick. As for his progress there, no more need be said than that he won the Douglas silver medal for Latin and Greek, the alumni gold medal for the Latin essay, and a classical scholarship. In 1879 he was graduated with honors in ethics, metaphysics and political economy. That same year he was appointed head master of the Chatham (N. B.) Grammar School. The next year, 1880, chronicled two notable events—his marriage, and the publication of his first book, "Orion and Other Poems."
In 1881, at the University of New Brunswick, he took his degree of Master of Arts for Greek and higher mathematics. During the next two years he taught school in Fredericton.
Then there came a brief excursion which may have illustrated his doubts about a career. He left off teaching and went to Toronto. There, with the assistance of Goldwin Smith, he establishedThe Week, the most important of the Canadian literary periodicals. He relinquished this work the following year to take the chair of English and French literature in King's College, Windsor, Nova Scotia. In 1887 he abandoned the French department for the department of Economics and International Law. At Windsor he lived in a house in the balmy woods—"Kingscroft," he called it—and there he planned three books—"The Forge in the Forest," his first Acadian romance; "The Book of the Native," and "A History of Canada."
These plans compelled the abandonment of teaching, so, in 1895, Roberts left King's College and returned to Fredericton. At the age of thirty-five, therefore, he formallyadopted the profession of literature.
Early in 1897 he moved to New York, where for eight months he was associate editor ofThe Illustrated American. Since then he has directed his efforts wholly to authorship.
And with the utmost justification. In narrative and in descriptive power he shines brilliantly among his contemporaries. Hovey would not answer the question: "Who is the greatest poet born on Canadian soil?"—"but," he writes, "when I say that Roberts ispar excellencethe 'Poet of Canada,' I have little fear that anyone will contradict me." There is his noble hymn, "Canada," there is "Autochthon," there is "Kinship," there is "Origins"—poems of faultless grace and deep-founded sentiment and what one critic has termed "chiselled, Parnassian calm." For example:
The mount, the star, the germ, the deep,They all shall wake, they all shall sleep.Time, like a flurry of wild rain,Shall drift across the darkened pane.Space, in the dim predestined hour,Shall crumble like a ruined tower.I only, with unfaltering eye,Shall watch the dreams of Gods go by.
The mount, the star, the germ, the deep,They all shall wake, they all shall sleep.Time, like a flurry of wild rain,Shall drift across the darkened pane.
Space, in the dim predestined hour,Shall crumble like a ruined tower.I only, with unfaltering eye,Shall watch the dreams of Gods go by.
Hovey, whom we may accept as an accomplished judge of symbolist literature, put "Do Seek their Meat from God" and "The Young Ravens that call upon Him," two sketches in "Earth's Enigmas," and "Savory Meats," a story published in theChap-Book, together, and said that they "form an altogether unique and extraordinary triptych. I am inclined to think these three pieces," he says, "Roberts's most notable contribution to literature. The problem of the struggle for existence, of the preying of life on life, is treated with an inexorable fidelity to the fact, a catholic sympathy, a sense of universality and mystery, and a calm acceptance,that reaches the level of 'pathos' in the highest Greek usage of the word. There is a finality in these three prose poems that is known only to the greatest art."
As for Robert's novels, they are full of the perfumed freshness, the vigorous life and the romantic wealth which constituted, and to a small extent still constitute, the salient characteristics of the lands in which he spent his youth. We have noted his narrative and descriptive power. Let us take from "A Sister to Evangeline" one of Paul Grande's visions of Yvonne de Lamourie.
"In one of these I saw her as she stood a certain morning in the orchard, prying with insistent little finger-tips into the heart of a young apple-flower, while I watched and said nothing. I know not to this day whether she were thinking of the apple-flower or wondering at the dumbness of hercavalier; but she feigned, at least, to concern herself with only the blossom's heart. Her wide white lids downcast over her great eyes, her long lashes almost sweeping the rondure of her cheek, she looked a Madonna. The broad, low forehead; the finely chiselled nose, not too small for strength of purpose; the full, firm chin—all added to this sweet dignity, which was of a kind to compel a lover's worship. There was enough breadth to the gracious curve below the ear to make me feel that this girl would be a strong man's mate. But the mouth, a bow of tenderness, with a wilful dimple at either delectable corner always lurking, spoke her all woman, too laughing and loving to spend her days in sainthood. Her hair—very thick and of a purply-bronze, near to black—lay in careless fullness over her little ears. On her head, though in all else she affected the dress ofGrand Pré maids, she wore, not the Acadian linen cap, but a fine shawl of black Spanish lace, which became her mightily. Her bodice was of linen homespun, coarse, but bleached to a creamy whiteness; and her skirt, of the same simple stuff, was short after the Acadian fashion, so that I could see her slim ankles, and feet of that exceeding smallness and daintiness which may somehow tread heavily upon a man's heart."
And there is a strong resemblance to Thomas Hardy in at least one of the paragraphs narrating Paul Grande's race with death toward the Anderson farm—the paragraph dealing with the idle things that then incongruously concerned the hero:
"Things idle as these: I see a dew-wet fir-top catch the moonlight for an instant and flash to whiteness, an up-thrust lance of silver; I see the shadow of a dead, gnarledbranch cast upon a mossy open in startling semblance to a crucifix—so clear, I cannot but stoop and touch it reverently as I pass; I see, at the edge of a grassy glade, a company of tall buttercups, their stems invisible, their petals seeming to float toward me, a squadron of small, light wings; I hear the smooth swish of branches thrust apart; I hear the protesting, unresonant creak of the green underbrush as we tread it down, and the sharp crackle of dry twigs as we thread the aisles of older forest; I hear, from the face of a moonlit bluff upon our left, the long, mournfulWhóo-hu-hu—Hóo-ooof the brown owl. I smell the savour of juniper, of bruised snakeroot, and of old, slow-rotting wood; with once a fairy breath of unseenlinœa; and once at the fringed brink of a rivulet, the pungent fragrance of wild mint. I feel the frequent wet slappings of branches on my face; I feel the strong prickles of thefir, the cool, flat frondage of the spruce and hemlock, the unresisting, feathery spines of the young hackmatack trees; I feel, once, a gluey web upon my face, and the abhorrence with which I dash off the fat spider that clings to my chin; I feel the noisome slump of my foot as I tread upon a humped and swollen gathering of toad-stools."
More than one judicious critic has remarked that few men of his years have achieved—and deservedly!—the literary renown which Professor Roberts's published works warrant. These works are as follows: "Orion and Other Poems" (1880), "In Divers Tones" (1887), "The Canadians of Old" (a translation from the French of de Gaspé, 1889), Appleton's "Canadian Guide Book" (1890), "Ave, An Ode for the Shelley Centenary" (1892), "Songs of the Common Day" (1893), "The Raid of Beauséjour" (1894), "ReubDare's Shad Boat" (1895), "Around the Camp Fire" (1896), "Earth's Enigmas" (1896), "A History of Canada" (1897), "The Forge in the Forest" (1897), "The Book of the Native" (1897), "New York Nocturnes" (1898), "A Sister to Evangeline" (1898), "By the Marshes of Minas" (1900), "The Heart of the Ancient Wood" (1900).
However, notwithstanding this long and excellent literary record, we are assured that Roberts "has a keen fondness for athletics. He is an enthusiastic football and tennis player, canoeist and fisherman, and is equally as skilled in these as he is in the pursuits of literature."
Another novel from his pen, "Barbara Ladd," appears this fall. "I consider it," he writes, "a sort of cross between 'The Heart of the Ancient Wood' and a historical-psychological romance." As for thefuture, he says: "Next will probably appear a collection of poems, and a collection of animal stories. Then another romance, planned but not yet named; and then, if the Fates are very good to me, I'll take time for a long lyrical drama on which I have been engaged off and on for some years."
Winston Churchill.
Photo by Strauss.
WINSTON CHURCHILL.
Latein the year 1900 it suddenly became plain to some of the mystified inhabitants of the literary world that there were two Winston Churchills.
It is indeed remarkable how long the error lived which confounded Winston L. S. Churchill, war correspondent and politician, and eldest son of Lord Randolph Churchill, with plain Winston Churchill, the author of "Richard Carvel."
The error cropped out soon after the beginning of the South African war, when the Englishman, at a place called Estcourt, took gallant part in the defence of an armored train bound to the relief of Ladysmith. It was the result of one of the sentences in the report of the action: "Winston Churchill's brilliant behavior iscompared with the gallant action in the Tirah campaign, which won the Victoria cross for Lord Fincastle, who was also acting as a newspaper correspondent."
Immediately some persons, who should have known better, jumped to the conclusion that this Winston Churchill was the author of a book then extremely popular in this country. It is a notable commentary on the persistency of false ideas that the two Churchills were not, in certain quarters, positively distinguished from each other until they met in Boston the middle of last December. It was an interesting meeting, as we gather from the notes of a witness.
"The young, light-haired Englishman was in bed, in his room at the Touraine, shortly after noon, when Major J. B. Pond arrived with a heavily built six-footer, smooth-shaven, dark-complexioned, a pair of merry black eyes, and a rather thickbody encased in a raglan of dark gray.
"'Mr. Churchill, Mr. Churchill,' said the Major. The man on the bed turned over on his side and held out his hand.
"'I'm sorry to find that you are ill,' said the Churchill in the raglan, as he caught the outstretched hand.
"'Nothing serious, I guess,' said the other; 'been travelling, you know. But, I say, how came you by that name?'
"The author of 'Richard Carvel' smiled.
"'The first trace of it I can find in the family,' he said, 'is about 1851. It seems that there have been Winston Churchills over here for a good many years.'
"Then there was an exchange of bouquets. Winston Churchill said that he had always been looking forward with pleasure to a meeting with his namesake, and the other Churchill said something in the same strain.
"'I was interested when I read your first book,' said the Englishman. 'Didn't think a great deal of that book; but the other one, "Richard Carvel," I was willing to become responsible for that.'
"Then it developed that each had been responsible for the other to a greater or less extent. For this reason it was inevitable that they should meet."
As a matter of fact, mail for the Englishman, simply directed "Winston Churchill, Boston, Mass.," had been sent to his namesake's residence on Beacon Street. Later it was told that the American met the same embarrassment in London. "When I was staying at Brown's Hotel," he said to the Parliamentarian, "I found it almost impossible to get my mail. They compelled me to sign for it personally."
The Englishman, by the way, is the author of a romance in regard to which the London critics seem to hold an opinionsimilar to that which he admittedly holds in regard to the American's first novel—"The Celebrity."
Speaking of "The Celebrity" reminds us of the still prevalent notion that its contemptible hero is Mr. Richard Harding Davis. In fact we believe that the author was openly charged with having written the satire merely to pay a private grudge. We heard an echo of the charge as late as this year. Yet, more than two years ago Mr. Churchill, in a public letter, took pains specifically to deny the imputation. "The Celebrity" he said, in effect, was entirely an imaginary work. No one at all resembling the chief character had ever been met by him. So far from paying grudges, he had no grudge to pay. Indeed, the young writer grew so tender on the subject that the Colonial atmosphere of "Richard Carvel" was attributed to his desire to avoidcontemporary themes. But the truth is, he completed "The Celebrity" while temporarily short of historical material for use in the history of Richard and his Dorothy. Twice he thoroughly revised "The Celebrity" before sending it to the publishers.
And who is this Winston Churchill? He is the son of Spalding Churchill of Maine and Emma Bell Blaine of St. Louis, and he was born in the Missouri metropolis on Nov. 10, 1871. The first sixteen years of his life were spent in his birthplace; and there, at Smith Academy, he prepared for college. The college proved to be the Naval Academy at Annapolis.
As a boy he was inclined to be uncommonly studious, but at the Naval Academy he developed a strong inclination towards athletics. It was largely owing to his energy and his enthusiasm that the cadets revived rowing. Like most other cadets,he learned to fence expertly; and you will find an intimate knowledge of this accomplishment in his treatment of one of the most dramatic scenes in "Richard Carvel." He took to horseback riding, also to golf and to tennis, in short, to all the pastimes that strengthen the body and enliven the mind. It is his devotion to physical exercise which has enabled him to work long and hard without distress.
He felt, before his graduation from Annapolis, that his place was at the writing table, not on the deck of a man-o'-war. Apropos of which he has said: "When a man is being trained for a definite career, it helps him to make up his mind as to his tastes and abilities. If he is sure he doesn't want to do that particular thing, he must know pretty definitely what he does want to do. When he throws over a certainty for a chance his heart must be firmlyset on the kind of work involved in the chance. For this reason a technical school helps some men to find their vocation better than four years at a university, where the training is general."
In 1894 he became editor of theArmy and Navy Journal. The following year he joined the staff of theCosmopolitanat Irvington-on-the-Hudson. While working for the magazine he took as wife Miss Mabel Harlakenden Hall of St. Louis, whose fortune induced him to give up magazine work altogether and devote himself to the realization of his dreams.
Now if Churchill lacked either determination or genius the wealth that through marriage he became a sharer in would have have availed him little. He might have attracted some attention as a dilettante, or he might have done the things that a wealthy person alone can do—establishanotherAnglo-Saxon Review, for example, or publish small thoughts in editions de luxe. He would have succeeded if his wife had never brought him a copper. It would have taken him longer to succeed, that is all. Art is long, and life is short only to the poor fellow who must ascend the ladder round by round. But not all the money in the world can ease the labor of the brain.
Churchill's ambition, from the first moment that he felt the literary impulse, was to write a historical novel. Annapolis had fired his imagination. "Seeing those old houses," he once said, "which used to be the scenes of the gayest and happiest social life before the Revolution—they look as if the people had just gone out of them—and reading the history of the town as it used to be, interested me greatly in a certain aspect of the life of the colonial planters, which had not, it seemed to me, been fully andtruthfully expressed in a novel. What I wanted to do in 'Richard Carvel' was to give a picture of the life of colonial Maryland and Virginia, with special reference to Annapolis, and to contrast the people who made it with the corresponding element in England. One of the things I wanted to bring out strongly was that, although the leading men in business, in professional life, and in politics, in both Maryland and London, came from the same stock, a few generations back, politically, the British had sunk into a state of gross corruption and degradation, while the Americans were men of the highest integrity and the cleanest motives, mindful of their legal and moral debt to Great Britain, but resolute not to endure more than a certain amount of injustice."
And how do you suppose Mr. Churchill prepared for the big task of writing a historicalnovel? He has answered the question himself:
"By visiting all the places concerned in the story, and by reading biographies, histories, memoirs, letters, old newspapers—in fact, everything which could give me an insight into the life of those days, or into the character of the people like John Paul Jones and Charles Fox, whom I desired to introduce. Of course I read a great deal too much; a great many books gave me no direct help and added nothing to what I had already learned; but I have no doubt that all this reading counted in the way of letting me into the spirit and the atmosphere and the ideas and the business methods and the modes of life and thought of those days. Of course, I took voluminous notes, and had no end of trouble to keep them arranged so that I could use them, in spite of the effort I made to keep notes on costumes in onevolume, manners and customs in another, unusual words and turns of expression in another, incidents in another, character in another, history in another and so on."
"Richard Carvel" was begun in St. Louis not long after the author's marriage. It was written over again for the fifth time between October, 1898, and April, 1899, at a little town on the Hudson, an hour's journey from New York. Yet it is a proof of Churchill's zeal and industry that in those six months he visited the metropolis only five times. His habit is to work from early breakfast until one in the afternoon, and then, after luncheon, for a few hours more, after which he takes some physical exercise; and after dinner he picks up the thread of the story again. You see, his literary methods are very simple; they mean work early and late, work done doggedly, and as scrupulously as if the keenest critic werelooking over his shoulder.
The furore which "Richard Carvel" excited is too well remembered, we think, to particularize on. The author was made a lion of everywhere, truly, and exhibited in all the gilded cages of the East. We recall that the mere announcement of his purpose to go to the theatre in New York was sufficient to insure a big audience. Not another one of our American authors whose fame is of recent acquirement, and whose inclination is to keep far from the madding crowd has been followed about by so many hero-worshippers as the author of "Richard Carvel" was during the twelvemonth following the publication of the book.
Was the attention justly merited? Undoubtedly. "Richard Carvel" is an extraordinarily powerful story. Its atmosphere is vivid; its characters are excellently drawn; its plot is skillfully laid; its action is vigorousand delightfully varied.
"Richard Carvel" was the first of a series of historical novels which Churchill planned just after leaving Annapolis. It has been followed lately by the second member of the series, "The Crisis," the writing of which occupied nearly two years. While thus engaged the author declined to be interrupted. Naturally, after bounding to the top of the ladder, anything which he might have offered would have been accepted by some publishers. "You have no idea," he once remarked, "of the temptations that are put in the way of a man whose book has been accorded a popular success." The temptations he brushed aside; he made up his mind to pursue a straight road. And wisely, for, as he argues, "When a man makes a great reputation by a single book, and then allows succeeding books to go from his hands which do notrepresent the very best work of which he is capable, the public finds it out at once. No matter if there is good work in these hastily written books, people ignore them. I think it is the worst thing a man can do for his reputation to write books too fast. Of course, it is the worst possible thing he can do for his lasting reputation, which is the thing really worth working for, but what I mean is that it is the worst thing he can do in the short run as well as in the long run. Why, even speaking commercially, which is the lowest and the least and the last way in which one can look at these things, it is a fatal mistake. And I think a novelist makes a great mistake if he confines himself to one period or writes several books on one epoch, though it is more or less the practice to-day. I think we ought to go in more for versatility."
Mr. Churchill is seen in New York and Boston in the winter; in the summer he is to be found only by traveling 'way down East. In Boston, particularly, the Churchills have become very well known. There Mr. Churchill puts up at the most aristocratic clubs, and Mrs. Churchill graces the most fashionable receptions.