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.
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:Obvious printer errors have been corrected. Otherwise, the author's original spelling, punctuation and hyphenation have been left intact.The unusual page numbering has been maintained.
Obvious printer errors have been corrected. Otherwise, the author's original spelling, punctuation and hyphenation have been left intact.
The unusual page numbering has been maintained.