The Charm of Reminiscing

PHOFESSOU PHELPS’S singularly infelicitous introduction to Archibald Marshall’s reminiscences. Out and About (Dutton, $8.50), will not deter his constant readers, but whether they agree with Mr. Phelps in thinking him an accurate social historian (as do so many devotees of Simple Stories.), or feel a mere graceless curiosity to know how his outlook upon life has come to identify itself with that of the Old Squire, they will regret that his book is limited to journalistic experience, however varied.

Mr. Marshall’s Cambridge connection with the brilliant undergraduate periodicals to which Hugh Benson and Maurice Baring were contributing led to a post under R. C. Lehmann on the Daily Sews, where Hclloc and Chesterton Were beginning their careers; he edited the Car for that pioneer motorist. Lord Montagu, contributed to Punch, and finally joined the Daily Mail. to assist and succeed Sir Kdmund Gosse as editor of the book supplement remaining as special correspondent when Northcliffe abandoned that expensive fancy. His success is to American eyes enviably effortless, and he gathers up his laurels with a suitably modest gesture; but journalism, though it has given him contact with the great, the near-great, and the beloved, has lent a superficiality to the intercourse which his own habit of mind does nothing to correct.

The fiery chapters denouncing Ford Madox Ford and all his works arc no exception, for the source of that heat is never quite revealed, while its presence belies the repeated assertion that Ford is utterly negligible. Hardly less surprising in its way is the account of that winter in Paris, so delightfully composed of little dinners in the open air, music, sketching expeditions, and evening strolls in search of silhouettes: ’The only fly in the ointment was that the Louvre was closed.’ The Louvre was closed because it was the winter of 191(5—1017, and Mr. Marshall was there as the Daily Mail’s Paris correspondent. Yet, however legitimately one may quarrel with people for feigning sentiments they do not feel, it is unreasonable to quarrel with them for not feeling them: and after all, perhaps Mr. Marshall’s detachment is enviable.

Unquestiouably to be envied is Mrs. WinthropChanler, fragments of whose Roman Spring (Atlantic & Little, Brown, $3.00) are already known to Atlantic readers, for a rarer and happier quality: an intense awareness which in its wide range values all that it can without resenting the rest. To an American child Papal Rome of the sixties, still trailing its mediæval robe of orbis Damian, offered much to value, even if one had not had Edwin Lear to draw alphabets, Augustus Hare to tell stories (and what stories!), and Fanny Kemble to teach the bearing proper to a Twelfth Night Queen in a playroom hung with painted silk and adorned with gold incense boats commeuiorating their owners’ descent from Balthasar.

Fqually enchanting is the later Rome ot music and parties and matchless conversation, where Liszt turns a shabby anteroom into ’a space between stars, where the Abbe Duchesne discusses the Major Relies and his last litter of kittens with equal charm and discernment, and the great black bear at the Orsini cotillon distributes Parma violets to ladies straight from the pages of Maurice Baring or vice versa).

But the test of Mrs. Chanler’s special qualities is the record of her years in America, before and after her marriage to her cousin Winthrop Chanler. She was Roman enough to find her own country a foreign and a sterile soil, and the New York society celebrated by her friend Mrs. Wharton singularly unrewarding: ‘ they would have fled in a body from a poet, a painter, a musician, or a clever Frenchman. The house on the Hudson where the younger Chanlers lived under the austere rule of their guardians excluded the ‘ random element’ she enjoyed even more rigorously than did Tuxedo, where the first years of her marriage were spent. But what they did offer she knew how to accept. Possessors of the intellectual detachment that enables Mrs. Chanler to portray so unforgettably all that was clear and finely tempered in her unhappy half sister Annie Crawford are seldom sent empty away. Washington as well as New York gave her friends whom she knows how to praise: La Farge, the Lodges, — ’He was a true scholar and a true friend; I do not know two qualities which please me more,’— and Henry Adams, Poreupinus Angelicus, who for her ’moulted his quills into angelic leathers. . . . We Catholics knew that he enjoyed the spiritual climate of our religion.’ Whatever the source of Mrs. Chanler’s own spiritual climate, it imparts extraordinary charm to the pages of Roman Spring.

MARIAN VAILLANT