Derby Day and Other Adventures
by
[Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown, $4.00]
DEVCTEES of A. Edward Newton will find in the sixteen essays which make up his latest book a full display of those talents which have hitherto delighted them. There is the same light-hearted effrontery, the same blunt honesty, the same ability as a narrator, the same wit, wealth of anecdote, and intimate glimpses of the almost-near-great. Clad in his checked suit, his cap, and his bow tie, — symbols of his refusal to truckle to convention, — Mr. Newton goes to the Derby, the dogs, about London, into the realms of fancy, to California, Vienna, Budapest, and Haworth. He describes commonplace things with an air of artlessness that gives them a renewed freshness, and retells old tales with an assumed naïveté that makes them worth reading again. The whole is garnished with anecdotes and spiced with Mr. Newton’s frequent and unequivocal opinions on the decadence of the times.
‘Johnsonians’ who expect of Mr. Newton, one of their high priests, something concerning their hero will not he disappointed. There are two whole chapters devoted to him. The first (besides two excellent illustrations) contains a description of Johnson’s house in Gough Square and a pleasing discussion of the great dictionary. In the second, Mr. Newton, with more courage than the lexicographer’s contemporaries, has brought Dr. Johnson and Benjamin Franklin together. But in so doing he has exercised more temerity than imagination and done his heroes no great honor, for he has presented them devoid of originality, their whole conversation being but a mosaic of things which they had written or said on other occasions. His blithe statements in the course of the book that Johnson Would probably have regretted his dislike of Americans could he have foreseen that A. Edward Newton would actually go to Bromley to look at Tetty’s grave, and that no more distinguished company ever gathered in Johnson’s house than that which included Augustine Birred, Lord Hewart, and himself, will be eagerly seized upon by rare-utterance collectors as good tall specimens of Newto-Johnsonianissimus.
Those, however, who approach the book without any preconceived attitudes will find much of genuine interest. There is some first-rate narration. The account of the greyhound racing is good and there are many curious and well-told anecdotes, such as that of the interview in Los Angeles and the account of the Coutts family. The reader must be a dullard indeed who does not laugh heartily at the story of the raven that committed suicide.
By far the best thing in the book is the section on the Brontës, wherein narration, description, and above all literary and bibliographical anecdote are agreeably and effectively blended. By saving this to the last, Mr. Newton confirms our doubts of the genuineness of his naïveté. The unhappy story of this brilliant family and the curious history of their manuscripts offer no dangerous temptations to the author to step out of his own field, within which he has no superior in contemporary American letters.
BERGEN EVANS