Arts and Letters

Francis Marion Crawford, cosmopolite and story-teller, became a singularly successful professional soldier in that regiment of literature, "the strangest in her Majesty's service," in which Mrs. Howe, his kinswoman, had served as a brilliant volunteer. Crawford's youth was passed mainly in Italy, in that American colony whose pioneer period has been sketched by Mr. Henry James in his life of W. W. Story. But he also studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, and at Heidelberg, and, like Mr. Kipling, he had edited a newspaper in India before he became a special student of Sanskrit at Harvard in 1881.

It was in the following year that his uncle, Samuel G. Ward, knowing the rich fund of experience which lay in the young man's mind, awaiting some magical evocation, half persuaded and half forced Crawford to write that most purely fascinating of all his books, Mr. Isaacs. The exotic qualities of a fertile and somewhat mystical imagination were restrained even in that first book by a skilful sense of what could be spun in a yarn rather than adumbrated in a poem. Novel after novel followed in a stream uninterrupted until the author's death—novels written with a rapidity which rivaled that of Walter Scott, even as they almost seemed to rival Scott's popularity. A workman as intelligent as he was facile, Crawford set forth his theory of the novel in the phrase, "It is a pocket stage." He illustrated his theory by brilliant dialogue and moving action and in sketching his varied backgrounds of southern European life. Himself, and in a double sense, an adopted child of Rome, Italy had few secrets that were hidden from Crawford's view. He wrote comprehensive books on Rome and Venice in a style happily blended of the antiquarian and the sentimental traveler. It may be surmised that Thomas Carlyle, if he could have had the pleasure of reading Crawford's tales, might have found that long row of delightful and often powerful stories deficient in a "message," and indeed it is difficult to affirm that they contained any doctrine except the enchanting one that this world is full of a number of things. But no reader of Crawford cared, such was the glamour of his inventiveness, the fidelity with which he reproduced the tone and spirit of picturesque Europe.

Crawford was personally but slightly known to his fellow-workers in the craft of literature; but the most casual meeting with him revealed a certain sailor-like quality of frankness and directness which gave charm to his person and to his conversation. He will no doubt remain a representative figure of literary cosmopolitanism. In the new alignments caused by the strong currents of contemporary change he may well prove greater or less than we think him now; but it will be long before we shall find a more adept guardian of Aladdin's lamp.