Show FRANCE H ODG ON BUR ITi I A Graphic Pen Portrait of the Brilliant Novelist i I I HEE PERSONAL APPEARANCE II I Some Specimen Nuggets of Her Brilliant Bril-liant Conversational Powers I Homo Life and Surroundings cf the Author 01 Little Lord tfauntleroy Pathetic Story of the Great Grief of Her Life HERALD Correspondence WASHINGTON May WThere is nothing noth-ing in Mrs Burnetts home which marks it as the abiding place of genius Prom the outside the house is like any other house on a fashionable street You see in the window a physicians sign telling his office hoursDr Burnett Perhaps jou were not awara there was such a per Ji c t JI1fi I SIRS FRANCES H BURNETT Bonorthat he was one of the best oculists ocu-lists in Washington The colored man asks if you want to see the doctor No no of course you dont the question irritates irri-tates you as if it were a slight to the woman you admire The rooms are furnished fur-nished like the rooms of ordinary taste and means You notice a Japaniso idol in the square hall some etchings of f reign r-eign scenes but nothing designed make an impression Now Mrs Burnett enters She wears a black gown and has yellow hair The skirts have the orthodox swishswish and train along the floor the hair is a tossed and tangled mess She has a well groomed wholesome look and the chic si women who spend much of their time abroad Why give thecatalogue of her eyes nose mouth chin with their various shapes I rnd colors Who ever got any idea of a person from mere adjectives She looks Very much like Miss Ada Rehan In repose re-pose her face is severe but it never stays In repose She smiles in two ways with deepening lines at either side of the mouth with diverging fanshaped lines from the juncture of the brows Oddly enough too she has a mania for collecting collect-ing fans Mrs Burnett is not an American She V was born in England loves English pee > r pIe and their ways speaks and looks like an English woman Her voice has the low English softness her complexion the warm English coloring American women who speak as she does are usually affected Mrs Burnett prefers Washington to any city in America One will pass through many places without finding such talker as the author of Little Lord Fauntleroy She sneaks when animated in rapid broken sentences with a curious staccato movement move-ment the words tumbling over each lither under the crush of ideas I can compare her in this respect to nothing but one of those luminous fountains which delighted the people so at the Paris exposition expo-sition There is neither end nor beginning one color running into another incessantly incess-antly J the whole being pleasant and brilliant bril-liant Start Mrs Burnett on any subject sub-ject under the bun and your task is accomplished ac-complished A question a suggestion a name is sufficient and away you go It is like opening the throttle valve of a locomotive You will hs whirled away over mountains moun-tains rivers and plains and will keep on whirling as long as there is steam in the boilers The difference between Mrs Burnett and the locomotive is that the latter has to follow the rails She follows nothing As she talks it fairly takes ones breath away to see how she glides from one subject sub-ject to another From Theos she glides to Italy takes in the Hue de la Paix and Paris fashions glides to New York then smoothly to fox terriers to ponies to an adventure in Surrey to amateur photography photog-raphy to the choice of a profession to Washington society to the latest crimes and winds up with dress reform and her < < plans for the summer I am afraid that gives the idea that Mrs Burnett is a chatterer which shows how I hard it is to paint people truly in words The very charm of her talk is that all of j these changes come about naturally each I I growing out of what went before just as the colors in the fountain blend the one I into the other Now it is Buddhism now I pet docs you dont know how you got over the gap and you dont care It was done artistically and there was no intellectual intel-lectual jolting in the process HEB GREAT POWER OF IMAGINATION A word about her reminiscences of child life now being published in Scribners called up a flood of memories of her own childhood from the day when she a tot of three formed an unfavorable opinion of her nurses intelligence because the latter lat-ter tried to deceive her in the matter of holding her baby sister The precision with which Mrs Burnett remembers her own mental state at such an early age and indeed all through her life is a proof of the unusual intensity of her sensations sensa-tions She remembers more things than other people do because she has felt more things and felt them more deeply Her tendency to analyze and puzzle over the characters and motives of persons per-sons about her is even more developed than her tendency to selfanalysis She is always putting herself in other peoples positions always trying to see with their eyes and feel as they do This often causes her very great suffering for she is affected by the ills and sorrows of others almost as much as though they were her own indeed for the time they become her own HOW SHE CONVERSES Mrs Burnett is clever of course she is as everyone who has read her books knows But not f everyone has had the privilege of knowing the sparkling cleverness clev-erness of her talk I think Mrs Burnett can say more bright things in a given time than any woman in Washington which is a high tribute And they are not frothy bright things such as one usually hears but have a basis of earnest thought which lingers in the mind after the laugh has died awav I have set down here a few gems picked from several of her conversations The words are naturally natur-ally mine as no phonograph was at hand but in each instance the thought was precisely pre-cisely hers 1 have to admit being an abject slave to the pronoun of the third person Oft I can only do good work when it is willing will-ing and it is very particular I have never been able to dictate my writings because it would rebel and go on a strike It insists on seeing the ink from my pen Interviews are almost invariably bad To be an ideal interviewer one should have the novelists power of analysis and a person who had that would be busy writing novels America wears me out with interrup tions and yet I have done most of my work in America I suppose that is because be-cause the most of my time in Europe is spent recovering from the shock of having hav-ing been in the United States I got over caring for fame when I was in my teens sawthe folly of working i I so hard simply that the world mav be e little longer in forgetting one I wrote because I had to write The doing of the j thing was its own reward I should have kept on writing had the publishers sent I back all of my stories I Ihould not be surprised to learn that I am a Buddhist without knowing it I I am constantly finding I am something 1 I never suspected myself of being I read a book or an article and say to myself Why those are my ideas I thought all that myself years ago This man has I stolen my thunder In the same way Buddha may have plagiarized my unborn I un-born thoughts One of my great trials in life is to get a good pen The pens other people have are always better than mine I never go into a bank without coveting the lovely smooth flowing pens I find there I usually usu-ally beg two or three from the cashier I but when I get them home thoy scratch as badly as my own There is a strange perversity about pens 1 Ever since I was a child I have felt an amusing sense of responsibility for the universe When my little sister was naughty and broke her doll it seemed tome to-me that I was to blame I have a vague feeling of the same kind still when greater things go wrong Whenever I come to consider what stories for half the amount he paid but he did not take advantage of her ignorance igno-rance Now she has far greater demands on her pen than she can fulfill and whatever what-ever she chooses to write and as much as she can possibly write bring her 10 cents a word That means that earning S200 or 300 is an easy mornings work for herAt her-At that rate one wonders why she does not work morning Ooon and night As I J1r721 HOME IN WASHINGTON THE HALL AND PARLORS people may call my virtues I find myself possessed with a harrassing tendency to reason them back to faults Thus generosity gen-erosity becomes weakness industry becomes be-comes abnormal ambition self denial a higher form oi selfishness and so on I wish I could reason my faults back to a 1 a matter of fact she is not even ablY t > work continuously during the mornin o In any event her afternoons and evenings are given to other dutie to her family and to society although she car ittle for the lalter But her mornings she sets apart or tries to set apart i her v I Ii 11 flEe BURNETS DEN IN HER WASHINGTON HME justification in heredity or something else by the corverse method but I cannot dolt I doitThe The great trouble with me is that the top joint of my thumb is too short and the second joint too long This means as the palmist tells me that my reasoning powers are developed at the expense of my powars of decision I see on all sides of the question at the same time and come to no conclusion except in a general way that everybody is right These practical illustrations show better than any generalities could the kind of things Mrs Burnett says but the accompaniment ac-companiment of her animation and intensity in-tensity is needed to complete the charm The story of Mrs Burnetts literary success has been told too often to need repeating Here at least is a writer who bears no grudge against the race of publishers She has always found them generous and courteous ever since the time years ago when one of them on his own accord offered to pay a higher price for her stories than she had been getting from him She was then a young girl of 16 and he might have had the I writing And then what happens MRS BURNETTS HOME AND FAMILY I So much for the jewel now a little more about the setting The Burnett house stands on Massachusetts avenue a few doors from the Chinese legation and the Elaine mansion It is the home of a cultivated woman who likes to have pretty things about her and knows how to arrange ar-range them effectively The rooms on the lower floor at the right are three in number and open into one another running the whole length of the house The first two are parlors the third is a cozy music room These rooms are furnished fur-nished in thoroughly modern style with few books and a liberal number of paintings paint-ings It is these which the casual visitor sees but what is best in the house he does not see At the left in the back is a dining room very largo and abundant in treasures of woodwork and carving brought from Venice Several of the cabinets in this room would do credit to a museum and in one of these are specimens of Venetian glassware that could not be excellel On I the walls hang two full length portraits of Mrs Bennetts sons Vivian and Lionel one of whom has been taken from her I herDr Dr Burnetts offices are on the other side of the house at the front Passing up stairs through the square hall with its fine woodwork one comes to the sleeping appartments on the second floor and then up another flight to Mrs Burnetts den up at the top of the house Wherever she is Mrs Burnett always al-ways prefers to do her writing where no one can get above her This den is full of interest full of memories full of triumphs There is the table at which many pages of her rather scraggly handwriting hand-writing have been turned out There are books she has consulted tHere the lounge on which she has rested there the photographs photo-graphs and tasteful things about the walls on which her eyes have fallen while seeking seek-ing inspiration or while trying to cajole it into a good humor And there never out of her sight are the photographs of I her two boys a wreath of flowers around I one THE GREAT GRIEF OF HER LIFE I learned later from an intimate friend of hers that once she lay unconscious I for five days from concussion of the brain the result of a runaway accident in England and another time I she watched for eight months at the bedside of her dying boy When I II heard that story I undeisood the depth of her womanly nature Lionel died in Paris about two years ago and up to the very last never knew that he was seri S 4 ti5 i72 IN HER BUNGALOW ously ill His mother determined that I lii should be snared that knowledge i alas his whole life had been happy and bright so should his death be His illness was long developing from an attack I at-tack of grip into rapid consumption but long as it was and trying it was more than equalled by the mothers devotion and courage For it took courage rare courage to sit beside that handsome young fellow of sixteen and see the varm color of his face fade away and the hands grow thin and the body waste day by day and yet smile and be gay through it all and never let him suspect anything was wrong That is what Mrs Burnett I di < during those eight months Her love made her capable of playing a part such as no actress could play the part of a mother watching death circling her boy in its grasp and laughing at the grim spectre as if he were a welcome guest No one xyili ever know the patience and ingenuity in-genuity dhovn by Mrs Burnett during those weeks so long and yet all too short to kecrjKLionels mind occupied to keep him from worrying from mistrusting She succeeded though and up to the end the boy believed that he was merely laid up with a bothersome case of grip and nothing more Weeks before his death Mrs Burnett had prepared herself for the final stene She was determined not to b eak down when it came but to smile at her son as she had done all along From the beginning begin-ning of his illness until his death Lionel J I never saw a tear in his mothers eyes nora nor-a cloud on her face nor a change in her I 1 I I expression She knows what she suffered i when alone but her boy knew nothing I he was happy I i The doctors told Mrs Burnett a longtime I long-time in advance that the end would come I painlessly Lionel would pass away as in a sleep It was possible that at the very I last he might have a vague consciousness I conscious-ness that he was dying but even this the mother wished to prevent Days before I she acted over the death scene as it must occur preparing the very words which I I she would say and training herself to say them calmly It all happened as she had I I anticipated She played her part through I without flinching As he was dying Lionel raised his head with a half frightened fright-ened look which was met by his mothers miIeDoes I I 1 Does my boy feel a little faint she said taking his hand Dont worry it I will be all right in a moment Lionel smiled and died i The shock of that trial left Mrs Burnett in a dreadful state She has quite recovered i recov-ered from it now physically and is indeed I in-deed in the very heyday of her vigor of i body and mind But as she expresses it she feels as though she were separated I from the rest of the world by a gulf which I she had passed and they had not 1 One strange result of her bereavement is that she has a superstitious terror of ever going to Venice Five times she has I started to go there and five times some bad news has kept her from going The last time it was a cablegram telling oi her boys illness 1 think she firmly believes that if she ever set out for Venice again she would learn that some harm had befallen her remaining son That would kill her for in this fine nat na-t ture there is a quality stronger than the cleverness deeper than the intensity and II that is the motherly love CLEVELAND MOFFECT |