Crawford, Francis Marion

Francis Marion (1854-1909), an American novelist. He was born in Italy. His father, Thomas Crawford, was an American sculptor. Young Crawford was educated at Concord, New Hampshire, and at Cambridge, England. He also studied at Heidelberg and Rome, acquiring a wide knowledge of languages and their respective literatures. He was for two years the editor of a paper at Allahabad, India. He married the daughter of General Berdan, U. S. A., in 1884, and settled in a permanent home near Sorrento, Italy. He joined the Catholic church. He died in April, 1909.

Mr. Crawford was a hard worker. His efforts were confined principally to the writing of novels, though he did some work in critical philosophy and philology and wrote one play, Francesca di Rimini, which Sarah Bernhardt produced in Paris in 1902. Many of his works have been translated into foreign languages, and, as a mark of recognition of his ability, the French government bestowed upon him the Monbrun prize and a gold medal.

In twenty-eight years Mr. Crawford produced forty novels and historical works. He is believed to have reached a larger public than any other American novelist for fifty years. It is interesting to know that in a little book entitled, The Novel, What Is It? Mr. Crawford has expressed his own views as to what a perfect novel should be. He does not believe in the "novel with a purpose," but thinks a novel should be an "intellectual, artistic luxury." He says it must be "clean and sweet, for it must tell its tale to all mankind. . . . Its romance must be of the human heart and truly human, that is, of the earth as we have found it. Its idealism must be transcendant, not measured to man's mind, but proportioned to man's soul." Thus he suggests that union of the real and the ideal, which we find exemplified in so many of his stories. Of Crawford's novels, Mr. Isaacs was the earliest and is intensely interesting. It is a romantic tale, involving the occult. The series, Saracinesca, Sant' Ilario, and Don Orsino, dealing with Italian life among the nobility, is doubtless his strongest and finest work. Others are Casa Braccio, which Crawford himself considered his best, Zoroaster, A Roman Singer, The Children of the King, In the Palace of the King, and Via Crucis. Ave Roma Immortalis is a history of Rome which reads like a novel.

Crawford is the most versatile and various of modern novelists.--Andrew Lang.

When Crawford first "found himself" as a writer of fiction at the age of twenty-eight, the result was like the rush of an artesian well when rock is pierced, and one book followed another in rapid succession. Those who think that he forced himself to write are mistaken; the writing forced him. When he was at work on a novel he was possessed by it--he heard the characters speak and saw them move, and they were as real to him for the time as living men and women. No novelist who has written many books is always at his best--there would be no "best" if that were so--but Marion Crawford, from first to last, gave all that was in him to his work, and a proof of its high average is that half a dozen people will often give as many different opinions as to which is his "best book."

To those who knew Crawford well no such presence will ever come again. His devotion to his family and to those friends outside it whom he loved; his high sense of honour, his absence of vanity, his simplicity of nature, and his generosity of thought and deed combined to make him a companion who was always desired. It may truly be said that much as he gave the world, he left it nothing so good as what died with him.