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Title: The doctor looks at biography : Psychological studies of life and letters
Author: Collins, Joseph
Language: English
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BIOGRAPHY ***
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* * * * *
THE DOCTOR LOOKS
AT BIOGRAPHY
THE DOCTOR LOOKS
AT BIOGRAPHY
PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDIES
OF LIFE AND LETTERS
BY
JOSEPH COLLINS
AUTHOR OF “THE DOCTOR LOOKS AT LITERATURE,”
“TAKING THE LITERARY PULSE,” “IDLING IN
ITALY,” “MY ITALIAN YEAR,” ETC.
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1925,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
[Illustration]
THE DOCTOR LOOKS AT BIOGRAPHY
--B--
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
_To_
LIGHTNER WITMER
_Psychologist and Educator_
TO RECALL STUDENT
DAYS IN GERMANY
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author expresses his thanks to the editors of _The
Bookman_, _McNaught’s Monthly_, _The International
Book Review_, and _The New York Sun_ for permission to
elaborate material used by them into certain chapters of
this volume.
CONTENTS
PART I: BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY
PAGE
I BIOGRAPHY 15
II AUTOBIOGRAPHY 43
PART II: INTERPRETATIONS
III LITTERATEURS: AMERICAN WRITERS 63
Sherwood Anderson
William D. Howells
Lafcadio Hearn
Mark Twain
Henry Thoreau
Henry James
IV LITTERATEURS: FOREIGN WRITERS 98
Anatole France
Sainte-Beuve
Leonid Andreyev
Joseph Conrad
John Donne
Thomas Burke
Robert Louis Stevenson
V POETS 147
Alfred Kreymborg
William Blake
John Keats
Edgar Allan Poe
Arthur Rimbaud
VI WARRIORS 179
Lord Wolseley
Robert E. Lee
VII EDITORS 188
Edward P. Mitchell
Edward W. Bok
Joseph Pulitzer
J. St. Loe Strachey
VIII CLERGYMEN 202
Dr. Frank Crane
W. J. Dawson
IX ARTISTS AND MUSICIANS 212
Walter Damrosch
Irving Berlin
Maria Jeritza
Emil Fuchs
X ACTORS AND ACTRESSES 225
Eleonora Duse
Charles Hawtrey
Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson
Otis Skinner
George Cohan
The Unsuccessful Actor
Weber and Fields
XI STATESMEN 242
Woodrow Wilson
Brigham Young
Abraham Lincoln
Theodore Roosevelt
XII EDUCATORS 277
Sir William Osler
G. Stanley Hall
XIII PRIZE FIGHTERS 291
John L. Sullivan
James J. Corbett
XIV FICTIONAL BIOGRAPHY 300
Ariel
The Divine Lady
The Nightingale
XV MISCELLANEOUS 308
A. Henry Savage Landor
Eric Horne
XVI THE LADIES 314
Madame Récamier
Rebekah Kohut
Kathleen Norris
Rheta Childe Dorr
Yang Kuei-Fei
BOOKS CITED 331
INDEX 337
PORTRAITS
FACING
PAGE
MARK TWAIN 74
ANATOLE FRANCE 98
Courtesy of Edward Wassermann
THOMAS BURKE 136
JOHN KEATS IN HIS LAST ILLNESS 158
By permission of “The Century Magazine”
JOSEPH PULITZER 196
Courtesy of “The New York World”
WALTER DAMROSCH 212
Photograph by Gutekunst
ELEONORA DUSE 226
BRIGHAM YOUNG 252
Courtesy of Harcourt, Brace & Co.
SIR WILLIAM OSLER 278
Reprinted from “The Annals of Medical History”
J. J. CORBETT 296
By permission of G. P. Putnam’s Sons
LADY HAMILTON AS CIRCE 302
Courtesy of Dodd, Mead & Co.
MME. RÉCAMIER 314
PART I: BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY
But all the world’s coarse thumb
And finger failed to plumb,
So passed in making up the main account:
All instincts immature,
All purposes unsure,
That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man’s amount:
Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and escaped:
All I could never be,
All men ignored in me,
This I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.
RABBI BEN EZRA.
THE DOCTOR LOOKS AT BIOGRAPHY
_Part I: Biography and Autobiography_
I
BIOGRAPHY
Biography is the story of a life, told by the man who lived it or by
the student of it. Biography does not consist solely of a record of the
events and adventures that constitute the actual and visual side of
existence. It is not merely a chronological narrative of happenings,
from which the reader may divine the inner and hidden qualities of the
subject: it is primarily a statement of the subject’s thoughts and
strifes, ambitions and realisations--and, as thoughts and ambitions
condition action, behaviour and achievement, that which we call the
“life” of a man flows from them. Biography presents a picture of a
mind, a soul, a heart; of an environment; of successes and failures
that make, or seek to make, the subject immortal. Biography strives to
make the subject as real as a character in fiction; actually, it makes
him as real as life. This, of course, applies to good biography, to
that sort of writing which may be classed as a branch of literature,
are not to the formless productions that are often labelled “biography”
and “autobiography.”
The art of living has always been man’s preoccupation, and has afforded
him constant and unlimited interest. This interest is increased by
the opportunities he has of looking into the past, and of learning
how others “turned the trick” called living. From biography man gets
moral, physical, mental and emotional assistance; he sees where others
have failed and why; he recognises avoidable obstacles and handicaps;
he learns the value of health and its relation to happiness; and he is
made to see that material prosperity does not always spell spiritual
welfare. He appreciates the meaning of culture and its influence on the
individual and his time; he runs the gamut of emotions that are aroused
by all good biographies; he suffers vicariously, or enjoys objectively
with the subject. His own life therefore becomes happier and more
complete because of his intimate sojourn with a successful predecessor.
To some readers, biography affords the opportunity of gleaning
historical facts without hard work; as a matter-of-fact much might be
said about the similarity of the two arts. It is safe to presume that
Voltaire would say about biography what he said about history: “a lie
agreed to.” Less stress, however, can be laid on the “agreed to” in
regard to biography, because whereas history is officially admitted
to be true, biography, not dealing exclusively with facts, is the
stepping stone between fiction and history. Indeed, the fictionist
is a biographer; when he creates a type of individual, he becomes
his biographer, all the more so since the type exists only in his
imagination. To blow the breath of life into the nostrils of a statue
as Aphrodite did in answer to Pygmalion’s prayer is a remarkable
achievement, but to lay bare the human soul so that he who walks
leisurely may read, compares favourably with it. When a biographer
studies a character in real life, or when a man writes his own life, he
has opportunity, by masterful handling of the theme, to push into the
darkness characters that have been built by the fancy of the novelist,
and to make them appear by contrast lifeless and stilted; for he deals
with the very essence of life; it is a real heart which palpitates
under his hand, real nerves that tingle and thrill. The novelist must
be content to deal with the children of his mind, the biographer with
the children of God.
As an art, biography is older than the invention of writing. Doubtless
it has existed since the creation of man. In ancient times, it took the
form of tradition, transmitted by word of mouth, which later became
the foundation of legends and mythology. It has now reached a high
degree of development; this is the best proof that man is unable to
build his life on the present alone, or on hope of the future. He must
still refer to the past for encouragement and stimulation. To begin at
the beginning, the masters of the remote ages had left to the world
great treasures of biographical matter; from Xenophon we know about
the philosophers, especially Socrates. The life of Alexander the Great
is set down in immortal words by Quintus Curtius; Tacitus has left a
biography of Agricola, familiarity with which is part of the classical
education; and to go back still further, to an authority that has lost
none of its prestige as centuries succeed centuries, the Old Testament
abounds in biographies.
Plutarch is the parent of biographical art. His _Lives of Famous Men_
is the source from which all later biography has flown. His conception
of the art is the one we have to-day, save that he, like all other
biographers of antiquity, sought to include an era in his studies.
There was constant competition in the importance between his subjects
as individuals, and the epochs in which these subjects lived. The
tendency then was to put man a little in the shadow in order that
his time might stand out clearly; as a result, biographies of olden
times were more concerned with principles of truth and morals than
with men; they were treatises through which the writer could expound
his doctrines and principles. Soon, however, fortunately for the art
under discussion, writers discovered that man alone is not big enough
successfully to compete with his epoch, and in the Middles Ages,
biographers realised that their task should be narrowly confined
between two events: the birth and the death of their subject. Outside
events, revolutions, and world affairs must be reduced to the point
where they could not diminish the importance of the person whose
biography was written. It was then that biographies became the sort of
literature they are to-day. They grew more subjective, more personal,
more deserving of the definition Thomas Fuller gives the art of
biography: “To hand down to a future age the history of individual men
or women, to transmit their exploits and characteristics.” The man as
implicit self, explicit in action, the person and his personations, are
what biography aims to depict.
The Greek’s conception of personality as we understand it was most
rudimentary. It consisted in the abundance of things which a man did.
A recital of deeds by a chorus was an adequate reflection of the
personality of a hero. It was not until Christianity put in practice
its principle of self-analysis that consciousness of personality became
dominant. Then it was made to embrace the abundance of things which a
man is--and might have been.
When a biography is all that it should be in form and subject, it may
be said to be the surest means of safeguarding a memory from oblivion.
As Jacques Aymot, the first translator of Plutarch, said: “There is
neither picture nor image of marble, nor triumphal arch, nor pillar,
nor sepulchre that can match the durableness of an eloquent biography
with qualities which it should have.” Regrettably, there are few such
biographies and, judging from the output of the past two or three
years, there is small encouragement for believing that we shall ever
have another Boswell. Like clothing, biographies of to-day look better
than the old ones, but they do not wear so well.
Biographies are written for many reasons, but the chief one is a
genuine desire to help others to live successfully. Now and then an
author seeks egotistically to perpetuate his own name, to identify
himself with some feature of immortality, but as a rule the creation
of such work is a response to the commemorative and altruistic urges.
Man works, builds, suffers, progresses, thinks and hopes--then death
comes before he has had time to finish a task which could never be
completed, should he live a thousand years, the task of perfecting the
world in the measure allotted to him. The only means at his disposal of
passing on to future generations the wisdom he has so dearly learned is
to write the story of his life, or to leave records and memoranda of it
that some one else may write it.
Relatives and debtors of great characters should not undertake to be
their biographers. Few have been successful in a gesture which is
usually dictated by loyalty to the dead or by piety. Most of such
works are written to order by widows profoundly appreciative of
their departed husband’s virtues and attainments; or by children or
colleagues who would have their benefactor’s virtues perpetuated. There
are a few, however, which are definite contributions to personality
studies--such as George Herbert Palmer’s _Life of Alice Freeman Palmer_
and René Valléry-Radot’s _Life of Pasteur_, his father-in-law; and
there are others which are important personality documents--such as
_The Life of Olive Schreiner_ and _The Letters of Olive Schreiner_,
edited by her widower, and _Out of the Past_, by Margaret Vaughan,
daughter of John Addington Symonds.
Biographies are read for many reasons: the chief one is to be found
in the nature of man; neither angel nor demon, neither beast nor god,
he is fascinated by his fellow men; and their actions and reactions,
which can generally be paralleled with his own or with those of his
acquaintances, become part of himself and excite sentiments in him that
the record of the life of an angel or of a demon could not arouse.
Then, too, it is one of man’s most dominant traits to show an untiring
interest in the affairs of his neighbours, and as a rule, neighbours
are delighted to show the inside of their houses, the manner in which
they are cared for, and the preoccupations of those living in them.
In reading biographies and autobiographies, we cherish the hope of
discovering some hidden and monstrous secret, of finding enlightenment
about the soul and its motives. If the subject has been a magnate in
business, we expect to find an easy way to make a success in life; if
he is a Martineau, we look for a formula for shouldering burdens; if
the writer is a Papini, we seek for help to withstand failure.
All biographers do not use the same method to achieve their ends.
All physicians do not use the same method to diagnosticate disease.
Some do it by painstaking analysis of the symptoms; others by process
of elimination. One biographer reveals the spiritual and physical
development of the individual by narrating his conduct, relating his
successes and failures and by giving detailed accounts of his forebears
and environment; another takes the individual, endows him with certain
distinctive qualities and then proceeds to analyse, and later to
synthetise them for our approbation, admiration, or amazement.
Stories of individuals’ lives have the fascination for adults that
fairy tales have for children. They engender a variety of emotional
states; most of them pleasurable and consequently beneficial. When we
come upon one that excites anger or disgust or anything approaching
it, there is no law or convention that compels us to continue reading
it. Next to poetry, biography is the most satisfactory reading for all
ages: instructive to youth, inspiring to maturity, solacing to old
age. Its human interest, its preoccupation with man, brings it close
to our understanding and to our emotions: “Truth,” said Stevenson,
“even in literature must be clothed with flesh and blood, or it can
not tell its own story to the reader.” Hence good biographies are
more entertaining and more edifying than books of theory or precept.
It is not astonishing that the reading world should be constantly
concerned with the manifestation of personality; in no literary field
can such manifestation reveal itself more conspicuously, display
itself more freely, explain itself more fully than in biographies and
autobiographies.
Each age has its joys and preoccupations; each epoch its dominant
tendencies and interests; these are displayed in contemporary writings
more convincingly than in any other heritage that comes down to us,
and the reading of biographies and autobiographies can do more toward
giving us a clear and general vision of an epoch than any other
study can do. In Plutarch’s time, when oratory was prized equally
with statesmanship, the great men who were to figure in the _Famous
Lives_ were chosen almost exclusively from those whose eloquence and
whose diplomacy had made them prominent among their contemporaries.
“Belles-Lettres” were a sign of culture then; beautiful expression of
speech an art; hence, the biographies of famous men included especially
orators and statesmen.
Later, when the world was engrossed in long periods of wars and
conquests; when Mars was more venerated than the Muses; and when
honours and glories went to those who distinguished themselves on
the battlefield, crusaders and conquerors received the homage of
mankind. Their lives and deeds were set down for posterity. Then came
the long years of the Renaissance; the time when men’s eyes were
turned toward artistic possessions and achievements which heretofore
had been neglected and which, as a result of familiarity with other
countries, they had now learned to appreciate. They saw tendencies and
realisations which theirs did not possess; they envied the artistic
superiority of their neighbours and they steeped themselves and their
children in the new beauty which had been revealed to them. The
dominant passion of the cultured class--the class to which writing
and reading were more or less familiar pleasures--was an adoration
of art which had become the glory of the period. Small wonder that
the greatest biographies and autobiographies of these times were
of artists. Vasari wrote of painters, sculptors and architects and
Plutarch was his model and his master.
At a time when England was free from external and internal
disturbances, a draper with literary bent solaced his old age with
writing, and consequently we have in Izaak Walton’s _Life of Richard
Hooker_ and of _John Donne_ and three other friends, the first really
great biography of modern times. The outstanding charm of Walton’s
_Lives_ is that they reveal the author more clearly than the subject.
With the exception of Walpole and Pepys, and possibly Boswell, no
biographer, letter-writer or diarist has left his measure to posterity
with such completeness and accuracy as did Walton.
The period of sophistication which the late seventeenth century saw
in Europe is revealed especially by the Memoirs which abounded at the
time. Saint-Simon and Madame de Sévigné, Madame de Motteville and Louis
XIV, while embracing all contemporary history, give minute details of
the famous men and women of that period. Later, when sophistication
had been replaced by frivolity, and when the morals of the great
nations of Europe had lost their decorum, free love and its pleasures,
irresponsibility and antinomy became the fashion. The _Confessions_ of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau testify to this fact, although his preoccupations
were subjective and introspective. He was determined to unveil himself
so that the features of his life would be as clear to men as they
had been to God. And there was a challenge in his gesture: he would
expose all his vileness and then dare any one to say “I am a better
man!” He wrote his autobiography at a time when his mental balance
was not what it had been; but that is one of its greatest merits.
It is a common impression among sane persons that the writings of
psychopaths are without value or interest. They are usually of greater
merit artistically, and far more informative and suggestive than those
of the equilibrated. What Rousseau did for himself, lesser men were
tempted to do for others, and thus from its most famous life-history,
biographical writing got its first great stimulus in France. As time
progressed and artistic achievement became less important, biographies
were replaced by contributions “useful” to civilisation. Biographies
and autobiographies then grew less concerned with ideals and became
mirrors of personalities. Always a sign of the times, they were never
more so than when they shed some of their introspection, and took on
universality and externalisation.
Our conception of personality confronted with modern scientific
analysis becomes less specific. We can not define self, we can describe
it; it is so chameleon-like that the self of one day or one year is
not like the one of the day before or the year after. In view of the
tremendous and increasing interest in personality due to an awakening
of the sense of personal responsibility, to the increasing interest
in human immortality, and to the widespread and searching study of
abnormal manifestations of personality, it is not to be wondered that
biographical writing which aims at revealing personality is so popular.
The time has now come when every one writes biography or autobiography,
and from every corner of the earth, and from every branch of human or
divine activity, there pour forth studies of the lives of prominent
representatives. Musicians, poets, novelists, artisans, actors,
playwrights, moving-picture stars and would-be stars, unfrocked
clergymen, prize fighters, puzzle-makers, chess players, tennis
champions, dethroned monarchs, manufacturers and jazzers have followed
the movement, and as a result biographies are enjoying a great
vogue. Soon people will make their living, not by taking in each
other’s washing as Mark Twain predicted, but by selling each other’s
biographies.
When the King of the Chewing Gum Industry and the Czar of the Chain
Cigar Stores--or some one able to write better than they--shall have
related their lives and revealed the secret of their success, we shall
know nearly everything we need to know about the business of life.
Should Gerald Chapman have opportunity to publish his autobiography
before he is hanged, we shall have a document rivalling in interest
the greatest biographies of the past, for he would probably be able
to display the sincerity of Jean-Jacques, the honesty of Benvenuto
Cellini and the frankness of Dick Turpin. There seems to be no escape
from the deluge, and it is probable that no escape should be wished
for. There is no harm in writing one’s biography; it is the subject
that one knows best and about which one is supposed to know more than
any one else. But, alas, it is given to only one man in a million to be
really self-revelatory. The only thing that can legitimately be wished
is that the facile biographer should evince the same ardour for truth,
sincerity and form that he does for approval, approbation and applause.
If only a few of the hundreds of biographies and autobiographies that
are constantly appearing succeed in surviving, there will be one thing
for which our age should be gratefully remembered. For, if we know what
a man really feels and thinks, we know the man, and forgiveness flows
from understanding.
However, a careful study of modern biographies, with all credit
to the few which prove that the art is not lost and that it has
disciples and followers, does not reveal the existence of biographies
or autobiographies of genius. None of the recent ones comes up to
the standard of many of the great ones of the past. It is true that
these set up such a stage of perfection that it would be fatuous to
hope that such performance can be repeated by every biographer. Now
and then one comes upon a meritorious book such as Valléry-Radot’s
_Life of Pasteur_, Charnwood’s _Life of Abraham Lincoln_, Cushing’s
Life of _William Osler_, but they are few and far between. Of the
hundred and more recent biographies and autobiographies that have been
read in preparation of this volume, scarcely half a dozen have real
claim to distinction, and none is worthy of comparison with the great
predecessors.
Opinions differ widely as to which is the greatest biography and the
greatest autobiography ever written. In all such matters, taste alone
does not prevail; opinions are formed according to what one seeks in
biographies, and to the measure in which one finds it. Few readers,
however, can resist the charm of Boswell’s _Life of Samuel Johnson_,
generally considered the greatest biography ever published. It is
undoubtedly the most perfect portrait of a man ever painted with
words; full-size, revealing all the blotches, pimples and blemishes
and all the beauty in the complexion of the character. Boswell loved
his subject, and then he studied it; love combined with critical
perception, literary gifts blended with human understanding, beauty
of form adapted to beauty of subject are the outstanding features
of Boswell’s _Life_. It is a model biography inasmuch as it has set
a standard for this sort of intimate personal narrative; his exact
reproduction of the conversations in their original form gives to the
reader the impression that he is living with Johnson instead of making
his acquaintance through a medium. And the best proof of the value and
quality of this biography is that, thanks to James Boswell, Samuel
Johnson is one of the best known men in history. No other character
study has ever attained the perfection that the _Life_ has attained;
there is a touch of genius in Boswell, and remarkable literary
facility. The more we study him, and the more we compare him with other
biographers, the greater his work and his genius appear. Fortunately
for his memory, the picture that posterity preserves of him is the
one he painted himself, not that sketched by Geoffrey Scott in _The
Portrait of Zélide_.
Lockhart’s _Life of Walter Scott_ may be said to be the most admirable
biography in the English language, after Boswell’s _Samuel Johnson_.
Lockhart had all the odds in his favour when he wrote his _magnum
opus_. He had had the advantage of years of close intimacy with Walter
Scott, who liked him as a writer of promise and achievement, before he
loved him as a son; and Lockhart’s sensitive and impressionable mind
was the best fitted receptacle for the genius of his father-in-law. He
devoted years to the writing of the biography which made him famous,
and he made it a labour of joy. It is at once objective and subjective;
it includes all the characteristics of the great Scotch writer; it is
criticism and biography combined. Trevelyan came near accomplishing
a similar success in _The Life and Letters of Macaulay_, a most
satisfactory biography. _The Life of Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield_,
by Monypenny and Buckle, an illuminating, accurate and complete account
of a complex personality and of his ancestors, compares favourably with
both of them. The modern biographies worthy to hold a place with these
great ones are Sidney Lee’s _Life of Shakespeare_ and Lytton Strachey’s
_Queen Victoria_. There probably never was a more tangled jungle to
explore, survey and stake out than that presented by the traditions,
theories and conjectures that have grown around the greatest poet since
Dante. Sir Sidney Lee succeeded in giving an exhaustive summary of
everything credible that has been written about Shakespeare and he gave
the _coup de grâce_ to much that was not only fictitious but monstrous,
particularly about the sonnets. There are few biographies that display
such tact, insight, erudition, industry and judgment, and if popularity
is in direct relationship to merit, it may be interesting to note that
it has had ten editions since its first publication in 1898. The only
one that rivals it is Strachey’s _Queen Victoria_, but Strachey’s task
was much easier. It is, however, a great feat to have made known to her
own people the Queen who reigned over them for nearly sixty years!
Lord Byron, one of the most astonishing figures of the nineteenth
century, found an exceptional biographer in Ethel Colburn Mayne. Byron
had the qualities of his defects and the defects of his qualities to
an extraordinary degree. There was such disparity between his nature
and his actions, his personality and its manifestations that it is a
difficult task for any biographer to plumb his depth and reveal his
intricacies. Although Moore wrote a life of him that has great merit,
he did not succeed in doing this. Miss Mayne has, and her book is the
best personality portrait of Byron that we have, and E. Barrington has
not jeopardised its claim with _Glorious Apollo_. She played the double
rôle of biographer and novelist, the latter a little too convincingly.
It is gratifying to note that she changed her point of view in regard
to Trelawny after reading Mrs. Olwen Campbell’s _Shelley and the
Unromantics_.
Biographers do not like to admit flaws in their heroes, and so Miss
Mayne finds excuses for Byron’s faults, passes lightly over his frailty
and is extremely reticent concerning the great mystery of his life. She
presents the facts of the “Astarte” question as they have been made
known by Byron’s grandson, Ralph, Earl of Lovelace, who died in 1906.
Every person interested in literature knows that the book “Astarte”
was written to vindicate the character of Lady Byron, who left her
husband, alleging that he had had meretricious relationship with his
half-sister, Augusta Leigh, and that he was the father of the child,
Medora. Miss Mayne’s comment is interesting: “Only pity will avail for
understanding of this household and we need but know the future of the
husband, the wife and Augusta Leigh for pity to constrain our heart.”
Hero-worship is one of the necessary factors of good biographies. At
the service of critical ability, and kept within the limit of facts,
it may result in such seductive reading as Mr. Charles Wheeler Coit’s
_The Royal Martyr_. Charles I, of England, his tragedy and its causes
are there rendered in their true light. A martyr he was, indeed--and
modest like most martyrs. Mr. Coit has done historical biography a
great service, because his book is more than readable--it has charm.
His display of erudition is nowhere overwhelming, but his fine use of
English and the poetical turn of his prose make literature of what
might have been a textbook. Love and loyalty to King Charles do not
blind him to his weaknesses--but he finds apologies for them, and he is
convincing. “The Royal Martyr” is one of the finest biographies, in the
more serious line, that has recently come out of England. For the king,
it will make hero-worshippers, and, for the biographer, admirers.
The best personality portrait with which I am familiar is that of
John Addington Symonds, sketched and painted by himself and finished
by his friend Horatio F. Brown. It is a model psychological biography
which concerns itself particularly with the nature and display of
the temperament of a man who was a strange mixture of mysticism and
practicality, scepticism and credulity, piety and sensuousness,
emotion and intellect; and who had, with it all, extraordinary energy,
painstaking industry, tireless application. Practically a life-long
invalid, and without the spur of poverty, he accomplished a stupendous
amount of literary work of the first order: biography, essays,
criticism, poetry, translation--which is likely to be more familiar to
coming generations than it was to his own. His history of the Italian
Renaissance, his translation of Benvenuto Cellini’s _Memoirs_ and his
version of the sonnets of Michael Angelo give him a permanent place in
literature.
Any one who would fit himself to recognise the neuropathic
constitution, the manic-depressive personality, the artistic
temperament, the hedonistic attitude, the religious nature, can do so
by reading comprehensively Horatio Brown’s splendid biography of John
Addington Symonds. Possessors of the phlegmatic temperament may get
neither profit nor pleasure from reading it, but all others will, and
many will get nourishing food for thought.
And now comes his daughter to say tactfully and deferentially that her
father was not at all the kind of man that his friend the Venetian
historian depicted; at least she wants to tell the world that there
were important facets of John Addington Symonds’ nature that were not
revealed by it. _Out of the Past_ is a fascinating biography and it
should succeed in reviving interest in an unusual personality who wore
the mantle of Pico della Mirandola with grace and distinction.
Another satisfactory biography is Henry Morley’s _Life of Jerome
Cardan_. Jerome Cardan would seem to have been the last man to appeal
to the fancy of an Englishman. He was versatile and unreliable; he had
the qualities and the charm of his race, but few of its defects; his
life was a constant pursuit of something ethereal and unreal, with,
however, definite achievements as its basis. Henry Morley understood
and interpreted his subject as though there were not between him and it
the almost impenetrable wall of difference of nationality. Regardless
of the admiration one may have for a foreigner, one can never get as
close to him as to a countryman; the wall prevents it, and love does
not always bridge it. Then, there was between them the wide span of
time; almost three hundred years had passed since the death of Jerome
Cardan, during which the Italian race had suffered more changes than
the British race. All these did not render the biographer’s task
easier, but Morley’s biography shows neither strain nor effort. It is
written gracefully and emotionally, as becomes the biography of one of
Italy’s most graceful and most sensitive children.
Yet it is not this Morley, but one of his name, John, Lord Morley,
who has gained a permanent position in biographic literature. The
latter’s series of studies on the literary preparation for the French
Revolution, and his books on Burke, Cromwell and Gladstone entitle him
to rank as the first critical biographer of his time.
His _Life of Gladstone_, though by no means a satisfactory biography
of the man who was called the day he died, and not by an Englishman,
“the world’s greatest citizen,” is a monument to his industry and an
enduring testimonial to his literary distinction. But it is the life of
the statesman, and Gladstone was not that alone--he was a moralist, a
theologian, a prophet, and now, a generation after his death, a writer
publicly brands him libertine and hypocrite! Man or superman, he had
positive views about literature which he often expressed dogmatically.
It may quite well be that the lasting substance of his fame is
dependent upon his performances and ideals as statesman, but readers
seeking instruction and diversion from biography want to be told of
the facets of his personality. They would gladly exchange some of the
debates and divisions, speeches and bills, for information about him
on the personal rather than on the public side; they are as interested
in a great Christian as they are in a great statesman, perhaps more
so; they want him interpreted as a sign of his time just as they want
Lincoln, or Cavour, or Bismarck interpreted.
Mrs. Gaskell’s _Life of Charlotte Brontë_, after many vicissitudes,
has taken a place among the great biographies. Soon after its
publication about seventy years ago, it was alleged by many to be
unsound, untruthful, unjust, but time has shown it to be a remarkably
accurate picture of a humourless genius who was sensitive, shy and
temperamental, and whose statements were sometimes founded in fancy
rather than in fact.
Biography-writing has been influenced, as novel-writing has been, by
the researches and discoveries of modern psychology, particularly by
the teachings of Freud, and to a lesser extent of the behaviourists.
The most prominent representative of this “new” kind of biography
is Gamaliel Bradford. He is not, however, a Freudian, but a sane,
temperate, laboriously trained writer who has a profound regard for
facts, great industry in unearthing them, and much skill in serving
them daintily and appetisingly, seasoned with fancy, to the reading
public. Mr. Harvey O’Higgins has swallowed the doctrines of the
Viennese mystic, bait, line and sinker, and in _The American Mind
in Action_ he has attempted to show how well he has digested and
assimilated them. A journalist by training, he has mastered the
Freudian jargon, and he writes it with the same ease that James Joyce
writes of the subconscious distillation and conscious crystallisation
of Mr. and Mrs. Bloom. He is the Técla of biographers, but he offers
his goods to the trade as genuine. They do not deceive experts. He
is attempting to do for biographies what Dr. George M. Gould did a
few years ago in his biographical clinics. Only he substituted the
Œdipus-complex for Eye Strain.
Œdipus Redivivus will have a longer day in court than Eye Strain had
and more spectators, and there is a salaciousness about the testimony
elicited that the elicitors and the audience like, but the verdict in
both cases will be similar.
A form of biography that is apparently finding great favour is
represented by such books as _The Divine Lady_, _Ariel_, _The Portrait
of Zélide_, _The Nightingale_, _Glorious Apollo_. It is an elaboration
of the variety popularised by Mr. Gamaliel Bradford which he calls
psychographs. These are psychographs and somagraphs flavoured with
time-denatured scandal. They are easy reading, mildly instructive,
and moderately diverting. They are a good substitute for fiction and
a fairly acceptable one for history, and they are infinitely to be
preferred to biographic fiction such as _He Was a Man_, the life of
Jack London, by Rose Wilder Lane.
They do things differently in France, and to point out the difference
between their point of view and ours in most matters that have to do
with artistic or literary manifestations, is not to show partisanship
for either side. But books like _Ariel_, _The Divine Lady_, _Zélide_,
must be admitted to be nothing more nor less than tales of love, under
guise of historical veracity. This pretence soothes the sense of
decorum of the American public which would be outraged if the books
were openly and unreservedly published as “romances.” The French adopt
the opposite policy. And one of the most respectable and ancient
publishing houses in Paris has recently commissioned several prominent
authors to write the biographies of the “loves” of great historical
characters. The series opened with Marcelle Tinayre’s _La Vie Amoureuse
de Madame de Pompadour_, and continued with that of _Talma_, by
André Antoine; _Louis XIV_, by his great biographer, Louis Bertrand;
_Casanova_, by the coming great poet, Maurice Rostand; and _Marceline
Desbordes-Valmore_, by the Goncourt Academician, Lucien Descaves.
The amorous life of _Joséphine_ has also appeared, written in the
delightful style and sensitive vein of Gérard d’Houville, the wife of
Henri de Régnier. More are coming, and they all bear the general name
of _Leurs Amours_. It is a new sort of biography which is bound to be
popular. Although it might be misunderstood in this country, it is not
in France where love and lovers are not taboo, even when they concern
great characters. These books purposely neglect historical facts,
except insofar as they relate to the love-lives of their subjects or
as they are necessary to the guidance of the reader. The object of the
series is to portray various personages solely in their relation to
love; and, so far, the experiment has been successful.
_The Portrait of Zélide_, by Geoffrey Scott, is the best fictional
biography that has been published in English. It is the story of
an eighteenth century Dutch belle, Isabelle Van Tuyll, who, after
she married her brother’s tutor, Monsieur de Charrière, developed a
reputation for wit, wilfulness and culture that extended far beyond
her native or her adopted country. She had the artistic temperament
associated with unusual intellectual endowment, remarkable facility of
expression and a great fascination for men. A friendly critic told her
that she wrote better than any one known to him, not even excepting
Voltaire; and Sainte-Beuve, the greatest critic of the day, said
that she had the “authentic tongue of Versailles.” She wrote a brief
description of herself which she called “The Portrait of Zélide,” and
which, as literary self-portraiture, has rarely been surpassed:
“Compassionate in temper and liberal by inclination,
Zélide is patient only on principle; when she is
indulgent and easy, be grateful to her, for it costs her
an effort. When she prolongs her civility with people
she holds in small esteem, redouble your admiration: she
is in torture. Vain at first by nature, her vanity has
become boundless; knowledge and scorn of mankind soon
perfected that quality. Yet, this vanity is excessive
even to her own taste. She already thinks that fame is
worth nothing at the cost of happiness, and yet she would
make many an effort for fame.
“Would you like to know if Zélide is beautiful, or
pretty, or merely passable? I can not tell; it all
depends on whether one loves her, or on whether she
wishes to make herself be loved. She has a beautiful
neck, and displays it at some sacrifice to modesty.
“Excessively emotional, and not less fastidious, she can
not be happy either with or without love. Perceiving
herself too sensitive to be happy, she has almost ceased
to aspire to happiness and has devoted herself to
goodness. She thus escapes repentance and seeks only for
diversion.
“Can you not guess her secret? Zélide is somewhat
sensuous. Emotions too vivid and too intense for her
organism, and exaggerated activity without any satisfying
object, these are the sources of all her misfortunes.
With less sensibility, Zélide would have had the mind of
a great man; with less intelligence, she would have been
only a weak woman.”
Sensuous she may have been, but sex never clamoured very loudly for
appeasement. Her emotions were too vivid and intense for her organism
and she lived in perpetual warfare with herself. Profoundly egotistic
she delighted in revealing herself. Her self-esteem did not permit her
to soften a defect or enhance a quality. In spite of her egotism she
gave out more than she received because of her abounding vitality of
mind and body. Her early love affairs were purely cerebral--indeed all
of them were until she met Benjamin Constant. She married without love,
because her mind told her that having reached the age of twenty-eight
it would be unwise to delay. Monsieur Hermenches, an older man, was
her first friend--one could scarcely call him lover. He had had
success with women, but she could not accept a master. When she was
twenty-three she met Boswell and for nine months she amused herself
at his expense. He was so assured of his own charm that he believed
Zélide was in love with him, and if he could reform her, he intended
to marry her. But Zélide had no desire or intention to reform. After
endeavouring in vain to support the boredom of life at Colombier,
whither she had gone with her conventional and unemotional husband,
she became ill and was sent to Paris for a change. There she met
Benjamin Constant, the nephew of her early friend Hermenches. He was
twenty, she was forty-seven. The attraction was mutual and immediate;
disparity of years was ignored; they spoke a common language and felt
that they had each found an _alter ego_. Constant, despite a most
unattractive exterior, appears to have made powerful appeal to women;
during his long association with Zélide, he had many _amours_ of which
she was cognisant. They did not arouse in her the slightest feeling of
jealousy. She feared only intellectual rivalry. Her love affair with
Constant lasted many years and was interrupted and finally shattered by
the advent of Madame de Staël. Constant was unable to withstand Madame
de Staël. Possibly he was tired of being completely understood and may
have craved the companionship of some one who would idealise him. He
met her at the psychological moment. Her strong personality, combined
with great sensuality, attracted him and obscured her limitations.
There was not room in his heart and mind for two women and Zélide had
to give way. She accepted the situation quietly and reasonably, but
never recovered.
Her death was tragic for she realised that she had failed to accomplish
that which she had set out to do. She was a great character to whom
truth made a profound appeal. Illusions and shams were abhorrent to
her. She showed this in her dispassionate description of herself;
her power of separating herself from her subject is extraordinary.
Above all her predilections, she sought reality. In a world where
the majority prefer illusions, it was difficult for her to find
congeniality. For a while she believed that she found it in Benjamin
Constant but it was transitory. She died alone, solitary in death as
she had been in life.
Some day a psychologist will explain why the artistic temperament is
inimical to happiness. Madame de Charrière had health, beauty, charm,
wealth, a complaisant husband, an ardent lover, an indulgent conscience
and withal ability which was loudly applauded and remotely echoed, but
she was not happy. Perhaps she would not have gone all the way with
Anatole France who said that he had never had a happy day in his life,
but she would know just what he meant to convey.
Beauty, fame, love and riches are seldom synonymous with happiness. The
case of Zélide is only one instance of the truth of this statement; she
has sisters in all races, in all times, and Yang Kuei-Fei, whom Mrs.
Shu-Chiung introduces to Western civilisation under the name of _The
Most Famous Beauty of China_, is another of those whom the gods loved
and tortured.
Then there is the form of biography that is not a portrait of the
soul or of the body, nor is it exactly fictional biography. It stands
midway between the psychographed and the idealised life. A conspicuous
practitioner of this branch of art is Meade Minnigerode. He calls his
latest book _Lives and Times, Four Informal American Biographies_.
Mr. Minnigerode has at his service a keen--almost too keen--fictional
sense. He seems to have less regard for truth and facts than for
incidentals that make a good picture and enhance a story; and in his
painstaking and careful selection of material, he uses only whatever
assists him in building characters and situations. He has searched not
so much for that which reveals character as motives in higher relief.
As a result, we know less accurately what the four characters really
were, than what Mr. Minnigerode thought they were--almost what he
thought it would be interesting for them to be.
The book, however, is convincing and that may be its greatest danger.
Whatever one’s cool judgment may be, it carries; and this success
is probably due to the many vivid scenes and to the clever, if not
profound or necessarily true, characterisations.
_Lives and Times_ will delight most persons who are interested in early
New York, because it is an attempt to do for that City what Dickens did
for London. “That funny little town” as it first appeared to Jumel, and
Philadelphia where Citizen Genêt suffered, are described in all their
arrogance, pathos, bustle and absurdity. And it is done with neither
sympathy nor indulgence, but with a smart dart which pricks through
every page. No one very young and no one very old should read it. The
young are too prone to look lightly on the generally respected portions
of society, and the old would be angered. But most of all, no one
without a sense of humour should read it; and to a sense of humour must
be added perspective and a knowledge of the writing motives of the day.
Let him read it who will not take it too seriously. Such an one will
be entertained and will acquire a feeling for the seethe and churn and
moil of the early days of the Republic which will be a real addition to
his sense of what early America was--or may well have been--if it was
as interesting as all that.
Yet, Mr. Minnigerode’s book does not contribute to the sum total of
our knowledge of human personality, and that because it does not get
behind the scenes; the whole action is played on the footlights and no
preparation is ever visible. Characters must take their place in the
scenery and are so overwhelmed with the details of the machinery that
they fade from the picture. They are lost in their time. The author
had a chance to work out the drives and conflicts going on back stage
in the mind of Aaron Burr, for instance. But he neglected it; little
is added to our real sense of what the man was. We know how he met
situations, but not why. We know what he seemed to desire, but we
never touch the spring of that desire. And the same thing is true of
Theodosia. The picture is always charming and rendered with delightful
observations and turns of expression. But none of the questions that
rush to our mind as we read of her are answered. Her death is moving;
yet we are stirred not by the loss of a character we have known, but
merely by the disappearance of one whom we have seen move gracefully
across the page.
And the other two characters, William Eaton and Genêt seem even less
real. The study of Jumel is the most penetrating of the biographies,
though it may be the most blameworthy from the point of view of the
“gossip urge in man.” But at least the man becomes real and known,
and we can appreciate the strange loyalty that bound him to his own
destruction. He holds together, grows and develops, reaches the climax
of his own possibilities and goes down to an end which is convincing.
There is a picture of desolation in his solitude which is a literary
contribution if not strictly a biographical one.
It is not entirely just to Mr. George S. Hellman to put his biography
of _Washington Irving_ in the category defined for Mr. Minnigerode’s
book, but it fits there more accurately than elsewhere. It is
laden with personalities and generously interspersed with gossip;
particularly about Irving’s love affairs, perhaps the most interesting
thing in the world about which to gossip and to conjecture: “It seems
perhaps a cruel thing to say, but I am convinced that if Mathilda
Hoffman had lived, the man of letters that the world of literature
knows as Washington Irving would never have come into being.” Perhaps
“cruel” is not the most felicitous adjective that the author might have
used. No doubt many will find Mr. Hellman’s interpretation of Irving’s
amativeness very entertaining, but it will scarcely add anything to his
reputation as the greatest pioneer of American literature.
Mr. Hellman says, “The present volume has been called ‛Washington
Irving, Esq.,’ and it is in the life of a great and lovable gentleman
that we are far more interested than in the easily ascertainable
achievement of the writer whose works have long been the subject of
critical evaluation.” If he had added to this that he had also wanted
to give Irving’s first biographer, his nephew, a black eye, and to
include a lot of letters which Irving had written from Spain, chiefly
to the State Department, it would have been a perfect description of
the motive for writing the book.
There are so many recent biographies that fall short of the ideal
that it would seem prejudiced distinction to make mention of one and
to point out with some specificity its shortcomings. But Mr. Ernest
Brennecke, Jr., had an unusual opportunity, an inspiring subject,
and a waiting public for his work. His _Life of Thomas Hardy_ must
be reckoned a failure. The reader who can glean a concept of the
personality of the famous English novelist and poet, whom George Moore
has recently derided, from Mr. Brennecke’s book has great perspicacity.
The narrative itself is clumsily composed and awkwardly arranged;
the material obtained from personal contact with Mr. Hardy is used
maladroitly; gossip, anecdote and puerile information clog the wheel
of the story; and the backgrounds of “origins” and “The Soil” take up
nearly a third of the volume. In a foreword, the author says, “There
is little spice and perhaps too little story in this book.” I would
not say so, but there is too little style, substance and sequence; too
much irrelevancy and not enough form and finality. If Mr. Brennecke had
given to Mr. Strachey one of the ten years that he devoted to Mr. Hardy
he might have written a more acceptable book.
The picture of Thomas Hardy which I should prefer to keep is neither
that which George Moore has slashed irreverently nor that which Mr.
Brennecke has muddled with too much reverence, but that traced by James
Barrie in his famous rectorial address: “The pomp and circumstance of
war will pass, and all others now alive may fade from the scene, but
I think the quiet figure of Hardy will live on.” As an antidote, I
suggest to those who have not found Dr. F. A. Hedgcock’s _Thomas Hardy_
sufficiently informative and appreciative that they read the chapter
entitled “The Builders” in Miss M. P. Willocks’ recent book called
_Between the Old World and the New_.
Another biography which should be discouraged is _James Elroy Flecker_,
by his friend Douglas Goldring. Critics of poetry who fulfil all the
requirements set forth in Flecker’s Essay on “The Public as Art Critic”
say that he has a permanent place in English literature. We should
like to forget that his obscenity amounted to a gift; that one of Mrs.
Peachum’s many descendants taunted him at a dinner party that his
swarthiness would succumb to “soap and water” and that he thought our
boys should not neglect the _Cortigiano_; whether he had one or several
moustaches during his early manhood does not seem to be essential
for our understanding of his emotions or our comprehension of his
intellectual remains.
Flecker was a champion of beauty. One who knows him only from his
friend’s “appreciation” could scarcely believe it.
For years Henry Fairfield Osborn, a distinguished naturalist of New
York, has been publishing a variety of biography somewhat after the
manner of the “Roadmakers” series of Small, Maynard and Co. It deserves
praise and imitation. _Impressions of Great Naturalists_ are made up of
reminiscences of Darwin, Huxley, Cope and other great men with whom he
was once intimate. Each verbal portrait is prefaced by a brief legend
which summarises the author’s relationship to, or contact with, the
subject.
Professor Osborn does not attempt to portray the whole man but a
principal aspect of each life, and as such aspect is always pleasant
and inspiring, he has only praise for his subjects. Some will find
him too laudatory, too uncritical. But he maintains with the French
author that if love is blind, friendship will not see faults; and when
friendship is engendered by the admiration and veneration that every
one should have for such benefactors of science, petty faults of life
and trifling defects of nature are forgotten.
Thus we read of the superiority of Francis Balfour, of the impression
he gave of living “in a higher atmosphere, in another dimension of
intellectual space” and of the great lessons of the balanced daily life
he gave to his disciples. We learn that Thomas Huxley had a delightful
sense of humour, combined with a spirit of sacrifice to education which
gained him popularity and gratitude. Mr. Osborn draws an interesting
contrast between John Burroughs and John Muir who had in common their
Christian names, their love of nature and “to a certain extent, their
powers of expression”; but they were unlike in almost every other
respect; and their variations are attributed to racial differences. The
author’s studies of ethnology make him competent to feel the influence
of race and of blood, and he applies his knowledge to understanding of
the soul.
The best sketch in the book is that of Pasteur, “the greatest
benefactor of mankind since the time of Jesus Christ,” in which love is
as visible as admiration.
Similar commendation may be given to the series of biographies now
being published by Henry Holt & Co., called _Writers of the Day_. They
have the rare merit of brevity and they are done by authors who know
how to write; one of the recent issues, _Bernard Shaw_, by Edward
Shanks fulfils nearly every requirement of biography. It does not dwell
upon the facts or data of his life, the scenery surrounding his boyhood
home, his self-imposed dietetic restrictions or his partiality for
the Automobile Club, but it does throw an illuminating light on the
character, personality and intimate thoughts of the extraordinary man
who has courage, understanding and humour.
Ivor Brown was not so successful in his presentation of a man who has
been up to his chin in the life of his time, because he pitched his
song of praise in too high a key. H. G. Wells has diverted many and
instructed some, but few will agree that when Woodrow Wilson lost his
sovereignty over the minds of men, it was transferred in no small
measure to him who would rather be called journalist than artist.
The accolade must be given to a Bishop. William Lawrence has written
one of the best biographies that have appeared in America for many
a year. His subject is Henry Cabot Lodge, a life-long friend. It
fulfils all the requirements of biographical writings, and it does
more: it gives a picture of the author: big heart, good mind, simple,
sincere, sympathetic, and above all tolerant and understanding. And
the picture of Lodge! With paint a Velasquez might rival it. It gives
his intellectual and emotional measurements, his compulsions and
restraints; his possessions and his limitations in just the way a
priest should know how to reveal them.
The student and general reader who want to learn about Samuel Butler
should turn to his own books, and especially to _Alps and Sanctuaries_,
_Luck or Cunning_, rather than to Mr. Jones’ ponderous biography. In
the former, Butler is to be seen as he was in the flesh, whimsical
and wise, cranky and crabbed, sensitive to beauty but fearful of
betraying it, arrogant in characterisation but weak in manner, urbane
in speech and demure in looks. Painfully aggressive himself, he loathed
aggressiveness in others and could not abide in his fellows the quality
that he possessed so abundantly: cleverness. He prided himself that
he was like the priests in the Sanctuary of S. Michelo, “perfectly
tolerant and ready to extend to others the consideration they expected
themselves,” but he was as unlike them as any one imaginable. He had
a first-class double-track mind, and although he lacked heart, he had
humour.
Demand unquestionably governs, in some measure, supply in biographic
literature. There would not be so many lives of prize fighters, “screen
artists,” singers and actors of a day’s reputation if publishers
did not have a market for them, or if experience had not taught
writers that the public is keen to hear the details of their lives.
Biographies pander to the urge that is so important to our progress
and welfare: curiosity. They ward off the poisoned arrows of ennui,
and they prevent the shells of boredom from exploding. Practically all
biographies and autobiographies are of individuals who have “succeeded”
or “arrived.” Men who make failures of their lives rarely have their
biographies written. It is to be regretted, for they would be helpful.
We learn more from our mistakes than from our ten strikes.
When the dominant determination of man seems to be to speed up life
so that we can do, or have done for us, in a day what formerly took
a month, it seems paradoxical that biography should continue to be
what Mr. Lytton Strachey says it is: “Two fat volumes with which it is
our custom to commemorate the day--who does not know them, with their
ill-digested masses of material, their slip-shod style, their love of
tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment,
of design?” Biographies have fallen so far behind the bandwagon of
progress that their makers can not even hear the music. We should like
to have our boys know about Willard Straight, but it is too much to
expect that they should read a ponderous volume of six hundred pages
to find out about the making of a young American, even though he was
a credit to his country. It is not fair to the boy, and it is unjust
to Miguel Cervantes. And much as one might like to travel through
Asia and Africa with A. Savage Landor, his two fat volumes make one’s
eyes turn lovingly to the thin, caressable _Religio Medici_ or to the
latest novel of Sheila Kaye-Smith. The great biographies, are they not
very long? They are, and that is the pity of it. No one reads them now
save a few bookworms and those who became acquainted with them before
tabloid nutriment was discovered.
Biography must be reformed, first in length, and then in substance.
What most of those now rolling off the presses need is form and
brevity. The man whose picture can not be painted with a hundred
thousand words does not exist.
II
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
“Human life is not to be estimated by what men perform,
but by what they are.”
J. A. SYMONDS.
It is generally accepted that the relation which exists between
autobiography and biography is so close that so far as purpose
and quality of form and subject are concerned, the words are
interchangeable; that is to say, the average person thinks the unique
difference between the two is that one is written in the first person,
the other in the third. No greater mistake could be made. One is first
hand information, the other second, or even third. As Trudeau puts it:
to recount the actions of another is not biography, it is zoology. Both
have points in common, as all works of art must be founded on art and
beauty, but the qualities that make biography great are not those that
autobiography needs to achieve perfection.
In the first place, the chief merit of autobiography is to be found
in veracity and sincerity; these qualities are more important than
style or grammar. One of the most illuminating autobiographies of
recent years is _The Letters of Olive Schreiner_; they are as devoid
of style and as disdainful of grammar as an apache is of culture.
Biography on the other hand must display literary qualities which
are not indispensable in autobiography, provided truth is absolute.
Cellini’s _Memoirs_ which, in its original edition, showed the lack of
literary culture of its author, is nevertheless one of the greatest
books of its kind. It is not only the story of a man, it is the
history of his time. Such a man and such times! If the style of the
writing had been perfected by its admirable translator, it would have
lost much of its charm. If the same style had been used by Boswell in
his _Life of Samuel Johnson_, no amount of veracity and of sincerity
would have redeemed it. We think of biographers as “littérateurs,” but
there has never been a great biographer who was not a great artist.
Autobiographers have something to say or to give to the world in the
manner they know best.
The biographer must be objective; he must be able to perceive quickly,
to understand readily, to grasp, gather and evaluate facts, to fuse
his material into a homogeneous mass, to stamp it with style, and
mix with his literary qualities a certain amount of hero-worship.
Self-consciousness has no place in his work; he may efface himself as
much as he wishes, and recent biographies have proved that the more he
does it, the greater his achievement.
To use a well-known and often told legend, the biographer may be
compared to the swan which Ariosto believed to be gliding on the
surface of the river Lethe--the river for which Byron sighed and to
which he called in one of his poems. Ariosto’s theory was that when
man comes to the end of his life, Death cuts the thread. At the end of
that thread is a medal which Time throws in the waters of the Lethe,
where it disappears. Occasionally, it falls on a passing swan and
nestles between its wings. Gracefully and swiftly the swan carries it
to a temple where it is kept for ever. The swan of the allegory is
the biographer who, by gathering the deeds and characteristics of his
subject, carries them to immortality.
The autobiographer, on the other hand, must be subjective above all.
His glance and his attention must be turned on himself; his critical
powers and his gift of observation must be directed on his own
character. As John Addington Symonds truthfully said: “Autobiographies
written with a purpose are likely to want atmosphere.” A man when he
sits down to give an account of his own life, from the point of view of
art or accomplishment, passion or a particular action is apt to make
it appear as though he were nothing but an artist, lover, reformer, or
as though the action he seeks to explain were the principal event of
his existence. To paint a true portrait, he must supplement the bare
facts of his existence. He must reveal himself emotionally as well as
intellectually. It is the emotional revelation that gives atmosphere
to his story. Naturally such “atmosphere” should not exclude a certain
amount of objectivity; if the writer is too introspective, his memoirs
may prove stimulating and illuminating for the student of behaviour,
but will scarcely interest the general reader who is not content with
deductive and inductive ratiocination, but wants action mixed with
sentiment.
The biographer is not a judge, but a witness; the autobiographer may
be both. The former should have no preconceived idea of his hero. His
efforts should be concentrated on presenting him to posterity as he
appeared to his contemporaries, to himself and to those among whom
he lived, acted, enjoyed and suffered. Such restrictions can not be
imposed on the autobiographer who has a much wider field in which to
push his investigations on personality; whatever he chooses to say
or reveal must be accepted at its face value, and his judgment upon
himself must be impersonal--and there are no judgments so fallacious as
self-judgments. Biographies should study both sides of an individual;
what he did and what he was, since his notions are determined by
his personality characteristics; autobiographies need not deal with
achievements which, if they are worth while, make their own publicity;
the stress should be placed on the manifestation of personality--on
motives, passions, experiences, failures, and accomplishments.
Long before it was the fashion as it is to-day to write the biography
of men during their lifetime Voltaire said: “We owe consideration to
the living; to the dead we owe truth only.” He foresaw with remarkable
keenness the danger of such endeavour; and to-day, overwhelmed with
biographies of living subjects, we deplore the fashion. There are
certain truths that no one likes to be told, but that is what we must
insist upon from the biographical art: truth, and more truth. Man is
not big enough to look at his contemporaries without partiality, and he
must allow a voice to his likes and dislikes. For instance, it would
have been as unwise for Mr. Alexander Woollcott to write anything
in his biography of Irving Berlin that might have made the composer
appear in a light less brilliant than that of semi-genius, as it would
be for a newspaper editor to write articles against the policy of his
newspaper. We must agree with Sir Sidney Lee that “no man has ever
proven to be fit subject for biography until he is dead.”
Finally the main difference between autobiography and biography, a
difference which is a _résumé_ of these reflections, is that the
former works from within outwards, while the latter works from without
inwards; and the autobiographer is successful only in proportion to the
self-absorption he reveals; his is a selfish and personal work. The
biographer, on the other hand, is successful only in proportion to the
self-effacement he shows.
Amiel is perhaps the best example of introspection that can be found
in a diarist, as Proust is of the novelist. They and Barbellion, the
author of _The Journal of a Disappointed Man_, lived within themselves,
and the outside world was for them merely an abiding place. A contrast
of great interest could be drawn between Amiel, Cellini and Rousseau.
Amiel’s diary would be a model of introspection, Cellini would head the
list of Memoir writers whose principal quality is to be found in the
wholesomeness of their objectivity. He was no student of inner nature.
Life for him was a great battlefield, where one could garner beauty and
trophies, achieve triumphs of art, and at the same time kill those who
stood in the way; Jean-Jacques would hold a place between these two;
he sought interior motives and the explanation of his sentiments, but
the life he led was not especially conducive to reasoning and internal
debate. So his _Confessions_ are as far above those of Cellini as above
the _Journal of Amiel_, in quality, in form and in subject, and are
still the best example of autobiography that has ever been published.
Facts are as necessary to autobiography as they are to biography. Even
when they are tampered with, as Marie Bashkirtseff tampered with those
of her life, they have their importance and interest and nothing that
is true should be allowed to remain in the darkness. Olive Schreiner
wrote, “There can be no absolutely true life of any one except written
by themselves and then only if written for the eye of God.” Marie did
not write hers for the eye of God, but it is the closest approach to a
true life since Jean-Jacques’.
If a life is worth writing at all, no consideration of personal feeling
or convention should deter the writer from setting down the facts;
for on them truth, the greatest quality of art, is founded. Marie’s
_Journal_ is a work of art in the full sense of the word; it reveals
a soul and a personality, it shows the extraordinary gift of its
youthful author for writing, painting and music, but it also shows the
disequilibrium of an imagination untutored and untrained.
It is doubtful if any Anglo-Saxon will ever parallel the feat of
Cellini, of Rousseau, of Bashkirtseff. There is a vein of reticence in
the emotional nature of the Anglo-Saxon that the publicity drill can
not penetrate, save in exceptional instances and even then the hole is
never large enough to permit the implantation of sufficient dynamite
to explode both the conscious and the unconscious, and thus reveal the
entire personality. The autobiographies of these three did reveal the
entire personalities of their authors. Marie Bashkirtseff’s _Journal_,
though fictional in execution, impresses the reader as containing more
forced draught, than Cellini’s or Rousseau’s. Marie is romanticism
itself and her imagination is the battleground on which there is a
perpetual struggle between the real and the fanciful. Early in life
she created a picture of herself and her ambition was to live up to it
to the end. Reality was not æsthetical for her, and life without the
æsthetic element was not tolerable, so she set up a stage and as she
was to be the central figure upon it, she must be the most eloquent,
the most colourful part, the undeniable centre of attention. She
could accomplish her object only by distorting facts and by weaving
around herself situations which are highly improbable, but which are
self-revelatory despite their distortion.
Her desire was for fame and her cast of mind made the sham, the
mediocre, the ordinary things of life as hateful to her as beef gruel
is to one whose taste turns naturally and by cultivation to chartreuse.
She was equal to her desire, and her mental keenness and her emotional
avidity demanded material which would satisfy her. Not always finding
it in her surroundings, she created it and made it part of herself.
She displayed mental hunger early in life and sought to find the thing
that would appease it. Through her literary interest and tastes, which
were the result of thought and not of ready-made judgment, Marie
reveals her mental life--a conscious life and yet unconscious. She
is forever reaching toward a goal which will fulfil her intellectual
hopes, and in the effort of reaching she improved her mind, added to
her artistic talent and enlarged her vision. The reader who accompanies
her in her journey through life must feel the restlessness of her
youth, the sincerity of her demand for death rather than nonentity,
the tragedy of her soul too big for her body. The inequalities and
contradictions of her character could never be brought into harmony,
and finally the soul won. But it is not the Marie of whom one reads
that is convincing, but the creator of that Marie--just as any writer,
when he shows himself as the force behind his characters--is more real
than these characters.
Behind all her stage settings, her literary effects, her hunger for
fame and her conscious effort to act always as one would in public,
and a carefully chosen public at that--there is the writer tense, at
times bored, restless, enthusiastic and depressed, giving a picture
of herself, of her own sublimely dissatisfied spirit. The picture is
successful in its large lines and in its small details; it reveals a
mentality more than an existence, but all Marie’s real life was lived
unseen by the eye, and nothing would really be true of her that did not
take its source and find its origin in her unconscious self.
Some parts of her _Journal_ are essentially biographical, and they
are not the most entertaining parts. She writes with sincerity and
quietness of the period which she devoted almost exclusively to work
and painting; she was real enough in those days, but we miss the Marie
who was neither peaceful nor fulfilled. We still feel, when we see
her at rest or when we see her at work before her easel, the bond of
æsthetic achievement between the creator and the created, between the
writer and the Marie of the _Journal_; but we miss the charm of the
Marie who flirts, dances, goes to balls where she looks like a Greuze
shepherdess, who captivates every man and outshines every woman in the
world.
Her response to life is such that we find it in every one of her moods:
whether she is romantic, analytical, hysterical or self-possessed,
she is always in a mood which is responsive to life and ready to give
all she possessed to life. All she demanded, in reality, was constant
change; no continuity of feeling or of sentiment was satisfying to
her; joy was sorrow if long and level; sorrow barbed with keenness was
joy, “... him whose strenuous tongue can burst Joy’s grape against his
palate fine;” Marie the writer is expressed in this sentence; pain was
welcome if it carried sharp sensations in its trend, if it gave her a
life more full and heady, foaming from the cup.
Her idea of love was as imaginary and as unreal as her conception of
life; no one but Marie could have been contented with the picture
she made of her emotional response to love. She darted through her
adolescent years rapidly and yet profoundly; she thought she knew
all she was to know about love before she had had much teaching; her
instinct and her intuition prompted her, inspired her conduct and
decided her actions. Her susceptibility to impressions was such that
on them she based her knowledge, and her flair for the dramatic and
the unreal made her prostrate herself before the tall, blond phantom,
and pretend to herself that this was love in its sublimest and most
convincing expression. She reveals herself as completely in her
dealings with love, as she does in her fierce demand for life; this
demand became more and more tenacious as death came nearer, and her
revolt and her despair as the final hour approached were coupled with
the sense of futility that made it almost welcome. She asked herself
the poignant questions that have troubled and upset mankind since its
creation: she suffered the inevitable struggle between spiritual hope
and intellectual denial. What has it all meant, and where is God? These
questions were not to be answered; if her genius was nothing but a
spent shadow, what was it? and why not prefer death to it? Strangely
troubling questions to a young mind. Marie was one of those about whom
Stephen Phillips wrote:
“The departing sun his glory owes
To the eternal thoughts of creatures brief
Who think the thing that they shall never see.”
The present generation has produced three extraordinary autobiographies
in the guise of fiction: James Joyce’s was entitled, _Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man_. Dorothy Richardson called hers _Pointed Roofs_,
and Marcel Proust’s is included in _A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu_,
which extends through several volumes, two of which, _Swann’s Way_ and
_The Guermantes Way_, have been translated into English.
They are valuable documents, for they set forth with great frankness
the awareness and the development of consciousness, and the interplay
of what is now called the unconscious and the conscious mind. Proust’s
is the most elaborate and detailed, and when we shall have it in its
entirety, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s _Confessions_ may no longer be rated
the greatest autobiography in existence. These books have had detailed
consideration in _The Doctor Looks at Literature_.
Introspection and confession are unpopular to-day in this country. They
do not fit the times. Man is so busy acting that he has little time
for thinking, and if time were vouchsafed him, he would not have the
inclination. If one needed proof of it the legislators of Tennessee
could furnish it. This disinclination to thought and reflection
may be one of the reasons why this country has furnished few great
autobiographies. Another is that until recently we have been bound
by tradition of reticence and we have always found self-estimation
difficult. When Walt Whitman broke the convention and put a premium
on himself we were outraged. Our reticence was a manifestation of
self-consciousness incident to our youth and inexperience. The
American autobiographies of recent years that came nearest to being
satisfactory are _The Education of Henry Adams_ and _The Life of Doctor
Trudeau_, though Andrew Carnegie’s story of his life fulfilled some
requirements. Had the second half of Henry Adams’ book kept the pace
set by the first, it would likely be called the most satisfactory
autobiography of the century. But the account of his life after
1900 shows occasional bewilderment, frequent discursiveness, and an
inclination to profitless speculation. Henry Adams was a singularly
sane individual, free from ancestor-worship; neither beholden to
convention nor enslaved by tradition and environment; a potential
antinomian of artistic temperament who devoted his life studiously to
self-education from which he deduced a dynamic theory of history and an
amorphous one of education. The account of his childhood and youth, of
his early environment; of the people with whom he came into casual and
intimate contact; of his attitude toward and his reactions to formal
education, is an unusually brilliant personality study. His pilgrimages
in search of knowledge to Germany, Italy and France and his experiences
as a diplomat in England are precious human documents. It is doubtful
whether any American has ever seen the English with clearer eye, and
commented on their characteristics with rarer judgment than he did in
the chapters “Foes or Friends” and “Eccentricity.”
_The Education of Henry Adams_ is not only a revelation of a
personality, a brilliant example of self-analysis; it is a treasure
house of comment on and estimate of scores of individuals who wrote
their names more or less large in their time. If a better description
of Henry Cabot Lodge was ever written I have not encountered it, and
any one who knew Theodore Roosevelt will admit that he merited this
characterisation, “he more than any other man living within the range
of notoriety, showed the singular primitive quality that belongs to
ultimate matter--the quality that mediæval theology assigned to God--he
was pure act.”
No student of American history can escape study of this Memoir; no one
interested in behaviour will neglect it; and no one seeking instruction
and entertainment can afford to overlook it. Henry Adams is Boston’s
asset that Washington made permanent.
Dr. Edward L. Trudeau had a powerful personality and his book reveals
it. Fearlessness vied with honesty to be the predominant feature of his
nature and the closing lines of one of Browning’s most popular poems,
sung in his heart:
“With their triumphs and their glories, and the rest;
Love is best.”
Seized early in life with the disease that he did so much to make
conquerable, he laboured for forty years burdened and often prostrated,
in the Adirondack wilderness, and founded there a health centre which
radiates his influence throughout the world and which will perpetuate
his name.
Dr. Trudeau had an unusual gift, and he had it to an extraordinary
degree: the gift of friendship. He had exceptional power to attract
people to him, to interest them in his work, and in his play. He not
only attracted them, but enticed them to participation whether it
was building a church, equipping a laboratory or outwitting a fox.
For a quarter of a century, he radiated a benign, salutary influence
throughout the North Woods, and in the latter years of his life
throughout the whole country. He spoked the wheel of the juggernaut
tuberculosis as few save Koch have done. His presence inspirited
thousands bending beneath their burden; his courage heartened even a
greater number; and his conduct inspired countless colleagues who were
working at the very problem he sought to solve.
He knew the ingredients that one must have to make life a success; he
knew the amount of work and play, love and worship which must be used
and he knew how to blend them to make them acceptable to the eye and
to the palate; but what he knew best of all was that man can not live
by bread alone. Any one who does not know it may learn from the least
egotistic of autobiographies.
The most readable of recent autobiographies is Maurice Francis Egan’s
_Recollections of a Happy Life_. But it is not a self-revelatory book.
One gets vistas of life in Philadelphia as educated middle class
Catholics lived it three generations ago, glimpses of the society that
politicians and a few men of letters made in Washington, a generation
or two ago; and one gets the distinctive and agreeable literary and
bohemian atmosphere of New York at about the same time. There are
scores of pictures of people, famous and infamous, interesting and
commonplace, and these pictures vary from trifling vignettes to
carefully drawn and finished Gibsons. To justify the word infamous
it is only necessary to remind that Egan was Minister to Copenhagen
when Dr. Cook sold that government a gold brick. Egan knew every one;
most of them he liked and they all liked him, Matthew Arnold excepted.
After they had passed on and he had entered another field of activity,
he re-invoked for his diversion the memories of the first half of his
mature life and jotted them down. “God had given him memory so that he
might have roses in December.” He was arranging and ordering them when
his call came, but despite the fact that he did not have opportunity to
finish them, they are charming and entertaining.
But the reader must be what is called very psychic who can understand
the personality of Maurice Egan from his autobiography. The average
reader will gather that he was cheerful, charming, courteous,
companionable, kindly, generous, urbane--perhaps even a little vain.
But these are secondary virtues of prime importance mostly acquirable.
He had the cardinal virtues too: he had a good conscience and the urge
to assist and benefit others was greater than personal ambition. He was
gifted socially and intellectually; he was lucky and he had as much
money as a poet should have. He escaped the accident called disease
most successfully; he had a host of friends and he never put them to
torture by asking them what they thought of his reviews or of his
poems. Small wonder he had a happy life, and that now when it has taken
other display, his work continues to contribute to the happiness of
others.
Most autobiographies are written by individuals of artistic
temperament: musicians, painters, actors, clergymen, whose conspicuous
possession, after talent, is self-confidence which the average person
often interprets as conceit. There are few better ways of obtaining
a comprehensive idea of what is called the artistic temperament than
reading such an autobiography, and the _Life of Hector Berlioz_,
whose fame as a parent of music seems to be permanently established,
is as good as any. Berlioz was weird, contradictory, unreasoning,
improvident, impulsive, selfish, jealous, egocentric, amorous and
inconstant. He was devoid of humour and he lacked all religious
feeling. He was intemperate of speech and of strength. Despite all
these he gained and kept the affection and esteem of many of the great
men of his time. His book can scarcely be called an autobiography,
although he planned it to be one. He gives the bare facts of his life
up to the time he abandoned medicine for music, but after that, one
must gain knowledge of his character and personality from his letters.
They reveal them as no formal autobiography could, for here are his
thoughts, feelings, aspirations and disappointments; his selfishness,
shallowness, fickleness and unreasonableness; here is the record of his
punishment by his disposition and disease. They show what a handicap
to happiness such a temperament is. Any one who thinks of choosing
parents from musicians should read the letters. Any one who doubts the
existence of Dante’s Beatrice or Petrarch’s Laura should also read
them, for Estelle Fournier was their sister.
A man of Berlioz’s temperament should not be judged according to
any standard but his own; his soul was too sensitive to radiate
happiness; his genius was of too fine a nature to leave place in him
for self-appreciation and optimism; his tempers revealed his weariness
of life and the extent to which life had conquered him; or rather
they would in any one but Berlioz whose personality could suffer no
comparison. M. Romain Rolland has attempted a parallel between Wagner
and Berlioz--all the advantage of the former if common measures are
adopted, but strangely contrasting in favour of Berlioz if we compare
his solitude, his unceasing pain and “unspeakable weariness” to “the
spectacle of Wagner, wrapped in silk and furs, surrounded by flattery
and luxury, pouring unction upon his own soul.”
The artistic temperament and the reformatory or uplift-urge are
antipodal. Those who possess the latter often write their lives. They
are sometimes instructive, rarely interesting; as an example of this
class, I select the _Autobiography of Harriet Martineau_ who, after
Mary Wollstonecraft, was the first doughty champion of “Rights of
Women.” Florence Nightingale said of her that she was born to be a
destroyer of slavery. It is an important historical document of social
evolution in England, and it serves as the perfect example of what an
autobiography should be, and should not be. In twelve pages appended
to the two fat volumes, the author makes an estimate of herself and of
her work which is quite ideal, but the descriptions of her nonsensical
and childish recollections scattered through the first volume are
fatiguing, and pages of irrelevant, inconsequent matter spoil the
second. Withal, the work is interesting and will always remain so
because of the brilliant thumb sketches it contains of famous persons,
such as Margaret Fuller, Carlyle, Coleridge, Malthus, Macaulay and
dozens of others; and because of the light it throws on what has come
to be called psychotherapy.
When Miss Martineau was approaching what Rose Macaulay calls the
dangerous age, she experienced a serious nervous breakdown. She found
plenty of doctors, apparently, to tell her she would not recover. One
meets them in literature so often and so rarely in the flesh! She
contracted the opium habit and to cure that she consulted a mesmerist.
He cured the habit and the disease, and she lived out the psalmist’s
allotment. An everyday occurrence now, it created a great stir in
England two generations ago.
Men and women who write their autobiographies are as a rule prompted
to such achievements by considerations other than the desire to leave
a legacy to the world or to attain immortality; some do it to clear up
their own problems; others do it to facilitate or effect reform; a few
like Benjamin Franklin do it altruistically.
Herbert Spencer wrote his autobiography to supplement his philosophical
work; it shows chiefly the anxiety of its author to state anew the
conclusions he had reached in his studies of ethics and sociology. It
is the picture of a man, engrossed in mental efforts, disregarding the
part played by emotions and affections, cold, didactic and impersonal.
It forms a striking contrast to the autobiography of Darwin which,
though not really a book at all, but a chapter included in his _Life
and Letters_, reveals the modesty, effacement and simplicity which
were the most lovable and conspicuous qualities of the epoch-making
scientist. _Far Away and Long Ago_, the story of the early life of
another English naturalist and one of the most delightful biographies
extant, was written to liberate a shut-in personality. It is strange,
in view of this book, that less was known about W. H. Hudson at the
time of his death a few years ago, than of any writer in Great Britain.
But he was the real “solitary-hearted.” Even to the small circle of his
literary friends, he was not communicative about himself. Had he lived
a half century earlier, he might have found Thoreau sympathetic.
Some autobiographies are written to purge the author’s conscience and
mind of sins of youth or of hallucinatory memories. St. Augustine’s
and Tolstoi’s _Confessions_ are typical of this kind of self-history.
St. Augustine dwells on the dissoluteness of his youth at such length
that it is difficult to obtain constructive thought from the narrative.
One would be tempted to believe that he found a certain pleasure in
recalling the lusts and concupiscences he had left behind when he
became converted, did not his later deeds and actions testify to the
contrary.
There is no doubt that he was one of the greatest sinners and one of
the greatest Saints of antiquity, but his _Confessions_ which reveal
exclusively his sins, are little help in aiding the conversion of a
soul--unless that soul was of such nature that it would have converted
itself; the _Confessions_ are the result of an imagination stirred at
the sight of sins and humbled by the telling of them. John Addington
Symonds has given a comprehensive characterisation of their author in
one of his letters:
“To treat the _Confessions_ of St. Augustine with the
same critical coldness of judgment that is brought to
bear upon ordinary works of art or literature would
be impossible. It stands alone among all the personal
Biographies that have ever been written. It speaks to
us, not like the ordinary narrative of a man’s life, but
like a deep cry of agony; which, once heard, resounds for
ever in our ears, imparting its own pathos to all music
that we hear, and confusing our utterance when we would
express the meaning that it wakens in our soul.”
The motive which prompted Huxley to write his autobiography is found
in his desire to set the facts of his life as straight as he knew
them, thus refuting what the malice, ignorance or vanity of others
might construe them to be. Franklin, on the other hand, was desirous
of showing how poverty could be overcome by thrift and shrewdness,
and his autobiography has been a model for students of all ages. It
is as valuable as a character-building book, as the autobiography of
John Stuart Mill is valuable in showing the waste there is in modern
education; the latter also wished to have his contribution serve
as a tribute to Mrs. Taylor, but both Franklin’s and Mill’s can be
classified under the heading of constructive writing, with an objective
which embraces a large portion of humanity.
These two works differ widely from the autobiographies of General
Grant and Trollope, both of which were prompted by personal motives:
the former to pay his debts, the latter to make money. Such motives do
not necessarily detract from the charm or merit of an autobiography.
Literary merit is not in direct relationship to moral or æsthetical
considerations, and an autobiography written in the hope that the world
will be improved by its perusal may not be worthy of comparison with
one written with obviously personal reasons as its motive.
Many men and women who have made a success of life have been inspired,
helped or guided by reading autobiographies during their plastic
years. It depends upon the individual’s outlook on life which one
helps him. If he is “practical” and material things appeal to him,
Franklin’s story does it; if he is beholden to ideals and the spiritual
side of his nature is dominant, he finds aid and encouragement in Mark
Rutherford’s _Autobiography_, and _Father and Son_, by Edmund Gosse; if
he is ambitious to be a mighty hunter and slay the wolf called want, he
may fortify himself by reading stories like Hamlin Garland’s _A Son of
the Middle Border_, or _Episodes Before Thirty_, by Algernon Blackwood;
if he is inclined to yield to the seductions of science and yet would
avoid becoming a human monster like Gottlieb of _Arrowsmith_ he would
do well to familiarize himself with _Memoirs of My Life_, by Francis
Galton; if he is “temperamental” and keen to know how the artistic
temperament conditions behaviour and how devastating egocentrism may
become, he can get enlightenment from _My Life_, by Richard Wagner. If
Samuel Smiles’ book appealed to him in his youth, he will like Mr. J.
J. Davis’s _The Iron Puddler_, or Mr. Roger Detaller’s _From a Pitman’s
Note-Book_; if recutting and revamping the social fabric intrigues
him, he will like Mr. Robert Smillie’s _My Life for Labour_, or the
_Autobiography of Samuel Gompers_; if within his heart there are graved
some lines setting forth that this is the land of the brave, the home
of the free, the arena of the ambitious, then Professor Pupin’s _From
Immigrant to Inventor_ is the book for him; if he is a pessimist and
wants to be cured, Sir Harry Johnston’s _Story of My Life_ will help
him accomplish it; if he is of a romantic turn of mind, _Everywhere_,
the Memoirs of A. Henry Savage Landor may be tolerated, and if his
vindictiveness has never been adequately appeased, Lady Oxford’s
_Memoirs_ and particularly those that she wrote when she was called
Margot Asquith will be satisfying to him, especially if he is keen to
attract and rivet the attention of all mankind: peer, superior and
inferior.
Few men to whom one of the fine arts or any branch of the humanities
appeal, escape pubescent inquiry concerning such things as the
meaning of life, the soundness of traditional religion, the value of
convention, the genuineness of the social fabric, the sincerity of
morality: and the resulting apprehension and depression in sensitive
natures amount oftentimes to despair and disorientation. John Addington
Symonds and William Hale White--particularly the latter--are the
doctors for such patients. _The Early Life of Mark Rutherford_,
contrary to its deserts, has never been a popular book here or in
England. It is a fine presentation of the artistic temperament trying
to persuade itself to wear the garments of Puritan dogma, shedding
them in moments of indignation and putting them on again when the
voice whispered that Puritanism gives the closest expression of
the truth about life; it shows the agony of the imaginative genius
struggling with the problems of practicality, while in spiritual
travail. It appeals especially to the sad and solitary; to those
dazed by the glamour of the modern world; to those who, dismayed by
its pretentiousness and disgusted by its speciousness, clamour for
simplicity or belief. But it has a message for every one who thinks too
much of himself, or who is out of alignment with his fellows and the
world.
PART II: INTERPRETATIONS
_Part II: Interpretations_
III
LITTERATEURS: AMERICAN WRITERS
A STORY TELLER’S STORY, by _Sherwood Anderson_.
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS, by _Oscar W. Firkins_.
LAFCADIO HEARN’S AMERICAN DAYS, by _Edward Larocque Tinker_.
MARK TWAIN’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.
HENRY THOREAU, by _Leon Bazalgette_.
THE PILGRIMAGE OF HENRY JAMES, by _Van Wyck Brooks_.
The next best thing to talking about ourselves is talking about others.
Hence the lure of autobiographies, biographies, and autobiographical
fiction. James Joyce wrote a book half the size of Webster’s Dictionary
to tell of a few hours in his own life, and Ben Hecht seemingly cannot
exhaust himself. The genesis and development of personality can be
conveyed only by words. Palette and brush in master hands can preserve
for posterity the lineaments, and in a measure the character, of those
we love and those the world admires or fears; but the written word
alone is the medium to convey the soul. Sherwood Anderson has laid bare
his soul in _A Story Teller’s Story_, and he has drawn a portrait of
his father that surpasses Velasquez’ _Innocent VI_.
Rarely have autistic and purposeful thinking, revery and directed
mental activity, been so skilfully displayed, so successfully made
vocal. In the lines, and between the lines, Mr. Anderson has told all
he knows about himself and more. He has put psychologists and writers,
be they Freudians or behaviourists, subjectivists or objectivists,
under obligation to him, for he has permitted them to observe the
gestation and travail of the poet’s fancy, the birth and growth of
poetical form. His story, taken with Mr. Stieglitz’s portrait, tells
all there is to know about a creature at once as simple as the heart of
a child and as complex as the mid-brain of an adult who first saw the
light of day in Camden, Ohio, nearly half a century ago.
He knows little of his ancestry, but that little goes a long way to
explain him. His father, a fifty-fifty mixture of Colonel Sellers and
Wilkins Micawber, born in the South and given to rum, romancing, and
revery, was once a dandy and always a hokum expert. The origin of
his mother, who had been a bound girl in a farmer’s family until she
married, was something of a mystery, which her children did not care to
solve; but she was kind, indulgent, faithful, and she suffered fools
silently. Her mother was an Italian peasant, one-eyed, polyandrous,
and at times murderous. Once a tramp tried to rob her humble home. She
beat him until he begged for mercy; then she filled him and herself
with hard cider and the two went singing off together down the road.
Marvellous germ-and sperm-plasm for a poet; wondrous parentage for one
destined to be absorbed by the visual fancies of his unconscious, to
see strange features in the clouds with Polonius, and faces in the fire
with William Blake. No wonder Sherwood Anderson has often been called
a “nut.” He is not averse to being thought a little insane, but he has
been stung to the quick by charges of “personal immorality.” One with
such ancestry is perhaps not so likely to be an invert as a poet, but
it is from similar ancestry that they both not infrequently come. Had
Mr. Anderson investigated the forebears of Judge Turner who found the
boys of his town were not of his sort and was unable to understand
them, who had never married, and indeed cared nothing for women, he
would have found them in many respects similar to his own. The judge
was very congenial to him, despite the disparity of age. They saw many
things eye to eye; and the short, fat, neatly dressed man with bald
head, white Van Dyke beard, cold blue eyes, soft round white cheeks,
and extraordinarily small hands and feet, is as typical an example of
the strange genesic anomaly as was M. de Charlus whose acquaintance we
made in Marcel Proust’s much discussed _Swann’s Way_. To understand the
long, long thoughts the judge had when as a boy he meditated poisoning
some of his schoolmates, one must either have “temperament” and
“fixations” like Mr. Anderson’s or else be a psychiatrist.
_A Story Teller’s Story_ is full of portraits, mostly miniature, but
here and there is a life-size done with a few sweeps of the brush. Such
is that of Alonzo Berner, from whom Mr. Anderson learned as much about
men as Mr. Kipling did about women from the “arf caste widow, the woman
at Prome, the wife of the head groom or the girl at home.” Alonzo did
not have that contempt for men that Sherwood had. He knew the great
commandment “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”; he had learned
there was none other greater; and it was vouchsafed him to believe.
“Where had I got my contempt and how had he escaped getting it?” You
got it, Sherwood, from the one-eyed grandmother who tried to kill her
granddaughter with a butcher knife, who had four husbands and was ready
for a fifth. Alonzo escaped it through the father who had, the night
the stallion Peter Point died, “some thought about most human beings,
including myself, that I haven’t ever forgot.”
Next to the evolution of the artist, the determination of Sherwood
Anderson to be a writer, the transformation from slug laborer to
chrysalis writer, these analyses are best in a book which is all
excellent.
Freudians will find Mr. Anderson’s story of his life corroborative
of their teachings. Fanciful birth, vicarious parentage, fantasying
childhood, reverying manhood, sexual fixation, self-observation,
unconscious fantasy following in the wake of conscious thought,
conflict between authority and desire--all these and more are here.
Rather than dwell upon them, and upon his artistic temperament, rather
than attempt a summary of his conduct which would represent his
strivings toward the beautiful, I shall discuss what may be called
his urge to authorship. The most remarkable thing about it is that it
did not seize him until comparatively late in life. What it lost in
forwardness it made up in intensity. After having lived nearly one-half
of the life of man as a laborer and business man, he began to write.
“There never was such a mighty scribbler as I later
became and am even now. I am one who loves, like a
drunkard his drink, the smell of ink, and the sight of
a great pile of white sheets that may be scrawled over
with words, always gladdens me ... oh, what glorious
times I have had sitting in little rooms with great piles
of paper before me; what buckets of blood have run from
the wounds of the villain foolish enough to oppose me on
the field of honour; what fair women I have loved, and
how they have loved me and on the whole how generous,
chivalrous, and open-hearted and fine I have been!”
The song chanted by Solomon that has come down the ages to testify
that the wisest of men was also a poet, is not more pregnant with
sincerity, no more redolent of fervor than Mr. Anderson’s record of his
art which he sought in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places
of the stars. By night on his bed he sought it; he sought it in city
streets and country fields, from watchman and from barman, only to
find it finally within himself; in his own creating, shaping intellect
into which the unconscious had projected its own grist. He began to
write of his observations, experiences, and fantasies; and as he wrote
he seasoned them more and more generously with his aspiration: to
cause his fellow men to share his love of beauty, to thrust beauty
first upon the middle west and then upon the U. S. A., to show that
happiness and prosperity are not synonymous. He was by nature a
word-fellow who could at most any time, be hypnotised by high-sounding
words, and he was to come under the influence of Gertrude Stein, a
“surefire” verbal artist; all of this resulted in _Many Marriages_,
which was the life of the author strung on a fictional clothes horse.
John Webster’s _grand geste_ in fiction is Sherwood Anderson’s in
reality. It came to him like a revelation; it came with a rush: the
overwhelming feeling of uncleanliness engendered by buying or selling.
“I was in my whole nature a tale-teller. My father had been one and
his not knowing had destroyed him. The corrupt unspeakable thing that
happened to tale-telling in America was all concerned with this matter
of buying and selling.” And so he walked out of his factory saying to
his secretary, “You may have it, I am not coming back any more.” As
he walked along a spur of railroad track, over a bridge, out of the
town, he whispered to himself, “Oh, you tricky little words, you are my
brothers and for the rest of my life I will be a servant to you.”
That is what he is to-day and likely will remain--a servant of words.
And though their servant, he is yet their master, for he is able to
assemble them in beauty and in majesty; he can march them rhythmically
in single or double file, or in platoons; he can blend them as a
kaleidoscope blends colors; he can draw from them a harmony that
Rimsky-Korsakoff drew from sounds, that Léon Bakst drew from motion
and colour. Indeed, there is a music in his style which, though not
classical, is charming. There is a measured flow of words in every
sentence; alliterations and rhythms, resonances and luminosities which
no contemporaneous American writing exceeds. But its author has a lack
and a compulsion. The former is in the ideational field, the latter in
the emotional. He lacks capacity for synthesis and integration, and
he is obsessed with sex. No one who reads of Nora, and of the high
school graduate from an Illinois town who had married a young man of
that place and come to Chicago with her husband to make their way in
the great world, can fail to interpret his obsession; neither can the
reader fail to understand how large it has loomed in Mr. Anderson’s
life.
The stories Sherwood Anderson used to hear on every side in stable,
work-shop, and factory concerned, he says, one impulse in life. He grew
unspeakably weary of hearing them, and gradually a doubt invaded his
mind. A similar weariness has come to many readers of his stories; and
the doubt that he had of his fellow keg rollers, I have of him.
Few critics will be able to dispose of Sherwood Anderson in as brief
space as his friend Mr. Ben Hecht: “I can give you all of Sherwood
Anderson in a sentence--the wistful idealisation of the masculine
menopause.” Like so many things Mr. Humpty Dumpty Hecht says, there is
truth in it.
Sherwood Anderson of manic-depressive temperament is an artist who
is a blend of many characteristics, the predominant one of which is
a love of beauty, particularly of form. All of them are inherited.
Had he been able, or enabled, to bring the unconscious of his make-up
into consciousness early in life, he might have earned the immortality
of Hawthorne, Howells, or Crane. Had he studied Fielding instead of
Whitman, Chekhov instead of Clemens, he might have been the bell-cow of
the literary herd of the midwest. The man who first said “It is never
too late to mend” has much to answer for.
* * * * *
Bliss Perry, whose reputation for sanity, soundness, and penetration
as a literary critic has long been established, says that Mr.
Firkins’s study of William D. Howells is a great biography. I feel as
a pariah should feel when I cannot share an authority’s conviction
and sentiment. But there is a discursiveness, a pretentiousness, a
highfalutin tone about it that distract me, and a papal atmosphere
about it that I do not breathe easily or invigoratingly. Little
annoying flaws of grammar and construction obtrude themselves while
one reads it. “I will set down briefly the migrations and occupations
of the family.” “The style has a pre-existence in the psychology, is
in essence the ingress of that psychology into language.” “When an
incident of travel reaches its probe into the sensitiveness of the
author’s profoundest and saddest convictions,” etc.
Self-forgetfulness, it has been said, is the beginning of happiness
among books; and it is because I cannot get lost to myself that I
have found less pleasure in Mr. Firkins’s book than in any save Mr.
Bok’s. When I read “the curious strengthening of the position of the
amphibious Balzac in our day,” I immediately begin searching for the
justification of “curious”--and why “amphibious”? Then there darts
into my memory chamber a line from an _Essay in Criticism_, by Robert
Lynd, that I read two or three years ago in _The London Mercury_:
“All criticism is, from one point of view, an impertinence.” Stuart
P. Sherman, reviewing recently Mr. Mencken’s latest book, said he
was determined to conclude his review with a gesture of amicality. I
am equally determined to say that Mr. Firkins’s book would not have
received such universal praise from the reviewers had it not deserved
it.
* * * * *
We like to read about men of genius and identify our virtues with
theirs; we deny ourselves their sins, and we do not recognise our
limitations in theirs. Lafcadio Hearn was a man of genius who had
tremendous limitations, and undoubtedly the Reverend John Roach Straton
would say he wallowed in sin. But he was an interesting human being;
he had a most uncommon ancestry; and if there were any occidental and
Christian conventions he did not trample upon, transcend and rail at,
it was because he did not encounter them.
In one of his letters to Henry E. Krehbiel, he called himself a dreamer
of monstrous dreams. The reader who gets information of Hearn from
Mr. Tinker’s book will think he should have said “a monster dreamer of
monstrous dreams,” for the Hearn depicted in _Lafcadio Hearn’s American
Days_ was a monster. He ate like one, he loved like one, he had no
family feeling, no capacity for sustained friendship. No hand extended
to help him was withdrawn unbitten; no kindness was ever accepted that
he did not endeavour to repay with cruelty and abuse; no appreciation
and praise were ever accorded him that he did not reciprocate with
scurrility and scorn. Exceptions prove the rule: Mr. Courtney’s hand
bore no teeth marks and Elwood Hendrick still speaks lovingly of him.
All that Mr. Tinker says of him may be true, but it is not a picture
of Lafcadio Hearn as he really was, or as the letters published by
Mrs. Elizabeth Bisland Wetmore discover him, or as _Reminiscences_
by his widow show him to be. He was hybrid, he was oversexed, he had
paranoiac trends, he was pathologically sensitive and morbidly timid,
he was deformed facially and possibly morally, and he saw neither
far nor straight. What has all that to do with Lafcadio Hearn, an
asset of literature? He wrote like a god and he made angelic music.
_Chita_, _Kokoro_, _The Nun of the Temple of Amida_, attest it. He was
a critic in the class of Rémy de Gourmont. He was a translator that
Mrs. Constance Garnett would call master. He had a flair for beauty of
literary style keener than any one since Pater. He could not judge men
and he could not discriminate between women; he had no colour sense,
and his olfactory sense was abnormal; he had greater compassion for
turtles and toads than he had for Jesuits and Jews; but he rarely hurt
any one’s feelings save those of Mr. Alden. That grand old mediator
of writers’ thoughts and reflections said, “Father, forgive him, he
neither knows the nature of his act, nor the enormity of the offence,
for he is a genius.” He may not have been “cultured” to a twisted mind
like that possessed by Dr. George M. Gould, but Goethe would have
thought him cultured, for he was a poet; and George Moore would have
made an affirmation to that effect for, like himself, Hearn was a
story-teller; Aristippus would not have denied him, for he too was a
hedonist, and Anatole France would have proclaimed him, for they both
held that beauty was the touchstone for worth.
Judged by his contribution to literature, he was a man of culture and
he had illumination and understanding.
I can understand that it interests physicians, especially
psychiatrists, to investigate the ancestry and study the conduct of men
who agitated the waters of their time; but I cannot understand what
bearing heritage or behaviour has on the contribution of these men
to literature. How does it concern the seeker of emotional solace or
intellectual sustenance to know that Poe and Verlaine were drunkards,
that Rimbaud and Baudelaire were inverted genesically; that Hearn’s
father was an Irish rake devoid of parental responsibility, his mother
an Ionian of composite ancestry profoundly psychopathic who married a
Jew?
Mr. Tinker says, “Hearn’s peculiarities and mental affinities were
entirely the result of idiosyncrasies of ancestry and youthful
environment.” Well, is Hearn any different in that respect from
the whole world? Does Mr. Tinker aim to do what Mr. White recently
attempted to do for Woodrow Wilson: allot his cardiac virtues to the
Wilsons and his cerebral gifts to the Woodrows? I suppose he would
attribute his bulimia and illassible sexual cravings to Charles Bush
Hearn; his tenderness for cats and his desire to create beauty to Rosa
Tessima; his Jesuit phobia to the strain of English blood; his penchant
for gastronomies to the Turk strain; his _Wanderlust_ to an ancestral
Arab; his passion for personal cleanliness to a gipsy forebear who had
learned that there are few more pleasant experiences than those of
bathing; his pride to a remote Moor; but his sensitiveness came from
his wall eye--all his friends say that.
Mr. Tinker thinks “his warring inherited instincts were to have a large
part in moulding his life, for they made of his soul a battleground.
Frank Oriental sensuousness was shamed, but not curbed, by Anglo-Saxon
self-control. Gallic expansiveness tried to break through Arab
impassivity, and all the while, Gipsy lure of the road and love of
new location lashed his life to restlessness; in short, what one
set of inherited impulses bade him do, another inhibited, until all
constructive action was paralysed.”
Lafcadio Hearn’s soul as it has been revealed to me from a long
intimacy with his writings is not my idea of a battleground.
Undoubtedly his instincts had much to do with shaping his life. They
have in shaping the life of any one who amounts to something. Lafcadio
Hearn had a very high sex coefficient and he did not bend the knee
to church and convention. Well, there are others, and I fancy they
would deny that their souls are battlegrounds. And this paralysis of
constructive action, how does that show itself? Certainly not in New
Orleans, more certainly not in Japan. Perhaps in Martinique? The heat
and the atmosphere there make for lassitude that is tantamount to
paralysis. We are perhaps on safer ground in attributing it to them
than to warring impulses. I need scarcely add that I do not admit
Hearn’s “paralysis of constructive action.”
Mr. Tinker’s book is a wrong picture of Lafcadio Hearn, but it is not
the author’s fault. It is Hearn’s fault. He should not have philandered
with Althea Foley; he should have spurned Dr. Gould’s advances; and
knowing Denny Corcoran’s record he should have avoided him; and we
can never forgive him for not wearing “stylebuilt” clothes. Had he
done so he would not have had Krehbiel’s door slammed in his face, nor
would the great musical critic have had occasion to write the letter,
Cæsarean in brevity and Nelsonian in construction: “Dear Hearn, you can
go to Japan, or you can go to Hell.”
Suppose Mr. Tinker were to get drunk and stay so more or less for a
week, and that I should shadow him with camera and notebook. Does any
one think that my record of his conduct and my picture of him would be
correct or adequate? I do not. It might do him a great injustice.
However, much should be forgiven a biographer who makes such searching
criticism as: Hearn’s constant vigilance to suppress finally came
to inhibit his creative power. This explains the carefully wrought
artificiality--the tenuousness of subject matter, but the exquisite
finish of form--which is characteristic of all his books. The truth is
he was forced to spin gossamer out of hemp when he could have made it
into strong rope.
* * * * *
William Dean Howells said that Mark Twain was the Lincoln of
literature. That is the apogee of praise. The more facets of his
personality we see, the more richly does he seem to deserve the praise.
The immortality of Poe, Whitman, and Mark Twain would seem to be
assured. Other names have been on the roster long enough to make
it fairly certain that they also will be chosen, but Hawthorne’s
reputation wanes as Melville’s enhances. Edwin Robinson a generation
hence may have greater renown than Longfellow, and William James may be
quoted when Emerson is forgotten.
We long for a great emotional writer as the Jews long for a Messiah,
and the fact that Mark Twain was vouchsafed us encourages me to believe
that our chances are greater than those of the Jews. We have never had
a really great poet unless Whitman was one, and not even an approach to
a satirist, and Mark Twain is our signal contribution to humour. He had
also the capacity to convey it, and an unawareness of the supremacy of
either gift. With it all he was a philosopher, a man of culture, and
fundamentally a poet.
His was the antithesis of the Messianic complex. He had a simple
heart, and an intricate soul. None of his writings reveals it as
does his autobiography. It is as unlike the customary autobiography
as Mark Twain was unlike the average man. It does not begin with a
tedious narrative of his forebears, and tiresome descriptions of their
environment. Nor does it dwell upon his mental prodigiousness and moral
sufficiency, followed by the enumeration of the obstacles he surmounted
owing to his health, holiness, habit, and his unusual possessions. It
does not end with a verbal portrait provocative of memories of Dr.
Munyon and his warnings.
It is the picture of a man, happily not a one-hundred-percent-American,
who lived during the second most important epoch of this country’s
history, and who from early childhood was a close observer and from his
youth a faithful transcriber of his observations. He began to write his
autobiography in his teens and continued to write it nearly to the day
of his death. _Roughing It_, _Tom Sawyer_, _Life on the Mississippi_,
_Innocents Abroad_, are just as much description of his life as his
autobiography.
Mark Twain’s conception of how to write biography was to start at no
particular “period,” to wander at will over his life, to talk only
about the thing which interested him for the moment, to drop it when
its interest threatened to pale, and to turn his talk upon the new and
more interesting things that intruded themselves into his mind meantime.
It is not only the picture of Samuel L. Clemens that one gets with the
autobiography. There are little masterpieces of his brother Orion, of
his daughter Susy, of his wife and of his mother, and there is one
of General Grant that should add to his fame as a generous, kindly,
big-hearted, forgiving man.
[Illustration: MARK TWAIN]
Did any one ever describe an amiable person so well as he describes
his fellow schoolboy John Robards; and did any one ever succeed
better in conveying the handicap that excessive amiability puts upon
its possessor? But the kohinoor of this tray of jewels is his
description of his brother Orion. Mark Twain may not have succeeded
in writing an account of his own life that was satisfactory, or
that he considered revelatory, but the description and analysis of
his brother’s personality is a real contribution to psychology and
biography. It is possibly the best description of a human chameleon
in all literature. It may never become as familiar as that of Colonel
Sellers, for Mark Twain did not put him _au naturel_ in his fiction.
Orion Clemens was fifty-fifty optimist and pessimist. Aside from the
fundamental endowments of honesty, truthfulness, and sincerity, he
was as unstable as water, as inconstant as a weather vane. He had an
unquenchable thirst for praise. You could dash his spirits with a
single word; you could raise them unto the sky with another. He was
a Presbyterian one Sunday, a Methodist the next, and a Baptist when
the fancy seized him. He was a Whig to-day, Democrat next week, and
anything fresh he could find in the political market the week after.
He invariably acted on impulse and never reflected. He woke with
an eagerness about some matter or other every morning; it consumed
him all day; it perished in the night; and before he could get his
clothes on he was on fire with a fresh interest next morning. He
literally took no thought for the morrow, and it was inevitable that
his illustrious brother should have to support him during his waning
days. Psychologically, he was a splendid example of adult infantilism,
manic-depressive temperament; genius is often associated with these
possessions.
The outline and the penumbra of these same qualities are to be seen
in Mark Twain himself. He was emotional, impulsive, explosive, avid
of praise, subject to depression and exaltation, and unprovident. But
he was teachable and his eldest brother was not; experience taught
him and environment influenced him, but they had no more effect upon
Orion than headache has upon a drunkard. Above all, the possession that
distinguished Samuel from Orion was humor.
There is much inquiry these days whether man has ceased to progress,
and biologists ask themselves if evolution is at a standstill. From
the standpoint of intellectuality it has apparently ceased. We have
had nothing the past two thousand years that compares with the eight
hundred years of unfettered thought which the human race enjoyed
while Greek philosophy was supreme. That progress has ceased from the
standpoint of emotionality is not so apparent, and this is the ray of
hope that reaches us; for if it has not ceased, we can confidently
look forward to a new code of ethics that will be livable, a new
dispensation that will allow the sheep and the goats to pasture in the
same field and sleep in the same shed, a new religion that will be
reconcilable with science.
It transcends understanding that so much attention is given to
the intellect and so little to the emotions. It is the latter,
together with articulateness, that distinguish us from the beast,
and approximate us to God. Humour and love are the two most precious
emotional possessions. Mark Twain had them both, and none of his
writings reveals them more conspicuously than his autobiography.
His account of Orion’s adventure at the house of Dr. Meredith, his
description of how he himself caught the measles, how he found the
fifty-dollar bill and the thoughts that it engendered, how he was
temporarily cured of the habit of profanity by his wife, are examples
of his humour; and his accounts of Susy, of his wife, of Patrick,
reveal his love. His narratives about the burglarisation of his house,
the interview with President Cleveland’s wife, the potato incident at
the Kaiser’s dinner party, his description of the illness and death of
his little boy--as well as the testimony of his family and intimates
show how enslaved he was by revery.
One of the many things that make this autobiography so delightful,
is its revelation of how human Mark Twain was in his sympathies and
antipathies, in his loves and hatreds. His words about Susy and Livy
are as tender as anything I have read in a long time, and his account
of Patrick makes one regret that the juggernaut Progress has eliminated
the coachman. In the jargon of the day, Theodore Roosevelt “got his
goat”; and the things he said about those who sought to crush him after
they had brought about his financial ruin would not be considered
printable in the Victorian era.
Mark Twain was in deadly earnest about many things he said “in fun.”
I choose to believe that when he wrote, “I intend this autobiography
shall become a model for all future autobiographies, and I also intend
that it shall be read and admired a good many centuries because of its
form and method,” he meant what he said. Whether he meant it or not
it is true, and his country, proud of him, should be pleased with the
account he left of himself to be published posthumously. It is ideal
though it is not adequate. Those who would know what sort of man Mark
Twain was may find out by reading it; those who wish to learn what
he accomplished, how he did it and where, may learn from Mr. Paine’s
biography of him. It is to be hoped that the rumour that there are
other volumes to follow is founded in fact.
Mark Twain was a spiritual composite of Patrick, the coachman and
gentleman; of Mr. Burlingame whose ways were all clean, whose motives
were high and fine; of Dr. John Brown who immortalised his own name
with _Rab and His Friends_; and of his brother Orion, as they are
described by himself. The best of Hermes was beaten up in the mixture.
Joe Miller and Miguel Cervantes alternated as batter beaters.
* * * * *
The further removed we get from the time of Henry David Thoreau, the
more appealing his personality and his experiment will be to us and
to our descendants. He was difficult to approach, more difficult to
companion, impossible to love, and hard to admire. Death took the
offence out of his egotism, the meaninglessness out of his paradoxes,
the repulsion out of his self-sufficiency. We forget his congenital
and laboriously acquired incapacity for enthusiasm when we read how he
championed John Brown. It no longer irritates us that he was determined
to base the laws of the universe on his own experiences and convictions
when we see through the vista of nearly a century how he lived his
hermit-like life. Time pales his peculiarities and limitations, and
tints his possessions and virtues. It may safely be prophesied that, as
we grow individually more sophisticated and nationally less democratic,
the books that have been made from his diary will be read with greater
avidity and more understanding.
A new biography of the Poet-Philosopher-Naturalist and America’s first
famous recluse, written by a foreign pen, justifies these statements.
Mr. Van Wyck Brooks has made a translation of the book which mirrors
his culture and testifies his mastery of literary technique. It is
the work of a Frenchman who stresses the Gallic and Celtic strain in
Thoreau, and who sympathises with his determination to create and
develop himself, to live, to make of existence the most beautiful
work of art. M. Bazalgette pitches his song of praise in a high key.
At times, it taxes the reader’s credulity; at other times, the high
notes long sustained exhaust him. The biographer loves to dwell on
Thoreau’s affectivity. He not only tells how Thoreau felt, he describes
his thoughts, and the thoughts he should have had. But he makes no
estimate of him as a poet, philosopher or naturalist. He submits the
facts of his life, the contacts of his activity, and lets the reader
draw his own conclusions. It is a picture of Thoreau that many will
prefer to that drawn by Sanborn, or Channing who knew him intimately,
or by Marble or Salt who were dependent upon his diaries and letters
for their information; for many prefer portraits that are idealised,
and he depicts his physical features as no other biographer has done.
M. Bazalgette essays to reincarnate and display the poet’s thoughts
on his peregrinations and pilgrimages. Some of these reflections are
infantile, a few puerile, such as the description of his knapsack
and the little bundle he carried in his hand; the discussion of the
advantages of an umbrella over a raincoat; the discourse on shoe
strings and on old newspapers.
There can be little doubt that Thoreau was sometimes playful and
joyous with human beings, but I doubt if he were ever so capable of
self-forgetfulness as it is alleged he was on a visit to New Bedford
when he executed, before his hostess at the piano, a Zulu dance in the
presence of Mr. Alcott. The story reminds one of the conduct of the
First Ranger in Von Weber’s romantic opera.
It was a strange freak of nature that manifested itself in Concord,
Mass., July 12th, 1817, by the birth of a Thoreau child to which was
given the name of Henry David. In breeding parlance he was a “sport,”
but from the social standpoint, he was far removed from it. He did
not have the varied ancestry that Sinclair Lewis gives Doctor Martin
Arrowsmith, but it was diversified enough to satisfy any one. Three
distinct chromosonic streams, French, Scotch and Saxon, confluented in
him. His father was the son of a Frenchman born in the Isle of Jersey
who married Jane Burns, daughter of a Quaker Scotch who emigrated to
Massachusetts. His mother’s forebears, the Dunbars and the Jones, had
been long enough in this country to be entitled to the designation
American.
There was little of Hermes in Henry Thoreau, but that little he got
from a maternal uncle, Charles Dunbar, and from him also he got his
unconventionally, his _wanderlust_, his self-command, his equilibrium
and determination. Uncle Charles had a disdain for taking thought of
the morrow that amounted to contempt and nephew Henry inherited it.
Where he got his self-sufficiency, his indifference to man and his
comforts, his amatory dysesthesia we are still uninformed.
No biographer has ever found much material for his pen in the plastic
years of Thoreau. M. Bazalgette has been no more successful than his
predecessors. Thoreau’s most distinctive urge: love of nature, and
the most conspicuous feature of his personality: self-sufficiency,
revealed themselves early in life and accompanied him to the day of
his death, and that is all there is to be said. Neither in school nor
in college did his conduct suggest scholarship or antinomianism, but
on leaving Harvard his Commencement Oration, in which he unrolled his
map of life, suggested them both. His auditors perceived but did not
apprehend that the future itinerant surveyor had had other engrossments
than examinations at Harvard. For him “this curious world which we
inhabit is more wonderful than it is convenient; more beautiful than
it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used. The
order of things should be somewhat reversed: the seventh should be
man’s day of toil wherein to earn his living by the sweat of his brow,
and the other six his Sabbath of the affections and the soul.” The
distinguishing feature of the paranoiac is that he reasons logically,
often trenchantly, but his premises are always wrong. One could argue
that the world is the most congenial place we know, that its usefulness
is testified by the mouths that it feeds, that those whom it supports
would not go very far should they substitute admiration for use of it.
Radicalism which had budded slowly in college flowered quickly at home.
It disturbed his family and annoyed his town-folk but water on a duck’s
back was a riot compared to the sensations that their disturbance
and annoyance caused in him. Had he been in the habit of invoking
supernatural aid he probably would have said, “God help me, I can do no
other.” A college course nearly a century ago was supposed to prepare
for a vocation, but Henry Thoreau manifested no sign that it had
prepared him. He began to teach in the public school, but his ideas and
conduct were offensive to parent and taxpayer, so he started a school
of his own and began to be keenly attentive to his sole confidant, his
diary; and he built a boat. In it, he and his brother John went from
Concord, Mass., to Concord, New Hampshire. The description of that
trip is the only tiresome section in M. Bazalgette’s book. This is all
the more astonishing to one who read _The Week_ in his boyhood, was
fascinated by it, and who has read parts of it many times since then.
Thoreau’s contact with the transcendentalists is described most
sympathetically, and the sketches which the author makes of some of
the leading figures, Emerson, Alcott, Channing, Margaret Fuller, are
animated and vigorous. If ever one falls in love with Thoreau it is
when he goes to the Emersons, to work for his board, as it were. Here
for the first time, he seems to be human: his playfulness with the
children, his praise of Mrs. Fuller, his appreciation of Aunt Mary
testify his kinship to man. The chip which he seemed always to carry
on his shoulder when he frequented the haunts of man, was consigned
to the woodbox and quickly burnt up. Here he indulged his tastes and
developed his ambition. The fields and the woods told him their secrets
and his host took him on adventurous excursions through the clouds into
the realms of philosophy. The children adored him, birds trusted him,
beasts loved him. Thoreau was happy and admitted it. But happiness like
all other things in the world is transitory and cyclical. He found it
out when he went to Staten Island to tutor the Philosopher’s nephew.
Neither the child nor the parents was sympathetic, and he was soon
back in Concord helping his father make pencils. Manual labour was, in
his opinion, the thing which agrees best with an intellectual worker.
It would seem to have been congenial to him--at times. Agrippa would
probably have agreed with him but scarcely any one this side of the
Roman. But that no one was in accord with him would not have disturbed
Henry Thoreau. Like all possessors of paranoiac trends, he had faith
and confidence in himself that transcended in intensity and depth every
other kind of faith and confidence. He was not like other men. He was
an American who cared nothing about getting on; a Yankee without the
slightest relish for trading; a man who seemed bent on remaining poor;
an individual in whose veins flowed the blood of the Celt and the Gaul,
whose temperature had never been raised by any of Eve’s descendants; he
was the one man in all the world who did not need a friend. He could
heed nothing that was said by man and he could hear everything that was
said by Nature. Public opinion was against him, but he had a contempt
for public opinion and for those who made it that words are impotent
to express. He liked all animal life, man least of all. The higher
one goes in the scale of animal life, the less the species understood
him and trusted him. His fellows found him conceited, sarcastic,
uppish; animals found him kind, companionable and simple. Men doubted
his sincerity and his sanity, but their doubt was founded on their
own fatuity. Animals trusted him. He was in love with the world and
satisfied with himself. He was more incapable of love than Amiel.
He had some family feeling as a child, but as years went by, it was
replaced by an affectionate feeling for poor, ignorant, simple people,
and small folk. They were his real family. He did not want to live with
them; he wanted to live alone, but he wanted to think of them. They
were like regular work, they would prevent him from living his life.
The simple life as Roosevelt understood it was a riot of luxury for
Thoreau.
It is well-known that solitude whether of desert or mountain often
increases self-consciousness to such a degree that the individual
doubts his own identity. But the eternities did not press down on
Thoreau, or submerge the boundaries of his reason. Neither solitude
nor poverty, neither dreaming nor distress of mind could make a
mystic of Thoreau. He was practical and pragmatic, but the world of
his acquaintance would not admit it. He patted the non-conformist of
religion on the back; he spat in the face of the non-conformist of life.
The whole world knows that he built himself a cabin on Walden Pond; as
John the Baptist did in the wilderness, he nourished himself on locusts
and wild honey with an occasional cereal and vegetable. For two years
he devoted himself to finding out what life is and how it should be
lived. Thoreau’s poetic biographer would have us believe that every
hour in Walden was like the measure of sand passed through the sieve of
the gold seeker--it left enough of residue to make a boy comfortable
for the rest of his days; perhaps it did, but many of his readers other
than those from Missouri will want to have other proof of it than is
given in a book entitled _Walden, or Life in the Woods_. It is the
romantic Frenchman who sees him there in this setting.
“You would say then that the earth had chosen this poor,
shy boy whom you see absorbed there, on the threshold
of his cabin, as an instrument for thinking in peace
of its own unity and eternity. How can he say where he
is? The planet is silent, time and space are strangely
annihilated, the notion of any journey is lost, he may
be at the antipodes. Under the pines of Walden, this man
who is lost in his dream is Mir Mohammed Ali, perhaps,
the painter of Ispahan; his American profile is drawn
in miniature in the colours of a precious stone on the
blue of the pond. Or is he some Chinese poet-philosopher
in whom mingle the souls of animals, and plants, and
hermits sitting under an arbour near a little lake? There
comes to this man as he listens to sounds beyond music,
a music that is deeper and more ample than the music of
his everyday life; he feels on his palate as it were a
taste of immortality--it grows clearer than the clear
morning about him. This beetle that buzzes by, this sweet
flag swaying on the pond are like messengers charged
with transmitting to him the friendship of men who have
dreamed the same dreams in the depth of the old Orient.”
But the friendship of the forest became irksome to Thoreau and he went
back to the Sage’s house while the Sage himself was abroad. Again it
fitted him like an old glove. He was not ecstatic there as he was in
his cabin on the pond, but he was happy; this happiness was interrupted
by a lady who thought to marry him, but like so many other little
annoyances of life, the trouble was transitory. After a short time he
tried lecturing but he did not hit it off with his audiences. They
could not stomach either his paradoxes or his ferocious affirmations.
He irritated, not amused them; he bored, not instructed them.
When he was in contact with a superior like Emerson or Agassiz, he
curbed his tongue, but how he really felt about scientists may be
learned from his journal; he considered them pedantic and pretentious.
He went to Boston to consult a book but, in the Library he was so
self-conscious that he could not concentrate his attention. The city,
though it reeked of respectability, was full of shams and shoddy.
“What,” he demanded, “is the real?”
The one great enthusiasm of Thoreau’s life was engendered by John
Brown. He had no more patriotism than he had family feeling, but he had
an enormous sense of justice. The speeches and conduct of that veteran
abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, moved him considerably, but the
seizure of the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, on October 18th,
1859, frenzied him. He had met John Brown, he had learned something
of his thought and of his plans, without being particularly moved by
them. But he was agitated to the depth of his soul by the thought of
the gallows’ rope strangling the rough neck of his old friend and he
began a verbal and scriptural drive to prevent the violence. It was the
only real storm of his blood. M. Bazalgette describes it with great
artistry. Likewise Thoreau’s meeting with Whitman is well rendered,
but with not quite the same attention to verity. The account of the
naturalist’s encounter with his hereditary enemy, tuberculosis, of his
trip to the Middle West, of his last days, is masterfully done.
The great hiatus in Thoreau’s nature, moral and physical, was his
incapacity for friendship. Emerson liked him but not enthusiastically,
and he was Emerson’s handy man. Harrison Blake made a hero of him,
and Daniel Ricketson of Cape Cod tried to deal with him on terms of
equality; but the former’s admiration annoyed him, and a little of the
latter’s _bonne camaraderie_ sufficed him for a long time. The man who
came nearest to him was William Ellery Channing: whimsical, fanciful,
unsociable, infantile but charming--of whom Thoreau wrote: “He will
accept sympathy and aid, but he will not bear questioning. He will
ever be reserved and enigmatic and you must deal with him at arm’s
length.” It is not improbable that he understood Thoreau but one is not
convinced of it by reading _Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist_, published in
1876.
M. Bazalgette’s sympathy with his subject facilitates understanding,
and the concluding pages of the seventh section of his book is the
best soul-portrait of Henry Thoreau in existence. But it is not the
last. Others will attempt it. Some day an interpreter of behaviour will
explain the man who wrote, “For joy I could embrace the earth, I shall
delight to be buried in it. And then I think of those among men who
will know that I love them, though I tell them not.” The interpreter
will tell why he did not tell them and why he could not.
Henry Thoreau was an intellectual monster. It showed in his face,
in his prehensility, dexterity, sense-acuteness and in his conduct.
He was a misogynist, teetotaler, vegetarian. He had no family or
community feeling. He was wholly devoid of the sense of humour. He
had no generosity, no sense of obligation, no bowels of compassion,
save for animals. He was a universal dissenter, saturated with keen
self-appreciation and devoted to self-indulgence. He had none of the
weaknesses called vices, few of the strengths called virtues, and
despite it all in life he was happy and in death he is a national
asset. He will therefore always be an interesting subject for the
moralist, the behaviourist and the psychologist.
His was a strange personality. He could not come out of himself, mingle
with the world, lose his soul and thus save it. He had no wife, no
children, no home, no town, no country as a part of himself, and yet
despite this his “self” seemed not to suffer mutilation. A modern
philosopher, Bradley, says: “A man is not what he thinks of, and yet is
the man he is because of what he thinks of.” Thoreau was a man made by
thought and he was that man because of what he thought.
Henry Thoreau did not add to the world’s knowledge, nor did his
activities increase or facilitate its dissemination, but he made a
contribution to the art of living at a time that was propitious and
in a country that sadly needed it. He was a primitive in an artless
land, an idealist in a country of materialists, a pagan in a community
of puritans, a singer of nature to philistines with ears stuffed with
cotton wool. He sought the ideal with the same ardour as man seeks the
pleasure of the senses. He was a thinker, not a sensualist; a poet not
a priest; a Pagan not a Christian; a genius not well poised who blazed
the way for Burroughs and Muir and scores of others who have opened our
eyes to the beauty of nature and have shown us how to appreciate and
profit by familiarity with it. Personality defects fortunately do not
long outlive the body. We quickly forget, when those we love are no
longer with us, the things that annoyed us and we remember only their
virtues. Time will remove the sting from Thoreau’s contempt, the hurt
from his disdain, the injury from his indifference to the beliefs and
welfare of his fellow-man. It will deal with him as it is dealing with
Woodrow Wilson.
* * * * *
“For God’s sake, try to get at him” said Convick to his young friend
when he threw Vereker’s (Henry James’) new novel into his hand and
asked him to review it for the _Times Literary Supplement_. The young
friend did it and he was convinced that he _had_ got at him; but later
when Vereker said across the dinner table at a country house where
he was staying, when the review came under discussion, “Oh, it’s
all right--the usual twaddle,” Convick’s young friend did not feel
so puffed up. Yet he need not have felt humiliated, for Henry James
himself was more lacking in specificity when he discussed his books
than when he talked of anything else. The earlier ones were written
that he might indulge his creative instinct (which was to produce works
of art); the next that he might discover new avenues leading to art’s
treasury; the last that he might guess the riddle that he propounded.
There was an idea in his work just the same as there was in Goya’s.
Goya was not able to describe it, neither was Henry James. A great many
persons have succeeded in giving us a fairly comprehensive account of
Goya’s idea; and a few, for instance, Mr. Follett, Mr. Beach, Miss
Rebecca West, have laboured with considerable success to make us see
the treasures of patience and ingenuosity that Henry James displayed in
the perpetuation of _his_ idea. Many readers of Henry James do not see
that the texture of his books constitutes a complete representation of
what he believed to be an exquisite scheme, but the initiated do and
that is all he had a right to expect.
A sensitive, scholarly, sympathetic student of literature, Van Wyck
Brooks, who has made a serious and laborious study of his writings
which he calls _The Pilgrimage of Henry James_, attempts to explain why
Henry James made a failure of life. If the interested reader objects
that the word “failure” is too strong, he has only to study the last
years of the master’s life, during which he expressed frequently to
his friends a dissatisfaction with his accomplishments, and allowed
them to discern that he had not received from the world the beer and
skittles that he had anticipated in order to be convinced the term is
not misapplied.
Mr. Brooks would have us believe that Henry James had a delusion and
that it conditioned his conduct. The delusion was that somewhere in the
world he could find a cordial, inviting culture; a people who would
have urbanity, understanding, and charm; an arena where vulgarity of
speech and conduct were rigorously excluded, where they would die of
inanition did they succeed in forcing an entrance; where there would
be no jostling, elbowing, or hurrying; where no one was better than
his neighbour; where boasting was barred and boosting prohibited;
a land where every prospect pleased and not even man was vile; the
ideal land for which no one but a Henry James ever searches. Then Mr.
Brooks thrusts an illusion on him as well, an optical illusion: he sees
England as such a land.
After nursing the delusion for more than a quarter of a century, and
after having lived intimately with the illusion for a similar period,
the cloud began to lift from his mind, the scales to drop from his
eyes. The delusion gradually left him and the illusion faded and
vanished. Then his mind became the prey of a question: whether he might
not have developed more harmoniously and survived more effectively
had he remained in America. The question obsessed him and, strangely
enough, since obsessions do not usually condition deliberate conduct,
it compelled him to formulate a plan to “go back to America, to retrace
the past, to see for himself, to recover on the spot some echo of
ghostly footsteps, the sound as of taps on the window-pane heard in
the glimmering dawn.” He had been in cotton-wool too long, he must
experience some of the perils of exposure, otherwise, he would succumb
to the first draught; moreover, he was hungry for material, for an
“all-round renovation of his too monotonised grab-bag”; he needed
shocks.
Had I not such a high regard for Mr. Brooks as author and interpreter,
I should reply to him as M’Liss did to the school-examiner who sought
to humble her beloved schoolteacher by posing the question: “Has the
sun ever stood still in the heavens?” But as I have such esteem of
him, of his sincerity and artistry, I content myself with saying, “It
is not true.” To bring Mr. Hueffer (I assume he means Ford Madox Ford)
forward to give corroborative testimony does not bolster up the case.
Mr. Ford is a discredited witness; his reputation for veracity has had
a tremendous dent put in it recently by Mrs. Conrad. And I am in as
favourable a position to give testimony as even Mr. Gosse. When Henry
James made this “come back” attempt which Mr. Brooks elaborates in
the chapter entitled “The Altar of the Dead,” the arterial disease to
which he finally succumbed had already progressed to such a stage as to
give great anxiety and concern to his intimates. He put himself under
my professional care and I saw him at close range nearly every day
for two months; and talked with him, or listened to him, on countless
subjects. I believe that it would not have been possible for him to
have harboured and essayed the plan that Mr. Brooks credits him with
having, or to have ruminated on it as he says he did, without my having
become aware of its existence in his mind.
Henry James was a man out of the ordinary. He was the type of man that
one, no matter how widely travelled, meets but once or twice in a
lifetime. It would take a long time to enumerate his virtues, for he
had them all, the cardinal and the trivial. He loved bread, music and
the laugh of a child, hence no one kept him three paces distant. It
would also take a long time to enumerate his defects, for though he had
few of the major ones, he had a multitude of the minor.
I have always questioned whether it facilitates an understanding of
Henry James the artist to understand Henry James the man. In my own
case, I am sure I had as comprehensive a peep into his artistic soul
after I had read _The Turn of the Screw_, _The Princess Casamasima_,
_The Ambassadors_, and _The Golden Bowl_, as after I had come to know
him intimately, when he was engrossed in the problem of abstract design
and fundamental organisation.
Henry James had an enormous amalgam of the feminine in his make-up; he
displayed many of the characteristics of adult infantilism; he had a
singular capacity for detachment from reality and with it a dependence
upon realities that was even pathetic. He had a dread of ugliness in
all forms, banality and vulgarity that the devil is reputed to have for
Holy Water, and he was solitary-hearted. Unlike Hartley Coleridge’s
queen of noble nature’s crowning, he had love and he had understanding
friends, but he had small capacity to avail himself of the gifts which
they desired to lavish on him. His life had been devoted to the pursuit
of an ideal; he had never been able to formulate with precision,
or to describe that ideal with words. He came as near to it in the
little story called _The Figure in the Carpet_ as he could come to
it. If he were not able to describe this ideal with the lucidity and
comprehensibility with which Leonardo described his, when he was at the
zenith of his creative power, why are we astonished at his inability to
do it when these powers were undermined by arteriosclerosis?
The great defect in the make-up of Henry James was in the amatory
side of his nature. His amatory coefficient was comparatively low;
his gonadal sweep was narrow. Had he had a quarter of the former that
Goethe possessed or one-half the sweep of Anatole France, it would be
safe to say that Henry James would have been the greatest literary
figure that ever came out of America, and that there would now be many
James carrying his name to perpetuity. It is a measureless impediment,
inability to fall in love; it is a dreadful handicap to have feminine
and masculine characteristics nearly equally proportioned in one’s
make-up; adult infantilism makes tremendously for dissatisfaction with
what life brings, and a low basal metabolic rate which gives rise to a
race of fletcherisers or other faddists is a burden that many find too
hard to bear.
Henry James had them all. Had he not had them, he would have been
happier and possibly he would have had a more successful career as
an author, if success is measured by the rule of popularity. If his
grandfathers had not been Irish; if he had spent his youth in Hoboken
and not in Newport; if he had gone to school in the fifth ward and not
in Switzerland; if he had had a little judicial starving meted out to
him in his early maturity, he might have had a happier old age and
fewer yearnings, fewer regrets that his life had not been fuller. Not
that I admit for one moment that his old age was unhappy, or that he
had such regrets or yearnings. The idea is Mr. Brooks’. It is in his
book we find that here was a sort of a lost soul, beating its enfeebled
wings against a cage from which time had not only removed the gild, but
which it had rusted as well.
Henry James did not dislike America, but the people he met here
with few exceptions did not interest him, and most of them annoyed
him, sometimes to the point of explosion. He had had many pleasant
experiences in Italy and in France, and he treasured them as a prima
donna treasures programmes and testimonials. He often took them from
the strongboxes of his memory and re-invoked the pleasurable sensations
that he had had in acquiring them. Above everything in the world he
valued good form, and all that it implies; good taste, good manners,
good breeding, good conduct, and he had convinced himself from taking
thought and from experience that it was to be had in England, even
without the asking. He took his tree of life there and planted it
and only one root developed, the social root. The political, the
scholastic, the religious, the marathon roots, did not develop. In
other words, the roots that make the tree of life so compelling of
admiration in England did not grow from the tree that Henry James
planted there. The tree that did grow was, however, sturdy and
majestic. It has given shade and protection to many travellers since
its full growth. The man who planted it insured, so far as he could,
that it should not soon be cut down, by making, a few months before
his death, the supreme genuflection to the country of his adoption.
He forfeited citizenship in the country of his birth and obtained
citizenship in the country that had sheltered him during the years
of his fruition. How could any such thesis as that of Mr. Brooks be
maintained in view of this last great gesture of Henry James, and why
is the act not mentioned in a book that aims to describe his pilgrimage?
Had James known that England is full of men like Jacob Heming,
one of Stella Benson’s Pipers, he probably would not have settled
there; he might have gone to Spain. There are many things about that
priest-infested, ceremonious country that would have appealed to Henry
James. He would have fitted Toledo as an oyster its shell.
No one need concern himself with proving to me that a man sheds his
inherited possessions only with the greatest difficulty. Among his
inherited possessions I place his religion, his politics, and his
“Patrie.” If a man whose father was known to me as a Democrat tells me
he is a Republican, I do not believe him. If a man whose parents were
Roman Catholics and who was brought up in that faith tells me that he
is a Baptist, I suspect his veracity. If I encounter a man living in
England without obvious reason who tells me that he is an American, I
immediately surmise that his conduct has been an offence to his own
land. And all this despite the fact that I have known the sons of a
Democrat who have always voted the Republican ticket, that I am on
terms of intimacy with an Unitarian clergyman who was formerly a Roman
Catholic priest, and that Mr. George Santayana seems to find England
more sympathetic as a permanent residence than Massachusetts. Moreover,
I do not recall having heard of a lament from Joseph Conrad that he
was not back in Poland or that he could not see Marseilles every now
and then. I know an American family named James whose members have
identified themselves conspicuously with the material and scientific
progress of this country who sent a branch to England two generations
ago and its members are more English than Winston Churchill; but that
knowledge does not separate me from the belief that one of the most
difficult things in the world to accomplish is to transfer a human
tree, after it has had vigorous growth, from the soil of one country
to another with the confident anticipation that it will bear abundant
fruit. In the majority of cases, it will die; very rarely will it bear
lusciously as it did in the case of Joseph Conrad. In some instances it
will bear every few years, but then not copiously as it did in the case
of Henry James.
Henry James had a happier life than any celibate who does not dedicate
his days to verbal praise of God is entitled to have. Responsibilities
as well as possessions are necessary for our happiness. They create
facets which permit us contact with life; they tend to frustrate the
increasing activities of the canker worm, egocentrism; and they succeed
in convincing him who possesses them that he is but a leaf on the tree
of humanity and not a branch or a bough. Had Henry James done his share
in peopling the earth he would have been as happy as any man I have
ever known save William Osler.
To uphold as a major thesis that, by forsaking the land of his birth he
had not given an adequate earnest of his talent, that he had failed to
saturate himself with life, that in his old age he found himself astray
in the gloomy wood, and that “it had been too much for him over there,”
must appear contrary to common sense or sound judgment to any one who
knew Henry James, who admired him as an artist and loved him as a man.
Is it not natural that a sensitive man, supremely susceptible to the
seductiveness of society, should, when the pulse of life begins to
intermit, dwell upon the terrors of loneliness; become apprehensive of
a future that would find him bereft of the sympathy that is the balm
of life, of that understanding which is the support of the inelastic
artery? Henry James knew that such society, sympathy, and staff were
in Cambridge, that they were composited in the family of his brother
William, that he might _have_ to go to them, as we all have to go to
the spring if there is no one to bring us the water.
He minimised the defects of his countrymen and exalted the virtues of
his country as he grew older. It is the way of a man with the world.
How often have I heard widows whose wounds I had dressed in their
matrimonial days, speak of their husbands as Anthony Burgesse spoke of
the Staffordshire Puritan Thomas Blake? “His kindness towards you could
not be considered without love, his presence without reverence, his
conversation without imitation. To see him live was a provocation to a
godly life, to see him dying might have made one weary of living.”
Any pilgrim who sets out on a journey may properly anticipate the
necessities of life even though he does not take them with him, but it
would be fatuous for him to hope for the comforts, and beyond belief
that he should expect the luxuries. Henry James in his pilgrimage found
the necessities, the comforts, and the luxuries, and we can never be
sufficiently grateful to the country of his adoption for having given
them to him without the asking.
François Mauriac, one of France’s coming great novelists, one indeed
who may be considered as having already arrived, said something in
explanation of his latest novel with which Henry James, at least in his
old age, would have agreed: “Even after years of living in Paris of
friendships, of loves and of travels, when the novelist is convinced
that he has accumulated enough human experience to fill a thousand
plots, he is astonished that his heroes always come from beyond this
tumultuous life--that they take shape in the darkest period of years
lived far from Paris and that they draw all their wealth from so much
poverty and aridity.” This constant going back to the years of youth
and early adolescence which obsesses François Mauriac has been felt by
Henry James and it is something of that sort that he had in mind when,
wishing to pump the pure essence of his wisdom and experience into his
most brilliant disciple, Edith Wharton, he said: “She must be tethered
to native pasture, even if it reduces her to a backyard in New York.”
Henry James was a master craftsman. He was concerned more with the
pattern than with the material with which he worked. He was continually
searching--not material but new ways of arranging it. M. Poiret reminds
me of Henry James. Material does not concern him much. It is the way it
is cut and basted. The finish is important too, but that is a detail.
The pattern is the thing.
IV
LITTERATEURS: FOREIGN WRITERS
ANATOLE FRANCE HIMSELF, by _Jean-Jacques Brousson_.
ANATOLE FRANCE AND HIS CIRCLE, by _Paul Gsell_.
ANATOLE FRANCE, THE MAN AND HIS WORK, by _J. Lewis May_.
ANATOLE FRANCE À LA BÉCHELLERIE, by _Marcel Le Goff_.
SAINTE-BEUVE, by _Lewis Freeman Mott_.
LEONID ANDREYEV, by _Alexander Kaun_.
JOSEPH CONRAD, by _Ford Madox Ford_.
JOHN DONNE, by _Hugh l’Anson Fausset_.
THE WIND AND THE RAIN, by _Thomas Burke_.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, by _John A. Steuart_.
Anatole France was picturesque, enigmatic and intriguing. He attracted
illuminators and interpreters. His protracted age gave biographers
ample time to prepare their revelations, interpretations and judgments
which came with a rush soon after his death--and before, and which
still come. The last of all these biographies is the best, that is, it
gives the best picture of him, both as individual and as savant. M.
Brousson, his Secretary for many years, had abundant opportunity to see
Anatole France without the mask he habitually wore. He has embodied
his observations and reflections in _Anatole France Himself_, and all
readers save literary historians and critics will find it satisfying.
Much was written of Anatole France during the latter years of his life.
His mode of life, methods of work, political, religious and social
ideas; his theoretical antinomianism and his practical conformity to
convention; and more than all his erudition excited curiosity, and from
attempt to satisfy it, there resulted envy in some, dislike in others,
admiration in all.
[Illustration: ANATOLE FRANCE]
_From a miniature Courtesy of Edward Wassermann_
The best interpretation of him and his work in English is by Mr. L.
P. Shanks, a graceful writer, a penetrating critic. The works of
Anatole France have been translated into English by Mr. Lewis May who
published _Anatole France, the Man and His Work_ in the year that
preceded his death. It is an agreeable introduction to the great
novelist, even though it is such a left handed and inadequate one.
The chief reason why Mr. May’s contribution to our knowledge and
understanding of Anatole France falls short of its aim, is that the
writer has not heeded the difference which exists between a biography
and a panegyric. It is a custom sanctified by time that the death of a
great contemporary figure should be the signal of a truce as it were;
foes lay down their arms for a period of time, friends and admirers
join in lauding the man who has gone to his reward. No one takes much
stock in an obituary dictated by the emotional reaction engendered by
death, and no one looks to such writing for constructive criticism, but
when a biography is written during the lifetime of the subject--be he
as old as Anatole France was when Mr. May published his--there should
be less puffing and more illumination, less heat and more light. Mr.
May allowed his personal feeling of friendship and his pleasure and
pride of semi-intimacy with Anatole France to colour his estimate
of the writer. He admires his versatility, his manysidedness, the
rapidity with which he changed his point of view. These are no grounds
for unqualified admiration. At most they would be occasion for wonder
and amazement, but the biographer should point to the danger of such
chameleon-like conduct, the weakness of such a nature. He “played all
parts in turn and played them all well,” but this very versatility
shows a lack of intimate convictions and standards. A philosophy
which consists of having none, a religion which insists on the
unsatisfactoriness of all belief--these are destructive and bewildering
forms of reasoning; but Anatole France combined these traits with
qualities and achievements which amply balanced their influence. What
we should have liked Mr. May to do, a thing which we are still waiting
for a biographer to do, is to have summed up, after consideration, the
contradictions, the theories, the principles and the talent of Anatole
France, from which we might obtain clear, critical, impartial, sober
judgment of the writer. He was more than any other author the Proteus
of modern time, an image and symbol of the constant change in man, and,
like Proteus, he could undergo a metamorphosis of ideas and judgments
which baffled the world at large, and made his personality a puzzle.
However, he did not have the reticence that the Greek hero had, nor the
loathing for answering questions; and he was so articulate that his
evolution is not difficult to master.
Every one agrees with Mr. May that Anatole France was a stylist of
talent, a psychologist of merit and a philosopher of profundity and
penetration, of smiling scepticism and amused tolerance; but to say
that a fairy bent over his cradle and endowed him with some of the
“douceur angevine” sung by Du Bellay, and that his voice is “the voice
of all humanity” is disregarding the claims of criticism. That is
just what Anatole France lacked most of all--the inspiring, soothing,
beneficial, unforgettable smile of a fairy over his cradle. Had he had
it, Mr. May’s estimation of Anatole France’s poetry, “that it will
endure so long as literature continues to interest mankind,” might find
a more responsive acceptation.
Anatole France the man was so closely linked with Anatole France the
writer that his biographers have been unable to separate them; and for
this we should be thankful. From the best pictures that are presented
to us, we gather an idea of the master-writer of the past generation
that is complete and convincing; his life was devoted to writing; and
his writing was always of life, as it appeared to him through intimacy
with ancient masters; through study of history; through contemplation
of his time; through deduction and observation of humanity. It is
difficult to divorce him from his own personality, and the biographers
who have succeeded in painting a picture of him that will endure have
all recognised this impossibility.
Of the many authors who have attempted to set down some of the most
interesting traits and characteristics of Anatole France, and who
have done it when their personal recollections were still fresh and
undimmed by time, Jean-Jacques Brousson has been the most successful.
He lived in close intimacy with the Master for many years; he is
himself endowed with critical faculty, with keen powers of observation
and, like Anatole France, he has a leaning toward the aspect of life
that puritans call the “unspeakable,” but which the French call
“_gauloiserie_.” If _Anatole France Himself_ is not a tribute of
respect and of deference Anatole France’s admirers would wish it to
be, at least, it does more than any other book has done to convince
us of the flesh-and-bone reality of the savant, to destroy the legend
that he was heartless. M. Brousson has written a biography in everyday
language, he has Boswellised his Master with fidelity, wit and a
certain amount of irony and of mockery which Anatole France would
probably have enjoyed and lauded. He has made him appear not only
in the flesh, but in the spoken word, so that the reader is able to
“listen in” and if he has an imagination vivid enough, he may believe
that he is living in the shadow of Anatole France. M. Brousson tells of
his first days of work at the Villa Saïd, of the tempers and tolerance
of his master, of his simplicity and his sarcasm; of his generosity
and his avarice; of his method of work and manner of play. The latter
has a large place in this biography, especially the only sort of
play in which Anatole France in his declining years could indulge:
imagination and ratiocination. We see him at times like a sensuous
and pleasure-bent faun; then he becomes the ascetic monk, with one
hand raised to an imaginary heaven in which the wisdom of time and the
wickedness of the world blend; now he is the writer, the historian, the
novelist, intent on his self-imposed task and working with industrious
and painstaking love. Then he becomes the child, reprimanded by
“Madame” because he refuses to tell a story with which she wishes
to impress her audience, or because he procrastinates in writing an
article for a Viennese newspaper; in turn he is the lover of antiques
and the searcher after old “estampes”; then he is the disillusioned
art-collector who finds that what his fancy believed to be genuine does
not bear the stamp of antiquity, and who overwhelms his secretary with
the objects that have ceased to please--generally in payment of his
services. We like him best when he is shown to be a real man, with a
heart and a nervous system reacting to emotional disturbance. “If you
could only read in my soul,” he said to his secretary one day, “you
would be terrified.”
“He takes my hands in his, and his are trembling and
feverish. He looks me in the eyes. His are full of tears.
His face is haggard. He sighs: ‛There is not in all the
universe a creature more unhappy than I. People think me
happy. I have never been happy for one day, not for a
single hour’.”
This reminds one of the text that Mark Twain constructed for his
autobiography:
“A person’s real life is led in his head, and is known
to none but himself. All day long, and every day, the
mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not
those other things that are his history. His acts and his
words are merely the visible, thin crust of his world
with its scattered snow summits and its vacant wastes of
water--and they are so trifling a part of his bulk; a
mere skin enveloping it. The mass of him is hidden--it
and its volcanic fires that toss and boil, and never
rest, night nor day.”
Anatole France hid his soul well: his volcano was frequently on the
point of eruption, but nearly always he succeeded in smothering it.
Jean-Jacques Brousson has written a valuable exposition of Anatole
France’s personality, of the home and the semi-public life of his hero,
and his intention to bring him as close and make him as familiar to us
as he could is evident in the French title of _Anatole France Himself,
Anatole France en Pantoufles_. This is the way in which we remember
him most vividly, with his felt slippers lined with purple, and his
multicoloured skull cap.
Another of his admirers is Paul Gsell, who was a frequent and faithful
visitor at the morning meetings at the Villa Saïd. Introduction to
these famous “audiences” was not difficult to get--the difficulty was
to get there a second time if the Master found the visitor a bore
or a fool. He could suffer neither, unless they were hidden in the
pulchritudinous envelope of an attractive woman--then everything was
allowed and overlooked to leave place for admiration and gallantry.
Paul Gsell has written _Anatole France and His Circle_, and his book
reads like a court report, or a newspaper interview, withal it is
full of the charm of the conversation of Anatole France, and of his
unforeseen and original reactions to ideas and beliefs. Among a great
many anecdotes and conversations which are interesting and instructive,
the episode of Mr. Brown, the Australian “stout, robust man of florid
complexion with close-shaven lips and chin,” who wore gold-rimmed
spectacles and who showed in his Anglo-Saxon elegance his assiduity
to golf and polo, and who came to see Anatole France in search of
the mystery ... the secret of literary genius, is one of the most
diverting. He may have found what he wanted, but his visit resulted, at
all events, in a disclosure of literary geniuses of the past as studied
by Anatole France which is remarkable in its scope and in its truth.
Paul Gsell’s book has had imitators and it has given an incentive to
assiduous followers of Anatole France to set down for posterity, some
of the memorable conversations and discussions at which they were
present. The most successful has been Marcel Le Goff, who, in the
last ten years of the Master’s life, saw him at his country home near
Tours, frequently and with increasing interest and admiration. He has
recorded his talks, but fortunately, he could not resist the temptation
of allowing us to peep into the intimacy of Anatole France, and into
his life at “La Béchellerie.” His tastes, and the trivialities which
form part of every life, have been divulged and even though M. Le Goff
is one of France’s admirers, he has avoided Mr. Lewis May’s pitfall and
has not allowed his personal feeling to blind him absolutely:
“Perhaps M. France has had weaknesses; it would be sad to
lay too much stress on them, to reveal them and to find
pleasure in their recital. One might better see in him,
the illustrious and permanent witness of the beauty of
our language and of the genius of our people.”
But the best biography of Anatole France is still the one he wrote
himself, under guise of four novels, _Le Petit Pierre_, _Le Livre de
Mon Ami_, _Pierre Nozière_ and _La Vie En Fleur_. They reveal the
formation of the clever novelist, of the profound thinker, of the
cultured critic, of the great stylist. Style was his obsession and
perfect expression of thought was his constant care; he reached the
heart of his subject as few younger authors have done, and never left
it until he had obtained all he could from it; surveying it from one
angle, then from another, he saw its shades and meanings, and this
explains some of his contradictions. Anatole France, partial as he was
as a man, was impartial when he wrote of universally interesting and
profoundly significant events.
By his allegiance to the teachings of the past, he deserved to be
called the last of the classicists; by his fidelity in maintaining
the traditions of novels, he is entitled to be called “romantic”; by
his love for the perfect phrase, for purity of form and loftiness of
sentiments, he proved himself a true son of the ancient masters; and by
his keen appreciation of intelligence, analysis and objectivity, he
made a definite place for himself in the modern school. His mind has
been influenced by the greatest minds of history and of literature. He
adopted their thoughts, and adapted their interpretation of life to his
own style, and he had neither scruples nor shyness in copying what had
already been said: “When a thing has been said, and well said, have no
scruples, take it. Give references? What for? Either your readers know
where you have gathered the passage and the reference is useless, or
else they do not know it, and you humiliate them by giving it.” That
was one tenet of his creed and many have said he lived up to it. He
did, indeed, and for that reason posterity is likely to rate him as an
interpreter more than as a creator, and to set him below men of real
creative genius, such as Ibsen, Dostoievsky, or Chekhov.
We do not need Jean-Jacques Brousson to point out to us France’s
principal fault in his literary work. It is evident in all his books.
He lacked a formulated plan, and had he had one, he probably would not
have pursued it with the energy, determination and single-mindedness
that Dostoievsky or Ibsen displayed. It was not his versatility that
shortened his reach for the crown of glory, it was his distractibility.
He could be diverted from a determination by whim, fancy, sentiment
or appeal, and most of all by the bigotries, stupidities, vanities
and selfishness of his people. He must hold them up to ridicule, lash
them with stinging words, scorch them with scorn and sting them with
sarcasm, before he could find peace in his “objets d’art,” satisfaction
in his bibelots, and contentment in contemplation of concrete beauty.
* * * * *
The star of Sainte-Beuve in the literary firmament of France shone
brilliantly during his lifetime; since his death its luminosity has
increased. Indeed, one may say that it has become a sort of sun which
lights the literary way with great brilliancy. Much has been written
about Sainte-Beuve in the brief half century since his death--brief
because of the tremendous changes which have taken place in his country
during that time and which have left relatively little leisure to
discuss and estimate the influence and achievement of a contemporary.
Moreover, the French are loath to commit themselves by placing a
crown of immortality on the brow of their artists, before time and a
certain unanimity of public opinion have confirmed the judgment of
early admirers. Yet, in the case of Sainte-Beuve it was different.
Immediately after his death he became for them the greatest critic of
the nineteenth century--possibly the greatest of all ages. It has not
been thought premature to attribute to him paternity of the modern
school of criticism, represented by Rémy de Gourmont. In the early
seventies, Matthew Arnold popularised Sainte-Beuve in England and
reverberations of this publicity soon reached this country; but it is
doubtful that he has the reputation here, especially among the younger
writers, that he deserves.
Until recently the biography by Count d’Haussonville has been our
most important document about Sainte-Beuve. It requires a delicate
and refined pen to write about Sainte-Beuve and it requires an
inborn distinction of mind and a responsiveness of heart such as
d’Haussonville possessed to understand and render the aristocracy
of Sainte-Beuve’s art--the art of one who was above all an artist,
with great intellectual powers at the service of his art, and who,
not content with his natural endowments, took endless pains and by
prodigious industry acquired vast learning.
And now we have another biography. A cultured and scholarly American
has written the most voluminous life of Sainte-Beuve that has appeared
in any language. Lewis Freeman Mott has gathered all the information
that previous biographers have given; garnered the most minute details,
elaborated and interpreted them. He has followed his subject from
birth to death, minute by minute, with closest attention. Mr. Mott’s
_Sainte-Beuve_ gives an impression of concentrated effort. He has
worked close enough to the subject to detect nuances difficult to
perceive, not close enough to hear the beating of the heart, and too
close to comprehend, in one large inclusive sweep, the atmosphere, the
local colour and the surroundings. It is a laboriously conceived study,
painstakingly faithful, rigorously integral, but not alluring.
Mr. Mott is one of the few biographers to lay emphasis on
Sainte-Beuve’s artistic endowment, but even he has done it more in the
letter than in the spirit. We wish that this last biographer had traced
Sainte-Beuve’s emotional reactions, instead of setting the finished
work before us with no clue to its genesis and fabrication. We know
that the French critic had more regard for good taste in literature
than for talent; that he was constantly seeking truth, that he frowned
on falsification of history and human nature; that he revolted against
the unnatural, abhorred abstract language and found delight even in the
most fugitive appearance of poetry, but all this we must divine, for
Mr. Mott does not prove it. He states the case as it appears to him and
is neither partisan nor judicial. He carries impartiality to the point
of indifference.
In the days of Sainte-Beuve’s early maturity, literary clans were
the fashion in Paris, and the _Cénacle_ of which he was one of the
shining lights, together with Alexandre Dumas, Gérard de Nerval,
Alfred de Vigny, Alfred de Musset and Victor Hugo, was one of the most
fashionable. The young men who met there to discuss their ambitions, to
find relaxation and stimulus and to air their views, were “strangely
garbed, wearing a ‛Merovingian prolixity of hair,’ and were ferociously
prepared to eat any stray Academician. They drank healths out of a
skull, tore the green coat from the back of Dumas” and showed an
effervescence and enthusiasm which has disappeared from the manners
of modern writers. But the _Cénacle_ was short lived, and Mr. Mott
has skilfully rendered the change of moods in Sainte-Beuve, whose
enthusiasm took him along different channels after the crisis of 1830.
He soon saw the danger of isolation, and of breaking up into groups;
“literature must become broader, more profound, accessible to all. The
time of the _Cénacle_ is past; the Romantic reversion to the Middle
Ages, the solitary inward revery, the detachment from reality” have
been replaced by sentiment for progressive and struggling humanity.
Sainte-Beuve then became revolutionary and proletarian, but lost none
of his delicate and artistic powers.
Sainte-Beuve had the capacity to shift quickly from one viewpoint to
the other, from one belief to another, from one political opinion
to its antithesis. This is common enough in men of great emotional
make-up, but it seldom goes with the sangfroid, the coolness, the
good sense and the clear judgment that he displayed. In him, these
sudden turns had their key in his emotions. He was sick at heart, a
prey to the passion that first Madame Hugo, then other women inspired
in him. In order to distract or benumb himself, he played with every
conceivable sort of thought. In all his love affairs, he was ardent
and sincere, and entered them without reserve or calculation. Though
he sought relief from the passion that possessed him, his emotional
disturbance was not allowed to interfere with his intellectual labour.
Mr. Mott should have taken the following quotation from Sainte-Beuve,
pondered and meditated it, for within it lies the secret of great
biographies:
“I have always been fond of the correspondence of
great men, of their conversations, their thoughts, all
the details of their character and manners, of their
biography in short; and especially when this biography
has not already been compiled by another, but may be
composed and constructed by oneself. Shutting yourself up
for a fortnight with the writing of some dead celebrity,
some poet or philosopher, you study him, turn him over
and over, and question him at leisure; you make him pose
for you; it is almost as though you passed a fortnight in
the country making a portrait or a bust of Byron, Scott
or Goethe; only you are more at ease with your model
and the tête-à-tête at the same time that it requires
strict attention, permits much closer familiarity. Soon,
an individuality takes the place of the vague, abstract
type. The moment the familiar motion, the revealing
smile, the vainly hidden crack or wrinkle is seized,
at that moment, analysis disappears in creation, the
portrait speaks and lives, you have found the man.”
Somehow the reader feels that Mr. Mott did not make Sainte-Beuve _pose_
for him.
It was the man in Sainte-Beuve, not the intellectual, who broke
with Victor Hugo and it was the jealousy of a human being, not the
superiority of a poet, that made him hate Madame Hugo when his affair
with her had lost its allurement. Mr. Mott has laid much stress on that
affair, and some may question the taste that guided him in this phase
of Sainte-Beuve’s life; but it must be said that Mr. Mott is firm in
his belief that there was more imagination, sentiment and words in the
romance of the two lovers than reality. He believes that their love was
based on a spiritual understanding, and one is inclined to agree with
him after reading his remarks on Sainte-Beuve’s inflamed state of mind,
after becoming familiar with the behaviour of the characters in his
only novel, _Volupté_, and after learning of the health of Madame Hugo.
Mr. Mott contrasts skilfully the sort of affair in which Victor Hugo
plunged with robustious frankness, with that of Sainte-Beuve and Madame
Hugo, it makes the latter appear like the pretty frolics of adolescence.
Sainte-Beuve had a genuine flair for literature. He justified La
Bruyère’s dictum: “the test of a man’s critical power is his judgment
of contemporaries.” _Les Lundis_, his greatest contribution to critical
literature, shows rare discernment in picking literary winners. He
was one of the first to express doubts regarding the permanency of
Chateaubriand’s works, and this despite the affection he had for him,
and his prominent place in the literature of the day. Mr. Mott’s
account of Sainte-Beuve’s position in the salon of Madame Récamier,
the guardian angel of the great men of her time, shows the biographer
at his best. His description of the “salon” and of the charm of Madame
Récamier are a fine bit of writing. Sainte-Beuve did not remain long
under her influence. About the time he forsook social intercourse
with her, he abandoned poetry and turned to criticism. The poet in
him was perpetually in conflict with the critic, sentimentality
trying to overcome reason. His heart was continually haunted by
visions of romantic situations--but prose was a medium in which he
was particularly happy, and to prose he remained faithful--prose and
interpretation.
Occasionally, Mr. Mott rewards his readers for attention to arid pages
of bibliography by giving them a piece of characterisation which is all
the more welcome because of its rarity. Some critics, even Sainte-Beuve
himself, have given the impression that he was devoid of merriment and
of gaiety, but Mr. Mott has found traces of joyousness. “This gaiety is
a note, unobtrusive though it be, that should not be omitted if we are
to appreciate the full harmony of Sainte-Beuve’s character. In spite of
_Volupté_ and certain poems, he was a normal human being, with plenty
of faults and weaknesses, it is true, but sincere with himself and
others, remarkably endowed, universally interested and indefatigably
laborious.” This is as near as Mr. Mott ever comes to letting us see
behind the mask of the intellectual into the make-up of the man. But
the biographer makes up for his lack of allurement with his profound
and clear knowledge and understanding of _Port-Royal_, and some of his
pages on it are not only the best in the book, but of the quality that
makes literature.
Sainte-Beuve’s _Port-Royal_ is his most permanent contribution to
literature, _Les Lundis_ excepted. The summary Mr. Mott makes of the
book might apply to his own _Sainte-Beuve_:
“We would not convey the impression that the book is
especially entertaining ... to sit down and labour
consecutively through the present volumes is somewhat
of a task. We appreciate and we admire, but we not
infrequently look ahead to discover how many more pages
the chapter contains. An unregenerate appetite might be
satisfied with a smaller quantity of this very plain
spiritual nutriment.”
We appreciate Mr. Mott’s remarkable labour also; and we admire his
mastery of the subject, but appreciation and admiration are not
synonymous with entertainment.
Mr. Mott creates a relationship between Sainte-Beuve and La
Rochefoucauld, and in the examples he has chosen to illustrate this
similarity of their views, he has been successful. The former had a
gift for imitation and he often took on the mentality of those he
admired, so that many of their thoughts can be paralleled in their
work. The same comparison might be made between Mr. Mott and his
subject. He, like Sainte-Beuve, supplies his books copiously with
summaries and with indications of location.
“Not infrequently, a chapter may open or close with
a paragraph, much in the manner of Macaulay, telling
us what the author is about to do, but rarely does
Sainte-Beuve persist, like Macaulay, in a consecutive
fulfilment of his prospectus. The side paths are too
alluring for his truant disposition.”
It is not a truant disposition that prompts Mr. Mott to follow the side
paths, it is a laudable desire of going to the heart of his subject and
presenting it as a whole, but the result is the same. Indeed, it may
be said that the summary of the chapters in _Sainte-Beuve_ is one of
its greatest attractions, for it states in a few words the main points
which the chapter never fails to develop.
Sainte-Beuve made enemies, but he did not fear them. His attacks on
Balzac especially brought a suit for damages to the magazine in which
he published his wrath, but the suit was mocked in an article which
he undoubtedly wrote and which concluded: “He (Balzac) will find
that we never in the least dreamed of contesting the _intrepidity_
of his bad taste.” Had Sainte-Beuve lived in this age, he would
have the same grounds for indignation; for “systems of inward
degeneration--emulation, self-esteem, charlatanism, log-rolling,
intimidation, avidity for popularity and gold” still exist.
Artistic preoccupation was one of Sainte-Beuve’s distinguishing
characteristics. He joined art to literary criticism, giving his
portraits creative value, and he does not renounce art when he speaks
the truth. He believed in Chateaubriand and Lamennais, yet he told
the truth about them, for believing with him was merely a way of
understanding. And he insisted that literary criticism should never
become static and dogmatic, but like art must remain dynamic and
plastic. All this, Mr. Mott has explained clearly. And by so doing,
he has written a book which will serve as a _vade mecum_ to all
students of Sainte-Beuve. It may not interest the general public for
it lacks the divine spark which changes bread into manna, coal into
diamonds. The picture he paints of Sainte-Beuve does not make those
unacquainted with his writings want to read them; those who know and
love Sainte-Beuve, know him and love him for the qualities which Mr.
Mott’s book has revealed.
* * * * *
Dr. Kaun, Professor of Slavic languages at the University of
California, put the American reading public under obligations when he
wrote Andreyev’s biography. It is the best I have encountered since
Mr. Janko Lavrin’s psycho-critical study of Ibsen, and as it is more
kindly, sympathetic and tolerant than that important contribution, it
is pleasanter to read and quite as illuminating.
Next to Maxim Gorky, Leonid Andreyev is more widely known in this
country than any recent Russian writer. Many of his novels, sketches
and plays have been translated and some, such as _The Seven That Were
Hanged_, _Satan’s Diary_, _The Little Angel_, _Samson in Chains_, and
various plays, have been extensively read.
The question has often been asked: “What kind of author was this
soul-analyst, this student of the brute in man, this writer who caused
more discord in the camp of Russian criticism than any of his fellows?”
Mr. Kaun’s book not only provides the answer but gives a glimpse of
literary tendencies in the Russia of yesterday which is as welcome as
it is instructive.
Leonid Andreyev was forty-eight years old when he died in 1919;
although he began literary work soon after his admission to the bar
in 1897, it was not until the publication of _Once There Lived_ in
1901 that the critics had intimation that a new force had appeared in
Russian literature. In the next fifteen years he won a place in the
literary hierarchy of his country, which since his death has become
more secure. When the history of Russia in the generation from 1895 to
1920 comes to be dispassionately and judicially written the name and
influences of Leonid Andreyev will frequently be mentioned.
The Slav is an enigma to most Americans and the more we learn
of Andreyev the less soluble seems the riddle. He was of the
manic-depressive temperament; at least three times in his life he
attempted suicide; he was addicted to strong drink; he had the naïveté
and egotism of a child; he was mulishly obstinate. Maxim Gorky, who
was one of the first to recognise his ability, who counselled and
befriended him, has recently written: “Strangely, and to his own
torment, Leonid split in two; in one and the same week he could sing
hosanna to the world and pronounce anathema against it.” In this
respect he resembled another writer of manic-depressive temperament,
Giovanni Papini.
This lack of co-ordination in Andreyev’s moods is continually shown
by Dr. Kaun, who follows him through all the periods of his life. His
childhood was gloomy, filled with serious thoughts and arid reading.
At times he put aside all his interests in literature and became a
“rough boy.” He displayed a remarkable gift for the stage and an early
inclination to draw and to paint. The death of his father, which
occurred when Leonid was very young, gave him a taste of poverty,
privation and humility and made him realise that his future was what he
alone would make it. Soon after graduation he became a court reporter
and then an editorial writer. Mr. Kaun devotes an instructive and
interesting chapter to this plastic period, during which he displayed
few indications of possessing constructive ability.
The transformation that Russia witnessed during the years of Andreyev’s
adolescence and early maturity must of necessity have influenced a mind
such as his. He saw aristocracy fail to convince itself that slavery
was legitimate; he saw the slow but constant development of a sentiment
of democracy which soon extended to all branches of society and turned
all eyes and sympathies to the peasantry.
They became the idols of the day in Russia; literature was concentrated
around their activities and that new discovery, their souls. The
Intelligentsia, to which Andreyev belonged, recognised and praised
their long disdained brothers. In his introduction Dr. Kaun has
expressed all this in clear and simple language; he has shown the
tendencies of Russian literature with such authority and coolness that
what seemed an abyss of darkness passing understanding becomes at
once easy to penetrate. Some of his definitions dismiss the cloud of
vagueness that before surrounded the object. “The term Intelligentsia
may be applied to the unorganised group of Russian men and women
who, regardless of their social or economic status, have been united
in a common striving for the betterment of material and spiritual
conditions.”
When Russian literature became as it were “single tracked,” when all
its interests turned abruptly to the “street” (save for the exception
of a few writers who refused to give up “art for art’s sake” and take
up the defence of any one class of society), the danger was that
Russian literature would become “a didactic sermon.” But Dr. Kaun
hastens to reassure us that “What saved it ... was the genius of its
creators, who remained artists under all circumstances.”
There was need, however, for a man who would not allow his passions
to rule his emotions, whose voice could be heard and heeded above the
popular outbursts, who would attempt a search into the motives and
the value of life, and Leonid Andreyev was the man, the voice and the
writer.
From his earliest childhood he had been obsessed by interrogations
about life and he expressed them constantly in his writings; he seldom
attempted an answer or a solution to the problems that pressed upon
his mind, and when he did it, it was ambiguous. Dr. Kaun points out
that Andreyev’s failure to define or to classify was due to his lack
of philosophical theory and to his incapacity for detaching himself
and viewing life in perspective; he dwelled in the reality, and
disdained philosophy and theories. He was neither a student nor a
reader. He would have his friends believe that he had been influenced
by Schopenhauer and there is no doubt that he showed envy of Nietzsche,
affection for Tolstoi and admiration for Gorky; but it is doubtful that
he read them, save casually.
One appealing quality in Dr. Kaun as a critic is his unbiased opinion;
he allows neither his admiration for the author nor his sympathy for
the man to influence his judgment. He seeks no excuse for Andreyev’s
lack of humour and lightness or for his egotism. He states his defects,
and finds a reason for his admitted eminence among modern authors in
his realism, which makes him address the public not as a teacher or a
reformer but as an observer from the rank and file, who related what
he saw and did not draw conclusions. He was neither propagandist nor
missionary.
Andreyev’s aim was to describe man as he was, with all the repulsive
instincts that make him a beast and all the qualities that identify him
with divinity; but it was the worse side of human nature that chiefly
appealed to him, and that he described at length. If we agree with
Samuel Butler that “virtue has never yet been adequately represented
by any who have had any claim to be considered virtuous,” and that “it
is the subvicious who best understand virtue. Let the virtuous people
stick to describing vice--which they can do well enough,” we must
consider Leonid Andreyev the personification of virtue.
He stood aloof from literary circles, parties or affiliations all his
life. Not even the revolution of 1905, which brought a split in the
ranks of the intelligentsia, changed him; he retained his impersonal
attitude, probing the conscience of man, “ringing his alarm bell”
of man’s vices, analysing life, and attempting to explain only its
illusions. He continually peered beneath the surface and questioned the
reactions of mankind, discovering vices where virtue seemed to lie.
He was a firm believer in the power of ideas over the actions of an
individual, and he has shown in _Thought_ how one unaccountable impulse
will ruin the career of a man.
Andreyev was non-conformist to the last degree. He refused consistently
to give way to the public’s tastes and held that sincerity was the
first quality that one should find in an author. His sincerity was not
to the taste of his readers. Andreyev neither approved of the “splendid
isolation” of the Russian symbolists, decadents or other definite
schools who refused to see beyond the limit of their ivory towers, nor
did he join hands with the people. He confined his observations to
their individual and immediate surroundings. But he also generalised
events and expressed opinions that included the world in connection
with an event that merely affected his country or his people. He
extracted the essence of upheavals and carried them beyond his time.
His passionate and ardent pen could describe horrors and cruelty better
than the pen of any author of his time.
The thing that strikes one most forcibly in reading of Andreyev is the
very brief period of his creative activity, fifteen years at the most.
After 1902 his writings were merely repetitions or elaborations of
former themes and his premise was always the same; a negative attitude
toward man, life, human intellect and institutions. He involuted early,
and the proof of it in his writing was that he no longer looked in the
direction of hope and encouragement. He was like a man who hurries on
an unfamiliar road hoping that he will arrive at a safe and comfortable
stopping place before the darkness which is fast approaching enshrouds
him. He became aware that his thinking faculties that once were
brilliant had lost their flexibility: “I feel as though I were in
a grave up to my waist.” “I am thinking of suicide, or is suicide
thinking of me?” “I am living in a jolly little house with its windows
opening on a graveyard”--these are entries in his diary that indicate
his increasing melancholy. But this was not his only cross; he lacked
money for the basic need of life. He was on the point of coming to
this country “to combat the Bolsheviki, to tell the truth about them
with all the power within him and to awaken in America a feeling of
friendship and sympathy for that portion of the Russian people which is
heroically struggling for the rejuvenation of Russia,” when he died of
arteriosclerosis, as his friend, admirer and interpreter, Mr. Herman
Bernstein, wrote in a letter to the New York _Times_.
A worthy biography of a great writer; it has the fascination of fiction
and the satisfaction of fact.
* * * * *
Contrast of Ford Madox Ford’s book on Joseph Conrad with Henry Festing
Jones’ book on Samuel Butler will show the difference between inspired
and studious writing. One is life, the other is death; one is clay
into which the breath of life has been breathed, tenuous, elastic,
receptive, emissive; the other is inanimate, inert, rigid, and crumbles
when you handle it.
Mr. Ford has megalomania and glories in it. He has systematised
delusions of grandeur to which his conduct conforms. He believes he
is, and has been in his generation, the finest stylist in the English
language and he expresses himself as if convinced that not only did
he teach Joseph Conrad to write, but that the renown of the romancer
was due in large measure to his collaboration. They are harmless
delusions and do not interfere one jot or tittle with my enjoyment of
his books. Indeed, as he grows older and fatter he writes better and
better. Few contemporary English writers could excel _Some Do Not_ ...,
none save possibly Cunninghame Graham could equal _Joseph Conrad: A
Personal Remembrance_. I am moved to that statement after reading Mr.
Galsworthy’s tribute.
The Joseph Conrad that Mr. Ford presents may not be the Conrad that
Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Doubleday, Mrs. Jones, or Mrs. Smith knew, but I
am convinced that he would be pleased that I should know him as his
alleged friend depicts him.
“A biography should be a novel.” That seems fair, since most novels are
biographies. Mr. Ford has written a novel about Joseph Conrad and he
has achieved a work of art. It will have the same effect upon readers
as Rodin’s sculptures have upon searchers for æsthetic stimulation or
appeasement. Some will be moved to smash, others will be thrilled.
All will admit merit. It is an informative, not a documented, book,
informative of a soul, not a body; it tells not how many days he lived
and where he lived, but how he lived and thought; how he dreamed and
loved; how he interpreted men’s conduct and how he shaped his own.
The work is a remembrance, a logical unfolding of Joseph Conrad as
he appeared to Mr. Ford from the first days of their acquaintance to
the last. We are told little about Conrad’s political, religious, and
social ideas. Mr. Ford was no more curious to know what his friend’s
past was than we are to know that an English dramatist made a shapeless
play out of one of Mr. Ford’s novels. Yet the latter episode becomes
important when we learn that this, and Mr. Ford’s interest in the
publication of a review, were the cause of the only “scolding” he
ever got from Conrad. Forbearing and forgiving Conrad, diffident and
reticent Mr. Ford!
The life of a man is an open book for no one, not even for himself. The
characteristics and peculiarities of Conrad intrigued his biographer
from the beginning. He binds them with tenuous threads to Conrad’s
hereditary traits and the influence of his environment, and finally
presents the picture complete, allowing his readers to draw their own
conclusions.
Joseph Conrad, according to the portrait, was not the sort of man
about whom a conclusion could be readily reached; and when it was, you
could not bank on it. He was of cosmopolitan appearance: considerable
British insularity, but more Slav and Eastern in his make-up. He gave
the impression of a Frenchman, born and brought up in Marseilles!
His hatreds seem to have exceeded his loves, but his life was a
contradiction of his tastes and he has more friends than enemies. Mr.
Ford avows that Conrad hated the sea and disliked to write. “_Un métier
de chien_,” he used to call it. When he had made up his mind to write
for a living, he had his choice of three languages: he discarded Polish
instantly, French with a sigh of regret which he never overcame, and
decided on English. And he hated English as a medium of prose, even
more than he hated the sea! He thought in French, sometimes in Polish,
never in English, unless his thoughts were confined to the most common
of everyday commonplaces; when they occupied a higher sphere they were
always in French. It was because of the difficulty with which Conrad
was constantly confronted that he first thought of collaborating with
one who was reputed to be “the finest stylist in the English language.”
Mr. Ford does not marvel at Conrad’s desire to write in English,
despite the fact that he knew French so much better. Ford himself
writes French better than he does English, not that he knows it
better--he does not--but because “in English, he can go gaily on,
exulting in his absolute command of the tongue; he can write like
Ruskin or like the late Charles Garvice, at will.” In writing, but not
in speaking French, he must pause for a word; it is in pausing for a
word that the salvation of all writers lies. The proof of prose is in
the percentage of right words--not the precious word; not even the
startlingly real word. That we might have a whole book on Mr. Ford
without a word about any one else!
Mr. Ford bears heavily on their collaboration, and one unfamiliar with
the writings of the two authors might gather that Mr. Ford was the
_fons et origo_ of much of Conrad’s work. I have no doubt that Conrad
put an appreciative valuation on Mr. Ford’s assistance, but I have the
same certainty that he did not evaluate it as did his biographer.
Some will think that Mr. Ford has lately had a bad quarter of an hour
reading a recent number of _La Nouvelle Revue Française_ which is
devoted wholly to Conrad. There, his colleagues and admirers, French
and English, tell of Conrad’s personality and his writings but never a
word of his “collaborator.” Water enters a duck’s back a thousand times
more penetratingly than failure to accord him what he believes to be
his right penetrates the dura mater of Mr. Ford Madox Ford.
Stephen Crane said, “You must not be offended by Hueffer’s manner.
He patronises Mr. James, he patronises Mr. Conrad. Of course, he
patronises me, and he will patronise Almighty God when they meet, but
God will get used to it, for Hueffer is all right.” We are ready to
agree with Stephen Crane even after we read as an antithesis that the
words in which Henry James always referred to Mr. Ford were “_votre
ami, le jeune homme modeste_.”
Conrad’s life revolved around his books, he was constantly occupied
with the best manner in which to introduce a character of fiction.
It was necessary to get the character in with a strong impression,
and then work backward and forward over his past; this theory was the
result of thought and experiment on the part of the collaborators.
In the same manner, they devised the best opening for each type of
writing; their theory was that the opening paragraph of book or story
should be of the tempo of the whole performance, so that the ideal
novel should begin either with a dramatic scene or with a note that
should suggest the entire book. They agreed that style has no other use
than to make the work interesting. Hence, they sought to render their
thought in the manner which appeared the most sincere and interesting,
not to make a display of erudition or of cleverness, or of juggling
with words.
Mr. Ford’s book is adorned with flights into the land of constructive
writing, and there is much to learn from the theories and principles
expressed on the authority of both Joseph Conrad and Mr. Ford. For,
there is no denying that the latter’s style is fluent and clear,
picturesque enough to be original yet kept constantly within the bounds
of pure English. Mr. Ford says that their greatest admiration for a
stylist in any language was given to W. H. Hudson, of whom Conrad
said that his writing was like the grass that the good God made to
grow--when it was there, one could not tell how it came. The consensus
of opinion however would seem to be that Conrad got his greatest
inspiration from Turgenev.
Conrad’s philosophy was résuméd in one word, “fidelity.” He was
faithful in his adhesion to Herrick’s maxim: To live merrily and
trust to good letters. He never believed in using novels as a medium
of preaching; if his standards of morality suffered from some of his
heroes’ breaches, he would create one who would express the opinions
Conrad might have been willing to express himself. Thus did Conrad
expound his beliefs anonymously, and because he was a gentleman he
always created another hero who would refute the preacher’s arguments.
His belief was that one of the most important qualities for a novelist
to cultivate was humility, to make himself as little conspicuous as
possible to the reader.
Mr. Ford has a heart. Unlike his mind, it is assiduously concealed,
but it pierces through the coarse envelope of the purely intellectual
interest to which he attempts to confine his biography of Joseph
Conrad. None of his memoir may be true, but that does not detract
from it as a work of art. He shows no trace of real emotion, and his
remembrances carry with them no suggestion of the broken heart which
some authors would have assumed had they been writing on the same
subject with the material Mr. Ford had at his disposal. His book,
whether biography or autobiography, is a beautiful tribute to the man
he liked and the author he loved. He says that there never was a word
of spoken affection between them, never a personal note which would
have revealed to either the inner sentiment the other entertained for
his collaborator and playmate. But if Mr. Ford will never know what
were Conrad’s feelings for him, readers of the biography will know that
Mr. Ford’s book found its first inspiration in his heart, and, shaped
by his affection, found expression in his intelligence. The duty which
prompted him to write it was one of love, and the real sentiment, never
expressed in words, is constantly watching over the author’s shoulder.
My disappointment in Mr. Ford’s book is the treatment of Conrad’s art.
Conrad had a form of realism that was nearly unique, blended with an
impressionism that was at once captivating and awesome. Colours,
sounds, voices, visions, atmospheres, are manipulated to make a harmony
and an effectiveness that are sometimes overwhelming, always stirring.
He accomplished realism through impressionism, and in this he was as
nearly original as one can be in literature. Then he had another great
merit; he did not draw conclusions about his characters. He submitted
the evidence without plea or prejudice, the reader renders the verdict.
He saw life as it is, and man as he wishes to be, and he took them both
in at a glance, just as Marlow did in _Chance_. He registered them and
in his hectic leisure reproduced them, and thus made posterity his
debtor. And Fidus Ford has made us his debtors for showing Conrad as
he appeared to him. I have no doubt he was quite a different Conrad to
Stephen Crane, John Galsworthy, Mr. Doubleday, and Mrs. Conrad, but not
more lovable and not more worthy of the admiration the whole literary
world gives him to-day.
* * * * *
Mr. Hugh l’Anson Fausset, whose English reads like translation from the
French and who handles polysyllabic words as a juggler handles gilded
balls, has made a study of the seventeenth century’s poet and divine,
that is sure to be widely read by the cultured public and to provoke
discussion and dissension. He calls his book _A Study in Discord_ and
it purports to depict the conflict that went on in Donne, throughout
his whole life, between the physical and the spiritual impulses of his
nature. Mr. Fausset’s thesis is that neither as poet nor preacher did
Donne succeed in resolving these discords. He enjoyed neither physical
nor spiritual harmony but was torn in strife between his intelligence
and his impulses. The Christian ideal acted as a poison on the natural
man in process of proving a purge. Self-consciousness was the only
discipline by which his egoism might learn the wisdom of selfishness.
The tale of that battle was Donne’s legacy to literature.
“His style, whether as poet or preacher, never achieved
either the fresh effusive gaiety, or the assured serenity
of absolute Beauty. He could not create beauty out of
life; he could not even see the beauty in which the limbs
of life were veiled which flamed through and over the
bleak anatomy of fact, consecrating the perishable dust
and redeeming it of squalor and grossness.”
It is the verdict of a judge, not of a jury and Mr. Fausset can not
expect that the world of letters will receive it without protest.
But he cites with skill and adroitness the evidence on which it is
based, holding Donne up in the successive phases of Pagan, Pensioner
and Preacher. Were he more advocate than judge he might have added
Penitent, for the sake of both alliteration and fuller justice, for
the death of the poetic dean was artistic to a high degree and in the
last months of his life after he had preached his last sermon, “Unto
the Lord belong the issues of Death,” he achieved an absolute harmony
of his life in the ebb-tide. The strings of his character then vibrated
with small amplitude in unison.
Donne may be a study in discord, but there is nothing of discord in
the writing of Fausset. He uses Donne as a peg on which to hang his
concrete thought, and his organised ideas of nature, philosophy and
religion. While it is a biography it is also a series of essays in
which the vagaries, character and personal appearance of his subject
are used to point the moral and adorn the tale. It is never left to
the reader to form his own opinion of Donne, his life or his acts; for
Fausset blares facts about the motive and the soul and his trumpet
gives forth no uncertain sound. Even when Donne in a verse letter to a
friend states, “and with vain outward things be no more moved,” Fausset
immediately states “yet excessive solitude can so affect a character
like Donne’s that only a restoration of ‛vain outward things’ can save
it from myopia or even madness.”
It required courage to write the life of a man who furnished the
material for a masterpiece of English biography. Izaak Walton’s
affection for his friend transported him to immoderate commendation of
the events of his career, but Mr. Gosse’s _Life and Letters of John
Donne_ is just and true. It will immortalise the personality of the
poet, just as his somatic features will be perpetuated by the picture
in a shroud he so studiously had made.
Fausset can not credit the picture of Donne given by the “gentle
Walton” for the reason that Walton wrote on Donne in the spirit of
love and admiration. Fausset writes of him neither with love nor hate,
but with the scalpel always in hand, dissecting, getting beneath the
surface. He is not the tender physician, he is the scientist at work in
the laboratory of research with Donne as the cadaver. There is a charm,
a beauty, and at times a poetic fervour of expression in the writing
which reminds one of the Essay on Shelley by Francis Thompson. One can
not help feeling that Donne was doomed from the first if we believe the
picture painted of him with unerring hand by Fausset.
But Mr. Fausset is a student and exponent of personality and it is as
such that we should estimate his work. Judged by the two studies that
he has published: the one under consideration and _Keats; A Study in
Development_, he has insight, sound psychology and a logical mind. With
years he will grow more kindly and less turbulent. Meanwhile he shall
have the benefit of our prayers that the happy day may hasten.
As Mr. Fausset sees him, John Donne was physically a genius;
intellectually “possessed”; one who ranged almost every scale of
experience, and upon each struck some note: harsh, cunning, arrogant
or poignant, which reverberates down the roof of time; a poet who was
at times near a monster, full-blooded, cynical and gross; a thinker,
curious, ingenious and mathematical; a seer brooding morbidly over
the dark flux of things; a saint aspiring to the celestial harmony.
He served the flesh with the same ardour with which he sought the
ideal. He was a sensualist and a thinker, a poet and a priest, a pagan
and a Christian. More than any contemporary he reflected the three
aspects of life which met in confused association in seventeenth
century England: Mediævalism, the Renaissance and the Reformation. The
physical, intellectual and spiritual elements each in turn dominated
his personality. The purpose of his life was to bring this trinity of
forces into harmony and by so doing discover a new and deeper unity
in the Universe itself. It is Mr. Fausset’s belief that he did not
succeed in this purpose but the tortured history of such a genius
lays bare the potentialities of humanity and of civilisation. His
life was one long battle with death: the death of physical grossness
and mental conceit, of worldly ambition and spiritual complacence.
He had explored the secret of the senses and the subtleties of the
mind. And so, psychologist and sensualist as he was, he was competent
in the later days of his spirituality to report adequately of the
soul. He related poetry to religion, and religion to truth, and he
showed us how to relate ourselves to God. His life teaches us that
spiritual satisfaction is unworthy of the name, if it be achieved at
the sacrifice of intellectual honesty and that religious experience is
the prize of perpetual conflict. Such is the man that Mr. Fausset has
composited from the creations of Walton, Gosse, Chambers and Grierson.
John Donne was born in London in 1573 and died there in 1631. His
life was a stormy one, tempestuous in youth, squally in maturity,
blusterous in old age. Calm overtook him but a few weeks before his
death. He was a neurotic individual and his neural disequilibrium is
testified by his portraits and by his conduct. A portrait of him made
at the age of nineteen shows a brow slightly receding and narrowing
at the temples, prominent eyes, gigantic nose coarsely flattened at
the base, thick lips and pointed chin. His resistance to emotional
influences was defective and he reacted strongly to inner as well as
to outer influences. From boyhood there was lack of equanimity in the
development of the psychic personality although his intellect made
him always a conspicuous figure and he “pursued mathematics, law or
theology with the same tenacious passion as an ephemeral liaison.” He
was combative, satirical, arrogant, Sybaritic, Dionysiac. The sap did
not ascend his tree of life gently or harmoniously; it gushed upward,
often geyser-like, drenching conventions and submerging morality. He
insisted upon licence to do as he pleased and clamoured for freedom and
promiscuity, especially in love.
“Who ever loves, if he do not propose
The right true end of love, he’s one that goes
To sea for nothing but to make him sick.”
He, like St. Paul, believed that woman is the glory of the man and was
created for him, and he had a contempt for women’s vaunted constancy.
“Foxes, and goats--all beasts--change when they please.
Shall woman, more hot, wily, wild than these,
Be bound to one man...?”
But he was soon to encounter one who was not polyandrous. Anne Moore,
in a period of sixteen years, bore him twelve children. He was about
thirty years old when he married her. The literary fecundity of his
third decade is represented by _Songs and Sonnets_ and _Elegies_. Mr.
Fausset is probably correct in his claim that the poetry of Donne’s
early maturity was, like Goethe’s, a reflection and refraction of his
loves. Donne’s contention was that sex neither can be nor should be
transcended and the _Elegies_ are his earnest of it.
But his moral nature was awakening even before he met Anne and he began
to question:
“Why should our clay
Over our spirits so much sway
To tie us to that way?”
And he denied that he had formerly protested
“Change is the nursery
Of music, joy, life and eternity.”
The manner in which he broke with the nameless lady whose husband was
a deformed man and was stationary all day in a basket-chair, affords
Mr. Fausset an opportunity to discharge some verbal pyrotechnics, and
to disgorge some righteous wrath. “So, at last, he turned upon the poor
woman, whom so short a time before he had bent to his purpose with a
militant ardour and a shameless licence. The cold and cruel cynicism,
the elemental spite of his last farewell to one who must at least have
given as much as she received, has no parallel in our literature. In
truth, no one is so ruthlessly vindictive, so callous to every claim of
sentiment and generosity as the moralist new risen from the ashes of
the brute.” He then quotes “The Apparition” in which Donne taunts her
as “feign’d vestal” and threatens one day to square accounts with her.
It was not a pretty letter but Mr. Fausset is likely a very chivalric
man and “brute” is scarcely justified.
Donne married in haste but never repented, probably because Anne never
questioned her husband or tried to improve him.
The first years of their married life were lean. Parental blessing was
slow in coming, and slower still was paternal allowance. But they both
came and soon after conversion. “Anne Moore served as the bridge which
Donne, at least as the lover, climbed from the abyss to the cheerful
daylight and even to a homely eminence.” As the fruit of his passion
for his mistresses had been disgusted cynicism, that of his devotion
to his wife was ecstatic platonism, which now became reflected in his
poetry.
Mr. Fausset takes us through the fourth decade of his life, documenting
the transformation that took place in his soul from cynicism to
platonism, from realist to mystic, from Catholicism to Protestantism,
by quotations from his poetry, by pen pictures of his friends,
particularly Mrs. Herbert who was “an idyllic retreat of sanity and
piety and sympathy in a sultry world” and by descriptions of his
reactions to illness, “illness the sword of God.” His religious
conversion was the important thing and these are the words that Mr.
Fausset uses to describe its onset:
“The young Dionysus, who had broken from the restraints
of Rome, seeking his way back to some primal ecstasy,
which conventions seemed at best to adulterate, was
now attempting to translate his ecstasy into ideas. He
had turned at first to those tortured saints of the
Dark Ages in whom sensuality and science melted into
mysticism, and then to the pure but tenuous conceptions
of Plato. But not for him were those enchanted bridals
of the soul with God, of the mind with Beauty, in
which the body passed away in flame or in smoke. There
was too much of the satyr in his seership, and of the
casuist in his mysticism. His branches might strain up
heavenward but they never forgot their native earth. His
only hope was to subdue his lawlessness to logic, until
the two, blended together in a rational whole, achieved
an equilibrium between mind and body as he had already
discovered for his passions.”
Rome suffocated him and Protestantism seemed a pallid, political
compromise, but thanks to frequent prayers, to use his own words, he
effected the transition. Donne succeeded in generating the spiritual
from the struggle of the rational with the natural, and by so doing Mr.
Fausset believes he waged a battle of human consciousness two hundred
years in advance of his time.
The turn of the tide in Donne’s worldly affairs dated from 1610 when
he wrote a poem, “The Funeral Elegy,” commemorative of the charms and
potentialities of a girl whose death had resulted from a box on the
ear administered by her adoring father. It was a shot in the dark on
the part of Dr. Donne but he “got” his man. Sir Robert Drury provided
him a home for three years, then took him abroad. These were years of
spiritual growth, emotional equilibrium and physical exhilaration.
Soon after his return he took Holy Orders and after much manœuvring,
King James, before whom he preached his first sermon, capitulated.
His worldly fortunes were assured. It now only remained to make his
heavenly ones.
Mr. Fausset indulges in one of his frequent rhetorical rhapsodies in
describing Donne’s first appearance under the stole:
“The figure who mounted the pulpit in these early days of
his ministry was not the spectral divine, the emaciated,
almost sardonic mystic, who was later to hypnotise his
audience by the reverberations of his eloquence, the
intensities of his imagination, and the sepulchral
tones of his voice. He was a man, despite the ravages
of ill-health, still in his prime, his beard indeed
touched with grey, but his face and carriage retaining
that air of buccaneering insolence, almost of dignified
roguery, which we have remarked in the young man. Arrayed
in vestments and uplifted by the sense of an august
occasion, his appearance must have been singularly
striking, suggesting indeed some challenging John the
Baptist or one of Dürer’s swarthy evangelists. At the
same time he did not forget the courtier in the priest.
There was a ‛sacred flattery’ in his address, which if it
‛beguiled men to amend,’ also gratified their vanity. His
learning was beyond dispute, but the crabbed style of his
correspondence, no less than the angular conceits of his
poetry, could scarcely have prepared his friends for the
miracle of eloquence which he was speedily to achieve,
pungent, rhythmical, varied, and, even in its passages of
scholastic argument, strangely sinuous and compelling.”
It is Donne’s spiritual life that his latest biographer finds worthy of
unstinted praise, and it is perhaps for that reason that Part Four of
his book entitled _The Preacher_ will be found least interesting by the
general reader.
Although his friend Izaak Walton wrote: “Donne’s marriage was the
remarkable error of his life,” it is difficult to believe him. Anne
put out the fire of his concupiscence though it cost her her life, and
from its ashes his soul arose. After her death, he withdrew from the
world and “in this retiredness,” Walton writes, “which was often from
the sight of his dearest friends, he became crucified to the world and
all those vanities, those imaginary pleasures that are daily acted
on that ruthless stage; and they were as perfectly crucified to him.
Now his soul was elemented of nothing but sadness; now grief took so
full possession of his heart as to leave no place for joy; if it did,
it was a joy to be alone, where, like a pelican in the wilderness,
he might bemoan himself without witness or restraint, and pour forth
his passions like Job in the days of his affliction.” It was through
an agony of remorse that Donne strove for harmony of body and mind.
He preached to others to express and reassure himself. Mr. Fausset
believes that his exhortation “was not the flower of any abstract love
of humanity,” but of intense personal preoccupation.
Preaching did not provide an adequate vent for his emotions so again he
turned to poetry which, in keeping with his spiritual integration, he
now cast in sonnet form. In these sonnets, Donne was primarily absorbed
in asserting his emancipation from worldly values, and lamenting past
sin. Mr. Fausset sees him “wooing his God with both the fervour and the
self-disgust with which he had before addressed his mistresses”; even
the erotic imagery recurs. His religion had become a personal passion
and a personal hazard to which theology was no more than a prop. Of the
many judgments his interpreter has passed upon him, this is the fairest.
Serious illness thrust itself upon him soon after his promotion to the
deanship of St. Paul’s. Even in those days, before “nervous breakdown”
was fashionable and a euphemism for episodic mental disorder, it was
attributed to overwork and emotional tension, two very rare causes of
disease. But he began to be seriously ill, ill of the disease that
twelve years later conditioned his death. Before Mr. Gosse published
his biography of Donne, he submitted the facts of his illnesses to
a London diagnostician who satisfied himself that it was malignant
disease of the stomach. But in 1899 when that diagnosis was made,
we knew practically nothing about the most insidious, and the most
prevalent form of chronic sepsis: that which has its origin in the
tonsils and teeth. With the temerity of one whose statement can not be
disproven, I boldly assert that, had his tonsils been removed after
the alleged attack of typhoid fever and his teeth X-rayed when he felt
himself at forty-five lapsing into an infirm and valetudinarian state,
he would have lived out the time allotted by the psalmist. Had he been
vouchsafed these natural years of piety and preparation, he would have
accomplished that synthesis of the physical and spiritual which Mr.
Fausset denies him, and the world would not have had _The Devotions_ in
which Donne incorporated the features and fears of his illness. England
waited three hundred years for some one to parallel his performance of
clinical self-observation and then found it in the young man who under
the pen name of W. N. P. Barbellion wrote a book as self-revelatory as
the _Confessions of Saint Augustine_.
Donne came to many fertile oases in his travel through the desert
of sin, to many pools of Bethesda in wading the rivers of disease.
The Herbert family was the most refreshing and restoring. In George
Herbert, fifteen years his junior, he saw what he would like to have
been; and in Herbert’s mother, he saw his ideal of spiritual womanhood.
“The Autumnal,” his poem of homage to Magdalen Herbert, embodies his
idea of the platonism of the soul as distinct from that of the mind.
Through it, there breathes, as Mr. Fausset says, a quiet, tender as
the evening sky before it has begun to pale with premonition of night.
Donne devoted the last five years of his life to dying, and he did it
with the same intensity and artistry as that with which he devoted the
first five years of his maturity to living. He interpreted himself
the seventeenth century representative of him that was spoken of by
the prophet Esaias and bent himself to the last atom of his strength
to make straight the Lord’s paths. It is a stirring and touching
narrative and Mr. Fausset has made the most of it; reading it, one is
forced to agree that he has established his contention that Donne never
achieved a harmonious conscience; for, even in his hours of profoundest
religiosity, he was dependent in a measure upon intuition for his
faith; the dread of death, and the doubt of God’s mercy were constantly
recurring, even though he maintained the priestly attitude with
outward calm and enviable courage. In the years of his wisdom he did
his best to crucify nature and to implore grace from Him who suffered
crucifixion that man might live eternally.
His whole life was a series of _beaux gestes_ and the last the most
picturesque. Standing upon an urn, with closed eyes and folded hands,
shrouded as for the grave, he had his portrait painted. And of that
portrait his latest biographer says:
“It was a face at once grotesque and sublime, sinister
and sanctified, fiendish and devout; seared and purified,
cynically ecstatic. The craftiness and arrogance of his
youth were sobered into a hungry, a cadaver simper, while
his mysticism seemed to glimmer through the shadowy
hollows with a phosphorescent life.”
For Mr. Fausset, Donne reflects and condenses the long labour of the
man to outgrow the beast and approach the divine. In his unrest we see
our own reflected.
This _Study in Discord_ puts Mr. Fausset in the class of biographers at
whose head stands Mr. Lytton Strachey. The reader may be annoyed by
his obvious inimicality to the realistic strain in Donne’s character;
he may be wearied by the turbulence of his exposition, but he can not
fail to realise that in reading this book he is companioning a man
of education, imagination, sentiment and vision, though his heart
sometimes dominates his head.
Throughout the biography we capture as interesting a revelation of
the mind of Fausset as we do of Donne, and his desire in writing the
biography is summed up in one sentence in the epilogue, “And this
soul is worthy of all honour; for though defeated it never accepted a
fraudulent peace.”
The reader who knows of Donne from Campbell’s British Poets will, after
reading Mr. Fausset’s book, be likely to agree that “the life of Donne
is more interesting than his poetry.” It is indeed, and it becomes more
interesting after each biographer has had his turn at it. The last word
has not yet been said but the best that has been said is the last.
* * * * *
Thomas Burke, a young Britisher who has familiarised readers of English
with the East End of London and its motley inhabitants, who writes
about unclean things in a clean way and of vicious people wholesomely,
and who has rare talent for creating literary atmosphere, calls his
biography _The Wind and the Rain_. Next to Mr. Anderson’s story it
is the most captivating narrative that I have read in a long time.
Scarcely are these words written before pages of the _Memoirs of an
Editor_ by Edward P. Mitchell are reflected in the mirror of memory.
[Illustration: THOMAS BURKE]
Thomas Burke says nothing of his parents; I fancy he did not know them.
His first recollections are of his uncle, a gardener with a sense of
humour, and of a Chinese with an appearance of mystery who was later
deported because he trafficked in opium and morals. He got from the
latter what Dostoievsky got from epileptic attacks: a sense of time
arrested, crystallised; a sense of eternity; a fancy that always,
behind the curtain of time, the joy of the moment had been. The secret
that Pater attributed to Mona Lisa he learned from Quong Lee. Though
Tommy was but ten years old, he knew all the beauty and all the evil of
the heart of Asia: its cruelty, its grace, its wisdom. And the contact
generated a writer, for from his sixteenth year he has been animated
by a single motive: to express in writing one moment in a London side
street. He has not yet succeeded to his own satisfaction. As Marcel
Proust seeks to revive the memories and reveries associated with
incidents and experiences of childhood and youth, Mr. Burke struggles
to make come again “the pins-and-needles sensation in the back of my
neck” and to have the soul feeling that accompanied it when Quong Lee
beckoned him to his shop and gave him a piece of ginger.
Mr. Burke’s life seems to have been without remarkable event.
He stalked poverty, and he fell in love with a snob who had an
understanding friend of her own sex who shared a flat with her; he
made a half-hearted attempt to get on in the City and a whole-hearted
one to be a bohemian; and he saw the seams of the seamy side of life
burst wide open now and then. But he also met men with hearts, like Mr.
Creegan who gave him his first leg-up. This benefactor rescued him from
_une maison de joie et de jeux_ where he cleaned boots and ran errands
after he left the orphanage; fed him, clothed him, lodged him, got him
a job, and started him on the road that led to hobnobbing with Caruso
and reminiscing in Monaco. And he met Gracie Scott. If he treated
Gracie as he says in his book he did, it will be one of the sweetest
memories of his life when that of Cicely shall have gone forever and
that of Cosgrove shall have faded.
One of the many precious lies that grown-ups like to tell themselves
is that the days of their youth were happy days. Mr. Burke is not
addicted to that sort of story-telling. “I had little happiness then,
partly because I was young, and partly because I had no friends, no
money, bad food, and no hope. There was just one thing I had then which
belongs to all youth, however miserable. Though utterly joyless, I
had a tremendous _capacity_ for joy.” One may share that tremendous
capacity--for he still has it--by reading _The Wind and the Rain_.
* * * * *
“It is better to be beggared out of hand by a scape-grace
nephew, than daily hag-ridden by a peevish uncle.”
R. L. S.
Mr. John A. Steuart has written two large volumes to explain our legacy
from Robert Louis Stevenson, which was “a delightful contribution to
the romantic literature of the world and an example of courage that
will continue to inspire men to remote generations.”
A generation has come and gone since Stevenson died. Of the one
now on the threshold even those gifted with imagination and those
who understand the impulsiveness of their countrymen, will find it
difficult to understand the esteem in which he was held in America in
the beginning of the present century. To form any conception of the
appreciation, praise and adulation that were bestowed on his writings,
they will have to turn to contemporary criticism.
The British “discovered” Stevenson after we revealed him, but when it
came to approbation they surpassed us. Then there was an earthquake
in the literary world. Henley, the intimate of his early maturity and
the doughty champion of his genius, who more than any one else made a
public for him, published an article in the _Pall Mall Magazine_ which
seemed to give the _coup de grâce_ to Stevenson as a great writer. The
blow glanced off Stevenson and stunned Henley; the spectators howled
and called the latter traitor, and ghoul. When the excitement subsided
dispassionate witnesses reflected upon the matter. Some of them were
moved to re-read Stevenson. Others to read him for the first time. The
result was that devotees of Stevenson grew less numerous. However, when
in 1914 a temperate and generous critic, a novelist of established
reputation, Frank Swinnerton, published a critical study of Stevenson
which was adverse to his candidacy to immortality, it precipitated a
shower of abuse, less inundating than that which submerged Henley, but
still disagreeable. However, since that time, indiscriminate adulation
of Stevenson has given place to critical estimation. The result to-day
is that most judges agree with Swinnerton that it is no longer possible
for a serious critic to place him among the great writers because in
no department of letters--save the boy’s book and the short-story--has
he written work of first-class importance. His latest biographer would
seem to agree, though it is difficult to say just what Mr. Steuart
believes, for his writing is so overladen with verbiage, so surcharged
with platitudes, so interpolated with irrelevancies and so replete
with alleged inside information that one can not see the wood for the
trees. But he does not agree that Stevenson was not a “great” man for
when “he is summed up, when his qualities, mental and moral, have been
analysed and tabulated, it will be found that a superb courage crowns
all and from that master-quality flows other virtues in which he was
conspicuous--chivalry, generosity, love of justice, an eager humanity,
a passion for the happiness of the race. It is valour more than aught
else that enchants, inspires, and endears him to the people of two
hemispheres.” Probably no one will contest Mr. Steuart’s statement,
but surely it is an extraordinary reason for a critical biography. No
one would think of writing a life of Meredith or of Heine because they
displayed courage that excites our envy and elicits our admiration. Was
the courage of Heine or of Meredith inferior to that of Stevenson and
what was the quality of Stevenson’s that made it so distinguished?
Heine had a disease which, at the time, was never known to end in
recovery, Stevenson had only a disease (so far as his latest biographer
seems to know) that frequently is cured and nearly always tends to
quiescence when given half a chance. Why has John Addington Symonds’
courage not been estimated properly as an asset of greatness?
In truth Mr. Steuart takes himself too seriously. He has not advanced
Stevenson’s reputation an atom. Mr. Graham Balfour’s biography of
Stevenson may be a barley-sugar effigy of him, and it may make him out
a seraph in chocolate as Henley claimed, and the portrait may have been
touched up to please the family as Mr. Steuart maintains, but taken in
connection with Mr. Swinnerton’s book, Miss Masson’s _Life_, and the
publications of the Bibliophile Society of Boston, it is a competent
account of his life and accomplishments.
There is a feature of Stevenson’s personality that has never been
touched upon, but which, now that Mr. Steuart has woven a crown of
oak leaves for him, must be discussed, and that is his infantilism.
It was his curse as it was in a large measure his shame. It showed
itself in many ways: in his relationship to his mother, to Alison
Cunningham, “Cunny, my second mother,” to Lady Colvin and to his wife;
in his speech, dress, manner and imitativeness; in his gestures; in
his emotional reactions and determinations; and more than anything
else in his inability to display common sense and ordinary prudence.
He was always under the dominion of women older than himself and he
enjoyed it; they all mothered him. He had no more capacity to get along
without mothering than a ten-year-old child has. He was as interested
in his appearance as Narcissus. “He could not be in the same room
with a mirror but he must invite its confidence any time he passed
it; he was never so much in earnest, never so well-pleased, never so
irresistible as when he wrote about himself,” Henley wrote and all his
biographers agree. That this is a childish trait, no one needs to be
told. His speech, manner and dress never failed to attract attention
and he took great pains that they should not. Yearning for notice and
efforts to secure it are equally well-known infantile traits. Many
children invent fictitious parents and forebears. Stevenson was one of
them. Mr. Steuart has discovered that one Margaret Lizars of French
descent was his great-grandmother, and he naïvely remarks that this
explains Stevenson’s oddities. His imitativeness is testified to by
the way he taught himself to write and this incident is discussed
in the book under consideration in a chapter entitled _The Sedulous
Ape_. It would be difficult to say which was the most childish of all
Stevenson’s _beaux gestes_, but I shall say, harmonious with heredity,
the one he did not make; this incident suggests another illustrious
victim of adult infantilism, Shelley. All admirers of that genius know
that he went single-handed and inexperienced to Ireland to redress her
wrongs. Stevenson, on hearing that a Kerry farmer had been murdered by
“moonlighters” and his wife and children boycotted, proposed to rent
the Curtis farm and to proceed there with his family!
His dealings with his father, his meeting and courtship of Mrs. Fanny
de Grift Osbourne, his break with Henley, all conform to the teachings
of child psychology and are harmonious with child-behaviour, and they
are even more suggestive of infantilism than are the playing with
tin-soldiers, and the setting up and operating a toy press, which was
his diversion at Davos when, in his thirty-first year, he sought health
there a second time.
But nothing shows his infirmity so conspicuously as his inability
to look after his impaired health. It is one of the most pathetic
chapters in all biography, Stevenson’s imbecilic neglect of his
health. No sooner was he benefited by a stay at Bournemouth, Hyères,
Davos, Adirondacks, South Sea Islands, than he, with what looks like
deliberation, went somewhere or did something which any one but a child
would know was suicidal. The climate of Hyères suited him; in later
years he declared that it was the only time in his life that he was
really happy. He was lazy, yet at the same time productive, and he
felt well. But he must go home, and the reason for going was that “he
was yearning to get back to her who had so often and so effectively
comforted him.”
Time after time he did the same thing. In fact he was on his way home
from Samoa and he had reached Sydney when symptoms developed that made
further flight impossible. His reason for selecting Samoa instead
of Tahiti or Honolulu was supremely childish, “it was awful fun.”
It must be borne in mind that adult infantilism displays itself far
oftener in the emotional side of the individual’s make-up than in the
intellectual. Geniuses, particularly in the realm of the fine arts, are
often emotionally infantile. It accounts in a measure for the quarrels,
tantrums and vagaries of artists, and entirely for their reputation of
being neither practical nor provident.
Any one who would convince himself that many emotional and a few
physical characteristics of infancy clung to Stevenson in his maturity
should read the Essay _Child’s Play_ in the volume _Virginibus
Puerisque_.
Mr. Steuart harbours the delusion that he has brought to light
something new about Robert Louis Stevenson. One person familiar with
everything that Stevenson wrote and practically everything that has
been written about him fails to find it. To be sure he found out the
name of the bonny lass with whom Stevenson fell in love while she was
an earning guest of Mrs. Warren in Edinburgh, but he should be ashamed
for having published it. He found out also that Stevenson did not live
a strictly continent life, either before or after marriage. That is no
business of Steuart, and it does not concern readers of Stevenson.
One feels on reading the chapter in which “Claire” is introduced that
writing it, Mr. Steuart experienced a kind of salacious exaltation and
his apology in behalf of Stevenson makes one creep. Why Wordsworth
is dragged in, no one save the author knows. He must be aware that it
was not pruriency or pathological inquisitiveness that gave rise to
the Wordsworth-Vallon story. Critics and interpreters had sought for
explanation of obscurities in the philosopher-poet’s work. The story
explained them.
Mr. Steuart is satisfied that he did a Sherlock Holmes turn about the
Henley-Stevenson break. Let us admit it. How do the details that he
gives make Stevenson’s personality clearer to us? Mrs. Stevenson did
not like Henley, just as Mr. Steuart does not like Mrs. Stevenson.
Henley wrote Stevenson a letter and requested that it should not be
shown to anybody, a thing which would indicate that, though he was
captain of his fate and master of his soul, he did not know the a. b.
c. of the matrimonial game. Stevenson showed it to his wife and “der
Tag” dawned for her. The battle was fought and Stevenson won, but at
the expense of his peace of mind and happiness. The reparations have
not been made. No one can yet tell who will finally be called the moral
victor, but unless all signs and portents are to be distrusted it is R.
L. S.
Mr. Steuart’s book is interspersed with homilies on education and on
British valour; bromidic reflections: “As all the world knows, the
Casino at Monte Carlo is the centre of life and excitement to that gay
community”; platitudinous moralisations: “In such matters fathers are
apt to forget they were once young themselves”; and “adversity, it
has been said, is the true test of manhood”; meticulous explanations
such as the varieties of solicitor in Scotland; and studied padding,
as an example of which may be cited seven-eighths of what he says
about George Meredith. Some people may be glad to hear what he thinks
of Meredith as a novelist and as a person, but there will be fewer
probably after his book on Stevenson has been read.
“It is certain,” writes the author, “that Vailima, with its ever
increasing strain, did much to kill Stevenson.” Not nearly so much as
these two volumes, which were intended as a monument to him, have done!
Had Mr. Steuart talked with every old woman in Scotland who had ever
seen Stevenson, had he searched the register of every lupinaria of
Stevenson’s day in Edinburgh, and had he spent twice as much time as
he has in reverence before a bust of Henley, he could not understand
Stevenson the man or Stevenson the romancer.
Finally there is something patronising and condescending in his
attitude toward Stevenson, something contemptuous toward Mrs. Stevenson
and something studiously neglectful of Lady Colvin that is very
irritating. The reader who can rise from Mr. Steuart’s volume without
feeling that the author takes himself with sibylline seriousness is
fortunate, and the reader who can peruse the closing line without a
smile should take a cholagogue. His salute of Stevenson makes one think
of a wood-pecker taking leave of an eagle.
V
POETS
TROBADOUR, by _Alfred Kreymborg_.
WILLIAM BLAKE IN THIS WORLD, by _Harold Bruce_.
JOHN KEATS, by _Amy Lowell_.
POE--MAN, POET AND CREATIVE THINKER, by _Sherwin Cody_.
EDGAR A. POE, A PSYCHOPATIC STUDY, by _Dr. John W.
Robertson_.
RIMBAUD, by _Egdell Rickword_.
Despite the number and varieties of biographies published every year,
we rarely come upon one that is so interesting that it can not be put
down until the last page is read, one that grips us like a novel such
as _The Constant Nymph_ or _Tono Bungay_. Alfred Kreymborg, a maker of
verses without rhyme or capitals, some of which have great emotional
range, has succeeded in writing a story of his life that rivets our
attention. And he has pitched it in a key that persistently revives
pleasant memories. Reading it, one feels that it is the faithful
portrait of a soul in its adventures through life. Mr. Kreymborg is an
uncommon individual: a modest artist. He is content that his artistry
shall dawn upon us gradually, that we shall discover it as it were. He
does not proclaim it in the first chapter and reiterate it in all the
succeeding ones.
Neither our country nor its metropolis has been considered favourable
breeding ground for artists, nor is our atmosphere congenial to the
artistic temperament. It is difficult to conceive of more sterile
soil or environment for the growth and display of the emotional and
intellectual endowment that constitute artistry than those in which Mr.
Kreymborg found himself at his birth and during his formative years.
Indeed, he can not even be said to have been fortunate in his parents,
though his father, a German cigar packer, had a sense of humour, liked
Jews, and detested Tammany Hall; and his mother played the Butterbrod
Walzer and was optimistic. But that his talent was nevertheless “in the
family” on his mother’s side is testified by his Aunt Isabelle, who
went to the library every day, and was devoted to things called ideals.
The author does not dwell upon the locus and environment of his early
days; he spares us the minutiæ of his drab and sordid surroundings,
but we get a picture of them that is more informative than if it
were painted in vivid colours. Years ago I saw it every day, that
German-American home in the middle East Side, I ministered unto
those who constituted it, and I gained an esteem and an affection
for its members that required a world-calamity to alter. Now that it
is presented to me anew through verbal medium my recollections are
refreshed, my affections renewed and I praise the dexterity of the
artist’s pen and the accuracy of his memory.
The picture he gives of New York is the thing that will give the
book whatever permanency it will have. When Mouquin’s and the Hotel
Algonquin shall be replaced with a Rotonde and a Café Michaud; when
there will be a Boulevard Saint-Michel instead of a Greenwich Village;
a rue la Boëtie instead of a 57th Street; when pagan practice shall
have succeeded puritanic principle--then hedonists and students of
manners and customs who would know what New York was like while big
with the twentieth century, may turn to _Troubadour_ for enlightenment.
When poets, now considered radicals or rhythmicals, shall have taken
on conventionality, or professorships, and would tell their fellows or
their students of the birth and early days of their art and show them
the incubators in which the punies were put for development, they will
take them for a walk in 14th Street and they will read to them from
_Troubadour_. The latter will be more agreeable than the former for
Kreymborg’s prose has much of the elusive loveliness of his poetry;
for like his friend Sherwood Anderson, he knows how to string words
together so that they make music for the reader; and Fourteenth Street
is down at the heels, frayed at the cuffs and woozy in the head.
The author bears unnecessarily hard on the _forte_ pedal when he
renders his hardship selections. It does not add anything to our
picture of New York’s Bohemia to be told about the “awful stench one
could never quite grow accustomed to” in Kiel’s Bakery, and one reader
at least has not been able to guess the riddle of the Fourteenth Street
studio. The occupant had been working at Æolian Hall and had progressed
to orchestrelle leader, apparently content with his prospects. Then
Eve came in ostensibly to buy some rolls for her pianola. They called
her Tommy. She was twenty-seven or eight and “scarcely what worldly
folks would have designated a sophisticated person but with one or two
indisputable claims in the direction of Plymouth and the Mayflower.”
“Krimmie” learned about women from her. I suspect it was to facilitate
deeper knowledge rather than to gestate his art that he resigned his
sinecure for the sake of a thing so quixotic as a studio, “not even a
studio, but a room, less than a room--up the stairs of a dismal rickety
building on West 14th Street.”
Be that as it may, it was from that day that he began to get that
intimate knowledge of the habits of the wolf called want, which his
autobiography shows us that he possesses, and of the world frequented
by the wolf’s readiest prey. He reduced the beast to fictitious
pacification by throwing him his winnings at chess and as he had become
an expert player they were often considerable, and his germinating
worldly love he embodied in a story called _Erna Vitek_, which brought
him a mild _succès de scandale_. As strange a trio as could be
assembled in New York at the time--George Francis Train having left
Madison Square for the beyond--came forward to defend him. They were
Frank Harris, Rev. Percy Grant and Dr. Frank Crane. Mr. Kreymborg
observes parenthetically that he has not met the author of _My Life
and Loves_ to this day. It is gratifying to know that amidst all the
blows that he received in his quarter century of struggle, there was
occasionally a caress!
Krimmie did not exactly tire of Tommy, nor did Tommy exactly tire
of Krimmie. But the latter went West and the former East and the
experience gave the lie to the poet who sang about the effect of
absence on the heart. In East Lyme or thereabouts, Christine threw a
dazzling light across Krimmie’s path. It flabbergasted him for a moment
so that he could not distinguish her from others, but as soon as his
eyes became adjusted to the illumination he knew the die was cast,
the seal was set. He hastily sought a scrap of paper and embodied his
emotion in six words, each a monosyllable:
Till you came,
I was I.
Thus did he disregard his oft-repeated admonition that simplicity
should occur at the end of a long line of tradition. It reminds me of
a picture that _Life_ published many years ago: a small boy gazing
intently at a child’s garment (the name of which it is improper to
mention in polite American society) hanging on the line of a tenement
backyard and uttering ecstatically: “They’re hern.”
And so they were married. Krimmie did not distinguish then between
infatuation and love, and Christine had no idea how rough the road
would be from romance to reality, especially the part through
Grantwood, N. J. So after a year of many detours they decided to try it
alone--for a time at least. A young man whose adolescence was pitted
with piety had returned from Rome whither he had gone to have love’s
scars removed. He was keen to take Christine into his _matriomonale_
Ford in which he had invited her to ride before the priesthood
beckoned to him. Day by day, in every way, Krimmie’s affectivity
resembled more and more that of the late Mr. Barkis. It is not clearly
apparent why Mr. Kreymborg gave up Christine with such readiness. I
suspect she had an infantile personality, much like Dora who stole
little Emily’s lover away. Adult infantilism and matrimony make an
unpalatable emulsion.
One of the many fragments of knowledge that years bring is that man
consoles himself readily, often quickly. Krimmie got a job in a Wall
Street office as literary secretary to a Hungarian fourflusher, “high
in the counsels of the Democratic Party,” to compose superfine notes,
commensurable with the calling of the Boss. He had not been there long
when he met Dorothy. If _Troubadour_ did not give us anything besides
the picture of a person who looked like one of Goya’s ladies, and who
had the gentleness of Ruth with the constancy of Penelope, it would
still be a precious document. When I think of the many perfect wives
of artists that I have known: Mark Twain’s Livy, James Joyce’s Lady;
Paderewski’s alter ego, I shall always have a fancy that I have known
Dorothy in the quick. One of the first things she did for him after
orienting him on life’s pathway was to save for the world his “most
quasi-popular composition,” _Lima Beans_. Then she married him and his
days began to lengthen as his heart began to strengthen. They went
West, he to intone his poems, and climb Parnassus on the lake; she to
pull the strings of his marionettes and to encourage him when his feet
slipped on the mountain.
Krimmie’s rejuvenation was more complete than anything Steinach has
accomplished. He wrote plays, walked securely amongst the Provincetown
Thespians, fraternised intimately with literary _arrivistes_
and puppet-people, encouraged youngsters who were yearning for
self-expression and struggling against starvation, earned the good will
of the _Dial_, “now the leading æsthetic periodical of the soil,” and
gained the confidence of the young man who was to facilitate him in a
long dreamed-of gesture: the founding of an international Magazine of
the Arts which would stress the efforts of young Americans. So Krimmie
and Dorothy went to Italy and brought forth _Broom_. Incidentally,
they met Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Jean Cocteau, Tristan Tzara, the
daddy of _Dada_, Gertrude Stein, the mammie of gibberish, and Gordon
Craig, the master of marionettes, and others too numerous to mention.
Krimmie liked them and they all liked Krimmie, or if they did not, one
would never suspect it from Mr. Kreymborg’s book; I fancy they did for
obviously he has a genius for friendship. If they did not like Dorothy,
good taste has deserted the _habitués_ of the Quarter.
Among the many engaging episodes of their European trip none is
more delightful than the description of their encounter with the
world’s most famous poetic clown, Signor F. P. Marinetti, unless
it be the meeting with the pompous Pound. Marinetti directing his
fellow-players, totally oblivious of the vegetables that were hurled
at him, insensitive of their obvious decay, deaf to the insults and
imprecations that came from every quarter of the theatre, was a man
risking his life for a reputation. Mr. Kreymborg knew the habits of
the wolf, but he knew little of bears or their garden and he had never
visited the Parliament of Italy when the House was in session. Later,
when he was informed that the civil warfare which he had witnessed had
been arranged by Marinetti in the subtle behalf of publicity--that he
always hired a number of desperados to open the attack on the stage,
and to arouse the audience to an emulation of activity, he realised
that he had had a lesson in finesse. Such lessons are given nowhere in
the world better than in Italy.
Krimmie came home a better man. No change was to be discerned in
Dorothy on her return. She was the same as when she went: a bit of
perfection. Then he published his latest book of poems _Less Lonely_,
which caused some of his friends to fear that it indicated the
consecration of approaching middle age. The verses observe too many
maxims too carefully; they are too regularly iambic; their plethora
of monosyllables cause them to lose the nuance of accent, etc. Others
thought they showed the effect of Italian atmosphere so favourable to
every form of classicism. He “made up” with Louis Untermeyer; and wrote
the story of his own life. For one of these accomplishments, we can
never cease to be grateful. It has contributed to our pleasure, our
instruction and our welfare. Any one who will read _Troubadour_ will
love his fellow man more easily, and more intensely.
_Troubadour_ is an album filled with pictures big and little of people
we have known or would like to have known. Some of them are vignettes.
Some are life-size portraits, all of them testify to the facile and the
tender heart. There are few who have figured in the artistic life of
this country in the past twenty years who do not come in for mention
or characterisation. They all had to do in some way with the genesis,
birth and development of his urge for expression,--an urge which is
upon him imperiously and which no one, so far as may be judged from
the text, has tried to impede. Indeed one of the striking features of
the book is that it reveals no skunner against puritanism, no grouch
against democracy, no belief in the existence of a cabal to strangle
artistry, no ideas of persecution on the part of the author. The world
has treated him fairly enough. If ever there was a writer who had no
preparation for writing it was Alfred Kreymborg. What he learned he
taught himself. If he had learned the piano or the violin without
instruction or direction he would have had no fewer long days or lean
nights than he has had.
It is a pity that Alfred Kreymborg could not have gone to Columbia
University instead of Æolian Hall. Had he been judiciously advised and
properly guided he might have been thrown into currents that would have
carried him more quickly to success, as he would have developed his
artistic consciousness more smoothly and harmoniously and would the
more easily have been able to guess the poet’s secret: to be happy in
his heightened power to see and feel.
The era of self-made men is passing; many regret it and amongst
them are those who get pleasure from struggle, and happiness from
contemplating it. As Mr. Kreymborg says, recalling the days when
he first went to Fourteenth Street to the “studio:” “And there was
absolutely no joy like it--nothing like it.” Writers and artists have
no “corner” on that joy.
* * * * *
Writing in 1833, six years after William Blake, the poet-artist,
had gone to immortality, Edward FitzGerald said, “To me there is
a particular interest in this man’s writing and drawing, in the
strangeness of the constitution of his mind.” That is the interest of
William Blake to-day when his poetry fails to thrill or to inspire, and
when his highest claim to be considered an artist rests on a series of
drawings and engravings called _Illustrations to the Book of Job_.
William Blake had visual hallucinations. At least, he had the capacity
to see the creations of his imagination with the same vividness as if
they had been before his eyes, and he maintained that they were before
his eyes. He contended that things whose reality cannot be proved,
such as angels, people deceased for ages, and buildings demolished for
centuries, presented themselves in his visual field. He maintained it
with sincerity and determination and he drew what he said he saw. But
the fact that a man has hallucinations is not sufficient to label him
“insane.” Conduct that is prejudicial to others’ happiness, welfare,
and comfort is an essential condition, and none of William Blake’s
biographers or commentators has described such conduct. To many
psychiatrists like myself, Mr. Bruce’s effort to show that William
Blake was sane will undoubtedly seem an unnecessary labor, but a
gratifying one, for sympathetic hero handling is a kindly thing to
observe.
We never cease to marvel that persons who are “mad” can create or copy
so masterfully that the admiration of contemporaries is compelled and
the gratitude of posterity earned. This, despite the long list of
accomplishments in the world of art and letters by men who have been
potentially or actually mad.
Mr. Bruce opens one of his chapters with the sentence: “Blake, in
other words, was neurotic.” Now, the word “neurotic” must have some
very specific meaning for our young author, otherwise he would not
declare himself in this dramatic way. If William Blake was neurotic,
there is no indication of it in Mr. Bruce’s book. William Blake was
psychotic. He had what is called for purposes of facile designation a
manic-depressive temperament. The manic-depressive temperament can be
described with the same specificity as pneumonia; practically the only
thing about it that we do not know is its cause, but it is only very
recently that we have known the cause of pneumonia. I do not consider
that this is the proper place for the disquisition on the individual
psychic functions, particularly on the one known as affectivity, which
would be necessary were I to make a readily comprehensible description
of the manic-depressive psychosis, whether it reveals itself in shadowy
outlines or majestic proportions. Mr. Bruce writes, “To say confidently
that Blake suffered from mythomania, or from automatism, or from
occasional hyperæsthesia, or from manic-depressive tendencies, or that
he did not tend toward a definite schizophrenia is to add polysyllables
rather than illumination to the discussion of his state.” This is an
attitude of preciosity on the part of Mr. Bruce that is very offensive
to me. If he does not know what “schizophrenia” means, then he should
consult a dictionary and not display his infirmities to the world.
If he knows a better word, that is a more comprehensive or a more
descriptive word for personality cleavage, I suggest that he submit
it. What further illumination concerning the mental processes of an
individual can be desired than is conveyed in the statement that he is
a manic-depressive personality, or that he displayed the manifestations
of the mental disorder known as the manic-depressive psychosis?
A few years ago, in a book entitled _Idling in Italy_, I said anent
Giovanni Papini (who in 1920 was quite unknown to the American
public) that no one unfamiliar with the disorder of the mind called
manic-depressive psychosis could fully understand him.
There is no one more sane and businesslike than the
former Futurist, yet the reactions of his supersensitive
nature have great similarity with this mental disorder,
present, in embryo, in many people. In every display
of the manic-depressive temperament, there is a period
of emotional, physical and intellectual activity that
surmounts every obstacle, brushes aside every barrier,
leaps over every hurdle. During its dominancy, the victim
respects neither law nor convention; the goal is his only
object. He does not always know where he is going and
he is not concerned with it; he is concerned only with
going. When the spectator sees the road over which he has
travelled on his winged horse he finds it littered with
the débris that Pegasus has trampled upon and crushed.
This period of hyperactivity is invariably followed
by a time of depression, of inadequacy, of emotional
barrenness, of intellectual sterility, of physical
impotency, of spiritual frigidity. The sun from which
the body and the soul have had their warmth and their
glow falls below the horizon of the unfortunate’s
existence and he senses the terrors of the dark and
the rigidity of beginning congelation. Then, when hope
and warmth have all but gone and only life, mere life
without colour or emotion remains, and the necessity
of living forever in a world perpetually enshrouded in
darkness with no differentiation in the débris remaining
after the tornado, then the sun gradually peeps up,
illuminates, warms, revives, fructifies the earth, and
the sufferer becomes normal--normal save in the moments
or hours of fear when he contemplates having again to
brave the hurricane or to breast the deluge. But once
the wind begins to blow with a velocity that bespeaks the
re-advent of the tornado, he throws off inhibition and
goes out in the open, holds up the torch that shall light
the whole world, and with his megaphone from the top of
Helicon shouts: “This way to the revolution.”
I contend that any one who will read even the summaries of the chapters
of Mr. Bruce’s book will need no further evidence to be convinced that
William Blake, who had “everywhere the poet’s firm persuasion that
things were so, who stuck to a choice that was contemned, to a taste
that was laughed at”; who was as immune to ridicule as a tortoise is to
admonition; who spoke his mind on all occasions even when it clashed
with authority; who, like the master potter, knew, knew, knew; who
swung backward and forward from high exaltation to pits of melancholy;
who listened to messengers from heaven daily and nightly and composed
under their dictation a poem which he considered the grandest that this
world contained, even though he was never able to find one purchaser;
who received Richard Cœur-de-Lion at a quarter past twelve, midnight,
and painted his portrait though he had been dead several centuries;
who displayed a persecutory state of mind when he was depressed, and a
self-sufficiency that brooked no curbing when he was exalted; who took
no thought for the morrow and was as unable to take care of himself
as a two-year-old child, was of manic-depressive temperament. That
he escaped being sent to Bethlehem Hospital, vulgarly called Bedlam,
entitles him to our belated congratulations.
When Mr. Bruce ceases to be annoying about adjectives, he is both
amusing and amazing. “William Blake had the neurotic’s need for
dependence on some one outside himself.” A neurotic is an individual
who has some nervous disorder or disease, functional or organic. A
typical nervous disorder is migraine, sick headache. I could easily
enumerate a score of the world’s great men and women who were thus
afflicted. What was their need for dependence on some one outside
themselves? “He had the neurotic’s sense of time.” What can that
possibly be? Was it the sense of time that Dostoievsky had just
before the convulsions appeared that attended his epileptic attacks?
Dostoievsky was a neurotic--one of the most typical that ever lived,
perhaps. He maintained that the few seconds previous to the motor
manifestation of an attack were a timeless eternity. If it lasted
another fractional part of a second, he could not possibly survive it.
Did William Blake have this kind of sense of time?
He could not tolerate a pedantic, pretentious, stupid, pachydermatous
patron, William Hayley. According to Sinclair Lewis there are only
two races of people, the neurotic and the stupid: William Hayley was
stupid, William Blake was neurotic. At least, it can be said of this
reasoning that it offers a better foundation for Mr. Bruce’s thesis
than that which he has heretofore provided.
William Blake was a happy man, for he believed in himself. He was
a lucky man--his wife believed in him. He was a courageous man: he
threw a trespassing sailor, emboldened by strong drink, out of his
garden and was tried for high treason. Yet he patiently tolerated the
inquisitive visits of the greatest bore of his time, Crabb Robinson,
without even threat of assault. He did not get his just deserts from
his contemporaries, but posterity has more than made up for their
niggardliness, and Mr. Bruce has given posterity a leg-up. Had he dwelt
more on the value and significance of Blake’s art and less on his
“neurosis” he would have served us better. But his book is a snappy,
concise, readable account of a man who had faith in himself and who,
finally, compelled others to acknowledge his merit.
* * * * *
Students of Keats’ poetry and personality are not likely to admit that
a new life of him was called for, in view of Sir Sidney Colvin’s
searching and critical study which has just appeared in a third
edition. Amy Lowell’s reason for putting forth a new biography was that
she had new material; but what I say elsewhere about Barton’s _Lincoln_
applies here: the new material justified a brochure, not a life.
Miss Lowell wanted to write a life of Keats; that, aside from anything
else, was reason enough for her. She had a vicarious mother-feeling for
him and she was determined to display it. Her last book is an enduring
monument to her industry, patience and perspicacity. She had a relish
for criticism, but at times she confounded it with abuse and when she
championed an individual, a cause, or a movement, she did it in the
manner of a fellow-townsman, John L. Sullivan: with all her might and
main. She “never trembled like a guilty thing surprised,” or if she did
it was only when she was enraged by the stupidities and ignorance of
others--those who did not agree with her.
[Illustration: JOHN KEATS IN HIS LAST ILLNESS]
From the sketch by Joseph Severn, January 28, 1821, which
Charles Cowden Clarke characterised as “a marvellously
correct likeness.”
_Engraved by Timothy Cole and reprinted by permission of
“The Century Magazine”_
Keats is a fascinating figure and always will be. The son of a
stableman, the doors of the best literary society in London were opened
wide to him; though he had but few years of mortal life, and few months
of literary activity, he has become one of the greatest English poets.
It was not the pathos of his existence, the diseases that ravaged him,
the hopelessness of his love, or the relative isolation in which he
was morally steeped that focusses our interest. It is his conception
of poetry, his flight into the world of dreams untinged by reality,
and the wondrous rapidity with which he scaled the heights of imagery.
They made him immortal. In “the Armour of Words and with the Sword
of Syllables” he fought a great battle and won. His personality had
many facets and they were nearly all made to arrest attention, enlist
sympathy and inspire admiration; but poet though he was, he was a man,
and his human side is as deserving of study as his poetical nature;
in the latter, there is primarily genius, and genius is not to be
explained or understood, still less studied. In the former, there is
the weakness of a mere mortal and the strength of an intelligence;
the misery of bad health, and the victory of will-power; the alleged
resignation to death and the desire to live; the heart break of the man
whose ambitions were never fulfilled, and the exaltations of the lover
who believes his love to be reciprocated; the grimace of the lip which
finds gall in the cup from which it drinks, and the satisfaction of the
heart which has faith in the world and confidence in friendship. All
these aspects of the poet Amy Lowell has followed day by day, almost
hour by hour, with the persistency of a detective. From the slightest
cue, she lays a course which soon leads her to the exact day and the
approximate hour when Keats accomplished the action she describes, and
with the support of a clear conscience and the encouragement of proofs,
to her irrefutable, she opposes the judgment of other biographers, and
fearlessly and categorically contradicts them. This scarcely justifies
her assertion “We may say, with something like certainty, that we know
everything he did; for which reason, it is safe to assume that what
we do not know of, he did not do.” I have encountered many foolish
statements in literature; the one quoted is not the least of them. It
would be far truer to say that we know every thought he had, and how
foolish that would be! His letters reveal his sensations, his emotions
and his thoughts, but they are singularly silent about what he did.
It would take a thorough knowledge of all the documents Miss Lowell
brings to light, and require a deep study of all that has ever been
written about Keats either to refute or to accept all her conclusions.
Many of them will seem to the average reader an aggregation of useless
details rather than an approach to the subject from a new angle, having
a bearing on Keats the poet, or Keats the man. The task of discussing
the foundation of her conclusions must be left to other biographers or
students of the poet, of whom there are legions; and it can not be
attempted at all until after the publication of all the notes of the
poet’s friend, Brown.
John Keats’ brief life was singularly full, and the best of his record
is to be found in the letters he wrote to friends, and to his brothers
and sisters. Written from the fulness of the heart and with no other
object than to relieve his mind and convey news, these constitute the
most complete and comprehensive characterisation of the poet. Keats was
modest about his genius, but he had an insatiable appetite for praise
and love. And every one who knew him loved him and believed in him. It
was the public that failed him. And sensitive as he was, its disdain,
and the scorn of Lockhart and other critics, caused him profound
suffering. To say that it killed him, as has been said countless times
the past three generations, is to utter an absurdity. He had two most
serious infectious diseases, and he had the kind of temperament that
facilitates the progress of both of them.
Amy Lowell thinks that had he lived, he would probably not have been
as great a poet as Browning. There seems small foundation for such
a statement, and in this prophetless age, such pronouncements are
worthless. What Keats produced in three years of poetic work, and less
than one year of real inspiration, suggests at least that he would
have been all the greater had he lived. He might not have developed
emotionally, nor intellectually, but there is very little question that
he would have developed critically and that his sense of values would
have taken on keenness and profundity. Even as he was, his creative
faculty was considerable. He could turn an inspirational current on
at will. When it stopped flowing, or when it began to flow feebly, he
could turn it off; then, while the Olympic dynamo was generating, and
the Parnassian battery storing the divine fluid, he could turn on the
light of criticism. Not all great poets can do that.
Early in life Keats lost his mother, who, by her attachment,
represented for him the ideal of motherly love. For such love, he
unceasingly sought. He had what the Freudians call a mother-complex.
He needed the constant watchfulness, the untiring devotion and the
profound understanding that a mother alone can bestow on a man. In
Fanny Brawne, he found youth and beauty, brains and brilliancy, but
none of the fondness and constancy that his nature demanded.
It was Miss Lowell’s unquenchable thirst for justice and honesty that
made her attempt such thorough rehabilitation of Fanny Brawne. The
effort seems useless and rather irrelevant, without much justification
or foundation. Fanny Brawne’s love for Keats was such that, had he
not been under the stupefying influence of the little Greek god who
blindfolds his victims, he would have seen that Fanny was of similar
calibre to the other women whose lack of motherly feeling for him
prevented them from taking a permanent place in his heart. Miss Lowell
realised the limitations of Fanny when she wrote: “One of the many
reasons for Keats’ failure in his relations with Fanny Brawne was
that he sought in her a mother as well as a lover, and she had not
yet grown up enough to stand to him in both capacities.” This is the
judgment of a mind, not of a heart; the judgment of a critic, not of
a psychologist; the judgment of one who believes that years bring in
their trend qualities and characteristics that do not exist in the
embryo of maturity. A woman need not be of mother-age to be maternal
any more than a pianist need be able to play Russian music at first
sight to be an artist. The maternal instinct, when it exists, is
revealed in childhood, and a love like that which united John Keats
to Fanny Brawne, should have been the spark which caused her love to
blaze. The letters of Fanny which have been published do not help to
build a shrine around her and to rehabilitate her, since they were
practically all written after Keats’ death--when memories and remorse
might have vied to make her appreciate what she had lost. Moreover
Fanny, who pretended to love him, did little to prove it; and none of
Miss Lowell’s arguments can convince one reader that, had she really
been seized of the same passion that possessed Keats, she would not
have married him, when marriage meant happiness and bliss for him.
Of course, Keats was ill, very ill, but no one knew it to be a fatal
illness, and it may be safe to assume that either of Shelley’s wives
would have surmounted the obstacle. Miss Lowell says: “Fanny lived in
an age when well-brought-up daughters in her class of life did not jump
over the traces and marry offhand; and suppose Fanny had happened to do
this, neither she nor Keats had the money to run away, and was it to be
contemplated that Fanny should move next door and let Brown support the
pair of them! The idea is absurd. Fanny was not Harriet Westbrook, and
Keats was no Shelley. They each did the best they could, as I think any
one not hoodwinked by an unreasoning love for Keats can see.”
It was lucky for Keats that Fanny was no Harriet Westbrook, but what
a pity she had not some of the virtues and qualities that made Mary
Godwin the exquisite creature and inspirer that she was! Furthermore,
there is no indication in Miss Lowell’s book that the question of
marriage had ever been brought up for family consideration. It seems
just to say that Fanny, with her limitations and light-heartedness, did
the best she could, and was no heroine; but what we would have liked
to see would have been a Fanny “hoodwinked by an unreasoning love of
Keats,” who combined pulchritude and intelligence with a magnificent
heart.
The picture that Miss Lowell paints of Keats is idealised. He is not
vulgar as Watson said, not a howler and a sniveller as Swinburne
said, and not “unmanly” as many said and thought after reading the
Brawne letters. We are ready to believe he was none of them, but it is
too much to ask that we shall believe “that the pure poet is a pure
poet because he is a pure man.” White-washing poets is the meanest
occupation in the world next to census-taking.
However, she has interwoven and blended the man with the artist in
such manner that the one overlaps the other constantly, and the result
is a homogeneous and substantial whole. When the man dominates, Keats
is delightful; when the artist has the upper hand, he is admirable.
She has rendered exquisitely the humanity of the poet who had belief
in nothing but what he learned for himself, and who could be himself
always. What she failed to convey was his profound self-consciousness
and sensuousness, and how they influenced, one might almost say shaped,
his life and his poetry.
Keats underwent a religious experience, conversion one may call it,
that influenced his life and his work; so that one may cite him as
evidence that poetic comprehension can not be complete unless it
includes religious comprehension. It is to be regretted that Miss
Lowell did not discuss this episode.
However, she made the most of her documentation, and of her subject
from an intellectual and objective point of view. She has written a
biography which is as powerfully conceived as it is intelligently
realised, and it can never be repeated too often that, above all, Amy
Lowell was an intelligence. Her capacity for work was astounding; her
painstaking and thorough study an achievement of labour that reminds
one of the monks of the Middle Ages who spent their lives in cells and
cubicles, illuminating prayer books with the most exquisite figures
and colours, bringing to their task the patience of angels, the piety
of saints and the skill of artists. But her industry was as naught
compared with the tenacity of her opinion and the legitimacy of her
judgment.
From a subjective and emotional point of view, _John Keats_ is far from
perfect; for the biographer has not made sufficient allowance for the
fact that she was writing of a genius. She took his measurements with
the same tape she would use if she were measuring William J. Bryan, and
she would probably have approved of James Barrie’s _Tammas Haggart_ and
his ideas in regard to “geniuses.” She did not allow for the spread of
Keats’ wings, or the aureole of his genius. She explained his motives
and his achievements with everyday words, and she brought to bear on
her task the illumination of medicine and the testimony of psychology.
She achieved a work of the head, not of the heart, and John Keats was
above all a heart. In several instances she is at a loss to understand
her subject, especially toward the end of his life, which takes in
centuries of achievements in a few months of actual life. Keats moves
too fast for her; his feet are too winged, the empyrean too rarefied.
She can not understand how life could have been “painful” for him since
he had almost everything he needed, and had not received more than his
share of misfortunes; and unless one attempts to read in the heart of
Keats, nothing in his external life can corroborate the statement that
his life was a tragedy. Human and material blessings are not enough to
make life bearable, and Keats had not an excessive amount of either.
It may be a comfort to think that nothing on earth would have made him
really happy--save perhaps to possess Fanny as wife, but it is safe to
assume that, unless such a marriage accomplished the miracle, Fanny
bound to Keats would have failed him. Better for him in this instance
to live in hope than to realise it.
Few things are more convincing of Miss Lowell’s inability really to
appreciate the heart of her subject than the comment on one of Keats’
letters to Fanny in which she says that few persons could endure much
longer the agonies and uncertainties which she was “so peculiarly made
to create.” Miss Lowell follows this quotation with “Nobody with a
grain of medical sense can fail to see this is delirium.” Perhaps not,
but to use medical sense to judge John Keats is a mistake. It was agony
of a sort that no medicine could relieve, and which no amount of sense
could subdue.
Miss Lowell said that “Endymion suddenly finding his empty uplifted
arms clasped about a naked waist is a beautiful flight of imagination
astringently absorbingly expressed.” Her _John Keats_ is astringently
absorbing, but its expressions are sometimes corrosive.
* * * * *
We may not know all Poe’s virtues and infirmities; time may be dealing
too harshly or too leniently with him; it is possible that short-story
writers do not acknowledge their indebtedness to him, and that students
of style do not study him sufficiently; and it may be that some do
not admit that he is one of a very small group constituting the
world’s great writers. But none of these injustices of mind or heart
will be remedied by Mr. Sherwin Cody’s book. The author may possess
qualifications for writing a life of Poe, but his book does not testify
them. The art of narrative has eluded him; style, which must give
flavour and substance to all biography, seems to be beyond his reach,
and he has no critical judgment in the use of the vast material that
Professor Harrison and many other students of Poe have collected. The
only qualification he would seem to have is “a confessed sympathy with
Poe’s difficult personal character.” Even though this sympathy embraced
Poe’s impersonal character, it would not suffice him as biographer.
It would be easy to characterize Mr. Cody’s book, but I shall refrain
and call attention only to his intemperance of statement and his
disregard of the rules governing grammatical construction. “Poe stood
absolutely alone among American writers.” “It is probable that Poe has
been the most venomously hated man of letters in the whole range of
history. W. C. Brownell in his cold, impersonal way discusses Poe with
a hatred as intense as Griswold’s.”
“Poe died of nervous breakdown rather than of the effects of
over-indulgence in intoxicants.”
“Poe wrote but few poems the next fifteen years, but every one is a
masterpiece.” There are scores of statements of similar texture, but
none of them is true.
As an example of Mr. Cody’s lack of critical judgment and
understanding, the following is offered: “The writer has in mind two
young friends who, in recent times, struggling to attain literary
recognition as Poe did, though with far less accomplishment than his,
sank under the mental strain and died, one of paresis, one of apoplexy,
and a careful study of literary history would reveal scores of such.”
Paresis has one cause, and only one; apoplexy in early life has two,
and one of them is the same spirochete that causes paresis.
There is a finality about the author’s statements that is at first
irritating, then depressing. “No very excitable person, such as Poe
was, could possibly give us calm and placid judgment that would
harmonise with the crude impressions of common men and women.” Anatole
France was a very excitable person, and he gave very calm and placid
judgments, and it is up to “common women” to say whether such judgments
harmonise with their “crude impressions” or not. Not all of Mr. Cody’s
book is irritating. Some of it is amusing. Commenting on some of Poe’s
well-known lies (his personal mendacity he calls it) he says, “Possibly
he regarded this romancing about himself as harmless in itself and of
some value as advertising, but the thoughtful critic can not refrain
from severely blaming him.” Here speaks the author of _Business
Correspondence and Advertisement Writing for Business Men_ and the
critic who is not only thoughtful but moral!
The publishers say that Mr. Cody received a letter from Bliss Perry
which contains the sentence, “You have done a real service to
literature.” It is more difficult to believe, even, than many of the
statements of his book.
Doctor Robertson says his study of Poe “contains something new which
attempts to harmonise and to present in new aspects old and well
established facts, and which further makes plain the neurosis from
which he suffered.” The facts about Poe were stated temperately and
judiciously forty years ago by a man whose labours have ornamented
American letters, and few facts have been added since the time George
E. Woodberry wrote:
“Poe, highly endowed, well-bred, and educated better
than his fellows, had more than once fair opportunities,
brilliant prospects, and groups of benevolent,
considerate, and active friends, and repeatedly forfeited
prosperity and even the homely honour of an honest
name. He ate opium and drank liquor; whatever was the
cause, these were the instruments of his ruin. He died
under circumstances of exceptional ugliness, misery and
pity. He left a fame destined to long memory. On the
roll of our literature Poe’s name is inscribed with the
few foremost, and in the world at large his genius is
established as valid among all men.”
To call his infirmity “dipsomania” and his genius a “neurosis” does not
more securely enhance Poe in the hearts of his countrymen, or add to
the lustre of his name.
The thesis of the psychopathic study is that Poe was the victim of a
hereditary “neurosis,” which, the author claims, differs essentially
from alcoholism; and that this neurosis rendered him at intervals
non-responsible for his acts, at the same time giving him a personality
as unlike his own in his normal condition as certain familiar forms
of insanity are universally admitted to do. Entirely apart from the
correctness of the author’s claims, they throw no additional light on
the events of Poe’s life, nor do they add interest to his writings,
either from the standpoint of literature or of psychopathology. It may
be comforting to some of Poe’s admirers to think of him as a psychopath
instead of a drunkard; an irresponsible victim of an inherited
handicap, instead of a moral weakling who, under the influence of
alcohol, sometimes committed dishonourable acts.
Dr. Robertson says: “Only those who are experienced in the study of
patients thus afflicted, and who have had personal association with
them, can fully understand and appreciate the nature of the neurosis
from which Poe suffered and the difficulty in overcoming such
obsessions.” A neurosis is a nervous disease not associated with or
dependent upon alteration of the nerves demonstrable during life or
after death. Dr. Robertson believes that Poe had such disease, that
it was inherited, and that it was beyond his will or determination
materially to influence or control it. What neurosis did he have?
Was it periodic “spreeing,” called dipsomania? If so, one might
legitimately, perhaps, call it a psychosis, if he is bound to give it
a name. But “neurosis” seems to be wholly beyond justification. Just
what he means by “the difficulty in overcoming such obsessions” is not
evident, or to me conjecturable. Psychologists and psychiatrists use
the term obsession to indicate a state of siege or torment which seeks
to control the individual and to condition his conduct. I have never
heard the word obsession used synonymously with impulsion to drink or
compulsion to yield to the desire to drink.
“Dipsomania necessarily is an alcoholic inheritance.” It is to be
presumed that Dr. Robertson means to say that individuals who have
an uncontrollable desire to drink periodically are descended from
stock who had similar desires and succumbed to them. But that does
not advance us any further in our conception of what this so-called
dipsomania is. The unwarrantable liberty the author of this book takes
is that he speaks of dipsomania as if it were a definite disease which
psychiatrists recognise and describe. Dr. Robertson is a bibliomaniac.
I have Ruskin’s authority for saying if a man spends lavishly on his
library, you call him mad, a bibliomaniac. If some of Dr. Robertson’s
ancestry bought books when their more material neighbors thought they
should have bought shoes, his neurosis might be called a bibliophilic
inheritance. This characterisation would not particularly advance our
knowledge of Dr. Robertson’s personality or aid us to interpret his
conduct.
Alcohol plays an important rôle in the causation of mental diseases.
Statistics seem to show that about 12 per cent. of the certified
insane in this country were addicted to the intemperate use of
alcohol. But it does not follow that their insanity was due to such
addiction. It is but one of the many causes of insanity, and not the
most important. “Dipsomania is a disease, and those suffering from it
should be given such medical consideration as we give the insane.” This
is purely a gratuitous assumption on the part of the author. Certainly
dipsomania is Dis-Ease if you emphasise the etymology of the word (a
thing which Dr. Robertson enjoys doing, as he is at some pains to point
out to us that genius is derived from _genere_, to beget): but if the
purpose is to convey that dipsomania is a mental disease, such as one
of the manic-depressive psychoses, paranoia, or other recognisable
and described mental diseases without anatomical foundation, it is
both unjustified and misleading. Dr. Robertson quotes Spitzka, “one
of our well-known authorities on insanity,” in support of some of his
statements. The lay reader might legitimately infer that Spitzka was
an authority of the present day, whereas in reality the science of
psychiatry has been revolutionised since he wrote. The modern textbook
of psychiatry has no chapter on dipsomania, nor does it recognise it as
a distinct variety of insanity. Modern psychiatry recognises many forms
of alcoholic insanity and it calls them alcoholic dementia, alcoholic
pseudo-paresis, alcoholic pseudo-paranoia, alcoholic hallucinosis, etc.
Dipsomania is used by the modern psychiatrist to indicate a periodical
impulse to drink. So far as the writer knows, no one has ever denied
that Edgar A. Poe had dipsomania. Why belabour this admission when he
has been comfortably seated on Parnassus for half a century?
Again it might be asked, what medical consideration do we give the
insane that dipsomaniacs should have? We deprive them of their liberty
for their own benefit and for the benefit of the community, but
that is a judicial consideration. We do not deprive dipsomaniacs of
their liberty because we are not permitted to do so, though it is
self-evident that it would be to their advantage and to the benefit
of those dependent upon and associated with them. Dr. Robertson seems
to think that it is not generally accepted that an uncontrollable
inclination to drink is inherited, and that he must prove it. In order
to prove it he feels that he must first prove that genius is inherited.
The teachings of biology are against him.
As a rule biographers deem that they have completed their
work of establishing hereditary predispositions on which
later accomplishments depend, when they have constructed
a genealogy blazed with quarterings, and all the more
ornamental if marked with the bend sinister. They know
nothing of the Mendelian laws of heredity.
How Dr. Robertson can possibly know that biographers know nothing
of the Mendelian laws of heredity is beyond any surmise on my part.
I should say that if a biographer like Woodberry should indicate in
his writing or allow it to be inferred that the Mendelian hypothesis
was known to him, it would be safe to lay a handsome wager on it. But
when Griswold, Poe’s first biographer, wrote his appreciation, or as
Dr. Robertson would prefer to call it, his calumny, Gregor Mendel,
the Austrian priest and Abbot of the Augustine Convent of Brünn,
was quietly working in his garden making those observations that
permitted him to formulate a law which has revolutionised our view of
the principles of fertilisation in plants, and which may eventually
revolutionise our ideas of heredity in higher organisms. He published
a paper about them in the Natural History Society of Brünn, but it was
lost sight of for many years and not until the principles of it were
rediscovered in 1899 by De Vries, by Corens and by Tschermak was the
epoch-making work of Mendel recognised. Although Dr. Robertson does
not say it in so many words, he leaves the reader to infer that the
Mendelian hypothesis is accepted and that it is the foundation of our
theories and facts of heredity. In reality, however, the theories of
heredity that must still be reckoned with are those of Darwin, Cope and
Weismann, respectively, or the theories of pangenesis, perigenesis and
the theory of the continuity of the germ plasm.
Biographers [says the author] ignore the fact that great
genius like that of Cæsar or Napoleón, or such mental
gifts as were bestowed upon Milton and Shakespeare, are
the results of what horticulturists call a sport and
occur only as an abnormality.
Biographers may ignore the alleged fact, but in doing so, they are
in the company of such biologists as Francis Galton and his pupil
and successor, Karl Pearson, to whom we owe much of our knowledge of
heredity, acceptable and accepted.
Dr. Robertson has a way of making an arbitrary statement which savours
of arrogance. For instance, “Genius develops early and is characterised
by precocity.” I suppose Pasteur was a genius. He was the founder of
the science of bacteriology, the architect of a diseaseless world.
There is every reason for believing that he was not precocious. Few
people would deny that Thomas Edison is a genius. He certainly was not
precocious. Though the names of youthful dullards in the roll of men of
achievement are not legion, I recall those of Davy, Linnæus, Humboldt,
Watt, Fulton, Schiller, Heine, Goldsmith, Beecher, Whistler, Patrick
Henry and Rousseau.
“Precocity of necessity foretells early decline,” says the author.
John Stuart Mill, for instance, who could read Plato and Demosthenes
with ease when he was eight and began a thorough study of scholastic
logic when he was twelve! J. St. Loe Strachey is still going strong,
and any one who doubts that he was precocious is referred to _The Joy
of Living_. “I view brilliancy in the child as an abnormal heredity
that must pay the price of premature decay.” Shades of Beethoven and
Alexander Pope! No one would deny artistic genius to Richard Wagner.
At the age of thirteen he translated the first twelve books of the
Odyssey for amusement; at seventeen his first production as a composer
was performed at the Leipzig theatre; and at sixty-nine the music of
“Parsifal” was completed.
Dr. Robertson is bound to show that Poe did not die of delirium
tremens, and he characterises the statement of Dr. J. J. Moran, who
was resident physician of the Washington University Hospital, where
Poe died, as “an intelligent statement covering the details of a death
due to brain inflammation or engorgement.” But brain inflammation
or engorgement is the condition of the brain and its membranes that
is found in every case of delirium tremens that comes to autopsy,
especially when the delirium has occurred in an individual whose
resistance to alcohol has been impaired by prolonged use of that
intoxicant or of drugs. The plain truth is that our greatest poet used
alcohol intemperately and opium indiscreetly; that he died of delirium
tremens; that his father drank excessively; that his conduct, drunk or
sober, did not meet with the approbation of all those who knew him,
possibly even not of the majority. But he put the United States of
America on the literary map and he put it there more indelibly than any
individual who preceded him or who has so far followed him. This is
not the opinion or judgment of the writer, but of countless students
and critics who have written of him during the past half century. Why
whitewash the crown that posterity has put upon his brow? Why not leave
the golden shimmer of the original burnish?
Merely to expose the quality of the whitewash which Dr. Robertson has
applied to the poet’s crown, and not from any desire to call attention
to the weakness of the man who wears it, one incident may be cited of
Poe’s action as a critic. This is his estimate of Estelle Anna Lewis, a
Brooklyn poetess, of whom he wrote:
All critical opinion must agree in assigning her a high,
if not the highest, rank among the poetesses of her land.
Her artistic ability is unusual; her command of language
great; her acquirements numerous and thorough; her range
of incident wide; her invention generally vigorous; her
fancy exuberant; and her imagination--that primary and
most indispensable of all poetic requisites--richer
perhaps than any of her female contemporaries.
Such an estimate could only go to prove that critics often make
mistakes and that Poe as critic was not the peer of Poe as poet and
story-writer, were it not for the fact that this poetess, prior to the
appearance of the notice in which the quotation appeared, had paid Poe
one hundred dollars to review one of her books, and when she complained
of his failure to do so he remarked that if he reviewed her rubbish it
would kill him.
Such incidents could be multiplied. But to what purpose? Poe was a
genius and he is immortal. As a man he was a pathetic figure, a moral
weakling. It can not add to the lustre of his immortal genius to expose
the pitiful skeleton of the man over whom the dust of time has spread
a merciful veil and the radiance of his crown has cast an indulgent
shadow. Nor can Dr. Robertson enhance the world’s estimate of the
writer by piling up words to convince it that Poe, the man, was full of
fine qualities only, but at times committed acts for which he could not
be held responsible because he was under the temporary influence of a
“neurosis”; and that this “neurosis” had no effect upon the quality of
his writing.
* * * * *
Edgell Rickword’s biography of Arthur Rimbaud, the decadent, is too
laudatory, too apologetic, too condoning; but it reveals penetrative
insight, sympathetic understanding, and a measure of critical acumen.
Rimbaud was a contentious, bumptious, conceited, selfish, pigheaded,
insensitive young hobo who in three years of his youthful life wrote
the best poetry of France since Baudelaire. He printed only one
book, _Une Saison en Enfer_, an epitome of his mind’s life. When
he was eighteen he stopped writing and began wandering, scoffing
at literature, regretting his part in its creation, and scorning
recognition of a position among the writers of his country.
He tramped, he travelled with a circus, he was overseer in a stone
quarry, and finally landed in Africa where he lived the last nineteen
years of his life, pioneering, exploring, merchandising. Then, just
as he was about to secure a modest competency and to see his dream
of fireside and family come true, a parasite possessed him. When he
reached Marseilles the surgeons amputated a leg, and he died soon
after, in the odour of sanctity and in his thirty-eighth year. His
devoted, pious sister, Isabelle, has told of his last days with fervid
affection in a booklet _Mon Frère Arthur_, and Ernest Delahaye, who
knew, understood, loved, and tolerated him perhaps more than any one,
published in 1923 a volume which pleased both the critics and Rimbaud’s
friends. About the same time an industrious critic of French letters,
Maurice Coulon, published a volume, _Le Problème de Rimbaud, Poète
Maudit_.
Rimbaud has been dead nearly thirty-five years. His literary output
is the smallest on record. His poetry, although generally admitted to
stand beside that of Hugo, Vigny, and Musset, has no human interest;
he does not sing of love, he does not chant the virtues of his
country or its people. Probably not one reader in twenty is touched
by _Les Illuminations_, and not one in ten discerns his thesis or his
philosophy in _Une Saison en Enfer_.
What then is the explanation of this sustained interest in him? Why
does posterity extol him and neglect Gérard de Nerval, who brought to
the light of day a long hidden pediment of literature: the æsthetics of
symbolism? The answer is easily given. His “affair” with Verlaine is
the human interest of Arthur Rimbaud. People like to read about him as
they like to read _Town Topics_ or _Le Cri de Paris_. Mr. Rickword is
to be congratulated on rendering the theme with his foot on the soft
pedal. Had he called his book _The Taming by Time of an Antinomian_, it
would have been a comprehensive and a just title.
The wide dissemination of the Freudian theories is responsible in
a measure for the keen interest of the reading public in sexual
fixations, their manifestations and liberations. Rimbaud apparently got
stuck on third base in the game of life, but there are many indications
that he was stealing home when the bell rang.
VI
WARRIORS
LORD WOLSELEY, by _Maj.-Gen. Sir Frederick Maurice_ and
_Sir George Arthur_.
ROBERT E. LEE THE SOLDIER, by _Sir Frederick Maurice_.
The biographies of men who make history are as a rule more remarkable
for the “action” they display than for the thought they invite. History
is not made by thinking about it: it requires the combination of
thought and deeds. When a man is endowed with the capacity for both;
when he lives at a time in which his country needs the intelligent
effort of its children to carry on its traditions, and when fate has
been kind enough to call one of them to service at such a time, the
story of that man’s life must be inviting, instructive and inspiring.
All this is true of Lord Wolseley. Early in his career, at the time of
the Civil War, Wolseley was sent to Canada to prepare for a possible
war with the United States, which Abraham Lincoln, in his wisdom,
prevented. Garnet Wolseley, from the time of his ensign’s commission in
1852 a diligent student of warfare, availed himself of the opportunity
to study it first-hand which a visit to General Lee offered him. He
rated Lee’s military ability very high and from this meeting dated a
friendship between the two, founded on admiration, which lasted until
Lee’s death. The biographer of Lord Wolseley is also the biographer of
Robert Lee and some of the unqualified praise of Lee with which Sir
Maurice sprinkled his book had its origin in Wolseley’s admiration of
the Southern leader.
But Sir Maurice is not alone responsible for this biography of Lord
Wolseley; he collaborated with Sir George Arthur, and the combination
of a military man with a literary student seems to have been a happy
one.
It is perhaps unjust that the present generation should know Kitchener
better than it does Wolseley; that it should place the one on a high
altar of martyrdom and sacrifice, and practically ignore the other.
Kitchener had all the odds in his favour; he was _the_ man when the
World War started; his death or disappearance reacted on popular
imagination in extraordinary fashion, and the mystery of his end
appealed to our taste for the fantastic and the incredible. But what
Lord Kitchener did for the British Army, was started by Lord Wolseley;
Kitchener put together the stones that his predecessor in the highest
military rank in Great Britain, had assembled, and he built on the
foundations which Lord Wolseley dug and prepared. At least, this is the
statement of his biographers who surveyed the subject with apparent
impartiality and integrity. Some authoritative authors have already
passed judgment on the quality of the British Army during the days of
the Boer War, and it may not be in all points favourable to the memory
of their Chief; but if the courage and efficiency of the Army as these
qualities were displayed in the Great War, were the result of Lord
Wolseley’s love for, and intelligent attention to, the needs and ethics
of the Army which fought under the Union Jack, all our gratitude, our
admiration and our praise should go to the man whose influence was
still felt in 1914. Never could an Army, got together with the rapidity
with which the British Army was formed in those days, as untrained as
it was, and as large as it grew, have done what it did, in the way it
did it, if some great heart and illumined mind had not been present
at its early formation and at its origin. Lord Wolseley reorganised
the British Army, he fought with all his power the “wicked” practice
of buying commissions in the Army, he prepared a real system of
mobilisation; he remodelled the machinery for supplying the Army with
food and munitions; he gave a stirring impulse to military education
and practical training, and he directed the attention of statesmen to
the problems of national defence and made them, as well as the soldiers
and sailors, concentrate on it. His activities were incessant; his
public life was long in years and rich in deeds.
Lord Wolseley was the typical example of the velvet glove covering a
hand of steel. His outward appearance was that of a dandy, of a man
more occupied with the cut of his clothes than with the fate of the
world. Judged by his photographs he was precious and self-conscious,
outwardly complaisant, inwardly arrogant; but his actions belied
his appearance, although he harboured within himself a sort of dual
personality. He had a keen inward sense of world-strangeness with a
great desire to be in communion with the world; he had the tenderness
of a woman, a devotion to and dependency upon his wife that was
balanced by his happiness when he was at war; he had the strength of
a lion in a frail body; the tenacity and obstinacy of a bull-dog and
an indomitable courage; and withal he possessed the qualities of the
thinker. He was neither boastful nor honour-seeking, yet he had taken
his own measure early in life and without humility; he knew what he was
worth to his country and to history, but he could not find it in him to
push himself save by his own merit. He had one of the most important
offices in the British Government, when he was still a very young man,
and he did not attempt to use power or influence to raise himself to
any undeserved honours.
The book takes in most of the great historical events of the fifty
years that saw Wolseley active in his career, and as a survey of
British history, no achievement could be at once more entertaining and
more instructive. But what his biographers did not do was to explain
some of the contradictions that Wolseley’s personality displayed. They
leave the reader with the impression that he had great powers, but also
great limitations. The latter may have been a puzzle to those who
were intimate with him, but his biographers should have studied and
explained them if they could. He may have inherited his “prettiness”
from the grandmother “whose face was her only fortune” and his strength
not only from the Wolseley side of his family which boasted of many a
good officer, but also from his mother who had never been ill in her
life and whose death left a gap in Wolseley’s heart that nothing could
fill. She was strong, but she was pious too, and she brought up her
son in such fervour of the Church that his biographers say he never
spent a day without reading the Psalms. He found a second mother in
his wife, Louisa Erskine, to whom he was profoundly beholden. “When
they were parted the hours were carefully counted until he should hold
her hand again.” All these made for manifold contradictions in his
nature. Deeply religious, he thirsted for blood and war; adoring his
wife, he accepted long periods of separation in the name of service;
pre-eminently a man of action, he was capable of deep thought and
vision.
Years before the War, he foresaw the power of Germany and he warned
against it; he advocated the adoption by his country of some of
Germany’s methods which, interpreted with the common sense of his
people, would have minimised fear of the growing Teutonic power and
enabled them successfully to deal with it. But his voice was not always
heard and his perception of the future not often heeded.
The biographers of Lord Wolseley have mixed a good dose of hero-worship
in their book; but they have done it with a sure hand, and with so much
discrimination and taste that it is never offensive. Sir Frederick
Maurice was his companion for several years, his _alter ego_ during
the campaign of Africa, and his devoted friend when sickness and
trouble came to Lord Wolseley. Thus, Sir Frederick’s information was
obtained directly, went through no deforming, exaggerating or reshaping
process. Despite the gaps that occur now and then in the mental and
moral formation of the hero, the book is invaluable to the student of
modern English history. It should prove illuminating to military men
and diverting to the general reader. But the story is of a soldier not
of a man. There must have been something particularly interesting to
say about him as a man; there is about all childless husbands. And the
foundations of his admiration for the novels of Rhoda Broughton might
have been unearthed and re-pointed.
Some day we shall have a book on the religiosity of great warriors.
Lee, Wolseley, Gordon, Cadorna, de Castelnau, will figure in it
conspicuously.
* * * * *
Major General Sir Frederick Maurice has given a firm grip to the hands
across the sea. His book does not purport to be a life of Lee but an
appreciation of his generalship. Regrettably, however, he paints a
picture of him as son, husband, parent and citizen, which his kin will
perhaps not recognise, and which I believe is not a good likeness.
General Maurice has been studying for more than twenty years the
military life of Lee, the campaigns he conducted and the battles he
fought. Therefore it can not be said that he has indulged in hasty
conclusions or snap judgments. For a soldier of his distinction, a
student of military science of his information to say that the name of
Robert E. Lee must be added to the roster on which are inscribed the
names of those who guessed the secret of the art of war: Alexander,
Hannibal, Cæsar, Gustavus, Turenne, Eugène and Frederick is praise
indeed. A British soldier who places Lee above Wellington as a
commander must be sure of himself and of his facts. Appreciation and
estimation of this sort is food that nourishes the _Entente Cordiale_.
It is so much more palatable and assimilable than the “one blood,
common language” variety.
After a brief chapter on the Lees of Virginia, the burden of which
is that the family had all the virtues save humour and the immortal
descendant all save the one that Hermes had to a superlative degree, he
takes up at once Lee’s training as a soldier, stressing his experience
in the war of 1845. “No matter how sure a man may be of his nerves, he
is the better soldier when those nerves have been tested under fire and
found reliable and the better leader from the confidence in himself
which such experience provides.” Lee’s nerves were tested and found
perfect at Chapultepec. He returned from Mexico at the age of 42 with
a reputation established. “And it was not confined to his own country.
Representatives of the Cuban junta offered him the command of an
expedition to overthrow the Spanish control of the island. Instead of
accepting, he hastened to inform the Secretary of War of the proposal
and his reasons for declining it.”
Commenting on trained and untrained commanders, General Maurice
writes, “Courage, physical and moral, common sense, readiness to
accept responsibility, the power to grasp quickly the essential of a
situation, and to form speedy decisions, these are not gifts which are
confined to regular soldiers nor have many regular soldiers possessed
all or even most of these gifts. The possession of them will make
any man a leader whether in peace or in war.” He quotes with fullest
approbation General Forrest’s explanation of his successes: “I get
there fustest with the mostest men,” and adds, “We have in those eight
words the gist of many volumes of Jomini and Clausewitz.”
Discussing John G. Nicolay’s explanation of Lee’s action in April,
1861, in resigning from the army and accepting command of the Virginia
troops, an action which, according to Nicolay, came from selfish
motives, General Maurice comments, “It would be difficult to compress
into a similar number of words a greater misrepresentation of fact.”
His latest biographer says of Lee’s decision and conduct, “He had but
one thought, ‛What is my duty?’ No motive of self-interest entered his
mind. He was prepared to make any and every sacrifice.”
He takes up briefly the problems of the Confederacy. In the author’s
opinion the Civil War throws valuable light on what should be the
nature of the relation between the statesman and the soldier in a
modern democracy at war. The claim that the soldier should be left in
free and complete control is ridiculous. The general direction of a war
should be in the hands of one man, and in democratic countries that man
must be a statesman and his supreme qualification should be the ability
not only to co-ordinate military, naval and air forces but to develop
and co-ordinate all the physical and moral resources of his country.
Lincoln, after he had been taught by experience, was the model of such
a statesman. Lee was the model of the perfect soldier. General Maurice
then proceeds to prove the latter statement by describing the Defence
of Richmond, the first offensive, the first Maryland campaign, the
battle of Chancellorsville and the second invasion of Maryland.
Before recounting Lee’s catastrophe, General Maurice interpolates a
most interesting chapter on Delay as a Weapon of War. After Lee had
given up hope that the defeat of the Army of the Potomac on Northern
soil was possible, his strategy sought new aim. He no longer attempted
to thrust battle on the enemy, on the contrary he sought delay that he
might exhaust their patience: “If the campaign of 1862, from Richmond
to the Potomac, is a model of what an army inferior in numbers may
achieve in offence, the campaign from the Wilderness to Cold Harbour is
equally a model of defensive strategy and tactics. Some commanders have
excelled in the one method, some in the other; few in both and amongst
these few must be remembered Robert E. Lee.”
Pleasant reading for an American, this book by Britain’s foremost
military writer. Some will shrug their shoulders and say: “The English
were always sympathisers with the South,” but this book is not the
product of a biased mind. It was not conceived in emotion, generated
by bitterness, or prompted by prejudice. It is the deliberate judgment
of a man temperamentally adapted to the task he set himself and
intellectually fitted for it by his training and experience. So long
as he sticks to the field in which he is expert he is persuasive and
convincing, but when he goes into history or psychology he is neither.
General Maurice would have been wisely counselled had he confined
himself to Lee, the Soldier, as the title of the book intimates was
his intention. He may have taken his measure correctly as a warrior,
but I am sure there is little justification for “Lee was never what
is called a man’s man. He did not drink, he did not smoke, he had no
taste for the ordinary amusements and weaknesses of the male sex.” If
he were that sort of a man, the less said of it the better. It is a
man’s human side that testifies his godship. Some one should enumerate
the “weaknesses of the male sex” that there may be no doubt in readers’
minds what they are.
General Maurice would have us believe that Lee was a studious,
serious, silent, solitary, superman who devoted his nights to study
and contemplation, his days to action and prayer. He was probably not
so playful as Osler and more of an anchorite than Anatole France;
it is likely that he was more abstemious than Grant and that he had
less humour than Lincoln; but he had some of all their qualities in
miniature and it is a pity he was not more liberally endowed for then
he would have had imagination or vision. That was the great hiatus in
the personality of Robert E. Lee; he lacked vision. He could run a
complicated machine, he could get great efficiency out of it, he could
keep it going even when it seemed to be worn out, but he could neither
design nor assemble it.
Many will seek to fathom the process of reasoning, or find the source
of information that led General Maurice to write: “He not only espoused
but was the main prop of a cause history has proved to have been wrong.
That is the tragedy of his life, and his conduct after the war makes it
clear that he realised that it was tragedy ... the whole tenor of his
life from the surrender of Appomattox to his death is evidence that he
believed in his heart of hearts that his State was wrong in seceding.”
This is neither evidence nor testimony. It is merely rhetoric.
His country has already selected Lee for its greatest military
executive and it is pleasant to witness a General of another great
nation laying the oaken crown on his tomb, and it is gratifying that he
can write: “Distinguished as was Lee’s conduct while an officer of the
Army of the U.S.A., splendid as was his career in the field, nothing in
his life became him more than its end.” He heard Lincoln’s charge to
bind up the Nation’s wounds and he hearkened to it.
VII
EDITORS
MEMOIRS OF AN EDITOR, by _Edward P. Mitchell_.
TWICE THIRTY, by _Edward W. Bok_.
THE RIVER OF LIFE, by _J. St. Loe Strachey_.
JOSEPH PULITZER, HIS LIFE AND LETTERS, by _Don C. Seitz_.
Editors and publishers of powerful newspapers have unique opportunity
to make their lives interesting. Many of them do. Some of them, like
Henry Watterson, Wickham Steed and Georges Clémenceau write about
their experiences, when they no longer take the world’s pulse, shape
public opinion and re-order society. Their memoirs and lives are of
the most entertaining of all biographic literature; they know the art
of writing; all their lives, they have been observing and studying
character, heralding and shaping events; it has been their self-imposed
duty to sit in judgment and the self-advancement urge of their fellows
brings them into intimate contact with the important persons of their
period. Small wonder they write entertainingly when their sun begins to
set.
Few have reviewed their experiences more delightfully than Edward P.
Mitchell, for many years Editor-in-Chief of _The New York Sun_.
When I read Mr. Mitchell’s _Memoirs of an Editor_ every page made
firmer the conviction that I was companioning a great mind and a kindly
heart. I recalled something that Mark Twain said of Anson Burlingame:
“His outlook upon the world and its affairs was as wide as the horizon,
and his speech was of a dignity and eloquence proper to it. It dealt in
no commonplaces, for he had no commonplace thoughts. He was a kindly
man, and most lovable. He wrought for justice and humanity. All his
ways were clean; all his motives were high and fine.” That is Edward P.
Mitchell if I may estimate him from his autobiography. If he has any
fault, it is that he is too affable. He is a tiny bit too polite. There
have been proprietors of the _New York Sun_ within the memory of man
who did not have _all_ the virtues, but no one would suspect it from
Mr. Mitchell’s book. The _Sun_ that he writes about most entertainingly
and instructively is the _Sun_ for which Charles A. Dana got all
the credit. Mr. Mitchell does not hint that the credit was unjustly
allotted, but no one can read the chapters “How I Went to the Sun” and
“The Newspaperman’s Newspaper” without being convinced that it was. The
_Sun_ could not have been what it was in the days of its ascendency:
a beacon light of newspaperdom, a stimulus and a joy to thousands, a
scourge to scores, had it not been for Francis P. Church, Fitz Henry
Warren, and William D. Bartlett.
But it is not the story of the _Sun_ that Mr. Mitchell set out to
write. His colleague Frank M. O’Brien did that, and any one who
believes he could improve on it would be as daring or demented as the
artist who believes he can improve on the Mona Lisa. O’Brien’s story
reflected the spirit of that newspaper as the portrait mentioned above
reflected the soul of her who reminded Pater of Leda. However, Mr.
Mitchell could scarcely tell us of himself without telling the story of
the _Sun_ too.
The volume is replete with personality studies of sages and cranks,
philosophers and buffoons, experts and amateurs. Any one who is
interested in the spirit of the Puritan, the pioneer, the pathfinder;
any one who is intrigued by guessing at the truth, will be helped by
reading the pages on Goldwin Smith. Any one who would like to clarify
his hazy notions of paranoia will be aided by perusal of the pages
on George Francis Train; any one who would make the acquaintance of
a critic of letters to whom his countrymen should have accorded the
esteem that the French accorded Rémy de Gourmont and the British George
Saintsbury, should read what Mr. Mitchell says of Mayo W. Hazeltine;
any one who would learn of the forces that did more than anything else
to deliver us as a nation from the spirit of parochialism should read
his pages on Bunan-Varilla, the French engineer, who made possible the
Panama Canal.
It is a book for a rainy day and a starry night; a book to be read
in Watchapey and Washington; to accompany one on Lake Louise or the
Atlantic. The author’s wish has come true. It was that here and
there some kind friends unknown might find in his book something as
interesting for them to read as it was for him to remember. If he had
as much pleasure in writing it as they have reading it, Edward P.
Mitchell is a giant joy-creator.
* * * * *
Mr. Mitchell is a modest man. That can scarcely be said of Mr. Edward
W. Bok. He is proud of his accomplishment as editor, prouder of
his success as uplifter and proudest of the masterfulness which he
displayed in piloting his ship of life through troubled waters and
adverse currents to a safe port and serene haven. A few years ago
he told about these various successes in a fat volume entitled _The
Americanisation of Edward Bok_. Now he rewrites his autobiography
and calls it _Twice Thirty: Some Short and Simple Annals of the
Road_. Simple is a more appropriate adjective than short. Mr. Bok
is pleased with himself. He was well born; he is of a nation that
has been a parent in most things. It invented golf; it was the
founder of the modern school of music; it furnished us with our
fundamental institutions; our Federal Constitution; the Declaration of
Independence; our State constitutions; our freedom of religion; our
free public schools; our free press; our written ballot; our town,
county and state system of self-government; the system of recording
deeds and mortgages; the germinal idea of the _Ladies Home Journal_,
New York City and the Hudson River. In fact, it would be difficult to
name anything or any one save the Ku Klux Klan and Mayor Hylan that the
Netherlands did not originate. And it contributed a man who never knew
fear: Mr. Bok.
Thomas Carlyle wrote that he could get a far more penetrating insight
of a writer’s personality from a portrait of the man, photographic or
oleographic, than from his writing. I was never convinced that the sage
of Chelsea was in the right until I saw the frontispiece in the book
under consideration. It is labelled “At Twice Thirty.” The legend could
be replaced by “Self-Satisfaction” and beneath it, this quotation from
the text might be pasted: “I have had too distinct a leaning toward
looking for and discovering the faults in persons and then of becoming
possessed with a mad desire to correct those faults.” But neither
from gazing at the portrait nor from reading the text am I moved to
objurgation similar to that of the Apostle: Mr. Bok is not a hypocrite;
though he believes it is the beam that is in his brother’s eye and the
mote that is in his own. Nevertheless it will occur to some that at
times he goes dangerously close to hypocrisy; for instance, “This book
is written for my two sons.” If Mr. Bok’s pineal gland were opened and
the day book diary of his soul extracted, it is safe to assume that the
magician who could read it would find there an entry, “October 9th,
1924. Decided to publish _Twice Thirty_ so that the world might have my
four pages of biographical data from a reliable source.” Then there is
that chapter entitled “My Most Unusual Experience,” in which Mr. Bok
relates how he rescued a young American girl from the jaws of the lion
and dragged her from the Coliseum, the jaws being a salacious Frenchman
and the coliseum the promenade of the Empire in London. The _beau
geste_ reflects great credit on Mr. Bok, and he intended it should.
That is the reason he published it. There can be no other. He does not
cotton to axioms even though they are of divine origin. His right hand
has always known just what his left was doing.
Mr. Bok quotes Henry Ward Beecher as saying to him that wisdom comes
at sixty, not before. Job said it before Beecher. Storing up treasure
in Heaven has always been considered an indication of wisdom. Even
in Heaven, I fancy, you can’t have your cake and eat it. You can not
insist upon having your reward now and also having it put to your
credit in the hereafter. In fact we have the word of the Master to that
effect.
I recall some years ago when I was in London Mr. Bok was much concerned
about the street walkers of the Strand. A more vulturesome variety
swarmed in Piccadilly Circus, but if my memory serves me it was those
addicted to London’s most famous street that engaged his reformatory
urge at the time. I have looked in vain for some account of it in this
book and in the “Americanisation.” I am disappointed, for it would make
an interesting companion chapter to “My Most Unusual Experience.” The
same title might have been used were the prefix lopped from the third
word.
This matter of hypocrisy and Edward Bok intrigues me; indeed I may say
it engrosses me, for the moment. In one of the most _naïf_ chapters
that adult ever penned, the author points out that the Edward Bok,
Editor of the _Ladies Home Journal_, and Edward W. Bok, “creator of the
American Peace Award of $100,000, Donator of a window in The Nieuwe
Kerk at Delft, and Knight of the Netherland Lion” are two different
personalities. The tastes, outlook, and manner of looking at things of
the former were totally at variance with those of the latter. In fact,
the two personalities waged incessant warfare. “My chief difficulty
was to abstain from breaking through the Editor and revealing my real
self. Several times I did so, and each time I saw how different was the
effect from that when the editorial Edward Bok had been allowed sway.
Little by little I learned to subordinate myself and let him have full
rein.”
Mr. Bok (the present one, for Editor Bok “has passed out of being
as completely as if he had never been”) says it was a case of dual
personality, and cites the notorious Miss Beauchamp sponsored by Dr.
Morton Prince to support his contention. It won’t wash. Edward W.
Bok knew that the things that Editor Bok did were oftentimes cheap,
sensational, undignified, unworthy of his heritage, birth, nationality,
accomplishments, ideals. But he knew also that when the Bok that was
worthy of them dominated the _Ladies Home Journal_ for six months
and its sales dropped eighty thousand, that it was up to him to let
some yellow into his lily-white character, or else lose his job. And
he turned on the saffron spigot. No, Mr. Edward W. Bok, that is not
dual personality, and I who say it gave as many years to the study of
double personality and cognate subjects as you did to journalism. Some
will say it was hypocrisy. I say it was expediency, and it was your
contribution to popular hedonism. You and another great journalist, Dr.
Frank Crane, had found out what “the people” want and you gave it to
them good and plenty. By so doing, you and he have set back the clock
of culture in this country about a hundred years.
The average reader, with a mind of his own as to what constitutes
good and bad literature, does not have to be warned as to the danger
of books like Mr. Bok’s _Twice Thirty_. As a matter-of-fact, it is so
unmeaning as to leave the reading public indifferent, but there is a
latent danger in taking such writings indifferently. The same can be
said of Dr. Crane’s books. They are harmless in themselves, but the
public is already too much inclined to take short cuts to every goal of
life; short cuts to fortune, to health, to taste and to culture. It is
the duty of the critics to show the hollowness and the danger of taking
Mr. Bok’s _Twice Thirty_ seriously; of taking Dr. Crane’s Talks as
guides in life; and of taking radios, victrolas and pianolas as forms
of high art. Feeding the public what it wants is not always working for
its best interest.
Diligent, careful reading of _Twice Thirty_ has sufficed to convince me
that Mr. Bok has never done anything that merited his disapproval. He
may be sorry that he had a big head when he was born for it cost his
mother a year on crutches, but he is not sorry he has one now. He is as
satisfied with himself, his accomplishments and potentialities as was
Nick Bottom, the weaver of _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_. In truth Mr.
Bok reminds me of Mr. Bottom. He could play Pyramus, and Thisby, and
the roaring lion, and like Bottom he can take pains, be perfect.
There is a certain amount of irony in the quotations Mr. Bok has chosen
to put at the head of each chapter, possibly to give the book an
atmosphere of culture. The most irrelevant one, the least _à propos_,
is Plutarch’s sentence, “Oh, that men would learn that the true speaker
is he who speaks only when he has something to say.” If Mr. Bok had
written this as an epitome at the beginning of his book, and if he had
meditated the advice of Plutarch and applied it to his own case, we
would certainly have been spared _Twice Thirty_.
Occasionally, an amusing experience, an interesting anecdote, or a
touching remembrance form a high spot in the book, but they are few and
far apart. What interest or originality is there in “There must be a
to-day before there is a to-morrow.” “Life may depart, but the source
of life is constant.” Or, “To-day I can and do sleep the clock around
once and sometimes twice a week”? Most of the incidents in his book are
of the sort that ask to be forgotten, and when they are related with a
lack of style which makes them flat, with a lack of humour which makes
them pathetic, and when they all tend to moralise and preach--the case
is hopelessly lost. In fact, it may be true to say that, had Mr. Bok
a spark of humour or a particle of wit, he would never have written
_Twice Thirty_, nor would he have published the “Letter that his father
slipped Tom when he left his mother for ‛Somewhere in France’.” This
letter is the most ludicrous and ridiculous thing that ever was done
in a sober mood. It is meant of course to be touching, elevating,
inspiring and to serve as a _vade mecum_ to the young soldier, as an
exorcism in time of temptation, and as a reminder of the “home-spirit”
when the flesh should show itself weaker than the will. As it is,
coming seven years after the end of the War, when the memories of the
way in which the American soldiers understood the meaning of the word
“leave” and the way in which they got acquainted with “life” is not yet
gone, it is the most out of place document in the book.
It must be a satisfaction to know that, throughout his life, with
only one exception, he has stood on the right side of it; that he
has pointed out the right way; that he has been the good Samaritan
to abandoned women, the successful prophet in his dealings with
Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the man of good judgment in
his editorship of the _Ladies Home Journal_, the paragon of domestic
qualities and the ideal father; yet, for our part, we feel that
although Mr. Bok may be sincere in what he says, he does not say all,
and what he does not say is exactly what we would like to know. There
again we can point to the lack of harmony between his quotations and
his achievement. “The author,” wrote Tolstoi, “who succeeds in his work
is he who describes the interesting and significant things which it
has been given him to observe and experience in his own life.” But the
successful author is also he who reveals a soul to his readers, and
that is where Mr. Bok fails lamentably. He reveals well enough the man
a photograph would reveal, providing the photograph were taken at a
time when he was ready to moisten his lips and look pleasant.
Mr. Bok has recorded his struggles and successes with evident veracity
and truthfulness, but how much more interesting they would have been
to us if he had transplanted them a notch higher in the field of the
emotional and intellectual efforts. The price he paid for the plot of
land on which his house stands, and the seven bath-rooms he had built
in it mean much less than the development of his ego from the point
when a ride on a truck which saved him a five-cent fare constituted
happiness for him, to that he reached later when he wanted the best
of everything and was in a position to demand it. It is a common
occurrence to be born in poverty and it is an achievement to rise above
it, especially when the advance has been made honestly and in the open;
but the soul should develop in proportion as the opportunities afforded
by better connections and associations increase, and that is just what
Mr. Bok does not reveal in his book; his mind is still on the same
level as that of the young messenger boy in the Telegraph Company and
his soul is still contented with a ride on a truck, as it were.
Bok’s motto was “The good that I would I do; but the evil which I would
not, that I do not,” a drastic revision of Paul’s confession.
The last chapter of _Twice Thirty_ bears the heading, “Is It Worth
While?” “Scarcely,” is the answer, “if _Twice Thirty_ is the antecedent
of the pronoun.”
* * * * *
A few years ago it would have been said that a career such as Joseph
Pulitzer’s could not have been staged anywhere save in this country.
M. Coty, Lord Rothmere, Sig. Bergamini are examples of similar careers
in France, England and Italy. Joseph Pulitzer galvanised the New York
_World_ into life, made it a power in the land and gathered about him a
group of clever men, one of whom has written his life.
[Illustration: JOSEPH PULITZER]
_Painted by John Singer Sargent
Courtesy of “The New York World”_
Mr. Don C. Seitz’s book is not a satisfactory biography, but it is
readable and it engenders thought and reflection. It neither reveals
nor suggests the mystery and secret of a dominant personality. He
calls Joseph Pulitzer the Liberator of Journalism. For many years
he was called the Libertine of Journalism, and worse than that.
He deserves the one as richly as he deserved the other, no more
so. The biographer, like the witness in court, should state facts,
not conclusions. Joseph Pulitzer was an unusual man and he had an
extraordinary career. Hungarian emigrant, without background or
adventitious aid, he acquired within a quarter of a century, power,
influence and wealth that were felt not only throughout this country
but in Europe as well. Politics was his passion, property his obsession
and power his ambition.
He was vouchsafed twenty years of public influence; he moulded minds,
shaped opinions, conditioned decisions, germinated ideals; and they
were twenty years of personal misery and decrepitude. Dying, he
perpetuated his name by the establishment of the School of Journalism
at Columbia University. It can scarcely fail to be interesting to
learn about such a man. Mr. Seitz with the instinct and experience of
the expert journalist, gives the information in the first chapter,
which he entitles “Characteristics.” He moulds the clay, then animates
it. As he hurls virtues into the receptive mass, he calls out their
names loudly; as the limitations and defects steal in, he whispers
or remains silent. Joseph Pulitzer had a genius for journalism and
he was saturated with belief in liberty, equality, and opportunity;
he was courageous, affectionate, hospitable, generous, indulgent and
just; but he was also vain, arrogant, domineering, verbose, bulimious,
tyrannical, self-sufficient, personally hypersensitive but insensitive
to others’ feelings; he was devoid of humour, and he wore a mask that
fell off on the slightest encounter. He had acquired a dexterity in
regaining it which often prevented adversaries from seeing that it had
fallen. The sea of his life was always turbulent. When he was on the
crest of the wave, his speech and conduct were hypomaniac; when in the
trough, he was taciturn, unapproachable, uncommunicative, inert. He had
a firm intellect and an infirm temper; firm energy and an infirm body;
a keen æsthetic sense and a contempt for his fellow man because he
would not make himself in Joseph Pulitzer’s image. “I have no friends,”
said he to one of his secretaries. “And this was in a great measure
true,” adds his biographer. He has friends now, and he will have more
in the future; Mr. Seitz’s book will make hundreds for him, and the
institutions he founded, thousands.
* * * * *
It is natural enough that editors should like to talk about their
doings. They have been compelled to be impersonal so long that they
are impelled to gambol and frolic, to shout and sing, when they burst
the barriers of their sanctums and do not have to return to them. John
St. Loe Strachey has not ceased to be editor of “The Spectator,” but
then he was never impersonal. The volume devoted to himself, published
a year or so ago, called _The Adventure of Living_, amply testified
it. Now he has published a new volume about himself called _The River
of Life_. He does not give a portrait of himself, and he eliminates as
far as possible enumeration of facts, positive statements, sequence,
logical or chronological, and conclusions. His diary is of the sort
that might have been written for the pleasure of the soul and the
contentment of the heart, with no further motive. He tells of his likes
and dislikes, as they are brought to his mind by travel and reading;
he does not indulge in ratiocination or in plans for the future. He is
content to see life as a river, flowing constantly, everlastingly the
same, everlastingly different, and his diary leaves the impression of
a walk through a flower garden. One stops at interesting points, picks
here and there a flower which will be kept as a memento, and which,
being seen again, will recall a pleasant day.
In an antescript, Mr. Strachey writes: “If I am not careful, some
votary of the New Psychology will get busy on my Diary and prove that
I am suffering from an inferiority complex.” Not a chance of it! A lot
of derogatory things about the Freudians may be said; yet though they
are deluded, they are not imbecile; they are priority fanatics, but not
blind. They know a superiority complex when they see it.
VIII
CLERGYMEN
WHY I AM A CHRISTIAN, by _Dr. Frank Crane_.
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A MIND, by _W. J. Dawson_.
An editor once said to Dr. Frank Crane, who spent the first twenty-five
years of his adult life as a Methodist and Congregational minister
and the next twenty-five as a journalist: “If you will write a book
on _Why I Am a Christian_ and tell the truth it ought to be mighty
interesting.” Dr. Crane says he has told the truth. I say it is
not interesting. Dr. Crane is a Christian because it is pragmatic,
because it is usable. That is not a good or sufficient reason. One
may be a Mahommedan or a Jew for the same reason. His species of
Christianity is, he says, one hundred per cent practical. Mr. Ghandhi’s
or Mr. Tagore’s species of Hinduism has a similar percentage. “I am
a Christian simply because I like it and I find it conducive to my
happiness and my general welfare.” That is a good reason for being a
Jew.
Dr. Crane prides himself on his large-mindedness; he is beyond pride
or prejudice. “If you should ask me whether I am a Trinitarian or a
Unitarian, a Catholic or a Protestant, Fundamentalist or Methodist
or Baptist, you might as well ask me whether I am a Guelph or a
Ghibelline.” When a man is omnipotent and omniscient he is all these,
and none. He is not only the trunk of the tree of which these are
branches (some of them gnarled, others withered), but he is the roots
as well. In one of his daily sermons he says he left the church in
search of adventure. Fortunately for him he left it while the going was
good.
“I am happier here and now when I follow the principles of Jesus. I am
wretched here and now when I reject them or doubt them.” Does Dr. Crane
think that any of his 25,000,000 readers believe that he practices the
principles that Christ enunciated to His disciples on the mountain?
If he does, such readers are incredibly credulous even for feeders on
denutritionised mush. He took thought for the morrow when he shifted
to a profession that pays him more in a week than he got in a year
labouring in the Lord’s vineyard. I am not contending the right to
shift was not his. I am pointing out the obvious hypocrisy of his boast.
His reasons for being a Christian have very little to do with Christ.
Indeed, for him Christianity is a point of view, an attitude of mind.
It needs no God and very little divinity. His idea of Christianity
is so largely matter-of-fact and so little emotional that his
confession--which he wants us to remember is not an argument--can not
make much appeal.
Reading _Why I Am a Christian_ is like listening to a lawyer who has
a fluent, persuasive vocabulary and who knows how to obtain the best
effects from his argument. He carries his auditors along and they want
to agree with him, but when he stops his monologue, rationalism claims
its rights and the case is decided against him.
It is evident that a church which has had some of the greatest minds
of the world at its head, which has lasted through centuries and wars,
is based on a foundation more solid than one which could be destroyed
by the argument of one of its members. Dr. Crane is a member of the
church, but he refuses to recognise the authority of an organised
religion. The fear of eternal punishment or the hope of never-ending
beatitude have no bearing, he maintains, on his decision, because he
finds the former foolish, the latter boring. Dr. Crane thinks he is the
first man to shudder at the thought of an eternity spent in heaven,
in a state of semi-stupor, singing forever to the music of harps. The
church itself encourages no such belief, but since the real meaning
of paradise is unknown to man, a symbol has been adopted which no one
tries to offer as dogma.
It is not because Christ is God that Dr. Crane believes in Him. It
is because He has shown the author what sort of a person God is. It
is malicious and pernicious for “a man with a million friends” to
express such doubts as to the divinity of Christ. The world does not
need a superman, the world needs God, and the figure of Christ is more
important as a foundation for the church than any other doctrine of
Jesus as a man could be. And there is no denying that the world needs a
church.
It is the personality of Christ, what He represents as a man, the idea
He gives of what God should be, what He has made of Christianity and
the energy He has put into it, the universality of His doctrine and of
His appeal and the beautiful story of His life which make Dr. Crane a
Christian. He does not ask Christ to help him, to succour him, to save
him and to give him happiness; he asks Him to give him enough force
to help himself, enough energy to resist falls and enough strength
to fight for his own happiness; he does not follow or wish to follow
Christ and imitate Him, but he wishes Christ to show him how to get
along on his way in the manner which is most pleasing to Him and of
which He would approve.
Dr. Crane has made a note of most of the standardised beliefs of the
world, of their ideals and fears. He labels them “delusions” and
proceeds to smash them in their very foundation. That human nature
is evil is a delusion of which reflection has purged him. Punishment
and reward are delusions; goodness to be real must be positive; the
fact that a man never lies, cheats nor hurts any one, never deceives
his wife in thought or act, never does any of the things he should
not do, is no proof that he has any goodness in him. The belief that
competition is necessary to progress, which has been proved time
after time, amounts to naught in Dr. Crane’s estimation; there is no
superior class and the idle members of the community, those who have
no need of working for a living, have been accursed by God. Dr. Crane
thinks also that it is a delusion to believe that happiness resides
in riches or in high positions; he advocates looking for happiness
every day, as we go along, instead of storing up treasures on earth or
happiness for the morrow.
All this leads us to wonder how much of the “Confession” is Dr. Crane’s
and how much has been gathered from the wisdom of centuries. Most of
his arguments are old and familiar; he writes a long chapter, for
instance, on the text of Abraham Lincoln: “God must have liked the
common people, He made so many of them.”
Dr. Crane has been writing pontifically so many years that he has come
to believe that whatever he says is true. It is true because he says
it. There is no discussion or argument about it; he knows. He is a
gushing fountain of knowledge and adjectives. He is an oracle whose
truth is not to be tested, but accepted.
“To be good, according to Christ’s program, is to fight here; to take
up one’s cross daily; to fear not; to love much; to hold on, and to put
forth vigour in every way.” Had Dr. Crane added “and to get the money
for doing it” it would be his own programme, admitting that writing
four hundred words of twaddle daily is the equivalent of taking up
one’s cross. To fight here, indeed! “Take no thought for your life,
what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink, nor yet for your body, what
ye shall put on.”
His reasons for belonging to a church are naïve to the point of
childishness. They are: because it is imperfect; because its purpose is
to disseminate the most important idea in the world; because he likes
it and likes the kind of people that belong; because it is the oldest,
most imposing and most beautiful of all the institutions of humanity.
“It is in the church that we must seek the origin of every great
movement for human welfare.” I suppose it is universally admitted that
the French Revolution and the English industrial revolution were the
two great modern movements making for human welfare. My information
is the church did not have much use for the encyclopedists, and if
Hargreaves, Arkwright, Crompton, Cartwright and Watt were of the
church, history does not say anything about it. The church had nothing
to do with Pasteur’s discovery, which was the origin of a movement for
human welfare which has lengthened the span of life nearly twenty years.
Here and there throughout the book, like freckles on the face of Juno,
are sprinkled gems of wisdom. “All the great literature of the past
has been tragic”--_Rabelais_ and _Don Quixote_, for instance. “The
fundamental insanity believed by the majority of the world to-day to be
the truth is that the work of the world is to be done by defectives who
are not clever enough to escape from work.” How pleasant it must be to
be so omniscient! Dr. Crane must admit that Lenine and Trotzky did not
have that fundamental insanity. And how sane Mussolini is!
* * * * *
Mr. Dawson is a clergyman and the leaves on his tree of life are sere
and yellow. When they were green they were smudged by the smokes of
London and Glasgow where he pumped up emotion in Methodist Chapel
and peddled rhetoric in Presbyterian Church, and thereby gained such
fame as pulpit orator that he was called to Newark, N. J., where he
ministered unto the needs of the parishioners of the Old First Church
for twenty years or thereabouts. Now one of the dreams of his youth has
come true; he is living in a simple house near a flowing stream, and
the sound of its running water lulls him to sleep and its garrulous
voice calls him at dawn. The other, that one day he would become a
great writer, he knows will not materialise, but he continues to write
because that which was nearly an agony for Flaubert and an exhausting
labour for Anatole France is not only a joy but a necessity for Mr.
Dawson. To him, it is nearly a fundamental urge. Early in life while
he was attending to the spiritual needs of the Wesleyans in the small
towns of Devon and Cornwall he wrote poetry by the ream to save himself
from the soporific effect of the thick, stagnant atmosphere of dulness
that enveloped him. Fate made him a preacher, but his secret aim was
to make himself a writer. If authorship of forty books entitles one to
such designation, Mr. Dawson is a writer. Another writer whose career
closely parallels Mr. Dawson’s, save that Dr. Algernon S. Crapsey had
the notoriety of a trial for heresy, recently wrote that he had never
seen nor heard Mr. Dawson’s name until the publisher sent him _The
Autobiography of a Mind_ for review. That is the only experience that
Dr. Crapsey and the writer have had in common so far as I know save
that we both read the book through in one sleepless night. But it
provoked neither tears nor laughter in me as it did in his colleague.
It provoked in me a series of interrogations. Why did he call his
book the _Autobiography of a Mind_? Why did he stay in the Church
upward of half a century? How did he reconcile his practices and his
preachings? Why did a man so beholden to the ideas of intellectuality
not do anything concrete to realise them? Why has a man who has written
so extensively and has lived so conspicuously in the public eye been
unsung?
To answer these questions it is not sufficient to say it was because he
lacked humility; because he did not love his fellow-man, because he had
a superiority complex. Many men who have made a permanent impression
upon their time bore with similar limitations and suffered similar
infirmities; it must be that Mr. Dawson lacked the talent which his
personality, conditioned by his conscious mind, proclaimed. Were his
book a biography of the mind he would have analysed his failure to
obtain the success as a man of letters which he believed his talent
justified.
The truth is Mr. Dawson is an emotionalist, not an intellectualist. So
far as I can judge from his autobiography he never did any constructive
work to fit himself for a writer. Early in life, he began to
externalise emotional states in writing and he has continued to do so
ever since. Emotional states, unless they are panoplied such as those
of Shelley, Rimbaud, Poe, Dostoievsky and countless others, interest
only the possessor and those who love him or are beholden to him.
It is passing strange to hear a young Methodist minister of robust
health say: “I can not imagine how I could have endured life had I
not found early a means of self-expression in my pen. Life would be
unendurable for most of us without some means of escape from ourselves.
Some find it in golf, others in collecting stamps, others in netting
butterflies.” Others find it in cheerful labour in the Lord’s vineyard
and that is where it is becoming for all clergymen to find it. If their
quest is unsuccessful then they should find other employment. _Tedium
vitæ_ is the most unbecoming disease for a priest, and if he has it he
should not talk about it.
Mr. Dawson’s father, hard-shelled, self-sacrificing, saturated with a
spirit of service, was able, largely through the resourcefulness of
an industrious, pious, tireless wife to put aside every year a few
shillings. When the legacy came to his son, then pastor of a Church
in London, it was quite a tidy sum. He promptly gambled with it and
lost. “It was a very pious man of most gracious manners who first
persuaded me that it was a foolish thing to buy shares and stocks for
honest investment when I could buy a hundred times as many shares on
margin. So I bought shares in a gold mine in Africa and a coal mine in
Australia.” There is a _naïveté_ about this that is equalled only by
his account of his exaltation on the discovery of the word ineluctable
and the pleasure he had in using it.
Mr. Dawson had the conventional Christian attitude toward avarice,
holding that it is the root of all evil; but he also realised that
without money there was no flowering of the softer and more delicate
amenities of life. How much mental misery might have been spared the
poetic pastor had he, in one of his trips to Italy, “whither I went on
all possible occasion,” come upon the story of one Francis Bernardone.
One day while Francis was still a boy he had an emotional crisis which
in its genesis was not unlike that which Mr. Dawson had when he became
conscious that something mysterious was happening to himself. “I--the
essential Ego, the thinking Self--was passing out of my body.” Some of
Francis’ constant joyousness might have crept into his soul, and the
enthusiastic love of poverty which was the keynote of the character
of the Poverello of Assisi might have heartened him in many hours of
apprehension. But though he had long loved Francis and year by year
sought his shrine, and even lectured in his own monastery he would
never have succeeded in assimilating his spirit.
When Mr. Dawson approached his fiftieth year, he had an emotional
experience of a kind that has often been described; some call it
conversion, others seeing a light. He who had an insatiable appetite
for pleasure now learned that there was a great difference between
pleasure and happiness. For the first time in his life he was
completely happy: he had discovered the poor and the sinful and he
was moved to deliver them, to succour them, and to purge them. For
the first time, he found himself invaded with a spirit of service. He
coveted martyrdom for the uplifting of the South London poor. He would
devote his strength and the remainder of his days to put in the way of
recovery those who had been bruised and battered out of human shape
by a terrible misfortune or more terrible vices, and those past cure,
he would absolve from their sins and bury. It was all a wonder and a
wild delight--while it lasted. But like all emotional states it was
transitory.
Perhaps nothing conveys Mr. Dawson’s subjugation to the emotional
states like his experience with Roosevelt. The latter talked to him of
the virtues of one of his books, _The Quest of the Simple Life_, which
apparently impressed the President as did Pastor Wagner’s classic. The
author was forced to the humiliating confession that he had totally
forgotten it. The phase of thought and feeling which had produced the
book was past. The late Marcel Proust and Mr. W. J. Dawson would not
have been congenial! The twelve years that he spent as pastor of the
Congregational Church in South London added to his reputation as a
pulpit orator and he says that they were marked by great intellectual
growth. We have to take his word; there is no display of it in his
autobiography.
At the end of this period he came to the United States to lecture. He
looked upon Newark and saw that it was a company of horses in Pharaoh’s
chariot. New Jersey’s metropolis said, “Rise up, come away,” and he
came. Whether he found it the rose of Sharon or the lily of the valley
we shall not know until his next book is published, but it is safe to
assume that he liked it better than South London. We trust he found
there “that rare kind of friendship which is rooted in intellectual
intimacy,” and that he encountered people interested in the kind of
thoughts most vital to him, so that he was not forced, as he was in
London, “to relatively low levels of conversation.” Had Mr. Dawson
called his book _Recollections of Emotional States_ it would have
been far more fitting than _The Autobiography of a Mind_. The reader
who can divine the writer’s mind from this book has perspicacity and
penetration that I do not possess.
From the photograph of the frontispiece, and from the lines of the
book, I gather that Mr. Dawson was leonine externally and feline
internally; that he had great sensitiveness to verbal intoxication and
that always logorrhœa threatened to exhaust him; that there was within
him a big hedonist and a little puritan, that the latter sat in adverse
judgment of the former at all times, and tried to trip him when Mr.
Dawson was not watching his step; that he was sensitive as a child and
self-conscious as a man; that his ear was not attuned to the reproofs
of life and that his eye constantly mistook the comb for the honey.
IX
ARTISTS AND MUSICIANS
MY MUSICAL LIFE, by _Walter Damrosch_. IRVING BERLIN,
by _Alexander Woollcott_. SUNLIGHT AND SONG, by _Maria
Jeritza_. WITH PENCIL, BRUSH AND CHISEL, by _Emil Fuchs_.
Neither Mr. Damrosch nor Mr. Berlin may admit that he likes to be
bracketed with the other, but expediency suggests that it be done here.
_My Musical Life_ does not profess to be an autobiography though it
is a more revealing one than many that purport to be autobiographies.
Leopold Damrosch, the father, was forty years old when he determined to
find out if a living and a career could be made for him and his family
in the land of the free, and in the home of the brave, so he came to
the U. S. A. The way Walter, the author of this book, feels about the
country of his adoption may be gathered from the opening sentence, “I
am an American musician and have lived in this country since my ninth
year.” Judged from his book his life has been an interesting one. He
has been on terms of intimacy with all the great figures in the world
of music; we read that Liszt, Wagner, von Bülow, Clara Schumann,
Taussig, Joachim, Auer, Haenselt, Rubinstein, when they were in
Breslau, generally stayed at the Damrosch house, and he has known most
of the great musicians that have favoured us with their talent.
Of it all he makes a charming kaleidoscopic picture, in which nearly
every musician of note the past fifty years passes in review:
[Illustration: WALTER DAMROSCH]
_Photograph by Gutekunst_
“It was not until midnight that we accompanied Liszt
through the park and the lovely Goethe Garden back to
his house. It was a gentle summer night with a hazy moon
giving an indescribable glamour to the trees and bushes,
and suddenly Liszt laid his hand on my shoulder and said
‛Listen!’
“From the bushes came the song of a nightingale. I had
never heard one before and stood spellbound. It seemed
incredible that such ecstatic sweetness, such songs of
joy and sorrow, could come from the throat of a little
bird, and to hear it all at twenty-four years of age and
standing at the side of Liszt! Dear reader, I confess
that to-day, thirty-five years later, I still thrill at
the memory of it.”
The chapter on Lilli Lehmann is delightful. He draws a picture of the
stately Lilli in Pittsburgh, dressed in white, ready for her appearance
as Brünhilde, covered from head to foot with soot, and at the same
time he gives us an example of ready wit and graceful gesture. Lehmann
insisted it was not Frau Engelhardt’s fault though she perpetrated the
outrage, and that it was wrong of Damrosch to discharge her:
“Slowly I allowed myself to be persuaded and at the
psychological moment gently left the dressing room,
giving Frau Engelhardt a comprehensive glance which she
understood.”
We realise what a diplomat was lost to the service when we read:
“Outside the dressing room I found my faithful Hans, son
of my prompter, Goettich. I gave him some money and told
him to run to a florist and buy a bunch of the whitest
flowers that he could find and to bring them to Madame
Lehmann with my compliments.”
We get interesting glimpses of the tribulations attached to the life of
a musician in New York over fifty years ago:
“I enjoyed my weekly rehearsals in Newark immensely,
although horse-cars, ferry-boats, and trains made
the trip in those days a cumbersome one. But after
each rehearsal, Mr. Schuyler Brinkerhoff Jackson, the
president of the Society, Mr. Shinkle, the secretary,
my dear old friend Zach Belcher, enthusiastic tenor and
music lover, Frank Sealey, my pianist and since then for
so many years accompanist and organist of the New York
Oratorio Society, used to go with me to a nice German
beer saloon near the railroad station where, over a glass
of beer and Swiss-cheese sandwiches, we waited until
train time and discussed the welfare of the Harmonic
Society and music in general.”
In his efforts to familiarise the American public with Wagner’s music,
he had many amusing, discouraging and thrilling experiences. Great
singers there were in those days--Fischer, Sachs, Brema, Alvary and
Gadski. With the coming of Melba, a successful combination of the
French and Italian was made with the German school and we read of that
remarkable group of singers, Jean and Edouard de Reszke, Bispham,
Nordica, Schumann-Heink, and of performances of “Tristan,” “which came
as near perfection as I ever hope to witness.... At the close we were
so elated that all concerned kissed each other ecstatically after the
last curtain fell.”
And how touching his account of a concert in Monte Carlo:
“Jean de Reszke was in the fifth row of the parquet,
and as I came to the ‛Prize Song in the Meistersinger
Overture which he had sung so often and so ravishingly
in New York, I could not help but turn around to look at
him. He gave me an immediate smile, but the tears were
running down his face.”
Mr. Damrosch may accept the assurance that he is wrong in thinking
many of the happenings described may prove dull reading; there is not
a word in the book most readers would be willing to part with. He did
not need Mr. Roosevelt’s letter to establish his Americanism. But as a
cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world, we must tell him that the little
fireman he brought from the wings with Materna could not possibly have
said “Be jabbers.” Occasionally Irishmen will say “Be jabers,” but the
introduction of the extra “b” is a reflection on the good English they
justly pride themselves on using.
Up until the time _My Musical Life_ appeared, we believed editors and
statesmen had a monopoly of writing the most interesting reminiscences;
but Mr. Damrosch’s book suggests that the belief is not well founded.
* * * * *
As Irving Berlin IS American music, this biography is as much the story
of the development--or rather, the birth of national music--as it is
of its creator. It is more a panegyric than a biography. The fact
that Irving Berlin, Izzy Baline, was born in Russia and brought to
this country when he was a few years old, after his village had been
destroyed by fire, makes him all the more an American figure. He had,
blended in him, the characteristics of his race which have given to his
music the touch of sadness and the occasional suspicion that its author
is feeling sorry for himself--self-pity being, in Mr. Woollcott’s idea,
one of the fundamental qualities of the Russian Jew--and he has added
to his inherited qualities the “pep” the “jazz” and the optimism of his
adopted country.
_The Story of Irving Berlin_ has been written by a friend, and friends
despite the adage have a way of being kind and indulgent which is all
to their credit, but which lessens somewhat the value of the adjectives
of praise they are tempted to use. According to Mr. Woollcott’s study,
Irving Berlin is as nearly perfect as a human being can be. He has the
detachment, the disinterestedness, the temperament, the lack of sense
of time and the etherealness of the artist. With those, he combines a
business acumen, a practicality, a flair and a knowledge of the value
of publicity of one who is determined to make a success in business,
and to have an income larger than he can spend. These qualities do not
clash in Irving Berlin; they make concessions to each other, and the
result is a quiet, keen, sensitive looking young man, who seldom raises
his voice and never hurts the feelings of any one--whose eye surveys
the acting of his characters on the stage and the credit and debit list
of his company’s returns with equal comprehensiveness, whose ears are
sensitive to good music but refuse to be “sold” to a piece that will
not be popular, and whose soul is everlastingly travelling from Florida
to Europe, from Virginia to Atlantic City. He is a composer and a
musical publisher. The two functions can be made to work hand in hand:
Irving Berlin has done it. As a composer he publishes his own music,
and as a publisher he accepts only his own compositions: they are sure
to sell.
Mr. Woollcott lingers lovingly on Irving Berlin’s youth. These early
years, spent in the tenement house of Cherry Street, are well pictured.
We like the devoted mother who had a sense of responsibility and a
sense of humour. She had to laugh at this absurd country which was
paying handsomely for her youngest child’s music while she, industrious
and economical, had a hard time to keep together the bodies and souls
of five hungry children. When she went after much effort to hear Irving
Berlin play on Broadway--after he had shed for good his waiter’s
coat--and heard the applause and saw the little figure of her son on
the stage, she went home with the impression that somehow New York was
“picking” on her Benjamin. These years were hard ones for young “Izzy.”
He had to contend with the sense of inferiority engendered by his
meagre earnings; he had to stand the rebuke of the young emigrants who
feel as Sophomores feel toward Freshmen; they have just been through
the period of acclimatisation, and no sooner have they found their way
about in the new land than they turn and scowl at those who come after
them.
A characteristic trait of Irving Berlin was the manner in which he was
accidentally drowned in the East River. When he woke up in Gouverneur
Hospital, his fist was firmly closed on the five pennies he had just
obtained from the sale of newspapers. This is the story of Irving
Berlin in miniature. He would be drowned mentally in the composition of
his music--at the same time, he would never lose sight of his material
achievement. His music must sell.
Mr. Woollcott has no timidity about saying that Irving Berlin is a
genius, and we are nearly ready to agree with him when we hear that
the greatest of American composers can neither read nor write music.
Some who have heard his compositions will say “I knew it.” Homer
could neither read nor write, and his poetry has stirred the hearts
of thousands of generations. But if Carlyle was right that genius is
unconscious of its excellence, Mr. Berlin would not qualify. Yet it is
genius more than art which has made Irving Berlin so popular. And his
popularity is due, largely, to his sense of the apropos. He catches a
familiar American expression, he allows it to say itself in music in
his mind, and when he has caught the rhythm that will make feet, young
and old, want to beat time to it, he has created a “best-seller.” His
genius rests on his musical interpretation of American everyday life.
His songs are a monument to American language; they are as national
as baseball and chewing gum; Irving Berlin is the pioneer of modern
American music, and not only Mr. Woollcott, but a few of the great
musical critics are hoping that his composition in the form of an
operatic score may some time be heard in the Metropolitan House. But,
of course, that would be in the distant future, and those who love
real music will be thankful that they will be spared the ordeal. Mr.
Woollcott would never call it that, however. He believes in Irving
Berlin, not only as a successful interpreter of a passing craze, but
as one who will live. He thinks that the musical historian of the year
2000 will find the birthday of American music and that of the creative
ignoramus Irving Berlin to be the same. And if it be objected that
he was born in Russia and can not be really American, his admirers
will reply, probably, that if the musical interpreter of American
civilisation came over in the foul hold of a ship, so did American
civilisation.
Little of the qualities of heart and mind of Irving Berlin are
discussed in this biography. Mr. Woollcott has been so intent on the
cortex of Mr. Berlin’s life that he has forgotten to show us the
marrow of it. He is too young, says his biographer, to be loaded with
the usual embellishments that human kindness lavishes on those who
have just passed away, to give him as Philip Guedella said somewhere
“the studied discourtesy of a premature obituary,” but throughout we
can feel that Irving Berlin’s qualities of heart are numerous, that
his kindness is great, that his friends are many and his friendship
valuable.
When Mr. Woollcott gets into his subject, he becomes less and less
self-conscious, and more and more likeable. He has touches of
sentiment, of humour and of keen observation which come on the reader
unaware and are therefore the more delightful. The story might have
been entitled, “From Rags to Riches,” undoubtedly; but it would have
given an idea of something spectacular, and that was unnecessary.
But like all biographers who are prompted by friendship while
their subject is still alive, and who are chiefly preoccupied with
the personal side of their effort, Mr. Woollcott has lost a real
opportunity to point out the value of the contribution of the negro to
ragtime music; this would have afforded a certain amount of colour, of
which the book is sadly in need. He is a musical critic and undoubtedly
has definite views about the subject, and he could readily have got an
incentive from the preface to James Weldon Johnson’s book, _The Book of
American Negro Poetry_. He might equally well have attempted a summary
of the birth and growth of jazz. Opinions are widely split on the value
of such music. To some it appears as part of the American nation, and
they can see beyond it, a taste for achievements higher than mere
material comfort; but others shake their heads, discouraged. They do
not believe that jazz is the way to anything worth while or lasting;
they lament the efforts of American composers to deprave the taste of
their countrymen, and shudder at the success attending the efforts.
Mr. Woollcott would have earned our gratitude, had he expressed some
views on the question. But then, he might have had to admit that the
only picture he could give of Irving Berlin was that of a business and
social success.
* * * * *
It is the fashion among the famous artists and actors of our time
to write their lives which, appearing while they are at the apogee
of their success, promote their artistic and business interests,
and reveal the personality of the writer at the time when his name
is constantly in the eyes of the public. As Maria Jeritza says in
_Sunlight and Song_ there is no denying that reminiscences are fresher
when “the laurels are green, and personalities and events described
are alive in the public mind.” Why should an artist wait until his
career is finished to write his memoirs? But the point which might be
contested is the desirability of publishing such writing when it is
without merit and when it can interest only the person who writes it,
or those mentioned or discussed in it.
_Sunlight and Song_ is one of the most uninteresting narratives of
stage life that has ever been published. It is neither more nor less
than a record of Maria Jeritza’s creations and interpretations,
comparisons of her waistline to those of other prima donnas, assurances
that her hair is all her own, except of course when she wears a
black wig--and even then she has her own--and auto-appreciation and
repetition of the flattering things that others have said of her.
There is no intimate or personal recollection, no confession or
avowal. Of her own life, not a word, so that neither the reports of
gossip nor the known facts about her personal record are denied or
sanctioned; and despite oft-repeated beliefs that artists should not
meddle in politics, and that “art and politics have nothing in common,
but sometimes they have” we have more of the too-well-known story and
tragedy of the Emperor of Austria and his family than we care to have,
especially as it is viewed from an altogether prejudiced angle. To
crown the insipidity of _Sunlight and Song_, either Maria Jeritza or
the translator has strewn it with the American use of superlatives, so
that a good teacher is always a wonderful teacher, a wonderful singer
and a wonderful woman.
It would be harmful to the career of a prima donna in her full
maturity, with a prospect of many years of success ahead of her and
a valuable list of successes behind her, to tell the truth about her
fellow-artists or even about herself. So with one exception Frau
Jeritza gracefully avoids the subject. She knows that a giantess could
scarcely play the rôle of the heroine in “Madame Butterfly,” so she
willingly admits it would be impossible to do it better than Farrar did
it.
However, Madame Jeritza is no poorer an autobiographer than her
semi-countryman, Emil Fuchs. Both in their different lines succeed in
obstructing their personality under the bulk of the personal pronoun
“I,” and neither reveals anything not known already.
* * * * *
Mr. Fuchs’ book mentions art occasionally, but most of the large
volume is devoted to himself, his material success, his influential
friends, his successful ascent of the ladder of fame. We do not expect
the life of an artist to read like an Almanach de Gotha, or a Blue
Book--made readable by the addition of gossip and the personal memoirs
of their editor. Mr. Fuchs takes his readers through the years of his
prosperity, without more than a passing glance at his youth, at his
formative years, at his friendships and enmities. His life has been
a series of successes, and he is well aware of it. The accounts of
his royal friends, of his noble admirers and wealthy patrons smack of
the _nouveau riche_. Mr. Fuchs knows it is not good taste to appear
conceited or vain--so he tries to be as genially simple as he can, but
all the time he makes one feel he is on the point of exploding with
pride. It is useless to deny that he has some reasons to be proud.
He has made his name synonymous with other things than success--his
work is art, and his art has a method, a tradition, and a foundation
in painstaking love, in culture and in thorough understanding of his
craft. It is because Mr. Fuchs could have given us a book on the artist
which would be something more than the creation of a social puppet
that we complain. Many authors can tell us of royalty and the English
peerage, but few can make a contribution to art. It is to be admitted,
however, that the former find a more ready market for their wares, but,
since Mr. Fuchs’ book was first written in the form of articles for the
readers of the _Saturday Evening Post_ who no doubt enjoyed them to the
full, why did not the author, in collecting these articles into a book,
revise them, leave out half the social world and allow his pen free
play to discuss Art? What he has to say of art comes as a reward, it
seems, after one has waded through the first half of the book.
“Art and music tend to supplement each other and to
blend with and relieve one another--like the cold and
warm hues on the palette of the painter. Or like the
major and minor chord. In fact, creation was founded on
this principle of positive and negative; it pervades
everything, commencing with the colours of the rainbow
... each needing its contrasting counterpart for the
formation of a homogeneous entity, the structure of
existence.”
Later, he expands a little, but not generously, on the art of
sketching:
“It is the gift of expressing with a few well-defined
strokes a hasty impression; and if each of these strokes
testifies to the mastery of the artist, the sketch often
stirs the imagination by its freshness and spontaneity to
a greater degree than the finished work. But to look at a
sketch by a dauber is like having to read a sentence with
every word misspelled.”
This, with a few lines on art criticism, ends practically Mr. Fuchs’
effort to write a book on the life of an artist. He has told us much we
do not care to know, and little that interests us.
No one is expected to have whole-hearted love for one’s competitors,
but at times Mr. Fuchs oversteps the limits of _bon ton_ by the
pleasure he takes in pointing to the mote in his neighbour’s eye!
X
ACTORS AND ACTRESSES
ELEONORA DUSE, by _Jeanne Bordeux_.
ELEONORA DUSE, by _Edouard Schneider_.
THE TRUTH AT LAST, by _Charles Hawtrey_.
A PLAYER UNDER THREE REIGNS, by _Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson_.
FOOTLIGHTS AND SPOTLIGHTS, by _Otis Skinner_.
TWENTY YEARS ON BROADWAY, by _George Cohan_.
LETTERS OF AN UNSUCCESSFUL ACTOR.
WEBER AND FIELDS, by _Felix Isman_.
Arthur Symonds once spoke of Eleonora Duse as “a chalice for the
wine of imagination.” She was just that, from the time of her birth
in a railway carriage near Venice, to the day when she lay, dressed
in white, in the mortuary chapel in Pittsburgh, and that she will
remain for those who knew her, and for those who will know her
through tradition and fame. None of those who heard her recite can
forget her--none of those who did not should cease to regret it. Her
personality was art come to life, and her life was devoted to her art,
to love and to the theatre.
It has been said that no one ever _knew_ Eleonora Duse. She, who
unfolded her soul on the stage, remained a mystery to her friends;
nevertheless, since her death, several biographies have been published,
each giving personal recollections, “intimate views” and character
studies of the greatest actress Italy ever produced. Of these
biographies, two stand out more conspicuously than the others: Jeanne
Bordeux’s for its irrelevancy; Edouard Schneider’s for its revelatory
qualities.
The former is an objective and impersonal life of Duse. The author
speaks of herself only at rare intervals, and with a detachment which
shows how engrossed she was in her subject. She focussed all her
lights on the “grand artist” as she likes to call her. All the rest
is incidental and serves only as background and contrast. The whole
life of Duse is held within its covers, and yet it is not a life; it
is an after image of some one who must have been great, but who is not
obviously so under the pen of the author. The most touching part of the
book is the end. We see Duse, a pathetic and lonely figure, fighting
with all the strength of her exhausted body to return to Asolo where
she had left all she loved. As she realised that the hope of seeing
her beloved “Patria” again was becoming more remote, she mustered
unsuspecting energy. All in vain. She was to die in America.
Jeanne Bordeux tells us in her preface that no one really knew Eleonora
Duse--and we can see no justification for her amendation “no one in the
world ever succeeded in knowing her as I did.... Each of her friends,
intimates and actors, saw her in a different light; I saw her in all
those lights merged in one, as from birth she unfalteringly followed
her destiny, magnificently, humbly following the mission for which
she was sent into the world.” We should have preferred Jeanne Bordeux
to tell us in what way she knew Duse--in what capacity she approached
her--what special privilege of intimacy or confidence she enjoyed with
the person who had few intimates, and those well-known.
[Illustration: ELEONORA DUSE]
Duse was one of the most subtle and difficult persons to understand
that ever lived in the public eye. Jeanne Bordeux gives no proof,
either by quoting Duse’s words, or by contributing a particularly
enlightening biography, that she either knew or understood her heroine.
Duse combined successfully a public life with a secretly guarded
private life; no one ventured to trespass on what she considered her
own garden; no one dared ask questions; few drew conclusions from what
they imagined to be the truth. Jeanne Bordeux did none of these things,
and for that she should be thanked. But why colour her statements
of what may have been facts with the hue of gossip, the _nuances_ of
scandal? Hero-worship should not be carried too far, but there seems
little necessity for reviving old affairs which may never have existed,
especially when they serve only to whet the curiosity of gossip-lovers.
It does not serve the memory of Eleonora Duse to discuss at length her
relationship with d’Annunzio. The only high spot in the book, however,
is connected with that, but might have been deleted of the unsavoury
revelations which precede it, and the portrait of the artist left for
our observation would not have suffered by the omission. It is said
that long after her separation from d’Annunzio, Duse had an interview
with him; at the end of the conversation, d’Annunzio said, taking her
hand in his, and kissing it: “Not even you can imagine how I loved
you!” And the Duse, serious, with that charming graciousness all her
own, replied, “And to-day, not even you can imagine how much I have
forgotten--you!” Apocryphal perhaps, but worth recording.
Despite her love for Eleonora Duse, Jeanne Bordeux will not see her as
anything but a woman of genius in her chosen line--of ordinary talent
in others. She brings out petty faults and weaknesses of temper which
can not counteract what we know of her character and of her virtues.
Whatever may be said about Duse, her admirers will not lose sight of
the genius under the human form; of the suffering under the brave brow;
of the tragedy in the soul; of the fundamental goodness and humility of
a woman who could have had the world at her feet, and chose to carry it
in her heart.
Jeanne Bordeux’s book is not a contribution to literature, because her
style is too tenuous, too thin, and she has few of the qualities of pen
and of heart that make for good writing. In beauty, sentiment, style
and grace, it can not compare with Edouard Schneider’s biography. The
latter is of so different a nature, so superior an attitude that it
should be translated into English as it is already into German. It
seems a pity that Madame Bordeux’s book should be the only one to speak
of Duse to the American public.
M. Schneider’s biography has no relation with Jeanne Bordeaux’s.
Indeed, it takes an altogether different viewpoint. It constitutes a
testimony of psychological, moral and spiritual order; it is not the
work of a foreigner who is unable to discern between truth and fiction
in tales gathered here and there. Rather is it the direct story of an
intimate friend of Eleonora Duse’s last years; he was bound to her by
bonds of absolute confidence of the mind and of the heart; and it is
important that the English reading public should be confronted with M.
Schneider’s biography of Duse, important to establish the basis of a
dignified admiration and attachment to the memory of the actress.
If Jeanne Bordeux has given the bulk of Duse’s life, Edouard Schneider
has supplied the flavour; she has worked on the warp and woof of the
plain fabric; he has incontestably woven his dreams and embroidered
his phantasy. His inspiration comes from his love for Duse, and his
love has served him as proof, as canvas, as basis. His personal
recollections of her have sufficed to make a beautiful book, and he
has written it from the fulness of his heart, and from the wealth of
his memory; his eyes still lingering on her picture; his ear still
thrilling with the music of her voice; his mind still astir with the
beauties she has revealed to him; his heart still under the influence
of her genius for friendship.
His presentation of Eleonora Duse is the best adapted to the picture we
seek of her; he has avoided the personal element; the human weakness;
the hardships of everyday life; all he has wished to remember was
the beauty of Duse’s genius. At least, that is all he has wished to
remember in this biography, but it calls for another one, from the
same author. The mine from which he has drawn his inspiration, his
memory, must be rich yet in wealth. M. Schneider has not insisted
on biographical facts, but every modulation of Duse’s voice, every
expression of her incomparable hands, and every utterance of her lips
impressed him. He is a playwright of great talent, a poet of renown,
and thanks to his magic qualities of pen, he has dramatised for us the
poetry of Eleonora Duse’s life. He loved her not as a woman, but as a
goddess, and his book is redolent of self-contained emotion, of bashful
adoration, of unlimited admiration.
He was not present at her end, but Pittsburgh and its realities are
there; the contrast he has drawn between the woman and Pittsburgh, of
all cities, where she was destined to die is one of the most inspired
parts of the book. The last chapter has the touch of the poet--and Duse
herself would have been pleased with it.
* * * * *
A clever actor who achieved greatness, an incorrigible gambler who
never knew satiety, a big heart, a winning personality and a modest
man are revealed in _The Truth at Last_, the record of Charles
Hawtrey’s life and achievements. As far as life is concerned, the
actor-manager-gambler is reticent and diffident. His autobiography
is carried along the most objective of lines, and the few words with
which Mr. Somerset Maugham introduces and closes the book are more
illuminating of Charles Hawtrey the man, than the complete and detailed
story of his life as told by himself. It is not a model autobiography,
though it tells with a certain amount of humour the failures and
successes of the subject--and the failures are certainly the most
attractive feature of the tale--but it is so impersonal an achievement,
treated with such indifference that the reader feels the vanity there
would be in trying to put more of himself into the reading than the
author has put into the writing. It is well-known that Charles Hawtrey
accepted fame as an actor with a nonchalance that showed how little
acting was his true vocation; but his reminiscences show to what
height of success good will, tact, charm, personality and the lack of
anything better to do, can take a man. The number of times he found
himself and his company in the hands of the bankruptcy solicitors
is only paralleled by the number of times he pulled himself and his
company out of total failure by bold and intelligent backing of a horse.
Horse-races and stage-management, work and gambling, filled his life.
The three graces that appealed so to Martin Luther played no part in
Hawtrey’s life so far as can be judged from _The Truth at Last_. Only
those who knew and admired Charles Hawtrey will be able to enjoy the
book with unmixed pleasure. They will have but to recall his ease and
grace, his smile, his utter lack of affectation (or so it seemed on
the stage) to find excuses for the stilted and unbending presentation
of his autobiography. Evidently, Charles Hawtrey was no writer, and
self-consciousness, which was unknown to the actor, was his constant
companion when “he took his pen in hand.” And then too, he lacks a
sense of proportion although this may be due to his determination not
to allow his personality, his emotions, likes and dislikes to creep
into the record of his life. He devotes the same number of words to the
death of his father, of whom he was very fond and to whose guidance he
owed the best there was in him, as he does to the purchase of a blanket
used on board a steamer; he mentions his second marriage, the War, the
impressions left on him by Rome and America, much more casually than
he does the receipt of a cheque from Australia, and his first marriage
is mentioned only by way of reference. Timidity, self-consciousness,
delicacy, lack of self-absorption? Probably a combination of all of
them, and an extreme desire to live, to live rapidly, an unchecked
interest in the display of life, in horses and in the life of the stage
are responsible for that lack of _laisser aller_ which is the greatest
charm of autobiographies. It is _The Truth at Last_, and a truth that
can probably compare point by point with facts, but it is not the
truth about the man who was one of England’s most beloved actors.
* * * * *
To read _A Player Under Three Reigns_ immediately after _The Truth at
Last_ is like going from a dark cave where one gropes one’s way around,
into the sunlight and the open. Where one author is cramped by a pen
and hampered in the choice of the words that make writing the natural
expression of thought, the other allows words and ideas to blend in
interesting, amusing or touching homogeneity, always harmonious and
always natural.
Forbes-Robertson is fundamentally an artist and it is interesting to
know that his first calling was to be a painter, a calling in which
he displayed gift and talent and which he followed in his spare time.
His reminiscences are of great interest not only because of the
personality of the author, which is never accentuated in the written
words but becomes fascinatingly evident between the lines, but also
because Forbes-Robertson has known practically all the people who
made art, literature and history in his generation; he has known them
personally, some intimately, and his book is almost as much a review of
the late years of the nineteenth century in England, in France and in
America, as the record of his own life. He is never afraid to add to
his memoirs a touch of emotion, an expression of a heartfelt sentiment,
and when he does, he is more charming than ever. The layman possibly
thinks that all the members of the theatrical world are jealous and
envious of each other; occasionally, a movement is set afoot to help
some actor who finds himself in poverty after a life of semi-luxury;
benefit performances are given to procure a comfortable few years
to a man who has given his talent without thinking of the future;
but these movements are always in favour of one whose competition is
no longer to be feared; and the general opinion is that theatrical
people are heartless, selfish and shallow. How quickly this impression
is dispelled when we read the tributes Sir Johnston offers to his
confrères of the stage. He must have had enemies, but he is careful to
avoid wounding them and those whom he has liked have their names and
their deeds lauded in _A Player Under Three Reigns_.
Some points of artistic or ethical interest are discussed
comprehensively--one, probably the most important, is the author’s
contention regarding the appropriateness of actor-managers. He was one
for years, not from choice, but from comparative necessity and his
opinion is not only valuable, but based on experience.
Humour, wit, lightness, grace and knowledge of facts form a good
foundation upon which to build an autobiography; these qualities fell
to Sir Forbes-Robertson’s share, and in so far as actor-biographers are
concerned they seem to be the lion’s share.
* * * * *
_Footlights and Spotlights_ is a diverting autobiography which has
much interest, reveals frankness and humour, and serves the reputation
of Otis Skinner, but it will not enhance it. Its author is one of the
intellectuals of the American stage and he could have written a better
book. However, he is very much alive in its pages and so are the great
number of people he has met and liked or disliked. His career has not
been a series of successes, and he makes no attempt to conceal it.
Apparently he took his troubles with optimism and cheer and he has
woven these qualities into his narrative, which unrolls itself as
a panorama of the stage-life of the past fifty years. A refreshing
feature of the book is the author’s appreciation and praise of others.
He is generous, often magnanimous, always charitable. He has not liked
every one, and those he has disliked get their deserts in moderation.
Otis Skinner’s life has been a full and varied one, and it is a
delightful journey to take with him through countries and behind
footlights, travelling and acting, and praying with him that the new
show may be a big success.
Mr. Skinner’s book is another of those which suggests there is a
great deal to be said in favour of writers who delay publication
of their autobiographies until after their death. Undoubtedly all
autobiographies would gain in quality if their authors devoted some of
the years of their lives, given to preparation of what James Barrie
calls “the greatest adventure of life,” to shaping and perfecting
the document. They would gain in objectivity if they waited until
the fading of their star; they would gain in charm and in honesty if
their pens were not guided by fear of the impression they will make
and how it will affect their career; and meanwhile they may weave into
the work, at leisure, the interesting information that those who make
history, literature or art should transmit to posterity, and that so
often needs the shadows of death to veil and envelop it.
* * * * *
Recently there has appeared in France a book entitled _Plutarch Lied_.
I have no doubt he did, like all mankind save George Washington, but
he was truthful when he said that the man who writes his life embraces
the opportunity to celebrate certain moral qualities. The quality
that George M. Cohan celebrates in himself is courage. He also prides
himself on his industry. He was long of courage from his birth, or at
least he was before he drained the tank so lavishly. Mr. Cohan is less
engaging when he tells how he achieved his success, than when he is
actually achieving it on the stage. He uses the personal pronoun, which
Pascal said was hateful, more frequently than any author I recall, save
Doctor Rainsford in his _Story of a Varied Life_. _Twenty Years on
Broadway_ reads like the inventory of a shop; so many pounds of tea, so
many ounces of bromide, so many packages of ginger. Nothing is said of
their origin, their prices or their uses. The possessor owns them, it
is his business how he got them, what they cost him in money and effort
and what he is going to do with them.
Any one seeking enlightenment about personality, its perfections or
defects should not go to autobiographies of actors: “I guess I am a
ham, all right” said Mr. Cohan to himself after he had been mildly
echoed by some of his fellow Thespians. I don’t know exactly what a
“ham” is but if he is one, he is an amusing one on the stage. In the
past twenty years he has written, signed and produced thirty-one plays
of his own. It is regrettable that he did not get some one else to tell
how he did it.
What Mr. Cohan’s book lacks more than anything else is the revelation
of an ideal of life--an ideal other than the ambition to “put
Broadway in his pocket.” It may be said in his defence that he was
not at a school where such ideals form part of the daily and hourly
preoccupations, and that his childhood was spent in an atmosphere not
conducive to taking thought of one’s fellow-man’s spiritual needs and
welfare. But there is a code of ethics which is particularly that of
theatre-people and which is as altruistic in its conception as the
Golden Rule; Mr. Cohan may conform his conduct to it, but one would not
surmise it from reading his book. I admit he is a dramatist who has
set a new style, a popular songwriter with a large following, a clever
comedian, a resourceful theatrical technician, and that he knows a lot
about the emotional wants of his fellow-citizens; but I am equally sure
he knows little about himself, and what he knows he does not know how
to tell.
* * * * *
A spiritual biography by one who prefers to withhold his name has
recently been published under the title _Letters of an Unsuccessful
Actor_. Although it is replete with shrewd observations, timely
comment, and evidence of sound thinking and wide reading, R. M. S.,
to whom the letters were addressed and who is responsible for their
publication, should have interpolated the word “self-satisfied” between
the last two words of the title.
There are fifty-six letters, and in one or another of them most of
the famous players of the last thirty years are discussed. It would
seem to be quite fitting that the first letter is in praise of R. M.
S. and the last an attempt to answer the question: Is acting merely
interpretative? From them both, and from the others, a comprehensive
idea may be gained of the man who wrote them and why he was a failure
in his profession. It is likely he would not admit he was a failure.
“Unsuccessful” probably means that he did not gain the position his
talent deserved, nor recognition similar to that accorded Lawrence
Barrett, Henry Irving, Dion Boucicault, Beerbohm Tree, John Hare,
Charles Hawtrey and scores of others who reached the top during his
lifetime. Self-consciousness undoubtedly was his stumbling block, and
over-readiness to sit in judgment with a predilection for the adverse
aided it. Possibly he was too original to be imitative; too immobilised
by ideas to be plastic and malleable; too assertive to be taught and
schooled. That is the impression one gets from reading this unusually
interesting gossipy book which should appeal to all actors, divert many
theatre-goers, and instruct some historians of the stage.
The writer is a man of opinions, most of them positive and difficult
to dislodge, but the reader should keep in mind that they were written
for a sympathetic, indulgent eye. This will suggest to him that many of
the judgments may be discounted. “The theatre of the early nineties was
dull as ditch-water.” That may be, but it was as sparkling and bright
as a noisy brook compared with the theatre to-day. “The ideal training
for an actor is no longer possible to obtain.” Was it possible
ever to obtain? Certainly not since the days of Hellenic supremacy.
“Garrick undoubtedly was a man of culture and accomplishment, a master
of the social art and full of parlour tricks. His anecdotes, his
imitations, his studies of various types of bumpkinhood were cameos of
characterisation. As a mimic he was supreme, but he was a charlatan
and he mutilated Shakespeare.” Posterity is even more tenacious of her
opinions than is the Unsuccessful Actor, and they are better founded.
His pronouncements are not by any means all drastic and destructive.
Many are mild, sensible and philosophic. “The greatest artist is he
who obtains greatness in his portrayal of the greatest conceptions” is
not original but it is felicitously expressed. Those who bemoan the
decline of manners and morals will be likely to sympathise with him
when he says: “With me manners were ever more important than morals.” I
fancy all members of his profession will agree. “It is when immorality
flaunts its bad manners that I won’t tolerate it.” Such intolerance
would be becoming to nearly every one, and no one will dissent from his
statement that “a good play is one in which a credible, an interesting
story is unfolded by means of living characters, psychologically
developed by incident.” If it were _either_ credible or interesting
most of us would vote it good!
The author occasionally indulges in prophecies and some of them have
already come true. In 1918 he wrote: “Once let the Germans get the
Allies talking around a table, during an armistice and they, not we,
will have won this War, and within a few years will start preparing for
the next.”
He has something interesting to say about dramatic criticism, about
democracy, about Lloyd George and about love. It is one of the most
interesting books to pick up and read for a few minutes, that has
emanated from the stage in a long time.
* * * * *
_Weber and Fields_ is not to be judged by biographic standards. It
is not a biography at all. It is a torrid narrative of the triumph
of two Jewish boys who, unaided by education, training or influence,
went from a cellar in East Broadway to their own theatre on Broadway
and who furnished during ten years wholesome amusement to more people
of this city and country than any two men of their time, not even
excepting William Jennings Bryan and Rev. John Roach Straton. No one
could reduce to writing the genius of Weber and Fields. It defies
verbal characterisation but Mr. Isman makes an excellent attempt. That
he does not quite succeed in conveying how side-splitting were their
conversations and antics, is not his fault. But he has succeeded in
giving some good pictures of the time, and some excellent likenesses
of many who were associated with the two comedians: of De Wolf Hopper
as Hoffman Barr; of Lillian Russell as the Wealthy Widow, and of David
Warfield as the Talking Doll. No one who knew Peter Dailey will fail to
approve this thumb-sketch of him:
“Oh, rare Pete Dailey! Inimitable Peter! Born comedian,
the quickest-witted man that ever used grease paint;
splendid voice; an acrobat and agile dancer despite his
two hundred and fifty pounds; no performance ever the
same; needing neither lines nor business, but only to be
given the stage; convulsing his fellow actors as well as
the audience with his impromptu sallies; an inveterate
practical joker; a bounding, bubbling personality.”
Things have changed since the heyday of their success! When thugs want
your money in New York, nowadays, they knock you down and take it;
or if it is jewellery they fancy, they enter your house or shop and
blackjack you if you seek to stay their quest. There was more finesse
in the good old days. The man who guessed your weight--“No charge if I
fail”--spoke in a code intelligible only to his accomplices. As he ran
his hands over a candidate he talked, seemingly to no purpose, but his
“I think your weight is,” translated, meant, “His money is in his right
trousers pocket.” “I guess your weight to be” located the victim’s
purse in the hip pocket, and “I say your weight is” the inside coat
pocket.
If Chicago were articulate she would probably deny that she now
harbours hostelries such as Joe Weber and Lew Fields were obliged to
patronise.
“For the period of the Chicago stay Grenier boarded out
his troupers by contract. Joe and Lew were assigned to a
boarding house with the freaks. The bearded lady sat at
Lew’s left and drank her coffee from a moustache cup. The
fat man occupied the next three chairs on Joe’s right,
and never missed the middle one when Joe removed it, as
he did at every opportunity. Directly opposite, on a high
chair, sat the armless wonder. What that unfortunate
lacked in arms, he made up in prehensile cunning of
his feet. With these he helped and fed himself, and
manipulated knife, fork and spoon as matter of factly as
the elephants used their trunks. The bearded lady had a
reputation as a wit to uphold and it was her pleasure to
shout ‛Hands off!’ at least once at every meal when the
wonder reached for some dish. At the first breakfast Lew
asked that the biscuits be passed. They lay nearest the
wonder. He thrust forth a leg with a biscuit clutched in
his foot. Lew did his own reaching from then on. They ate
dinner sometimes at the Palmer House, Chicago’s pride,
where a jar of stick candy stood beside the catchup
bottle and the vinegar cruet in the center of each
table, and there were nineteen choices of meats on the
seventy-five-cent table d’hôte menu that read like an
inventory.”
The sun of Weber and Fields stayed in its zenith about five years. Then
John Stromberg, their musical genius, died, and it set rapidly; and in
the twilight, Hopper, Collier, Bernard, Mitchell and his wife, Bessie
Clayton, strayed. Innocent slaughtering of the English language began
to jar the ears of those who slaughtered it themselves; the quality of
the Metropolis’ population changed rapidly; theatres began to spring
up like mushrooms after a rain and music-halls made way for Follies.
Numbered were the days of the Music Hall, which reserved the character
of the Daudet heroine, and rechristened her Sapolio in token of her
having consecrated her life to the task of making Paris a spotless town
morally--the old Music Hall, where Dailey was Jean Gaussin, unwilling
victim of Sapolio’s high moral purpose; Warfield, Uncle Cæsaire who ate
moth balls to conceal his alcoholic breath; Fields, a comedy servant
girl who, ordered to serve the capon en casserole, cooked it in castor
oil; Joseph, Fanny Le Grand’s perfect little gentleman of a child,
became in Weber’s hands, a kicking, brawling, tobacco-chewing brat;
Harry Morey, now a Hollywood hero, a concierge with an Irish brogue.
And such dialogue! Foolish, oh, yes, but of such is the kingdom of real
laughter.
A precious book for a melancholy mood, for an hour of convalescence,
or for ten minutes of waiting while your wife makes obeisance to her
mirror.
XI
STATESMEN
WOODROW WILSON, by _William Allen White_.
THE TRUE STORY OF WOODROW WILSON, by _David Lawrence_.
BRIGHAM YOUNG, by _M. R. Werner_.
THE LIFE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN, by _William E. Barton_.
SELECTIONS FROM THE CORRESPONDENCE OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT
AND HENRY CABOT LODGE.
LETTERS FROM THEODORE ROOSEVELT TO ANNE ROOSEVELT COWLES.
William Allen White has the qualities that fit him to write about
Woodrow Wilson entertainingly for his contemporaries, illuminatingly
for posterity. He is versatile and perspicacious; he has a sense of
humour and he is colossally industrious; he is sensitive and sensible,
and has been disciplined in the art of verbal expression, by intuition
and experience. He is a man of ideals and ideas; the former are
realisable, the latter not persecutory; and he has a tender spot in his
heart for the Irish.
Posterity and its spokesmen will render the verdict on Woodrow Wilson
that will endure. I do not agree with Mr. White that his place in
the history of the world will not be determined by his character.
It will be determined by his character, not by his characteristics,
just as George Washington’s was and just as Abraham Lincoln’s was.
Nor do I agree that “the relation between character and fame is not
of first importance” though I am aware that “many good men live and
die unknown.” They do, indeed, but many good men have very little
character. “Character” and “good” are not synonymous. A “good” man is
a man who does not disobey the commandments nor transcend conventions.
A man with “character” frequently does both. Woodrow Wilson did and I
have no doubt George Washington did, despite the cherry tree story.
The greatest of all commandments is, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour
as thyself.” If he had affectionate feeling for Dean West, President
Hibben, Senator Lodge and others “too numerous to mention” he
successfully concealed it. He was undoubtedly a truthful man, but he
said he had written the preface to Dean West’s publicity brochure
without reading it, and later, when it was shown that he had read it,
he said he had written it good-naturedly and offhand, which was again
at variance with the truth, for it carefully and lucidly expressed
his attitude to the school. He told the Senate Committee on Foreign
Relations that he never had seen the secret treaties, though there is
documentary evidence to the contrary.
He had character: he was firm, fearless and free, and he had vision. He
showed these qualities in Paris. In his vision it was revealed to him
that from the sanguineous and agonising travail of the war a child had
been born; that it did not resemble its parents; that many called it
monster, others Bolshevism; and that it subscribed to none of our rules
of bringing-up or behaviour. He saw that it was lusty, growing like the
traditional weed, that it threatened to shut out our sunlight and our
source. He realised that we must deal with communism, and gradually,
day by day, the world is realising it. Woodrow Wilson was “good”
enough, but unfortunately for him, for his peace of mind and happiness,
he had “characteristics” and they fettered him.
Mr. White bears heavily on Woodrow Wilson’s ancestry, too heavily some
will think, or too indiscriminatingly.
It may have been the Woodrow in him that told Colonel Harvey that his
advocacy of him as a presidential candidate was injuring his prospects
and it may have been the Wilson in him that charmed the “bawling mob,
hot, red-faced, full of heavy food and too much rebellious liquor”
which nominated him for Governor of New Jersey; but it was Woodrow
Wilson that met the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the White
House in June 1919, when he made the misstep that lamed him for his
remaining mortal days, and dislodged his country from the saddle of
world-leader, in which it seemed to be riding a winning race.
Mr. White would have us believe that Woodrow Wilson got his intellect
and obstinacy from the Woodrows, his emotions and charm from the
Wilsons. What did he get from Ann Adams, his lynx-eyed grandmother
whose mouth dropped at the angles and who neither saw nor forgave a
daughter after she married beyond her approbation? From her, I suppose,
he got the capacity to treat Colonel House, his polar star for the ten
years of his fruition, as though he were a Judas, and Joseph Tumulty,
who served him with dog-like fidelity and intelligence from the
beginning of his political career to its zenith and beyond, as though
he were not only mangy but had rabies as well?
The chapter entitled “The Miracle of Heredity” might more appropriately
and truthfully be labelled, “Teachings of Heredity Exemplified by the
Appearance, Conduct and Career of Woodrow Wilson.” The author would
have us believe that environment had much to do in conditioning his
limitations. He writes:
“If only there could have been in his life some
shanty-Irish critic with a penchant for assault and
battery, some dear beloved sweetheart to show his notes
around the playground, some low-minded friend to fasten
upon him the nickname ‛four eyes,’ calling brutal
attention to his spectacles, or some other nickname in
thinly veiled obscenity which would reveal a youthful
weakness and so make him truckle to the baser nature of
his gang that he might remove the black curse of his
sobriquet--what a world we should have to-day!”
Alas, that I should disagree again with one who has given me hours
of pleasure from which enduring admiration has developed! Woodrow
Wilson would have been the same had he budded in Hoboken, flowered in
Montmartre and fructified in Tahiti.
If one can say there is a disappointing chapter in the book it is
one entitled “The Development of Youth.” The study that will throw a
penetrating light on Woodrow Wilson will be one that concerns itself
chiefly with the years between 1874 and 1885, from the time he went
to Columbia, South Carolina, until he left Johns Hopkins University,
where “he was known as a friendly cuss in the American vernacular
and never a grind.” In his school and college days he met, worked
and played with other boys who were destined to become successful
Americans. Perhaps there was a rule amongst them taking notes which
he will print. If there was, he is the one to unleash the bridegroom
“coming forth rejoicing as a strong man to run a race” better than his
brother-in-law, Stockton Axson, whom Mr. White quotes.
Woodrow Wilson’s presidency of Princeton University has probably never
been outlined more accurately and attractively than in the chapters,
“The Lecturer Becomes the Administrator” and “Going Through the First
Fire.” Not only is the chief leading actor sketched by the hand of a
master, but there is a Hogarthian vignette of Dean West, and a portrait
of Colonel House which is so perfect that I must quote it:
“A man of slight figure, perhaps five feet six in height,
of a thin, oval cast of countenance, adorned by a short,
grey, stubby moustache over a firm and yet sensitive
mouth which in turn is carved above a strong chin. The
whole countenance bursts into illumination with beaming,
kindly eyes below a rather higher brow than one expects
from the remainder of the face; and the voice, when it
comes from this gentle, interesting, and intelligent
face, is soft and low and modest. A certain almost
Oriental modesty, a Chinese self-effacement, abides with
the personality of Colonel House. He seems to be in
constant and delightful agreement with his auditor. And
this delightful agreement, as one knows him, expresses
itself in a thousand ways in an obvious and unmistakable
desire to serve. He is never servile, but always serving;
gentle without being soft, exceedingly courteous with the
most unbending dignity. He is forever punctuating one’s
sentence with ‛that’s true, that’s true’; and stimulating
candour among men, which is the essence of friendship.”
Mr. White is an impartial partisan, a pleading judge. These desirable
qualities of the biographer are revealed most conspicuously in the
narrative of Woodrow Wilson’s first great struggle with his most
deforming limitation: inability to bear and forbear, to do team work,
to play the game according to the rules. No doubt he felt that he had
gained a moral victory at Princeton, but the trustees were glad to see
him leave.
How he got the nomination for Governor of New Jersey, how he
short-circuited the political machine, how he inoculated the Democratic
party of his adopted state with liberalism and how, gradually but
surely, the immunisation that resulted was felt throughout the country
are told most interestingly. The chapters are interspersed with
pleasant references to three women who influenced his life: he got
understanding, loyalty, indulgence and devotion from Ellen Axson and
from Edith Boiling; from Mrs. Peck he got appeasement of his latent
hedonism, encouragement of his ambition, justification of his conduct,
and praise which was to Woodrow Wilson what manna was to the Children
of Israel. She, “of exquisite spiritual prowess and facile charm,” is
supposed to have enjoyed his confidence to a remarkable degree. Her
recently published story does not tend to prove it. Until his letters
to her are published, I shall continue to believe he got nothing from
her save what I have enumerated.
Woodrow Wilson’s nomination and election to the Presidency of this
country and the accomplishments of his first administration are passed
over rather briefly. All will not agree “that when his four years’
work are considered as a whole, when they are viewed retrospectively
they may be seen as the fastest moving four years in our economic and
social history.”
It was in 1916, when he was renominated by his party without
opposition, and re-elected, that President Wilson became a world
figure. His dealings with Germany, his restraint in bringing this
country into the war, the way in which he developed public opinion
to back him up when there was nothing to do save to join up with the
Allies, are told with candour and simplicity. Then come the glad and
the sad chapters: the President’s gestation of the League of Nations
plan, and his abortive attempts to deliver himself; his European
odyssey; his encounter with the sirens; his shipwreck; the shattering
of the raft that he got together to take him before the people when the
Republican Senators convinced him they would not accept the treaty; his
final illness and his tiresome wait for the ring down of the curtain
are told with gratifying impartiality and in satisfactory _résumé_.
The relation of Woodrow Wilson’s illness to his great failure: his
inability to get his country to accept the League of Nations idea
and membership in that product of his brain, has never been properly
recognised nor publicly discussed. But it has a definite and a pathetic
relation. Mr. White says:
“He brought with him to the White House a stomach pump
which he used almost daily and a quart can of some sort
of coal-tar product--headache tablets; they were giving
him incipient Bright’s disease until the White House
doctors took hold of him and stopped the tablets. The
tinkering with his intestines proved the frailty of the
man.”
Alas, how frail man is, and how many men and women are frail if
“tinkering” with their intestines proves such frailty!
Before he went to the White House and while he was still governor
of New Jersey, and possibly even before that, Woodrow Wilson showed
distinct symptoms of the disease to which he finally succumbed:
arteriosclerosis. The disease was detected first in his retinal
blood vessels by a famous ophthalmologist of this country and he was
instructed to a régime which, subscribed to and followed, is adequate
frequently to bring about a cessation of the progress of the disease.
Perhaps “tinkering” with the intestines does not felicitously or
appropriately describe the essential features of that prophylaxis,
but if it embraces what is meant by overcoming fermentation and
putrefaction in the digestive tract, then “tinkering” is the word to
use and it is to be regretted that “White House doctors” were not
“tinkers” too.
One day, some one will point out that President Wilson’s irascibility,
obstinacy, mental inflexibility and emotional inelasticity, which he
displayed so frequently, painfully to himself and humiliatingly to his
people while in Paris on his second European venture, and here when he
took his plan to the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and finally
to the people at large, were mainly due to the arteriosclerosis, which
at that time had made great inroads on the nutrient channels of the
brain. It accentuated his limitations and minimised his possessions. It
immobilised him like a hephæstic fetter, and there was no one strong or
courageous enough to break the links before the fibre of the web had
annealed.
Mr. White’s concluding chapter is entitled “The Assessment,” and it
contains these words with which every one must agree:
“If Fame does not come to him through the conjunction of
time and chance working upon the genius of the race to
preserve the structure which he previsioned in his hour
of trial, Fame will find a man here--a clean, brave,
wise, courageous man--ready-made for heroic stature.”
How unfortunate it is that Mr. White could not have interpolated the
adjectives “understanding, kindly, compassionate, loyal!”
In another connection Mr. White says: “And we must not forget that from
the bottom of his Irish heart always the motive which most surely moved
Woodrow Wilson was the love of his kind.” Against this statement I set
the following extract from my own writings:
“Woodrow Wilson does not love his fellow men. He
loves them in the abstract, but not in the flesh. He
is concerned with their fate, their destiny, their
travail en masse, but the predicaments, perplexities and
prostrations of the individual or groups of individuals
make no appeal to him. He does not refresh his soul by
bathing it daily in the milk of human kindness. He says
with his lips that he loves his fellow-man, but there is
no accompanying emotional glow, none of the somatic or
spiritual accompaniments which are the normal ancillæ
of love’s display. He does not respect his fellow’s
convictions when they are opposed to his own. He does
not value their counsel when it is adverse to his own
judgment.... In contact with people, he gives himself
the air of listening in deference, and indeed of being
beholden to their judgment and opinion, but in reality
it is an artifice which he puts off when he returns to
the dispensing centre of the world and of the law just
as he puts off his gloves and hat.... Woodrow Wilson
attempts to mask, with facial urbanity and a smile in
verbal contact with people, and with the subjective
mood in written contact, another deforming defect of
character; namely, his inability to enter into a contest
of any sort in which there is a strife, without revealing
his obsession to win. When he attempts to play any
game, his artificed civility, cordiality, amiability,
are so discordant with the real man that they become as
offensive as affectations of manner or speech always
are, and instead of placating the individual for whom
they are manifest, or facilitating the _modus vivendi_,
they offend and make _rapport_ with him impossible....
Mr. Wilson is a brilliant, calculating and vindictive
man; brilliant in conception, calculating in motive and
vindictive in execution.... Were he generous, kindly and
humble, it would be difficult to find his like in the
flesh or in history.”
That was my deliberate judgment after having studied Woodrow Wilson
from the psychological point of view, and that is my judgment now
after having read and re-read Mr. White’s book.
It is by his possessions, not by his limitations, that Woodrow Wilson
will be estimated. The campaign is on. It is not a noisy one. No one
can say what the outcome will be, but the straw vote now being taken
suggests that his election to membership in the Academy of the World’s
Immortals is assured.
* * * * *
Another journalist, David Lawrence, has written what he calls _The True
Story of Woodrow Wilson_. Either the adjective should have been deleted
from that title, or the indefinite article should have been substituted
for the definite.
Mr. Lawrence was the correspondent of the Associated Press at Princeton
from 1906 to 1910, the closing years of Wilson’s pedagogical life and
the opening years of his political career. For the past fifteen years,
he has done journalistic work in Washington which has brought him in
close contact with the pattern makers of our national destiny. He has
had therefore unusual opportunity to observe, and he is a trained and
trusted interpreter of events. Small wonder that his book is readable,
interesting and instructive. Were he as trustworthy an interpreter of
souls as he is of events, his book would deserve high rating.
The satisfactory life of Wilson must be written from his letters,
messages, memoranda and books after the disappearance of the emotional
states engendered by his presence and personality, which are
prejudicial to correct estimation and inimical to sound judgment. Such
states of popular feeling never disappear in one generation. It is only
now that we begin to realise the majesty of Lincoln’s mind, the harmony
of his soul.
Mr. Lawrence’s opening sentence is “Woodrow Wilson died as he
lived--unexplained and unrevealed.” He was more “explained” than any
man of his time, and neither Mr. Baruch nor Mr. Bridges would, I fancy,
admit that he was unrevealed. He may have been improperly explained,
and insufficiently revealed, but there are thousands who saw and met
him who will not believe it.
Mr. Lawrence states that his purpose was to put on record a
dispassionate narrative of the man who, equipped only with the
qualities of personal magnetism and intellectual power, made the
unparalleled ascent from College Professor to Moral Leader of the
world. Every unprejudiced reader must admit that success crowned his
effort.
When Admiral Grayson shall publish his diary; when the archives of
Colonel House’s mind are accessible; when all Walter Page’s letters
are available, and when Mr. Robert Bridges, Mr. Norman Davis, and
Mr. Bernard Baruch shall testify the qualities that the world denied
him--qualities of heart--we shall be in position to estimate Woodrow
Wilson and to assess his career. Had Mr. William Jennings Bryan shifted
the focus of his mind from fundamentalism to fact, and told us of his
intimacy with Woodrow Wilson, it would have served a useful purpose.
* * * * *
It was said of Brigham Young that he was a Cromwell in daring, a
Machiavelli in intrigue, a Moses in executive force, and a Bonaparte
in ruthlessness and unscrupulousness; and William H. Seward said that
America has produced few greater statesmen. These testimonials and the
universal admission that he gave Mormonism whatever permanency it has,
and that he was the parent of its material prosperity prove that he was
a man of uncommon personality.
Personality analysis and portrayal are the Elysian field of the
biographer. Here is a man who was to the system of polytheism called
Mormonism what Paul was to Christianity: preacher, organiser,
administrator. A farmer lad without background or education, he
supported himself by painting and glazing until he undertook the
dissemination and direction of the doctrines revealed by God to Joseph
Smith, Jr., who devoted all the succeeding days of his life, until his
neighbours killed him, to their promulgation. Religion took the place
of education in Brigham Young and aroused his latent qualities and
power. It led him to the Governorship of Utah and to the Presidency of
the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; and before he died
nearly a half a million people were convinced that he, like Christ and
Mohammed, partook of divinity.
He has only recently been called to his reward; fifty years ago, he
was a power in the land; for more than a quarter of a century every
word that he said that was fit to print was printed and archived; his
life is thoroughly documented. He should be a fascinating subject for
a biographer. It would be fulsome praise to say that M. R. Werner has
written a satisfactory or a successful biography of him. It reveals
neither diligent research nor careful reflection; it is neither
skilfully composed nor effectively told; there is scant evidence in it
that the most important source of such a biography, _The Journal of
Discourses_, has been deeply studied or adequately transcribed. But
its most serious shortcoming as a biography is a possession, not a
lack, and that possession is the engulfing, overwhelming background.
Mr. Werner says it is impossible to write the life of Brigham Young
without also writing the history of Mormonism, and it is impossible
to write the history of Mormonism without writing the life of Joseph
Smith, Jr. I fancy few will agree with him. I should go so far even
as to say that no one can write the history of Mormonism and the
lives of its author and proprietor and of its administrator and
perpetuator, simultaneously. To do the first of these alone would be
an interminable task. It would require a discussion of the religious
instinct, explaining why this instinct is so rarely appeased by
what the wisdom of God and the ingenuity of man have to offer. And a
detailed, specific statement of the system of polytheism which the Book
of Mormon professes to teach and the Book of Doctrine seeks to justify,
would require examination of the status of prophecy, of miracles, of
the imminent approach of the end of the world, of personal contact
with God through sight or hearing at the present day, of liberty of
private judgment in religious matter, and of scores of other tenets
of the Mormon creed. Moreover, it would require an explicit statement
of the Mormon hierarchy, an extremely complicated structure, and a
summary of the Mormon’s form of government. No biographer, however
facile, could interpret Joseph Smith, Jr., who is not familiar with the
psychopathology and experienced in the ways of the psychic deviate.
Concerning Mr. Werner’s apology regarding the necessary scope of this
book, it would be just as legitimate to say that the life of Francis
of Assisi could not be written without writing at the same time the
history of the Catholic Church and the story of the life of Ignatius
Loyola.
[Illustration: BRIGHAM YOUNG]
_Reprinted from “Brigham Young,” by M. R. Werner
Courtesy of Harcourt, Brace & Co._
In brief, Mr. Werner bit off more than he could chew. However, one gets
more from a second reading of the book than from the first. That is a
poor recommendation for a book these days when people are insisting
that they be enlightened by electricity. By careful and persisting
digging, the reader may get a notion, form a concept, of Brigham
Young’s personality, particularly if he concentrates on the chapter
entitled “Sinai.”
Brigham Young said with his lips that he believed in God, but with his
heart he said he believed in himself. He was self-sufficient, but not
self-satisfied.
He was about as fearless as man can be. His conduct all his life
testifies that he was as devoid of fear as the words of Edward W. Bok
testify that he is. Brigham Young and Theodore Roosevelt had the same
brand of courage and about the same supply.
Young understood the primitive and the acquired urges of man as few
understand them. He curbed those of others and indulged his own; and
he was the only man of his country, save Benjamin Franklin, who really
understood women.
He was ruthless, and he had a vein of cruelty in him that came
to the surface with increasing frequency. He imposed his will
and determination upon friend and foe; he brooked no denial, no
contradiction. Cast in the mould of Joshua, he firmly believed every
place the sole of his foot trod was his, for the Lord had given it to
him.
With it all, he had a sense of humour and he loved children. Small
wonder that orators in the throes of self-excitation liken him to
Pericles and Cromwell, and frenzied preachers liken him to God.
One has but to study the various photographs of Brigham Young and
to keep in mind one thing he said about his father in order to be
able satisfactorily to solve the mystery and guess the secret of his
personality: “It was a word and a blow with Father, but the blow came
first.” And Brigham Young’s method was the same. He wanted to keep
polygamy as the strong link in the chain of the hierarchal organisation
that was such a brilliant economical success; he kept it there until
the Government imprisoned him, and when he died, seventeen wives and
forty-four children were at his funeral.
He had his own way in everything save with Amelia Folsom. To her
determination not to bend the knee, he owes the preservation of his
character. Another young woman whom he took to wife when he was
sixty-six attempted to discipline him, but without success. Even if she
had not failed, his character would have been safe; that possession can
not be ruined after sixty.
Like Achilles, Brigham Young had one vulnerable spot, but it was his
heart, not his heel. Women acted upon him as the lamp does upon the
moth. It was not face or figure, intelligence or charm that lured him.
It was sex. Casanova was to him what a candle is to a phare. The
illusion that most men develop when they approach senility, viz., that
they are still attractive to young women, seized him early. When he was
fifty-six years old, he said, preaching to his flock: “You think I am
an old man? I could prove to this congregation that I am young, that I
could find more girls who would choose me for a husband than any of the
young men.” His experience would seem to justify the boast, but with
all his understanding of women he forgot that women marry for different
reasons, some for position, some for protection, some for title. But
what is Princess or Duchess compared to Goddess?
“I am a great lover of good women. I understand their nature, the
design of their being and their work.” Had Brigham Young left out
the only adjective in that sentence and added: “Once it mattered not
to me that they were old or young, homely or plain, temperamental or
indifferent, but now that I am old, I like them young and pretty,” it
would have been an epitome of what women meant to him in the twilight
of his life, as the following sentence epitomises his general estimate
of them: “Let our wives be the weaker vessels and the men be men, and
show the women by their superior ability that God gives husbands wisdom
and ability to lead their wives into His presence.” After looking
at the pictures of scores and more of Brigham Young’s wives, one is
convinced that Mark Twain was right when he said the man that marries
one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitled him to
the kindly applause of mankind, and the man who marries sixty of them
has done a deed of open-hearted generosity so sublime that the nation
should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.
The hiatus in Brigham Young’s personality was on the æsthetic side.
He had no feeling for beauty in any form or display and he could not
distinguish between vulgarity and refinement in conduct, thought or
speech. Rabelais alone outranks him in putridity of speech, and his
sermon of the first Sunday of September 1861, when he talked to his
flock about how they should dress, is offered in evidence.
Shrewdness, cruelty and industry were his dominant possessions. They
radiate from the daguerreotype made of him when he was fifty, like
scent from a lily. He was hirsute, heavy-jawed, thin-lipped and the
corners of a mouth, that seemed framed for an oath or an obscenity,
dipped deeply into his cheeks. He was thick-necked, barrel-chested and
his hands and feet did not fit him, but they were adapted to a man
who ruled with a rod of iron. The secret of his success he said was
“I am a Yankee. I guess things and very frequently I guess right.” If
he had added, “I see straight; I know that original sin is fear and
that all mankind is born in it; and that the real pleasure of life is
in gratifying the fundamental urges,” neither his personality nor his
success would be enigmatic.
It would help the searcher after explanation of Brigham Young’s success
as proselyter, exhorter, guide, executive, lover and tyrant to know
about his parents and his brothers and sisters. They were all steeped
in seriousness and saturated with religiosity. His father, who became
the right-hand man in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
was an unreasoning Methodist, an uncompromising moralist. His brother
Joseph “was solemn and praying all the time and he had not been seen
to smile for four years or to laugh for two.” His brother Phinias
was a preacher who saw visions and his sister who mediated him to
Mormonism was the wife of the Reverend John P. Green. He lived in a
recreationless community to which a new religion was what the County
Fair, Circus and Cinema are to remote rural communities to-day.
It was as natural for Brigham Young to go into Mormonism as for a duck
to go into water. When he got in, he soon found it was a quick and safe
way to prosperity, power and posterity. He put his religious enthusiasm
out at compound interest and in twelve years it made him a Prophet, a
Seer, a Revelator and a Realtor. He pitched his economic tent in the
desert plains of Utah and he directed his co-religionists to thrust
fertility upon them through irrigation and bent backs. Having no
capacity for spending money, he soon began to experience the feelings
of Crœsus. He realised that the surest way to wealth is to be a big
earner, a small spender, and a prudent investor. He urged his flock to
those ends and said: “I am your avatar.”
There were two things he liked to do: to dance and to make love. He
was strangely susceptible to rhythmical movement and he loved to marry
women and to beget children. He acknowledged twenty-seven of the former
and fifty-six of the latter.
The day Mormonism was purged of polygamy, it ceased to be an object of
popular interest and likely it will remain so unless the Ku Klux Klan
or the Fundamentalists can be persuaded to concentrate on it, when it
shall have again its day in court, but there will never be such days as
those of Brigham Young.
Mr. Werner says he is convinced that Mormonism is a perfect example of
religion carried to its illogical conclusions. If he would only tell us
what religion carried to its logical conclusion is, it might help us to
fathom his meaning. But nothing will help us understand what he means
by “demented frog” and “neurotic horse” or why one of Joseph’s sisters
was _enceinte_ and not pregnant, or what there was about Brigham Young
that made him “constitutionally, and by habit, incapable of languor,”
for languor shall always mean for me feebleness, faintness of body,
oppression from fatigue, disease or trouble. Brigham Young was a god,
but he was also a mortal.
* * * * *
Dr. Barton’s reasons for writing another life of Lincoln are three:
he has some new facts, he wishes to correct misstatements in extant
biographies, and fifty years of clearing weather have added to the
visibility and luminosity of the atmosphere through which the Great
Liberator is to be seen. Moreover, fifty years is the gestation period
of judiciality.
There are few more puerile chapters in biography than Chapter I
entitled “The Birth of Abraham Lincoln,” with its trivialities
and platitudes on the birthplace of eminent men, Christ included;
discourses on log cabins, their shape and size and construction;
homilies on the comfortlessness of Nancy Lincoln’s bed and the
relationship of plains and woods to Presidents; reflections on the
relationship of child culture to sanitation; the description of Nancy’s
smile when she was told that she had brought forth a man child; and
the astonishing statement that the author has ridden in the Kentucky
mountains many miles side by side with a doctor who died soon after
1809. Any one who can get through the first chapter, brief though it
is, will be able to read the book.
Abraham Lincoln held biographies in slight esteem and could scarcely
be persuaded to read them. He wanted the truth about people. Hence he
read the Bible. He would probably have found Dr. Barton’s three books
about him far too eulogistic, but eulogy comes naturally to clergymen.
“This book attempts to tell the truth about Abraham Lincoln.” So did
Nicolay and Hay’s, so did Lord Charnwood’s, Miss Tarbell’s, Herndon’s,
Josiah Holland’s, and others “too numerous to mention.” Dr. Barton has
no corner on truth. His new facts are important, but not so important
as he thinks. Aside from putting it beyond question that Abraham
Lincoln was born to Nancy Hanks while she was wedded to Thomas Lincoln,
there is nothing new of importance except perhaps certain emotional
sidelights. He has unearthed some documents that bear directly on
Lincoln’s ancestry, but we are no more interested in his grandfather
than in his great-grandfather and in him no more than the grandfather
who had eight or eighty grands before his father-appellation. He has
had access to the diaries of Orville A. Browning, once United States
Senator, but I should not consider his Excellency George Harvey’s
diary a repository of facts about Woodrow Wilson. Although Senator
Browning was reputed to have known Lincoln intimately, he and Judge
David Davis, discussing the Nation’s loss the day after Lincoln’s
death, agreed that no one knew him through and through. Moreover, Mr.
Browning was a pious man and piety is a parent of prejudice.
The writer who has new facts about Abraham Lincoln should state them in
plain language at the beginning of each chapter. Dr. Barton has written
an enormous book, two volumes, 500 pages each, about America’s inspired
statesman, of which the only interesting portion is that which treats
of the parents of Lincoln, and he had already treated that subject in a
book entitled _The Paternity of Abraham Lincoln_.
Dr. Barton writes that now for the first time he is able to give the
true story of the Hanks family from which our greatest President
descended. It has the hallmarks of a true story, and henceforth it
must be accepted. The investigations that the author has made of the
Sparrow family have been fruitful and they should forever close the
controversy concerning Lincoln’s parentage. The records of Mecklenburg
County, Virginia, and of Mercer County, Kentucky, have told Dr. Barton
the truth about it. We could wish that he might have told it with more
brevity, directness and felicitousness. He is far stronger in research
than in narrative power. Digression, circumlocution, overtake him on
every page.
Joseph Hanks’ eldest daughter was Lucy. She came to young womanhood in
a period of license and revolt that followed the Revolutionary War,
similar to that which followed the Great War. Dr. Barton thinks this
explains, but does not justify her conduct. She bore a child when
she was 19 and she called it Nancy. The father has been conjectured,
but history does not name him. Seven years later she married, and
though she “was behaving like a perfect lady when her father died, he
disinherited her.” He could not forget her seven years of sin. After
she had been indicted for fornication and branded publicly “with an
unpleasant name,” Henry Sparrow made his beau geste. He married her and
thus vested her with virtue. The indictment was quashed. From that time
Lucy was known as Nancy’s Aunt. Readers of Edith Wharton’s _The Old
Maid_ will know just how Lucy felt about it. Let us hope that Elizabeth
Sparrow, the real aunt, was as good a vicarious mother as Delia Lovell,
and let us also hope that some day Mrs. Wharton may write her story.
Discussing the parents of Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Barton takes occasion to
say that Lea and Hutchinson’s book, _The Ancestry of Abraham Lincoln_
is not _always_ wrong. That is Dr. Barton’s idea of high praise.
Thomas Lincoln married Nancy Hanks and a photograph of the marriage
certificate which adorns Dr. Barton’s book convinces us that it was a
_bona fide_ marriage. Whether Nancy’s mother was there we are still in
doubt. Dr. Barton concludes this chapter with two brief paragraphs:
“I wonder if she was there.”
“I wonder if she could keep away.”
When I read those lines, I found myself murmuring, “I wonder”; and
then “I wonder why I wonder.” All readers of _The Old Maid_ will say
“I’ll say she was there,” and indeed Dr. Barton says so in the fourth
chapter, which is devoted to the Hankses and the Sparrows.
Dr. Barton strangles the Mary Shipley myth. The Shipleys now fade
out of the Lincoln picture. Abraham Lincoln, the pioneer who went to
Kentucky from Virginia, was alleged to have married twice; first in
leisure to Bathsheba Herring; then in haste to Mary Shipley. It is not
true. Bathsheba was his one and only wife. Everything that has been
found out about her is to her credit. Her fourth child, Thomas, was
selected by Providence to father him who was to purge the world of
slavery. He had no idea that he had been selected, but had he known,
he could not have improved on his selection of Nancy Hanks; from her,
Lincoln got his heart and his humour. His other great possession,
his capacity to learn by experience, he got from the Bathsheba. The
Lincolns only passed on the chromosomes, but it is now forever settled
that they did that and for it they shall be glorified eternally.
Dr. Barton gives Nancy and Thomas good characters. The former was
serious, but emotional, industrious, a good housekeeper and a better
mother. The latter was not the shiftless, improvident migratory
vacillator that he has been reputed to be, but he liked water better
than land. He did not have an uncontrollable urge for work, nor did
he starve himself or his family to swell a savings bank account. “He
accepted his situation, and when his day’s work was done, he rested and
visited and took life as comfortably as he was able.” To be sure he
was evicted from Knob Creek farm, but that was due to a failure which
he had in common with many others: foresight inferior to hindsight. Of
Abraham Lincoln’s childhood at Knob Creek little is known. Dr. Barton
indulges in some pleasant conjectures and it is known that the future
saviour of the Nation did write verse in his youth. So his biographer
may also be right in these surmises.
An illuminating and convincing chapter is entitled “Lincoln’s
Kentucky,” for it shows that the slavery question was brought
frequently and dramatically to the plastic mind of Abraham, and it
reveals a people of primitive prejudices, of intense antipathies, of
violent intolerance, of cowardly superstitions. Abraham Lincoln may
have laid the foundation of his fair-mindedness, tolerance, kindliness,
sympathy and sanity in those years; built the structure in Indiana
and furnished it in Washington. Lincoln was nine years old when his
mother died, but he was of a maturer mind than many boys of fourteen.
A year later, he was given a stepmother. “She transformed the home of
the cheerless widower into a spot of pleasant associations and happy
memories.” That epitaph should satisfy any stepmother. Lincoln’s
schooling is an old story. Retelling it does not improve it. Mrs.
Allen Gentry’s recollections that were given to Herndon are still the
most interesting. It is safe to assume that the world will always be
interested in Abraham Lincoln’s love affairs, but until the ideas
of George Bernard Shaw are accepted and we have acquired, like the
French, an acceptable sex language, we shall not be able to appease the
interest. Even then the story will have to be told by some one who had
limitations and experiences similar to Lincoln’s or by some one to whom
privileged communications are made--and who is invested with the power
of inspiring confidence.
Dr. Barton’s treatment of John McNamar, who was the first to fan Ann
Rutledge’s amatory smouldering fire into flame, will be approved by
his readers. John was a poor thing and it is a pity his path ever
crossed Ann’s. Posterity has aureoled the love of Ann and Abraham
and time does not tarnish it, indeed brightens it. The permanency of
love is a lost illusion. Even had Ann lived to marry her lover, their
love might not have lasted their years. I can think of few subjects
that lend themselves to discussion with less grace than “did Abraham
Lincoln love Mary Todd when he proposed to her and when he married
her?” I do not know--nor do I know any one who does know, but reams
have been written about it. I have an opinion, but like so many others
it is valueless to any one but myself. If he was in love either with
Mary Owens or Mary Todd, he had strange ways of showing it. His love
letters to the former, especially those indicating willingness to
marry, are masterpieces of frigidity and would put out any heart-fires
that were ever ignited; and the person who, reading _any_ account of
Lincoln’s conduct the day set for his marriage with Mary Todd, can say
he was in love certainly never has been in love himself nor has he even
observed at close range any one in the throes of the divine passion.
Whether he “went crazy as a loon” when he bolted the expectant bride,
as his friends alleged, or whether his heart failed him is beside the
question. Sane men in love sometimes act as he acted. I doubt if there
is a neurologist whose professional experience does not encompass an
example of such conduct. It is astonishing the thoughts and convictions
that come to sensitive, self-conscious men confronted with the
obligation of obeying God’s first Command. Partisans of his head may
say that he was not in love, of his heart that he was not sane.
He married Mary and his treatment of her indicates that he learned to
love her, and no wonder if the account Dr. Barton gives of her is true.
His conduct in this respect reflected his common sense and uncommon
judgment. If Abraham Lincoln’s reputation had depended upon his
knowledge of women and his proficiency in the _ars amandi_, it would
not have outlasted his days.
Dr. Barton is a fine example of researcher: patient, industrious,
indefatigable, determined. Certain investigations led him to frame
a hypothesis about the ancestry of Abraham Lincoln. Then he set to
work to prove that the assumptions of the hypothesis were facts. He
succeeded to an astonishing degree. If Lord Charnwood will now make a
few corrections, interpolate a few facts, it will be an almost perfect
biography of Abraham Lincoln, and if Miss Tarbell will do the same and
make a few deletions as well, it will be on the whole the most readable.
From the time Lincoln was elected President of the United States, he
begins to elude his latest biographer, or perhaps it would be more
just to say that Dr. Barton does not make his knowledge of Lincoln’s
later motives and conduct so impressive or so convincing as he does
when he writes of the twenty pre-and post-natal years. However the
last chapter, most infelicitously entitled “Mr. Lincoln,” is a model
of catholic taste, commendable restraint and good judgment. Deleted of
its last sentence, it would be an ideal summary by a man who makes no
claim to being a biologist, psychologist or personality expert and who
is neither biographer nor historian by temperament. Here he pitches his
pæan of praise in the right key, and he does not distract the listener
with gossipy interpolation or jejune ejaculation.
* * * * *
Physicians whose concern it is to estimate and adjudge their fellows’
mental balance find frequently that they get more information from the
writings of the individual whose sanity is in question than from his
speech. It is more self-revelatory especially if it is thrown off in
emotional white heat. Theodore Roosevelt was an intensely emotional man
and he was the most prolific letter-writer of his time; and perhaps
of all time. His biographer, Mr. Joseph B. Bishop, estimated that he
wrote during his public career more than 150,000 letters--an average
of more than 10 letters a day. It seemed beyond belief when we were
first told, but gradually one gathers credulity as volume after volume
of his letters are published. “Writing is horribly hard work to me,”
he wrote in a letter dated March 26th, 1887. He liked hard work. He
loved few people and it was essential to his happiness and welfare
that, with these few, he should share his emotional states and discuss
his intellectual preoccupations. Hence, the number of his letters. His
friendship with Henry Cabot Lodge did not date from school or college
days. In the Spring of 1884, when he was a member of the New York
State Legislature, he was addressing him as “My dear Mr. Lodge”; in
the Summer as “My Dear Lodge” and telling him he is one of the very
few men he really desires to know as a _friend!_ in the Autumn as,
“Dear Old Fellow” and assuring him he is the salt of the earth whose
people shall one day become cognisant of his savour, and by Winter as
“Dear Cabot” and testifying his admiration, affection and spiritual
intimacy. A quarter of a century later he wrote “from the Spring of
1884 Cabot Lodge was my closest friend personally, politically, and
in every other way, and occupied toward me a relation that no man has
ever occupied or ever will occupy.” In his entire political career he
maintained that he had never formulated a policy or made an appointment
without seeking the counsel and guidance of this friend. The letters in
the volumes entitled _Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore
Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge_ give ample proof of this friendship
and intimacy. Roosevelt poured out his heart and his mind to Lodge and
thus furnished us material for estimating the kind of man he was; his
conscience, morality, patriotism; his sincerity, affection, hypocrisy;
his imagination, intellect, culture; his idealisms and realisms; his
body and his soul. Here is first-hand information, awaiting indeed
inviting interpretation. Perhaps no one ever better illustrated the
fact that basically every mood is the mental transformation of a bodily
state than Theodore Roosevelt.
The beginning of any understanding of him must be made in his “stunts”:
cow-punching, cross-country riding, big game hunting, endurance tests,
soldiering, exploring. It is generally known he was a delicate youth
and it is alleged he went West seeking invigoration. He went West for
the same reason the Sun goes: it was a part of the divine order. Chains
could not have thrust inactivity upon him. Physical activity was as
fervently in his blood as lust in the blood of a normal man; no one
can read his letters from Little Missouri, from Elkhorn Ranch, Dakota,
or his account of participation in a fox-hunt with battered head and
broken arm, and need further proof of his indomitable energy. He knew
minutes of physical peace, but they were thrust upon him by mental
activity; he had hours of bodily rest, but they were stolen from his
urge that he might display or convey his emotional state. He had to a
singular degree the capacity to concentrate all his energies on the
job in hand, the task undertaken; to do it and fulfil it with all his
might and main, to tolerate no distraction, to suffer no interruption,
to brook no interference. Whether he was playing tennis, orienting the
Civil Service Commission, directing the New York Police Department,
scorning Mr. E. L. Godkin, organising the Rough Riders, framing the
policies and administering the affairs of his country, or reading
a book, he did it with all the punch there was in him and when his
punch-exchequer got low he sought the services of a trainer. He liked
to drink the wine of life with brandy in it, he says in one of these
letters, and the brandy he used is now not even outlawed. As Henry
Adams says, “Roosevelt more than any other man living within the range
of notoriety showed the singular primitive quality that belongs to
ultimate matter--the quality that mediæval theology assigned to God--he
was pure act.”
The next most characteristic feature of Theodore Roosevelt is that he
took himself, his beliefs and convictions with great seriousness. Early
in life he convinced himself that he had come upon a brand of honesty
that he must popularise and persuade his fellow-citizens to use. If
they would not use it after they had been appraised of its quality and
source they were perfect asses like Vilas, malicious and dishonest
scoundrels like Godkin, demented mugwumps like John Fiske, dogs like
Carl Schurz, hypocrites like George W. Curtis and accessories to the
deeds of the German governmental murderers both before and after the
facts like Woodrow Wilson. G. W. Smalley’s attitude was contemptible,
he would like to put the editors of the _Evening Post_ and of the
_World_ in prison. President Eliot made himself ridiculous by his stand
on civil service and ballot reform; and it would be a pleasure to shoot
or thrash his colleague Parker. Only he and Cabot were right: straight
talkers and hard hitters.
Theodore Roosevelt had a keen and profound sense of duty to his
country, to his community, to his family and to his friends and he had
a superhuman facility for conveying recognition of it to every one who
saw him or heard him. To that and to his reputation for fearlessness
he owed a popularity which has never been equalled in this country.
He was the embodiment of the American ideal: fearless, impetuous,
resourceful, self-confident, ready to throw his hat into any ring and
to follow it up with a smile on his face and the exclamation, “This is
bully,” escaping from his lips. He could inoculate his fellow-citizens
with his ideas more quickly than any man of his time and he could
galvanise them into greater activity and more sustained determination
than any President we have ever had. His qualities may outlive the
children of those who knew him. One of the astonishing confessions of
these letters is that he had few friends and fewer intimates. I have
had friends who were convinced they knew him fundamentally and were
in close communion with his thought and determination. From their
conversation I could readily believe that he rarely made decisions
without consulting them. Their names are not even mentioned in his
correspondence.
Any one who has been inclined to doubt Roosevelt’s sincerity, _i.e._,
to consider that he sometimes affected an enthusiasm which he did not
feel, will have his doubts appeased by reading this correspondence.
He believed in himself but he was not vain; he rated his abilities
high, but his conduct displayed no arrogance; he valued his mental
and physical possessions, but he was not proud. If he ever doubted
his ability to do any job that presented itself, his most intimate
correspondence does not betray it. What he doubted was that the
opportunity would not be vouchsafed him.
The man to whom these letters were written was vain. It flattered his
vanity that he had seen Theodore Roosevelt on the road to the White
House while he was Police Commissioner, and that he had told him so
with assurance; thus discharging in advance the obligation he was to
incur by receiving such evidences of trust as the letters betray from
so great a man as Roosevelt. He saw his own thoughts disseminated and
his convictions popularised by his friend who knew how to gauge the
feeling of the people and to raise their temperature; and in some
inexplicable way there steals upon the reader a thought that when Lodge
made up his mind that Roosevelt was going to the top he also made up
his mind that he would link his name with that of the rising star in a
correspondence that the world would not let perish.
Roosevelt was a many-sided man. He was gifted with foresight and
hindsight. There has never been a President save Lincoln who had
such capacity for learning by experience. For a man so emotional, he
was a good judge of men and he could do team work. These qualities
distinguished him from the man upon whose head he poured the vials of
his wrath the last few years of his life and who may get from posterity
both the laurel and the oak-leaf crowns. Scores of instances could
be cited from this correspondence in support of his power to size up
men, but none serves better than his letter to John Hay urging him
to persuade the President to appoint General Wood to the command of
all Cuba. “Wood is a born diplomat, just as he is a born soldier.
I question if any nation in the world has now or has had within
recent times any one so nearly approaching the ideal of a military
administrator of the kind now required in Cuba.” No recorded prophecy
has ever come truer than that.
Roosevelt was not a modest man, but he had a sense of propriety
and fitness that was very becoming. His letters to Lodge about the
hesitation on the part of the War Department to recognise his military
service in Cuba by giving him the Medal of Honour, are dignified and
straightforward. There is no pumped up humility. He did a good job and
the labourer is worthy of his hire. In the same way his letters, when
he was being groomed for the nomination of running mate to McKinley,
are full of good sense and sound reasoning. He is satisfied with what
he has accomplished as Governor of New York, and so were the people.
What he would really like, would be to be re-elected Governor with a
first-class Lieutenant-Governor, and then be offered the Secretaryship
of War for four years. He knew what he wanted, and he got it, the
Presidency, but the letter that describes his visit to Buffalo after
McKinley had been shot should be ample testimony to convince any one
that he did not want it the way it came. Any one keen to learn the
tricks of the political game will be aided by perusal of the letters
written from the New York State Capital. They may also observe how
statesmen develop. Roosevelt’s letters from the White House are just
as frank, intimate and revealing as were those from New York Police
Headquarters and from Albany: full of praise for Lodge’s potential
and actual accomplishments; of proffered suggestions and requests
for counsel; of enthusiasm about exhausting rides and the fording of
turbulent streams, “altogether it was great” or “bully fun,” full of
vigorous comment and of plain characterisation of men. Discussion
of literary matters which was so conspicuous in the early letters
has now practically disappeared, though occasionally he makes brief
comment when relating his diversions. In September, 1903, he writes,
“I have been reading Aristotle’s politics and Plutarch’s miscellany
and as usual take an immense comfort out of the speeches of Lincoln.”
It is extraordinary how his partisanship determined his likes and
dislikes even in literary matters. “The more I study Jefferson the more
profoundly I distrust him and his influence.” Lodge writes to him on
returning the proof of his first inaugural address, “Literary form is
after all the salt that keeps alive the savour of the thoughts we would
not willingly have die.” Indeed his “form” had improved enormously
since he wrote the life of Thomas H. Benton in 1887, when he stated “my
style is very rough and I do not like a certain lack of _sequitur_ that
I do not seem able to get rid of.” That sentence alone is proof of the
first allegation, but he bettered it before he reached the White House,
and the lack of _sequitur_ disappeared forever.
Though his letters to Lodge are chiefly concerned with his political
activities, realisations and prospects; with justification of his
conduct, refutation of the allegations of their opponents, and comment
on their sinister motives and malign trends--there is much sentiment in
them and not a little play. Commenting on something Lodge wrote about
the death of John Hay, he says: “It should not make us melancholy.
He died within a very few years of the period when death comes to us
all as a certainty, and I should esteem any man happy who lived till
sixty-five as John Hay has lived, who saw his children marry, his
grandchildren born, who was happy in his home life, who wrote his name
clearly in the records of our times, who rendered great and durable
services to the Nation, both as statesman and writer, who held high
public positions, and died in the harness at the zenith of his fame.
When it comes our turn to go out into the blackness, I only hope the
circumstances will be as favourable.” His hope was realised, save that
he was four years younger when his turn came to go.
There are many high spots in the correspondence that reveal Roosevelt’s
character; one of them is his appointments to ministerial and
ambassadorial positions and the comments on the appointees; they are
all scratch men; he never nominates a man with a handicap and he
submits the name first to his friend. Another is the genesis of the
thought that led to his bringing Japan and Russia to the council table
at Portsmouth, the development and maturity of it, and its success. A
third is his break with Lodge that came when he decided to seek the
nomination of the Republican Party, and when that was shown to be not
available to the Progressive Party--his own creation. Lodge’s political
conduct in the last ten years of his life alienated many admirers, but
it is in a measure offset by his conduct in the trying year of 1912.
He was opposed to the constitutional changes advocated by Roosevelt,
therefore he could not support him; “but as for going against you that
I can not do. There is very little of the Roman in me for those I love
best.” There was a lot in him for those he did not love! Finally the
student of political events misses the inside story of the Progressive
Party. It is likely there is a series of letters to some one else on
that subject.
Another thing that he misses is an explanation of his break with
Taft. There is a strange and inexplicable absence of any illuminating
reference to it in these letters, the place where it should be.
Unquestionably our Chief Justice has hundreds of Roosevelt’s letters
which will one day be published. Until then we must curb our curiosity;
but there has been something in Taft’s conduct since he became
ex-President and in his speeches, that leads one to believe that, when
the facts are submitted to the public, it will be seen that he was not
responsible for the break or for the hard feeling it engendered.
Some day also the President of Columbia University, who was once a
“bully fellow,” will publish the scores, perhaps hundreds, of letters
he received and they will throw a revealing light on Roosevelt’s
loyalty. Mr. Bishop in a recent book, _Notes and Anecdotes of Many
Years_, has given some personal recollections of him and his humanness
which are illuminating.
If one asks men conversant with public affairs of the past thirty
years, “What specifically did Roosevelt do while President that
entitles him to be classed with the Immortals?” they find it very
difficult to be specific in their responses. They will mention the
taking of Panama and the organisation of the Commission to construct
the Panama Canal, his interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine when
Germany was pressing her claims on Venezuela, his vigorous enforcement
of the Sherman anti-trust law, and the Peace Conference at Portsmouth.
These were most creditable accomplishments, but scarcely epoch-making.
It was a beautiful gesture to bring Japan and Russia to the Council
table, but it takes from the glamour to know that the suggestion came
from the Japanese. And the breaking up of interlocking directorates,
the unloosening of the hold of corporate influences on the government,
required courage, judgment and self-reliance; but the historian of the
future will be puzzled when he reads that Congress was insisting in
1924 that the railroads should do what they were prosecuted for doing
twenty years before. Victory in the Northern securities case may prove
finally to be the equivalent of defeat.
Theodore Roosevelt was essentially a great actor, but he wrote his own
lines and submitted them to Cabot Lodge for deletion, addition and
correction. Stunts of every kind appealed to him. He had a natural
talent for accomplishing them which was enormously enhanced by
practice. He got away with nearly everything he undertook. Had he given
permanency to the Progressive Party, history would credit him with
few failures. He knew how to make acquaintances feel that they were
friends, and friends that they were loved.
Taken all in all, the features of his personality that attract me
most are those revealed in the letters published by Mr. Bishop in
the volume called _Theodore Roosevelt and His Time_, in the letters
to his children and in the letters to Anne Roosevelt Cowles. This is
possibly because he does not there reveal so much bitterness, so much
contempt, it must indeed be said, so much hatred, as he reveals in
the last letters to his dearest friend: hatred of his successor in
the Presidency. Possibly the word “hatred” is not the right one. He
despised Wilson, he commiserated the country that was obliged to suffer
him, it was a disgrace to continue him in office; he knew less about
the conduct of War than he knew about anything, and he knew nothing
save academics. Wilson could do no right. But he did one thing which
took the check-rein off Roosevelt’s inhibitions. He ignored him; he
took no heed of his counsels, his detractions, his desires.
Roosevelt was just as sincere in this belief as he was in others,
and he had a legion of sympathisers and supporters, at the head of
which stood the man to whom the letters were addressed. Every one
is entitled to, and has, his own opinion of the merits of the two
Presidents as men and statesmen. Those to whom the one appeals are
repelled by the other; but every one will agree that one was more
lovable than the other; that he understood the heart of man and that he
had one himself. Theodore Roosevelt was one of Nature’s wonders and he
should take a place among the great Presidents because of what he was
rather than what he did.
It must be admitted that the Roosevelt-Lodge letters leave a taste--not
quite bitter, not quite acrid, but slightly disagreeable. It can be
removed quickly by reading for a few minutes the volume entitled
_Letters from Theodore Roosevelt to Anne Roosevelt Cowles_. Here he
is revealed as the affectionate brother, the indulgent father, the
sympathetic friend of children, especially those of Roosevelt blood.
Loyalty to his family and confidence in himself radiate from most of
the letters. Fancy a civilian of thirty writing, “‛La Guerre et La
Paix,’ like all Tolstoi’s works, is very strong and very interesting.
The descriptions of the battles are excellent, but though with one or
two good ideas underneath them, the criticisms of commanders, and of
wars in general are absurd.”
On the eve of declaration of war with Spain, when McKinley seemed bent
on peace, he wrote: “I’d give all I’m worth to be just two days in
supreme command ... I’d have things going so nobody could stop them.”
And that was what Theodore Roosevelt always wanted to do, to get things
going so that nobody could stop them.
He always wanted to start something. He never disclaimed the children
of his brain; they were all legitimate. He never mistrusted the
potency of his brawn, it never failed him. Courage, self-confidence,
self-belief, facilitated the conviction that he was a man of destiny.
Though he was not such actually, he scaled the flaming ramparts of the
world more gracefully and successfully than any man of his time.
I have never been able to convince myself that Southey was right when
he said, “A man’s character can more surely be judged by the letters
his friends address to him than by those he pens himself, for they are
apt to reveal with unconscious faithfulness the regard held for him
by those who knew him best.” If Theodore Roosevelt’s character were
estimated from Cabot Lodge’s letters one would have to call him a god,
not a man--a god who nodded once, in 1912.
XII
EDUCATORS
THE LIFE OF SIR WILLIAM OSLER, by _Harvey Cushing_.
LIFE AND CONFESSIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST, by _G. Stanley Hall_.
Sir William Osler occupied a unique position; he was the most widely
known and best beloved physician in the world. He made an indelible
impression on the teaching and practice of medicine in three
countries--Canada, the United States and England. He lived the number
of years allotted to man by the psalmist, and each succeeding year of
his life he added to his mental stature by taking thought, and to his
emotional profundity by doing deeds of kindliness.
He was the son of an Anglo-Saxon pioneer parson, Featherstone Lake
Osler, and of Ellen Free Pickton, a Celt who went from Cornwall to
the Province of Ontario in 1837. His spiritual parents were Hermes
and Minerva, and he had three godfathers--a parson, Arthur Johnson; a
physician, James Bovell, and a professor, Robert Palmer Howard--to them
he dedicated the most widely read textbook on the practice of medicine
ever written.
He had a genius for friendship that was nearly unique; he had a
capacity for quick and accurate observation which is not vouchsafed
to one man in a thousand; he had a prehensile mind to which synthesis
and logic appealed; he had a liking and a capacity for work that
resembled those of Theodore Roosevelt; he had an inborn understanding
of humanity; and he loved his fellows. When they were ill, he added
great tenderness to his love. He was playful, prankful and guileless,
with the face of a sphinx and the expression of an ascetic. He was a
scholar without pedantry, a scientist without pretension, a wit without
venom, a humanist without scorn. Small wonder that he was the man
without an enemy.
One of his most beloved friends and esteemed colleagues has written
his biography and at the same time achieved one of the most difficult
of all tasks: he has kept himself out of the book and refrained from
eulogising the subject. There are many biographies of physicians that
merit the designation “great”; among them, Henry Morley’s _Life of
Jerome Cardan_, René Valléry-Radot’s _Vie de Pasteur_, Stephen Paget’s
_Life of Victor Horsley_, Agnes Repplier’s _Life of William White_ and
to the list must be added Harvey Cushing’s _Life of William Osler_.
Osler did three great things for medicine: he conceived and effected
bedside teaching; he demonstrated the value of history as a pedagogical
agency and of culture as a humanising one, and he succeeded in making
the medical world heed that cure meant prevention. He had but one
fundamental dislike: chauvinism; one abiding disdain: insincerity; one
supreme contempt: pretence. He could not abide a faker, unless he were
feeble minded; then pity facilitated tolerance.
On his seventieth birthday his former pupils and intimate colleagues
of this country sent to Oxford two memorial volumes made up of
contributions to the science and art that he had fostered and
developed. Replying to his fellow Regius professor of medicine in
Cambridge, who made the presentation, he said:
[Illustration: SIR WILLIAM OSLER]
_Reprinted from “The Annals of Medical History”_
“Among multiple acknowledgment I can lift one hand to
heaven that I was born of honest parents, that modesty,
humility, patience and veracity lay in the same egg, and
came into the world with me. To have had a happy home in
which unselfishness reigned, parents whose self-sacrifice
remains a blessed memory, brothers and sisters helpful
far beyond the usual measure--all these make a picture
delightful to look back upon. Then to have had the
benediction of friendship follow one like a shadow, to
have always had the sense of comradeship in work, without
the petty pinpricks of jealousies and controversies,
to be able to rehearse in the sessions of sweet, silent
thought the experiences of long years without a single
bitter memory--to have and to do all this fills the heart
with gratitude. That three transplantations have been
borne successfully is a witness to the brotherly care
with which you have tended me. Loving our profession,
and believing ardently in its future, I have been
content to live in and for it. A moving ambition to
become a good teacher and a sound clinician was fostered
by opportunities of an exceptional character, and any
success I may have attained must be attributed in large
part to the unceasing kindness of colleagues and to a
long series of devoted pupils whose success in life is my
special pride.”
There is the man, modest, grateful, appreciative. He attributes his
material success to what others have done for him; his spiritual to his
inheritancy. Had he added that, early in life, he had a vision and had
striven heroically and worked laboriously to make it concrete for the
benefit of mankind, and that extraordinary success had attended his
efforts, he would have explained William Osler and his career.
What more need be said of his parents? They struggled successfully with
the virgin soil in a primitive civilisation; the father ornamented
his profession, and the mother fulfilled bounteously her destiny; she
mothered eight children, four of whom became famous. The youngest, the
subject of this biography, was in nowise remarkable as a child or boy:
“I started in life with just an ordinary everyday stock
of brains. In my schooldays I was much more bent upon
mischief than upon books, but as soon as I got interested
in medicine I had only a single idea: to do the day’s
work that was before me just as faithfully and honestly
and energetically as was in my power.”
And this he did to the day of his death.
He was steered into medicine by a strange mixture of scientific and
pietistic ardour, James Bovell, and he studied and graduated at McGill
Medical School, then a proprietary institution at the head of which was
R. Palmer Howard, who by possessions and conduct influenced Osler’s
life, for he said of him thirty-five years later: “I have never known
one in whom was more happily combined a stern sense of duty with the
mental freshness of youth.”
Osler went abroad and while increasing his knowledge of medicine laid
the foundation of friendships and intimacies which years later, after
he had become a famous teacher, facilitated a call to one of the most
ornamental professorships in Great Britain. At twenty-eight he had a
chair in his alma mater. In ten years he went to the top. Then began
that series of calls to colleges and universities here and abroad which
did not cease so long as he lived. He refused them all save those of
the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins. In the former he
stayed five years; in the latter fifteen. The temptation to respond
favourably to the call from New York was very great, and greater
still that from Edinburgh. But temptation for Osler was created to be
resisted and there was a star that guided him as it guided the Wise Men
of the East; he had but to follow it at night, and to be counselled
during the day by the voice that once had counselled Socrates to reach
his goal, viz., a true knowledge of himself and of his relations to his
fellows, and, having reached it, to plant there his banner bearing the
masterword in medicine: work. And he worked industriously, honestly,
patiently, persistently.
Then came the call to Oxford. He had been in the harness actively for
thirty years and the load had begun to drag; the burdens that he had
not only willingly borne, but sought, had begun to bend him, and the
unfinished literary material of many years clamoured for academic
leisure and favourable environment. Oxford was the place and Osler
was the very man! Going for good meant farewells, and out of one of
them flowed a stream of notoriety which, for a time, threatened to
drown him. He took leave of his students, colleagues and trustees in
an address in which he discussed many problems of university life;
particularly the danger of staying too long in one place, and the
danger of not thrusting opportunities and responsibilities upon young
men--and at this point he inadvertently remarked that he was not sure
whether it was Anthony Trollope who suggested that there should be a
college into which men of sixty retired for a year’s contemplation
before a peaceful departure by chloroform, but there was much to be
said in favour of it. The journalese rendering of this was “Osler
recommends chloroform at sixty.” The storm gathered during the night.
It broke in the East the following morning and by the evening it had
spread throughout the country.
Every man and woman above sixty, or approaching it, would seem to have
been affronted. Following the acrimonious discussions of the newspapers
and the caustic cartoons, came the studied magazine articles proving
that Enoch not only begot Methuselah after he was sixty, but walked
with God; that Edison was in the heyday of his inventive activity;
that Ford would practicalise flying after the chloroform age and that
Clémenceau would save the world for democracy, perhaps for socialism.
For a short time it looked as if the man without an enemy had lost his
distinction. Again, his inner voice counselled him wisely. He did not
attempt to explain; he could not be persuaded to refute the alleged
statement. He had said the truth, and the truth sufficed William Osler
to the end.
Of the many extraordinary things in Dr. Cushing’s adequate and
appealing biography, none is more arresting than the account given
of the birth of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and
the part that Osler unconsciously played in it through his textbook.
A young man who had access to the ear and the purse of John D.
Rockefeller read it and was appraised of the fertile field awaiting
planting by preventive medicine. The crops that have been harvested
have been enormous, but they are as naught compared with those
about to be garnered. How little it is generally appreciated that
the colossal success of the Panama Canal was due as much to Gorgas
as to Bunau-Varilla, and that Osler mediated his appointment to the
Commission, and still less is known of the leading part Osler played in
decapitating the gorgon typhoid fever in this country thirty years ago.
In England, Osler added to his cultural fame. He was made president of
the Bibliographical Society, of the Ashmolean Society and, to cap them
all, of the Classical Association, an honour which probably pleased
him as much or more than any that had ever come to him. His address of
acceptance, which embodied the whole spirit of his ideal, cost him the
greatest labour of his life.
He found great joy in England, but he found also his greatest sorrow,
for his son, a singular combination of his mother’s suaviter and his
father’s fortiter was killed in the war. It did not kill Osler, it only
killed his desire to live. Like his master, Sir Thomas Browne, he knew
that oblivion is not to be hired and that the night of time suppresseth
the day. He had lived every moment of his day, and every hour had been
joyous save one, and he had never stopped to compute his felicities. He
died as he had lived, like a marathon runner taking the hurdle.
Dr. Cushing’s biography is documented and detailed. It is the kind
of biography of Osler that should exist, but there should be another
made from it: the story of his life and the charm of his personality
in narrative form followed by interpretation, characterisation and
estimation. The present one will be received gratefully by his former
pupils and colleagues, by his connections and associates, and by
libraries; but the general reader, the one who wants to find out
without reading hundreds of letters and without wading through 1,500
pages, what Osler was like, how he acquired primacy of the medical
world, how he made himself a savant in literature while climbing to
the top of his own profession, will seek a book where these are told
informatively and entertainingly.
Such a biography of William Osler is bound to come in time. I venture
to say that, when it does come, it will dwell at far greater length
on the first half of his life. Those who knew Osler intimately will
be astonished to find scant reference in Dr. Cushing’s book to the
interesting Francis family, with whom he lived for so many years in
Montreal, or to Nancy Astor, to whom he was legal guardian. There
is almost no allusion to the playful side of his nature. To make
a man into a saint, though he deserves it, does not always do him
justice. William Osler had extraordinarily great qualities, but he
was passionate in his likes and dislikes; he was often indiscreet,
sometimes tactless to an unbelievable degree; he could not and would
not suffer fools; and he exacted unqualified devotion, while preserving
the freedom to go his own way. He loved practical jokes, but he was not
at all happy when they were played on him. For all this, his feet were
less of clay than those of most men. One of the great charms of Osler
was that he was so human, and had so much love and understanding of
humanity. It is as a man that his friends remember him, and it is as
man and teacher that he shall be known to posterity.
* * * * *
Thirty-five years ago a Yankee wagonmaker, who had gone to California
as a “forty-niner” and piled up a fortune, thought to immortalise
his name by founding a university in Worcester, Massachusetts. This
University should be a beacon light to other educational institutions,
the object of their emulation and envy. Realising that he was lacking
concrete pedagogical ideas, that he was devoid of, even antipathic
to the principles of organisation and co-operation, and, at least,
suspicious of his prejudices, Jonas Gilman Clark was persuaded by his
counsellor and friend, the late Senator Hoar, to ask a young professor
of psychology at Johns Hopkins University, a froward, self-confident,
energetic man of promise, to plan and steer his venture. In the book
which he called _Life and Confessions of a Psychologist_ G. Stanley
Hall tells us how he did it, and how his forebears and parents, his
education and environment, permitted him to do it.
The story is an interesting one, and besides revealing the personality
of Dr. Hall, as it was meant to do, no doubt that he might better
understand himself, it throws a light upon the road that education has
travelled in this country the past third of a century, a light that
is illuminating though not dazzling. Stanley Hall often filled the
lamp that generated it, and he swung the reflector with great skill.
It is possible that the coming generation will say that he was the
soundest psychologist of his time and that he broke more virgin soil
than William James. He was an important and tireless worker in the
field of pedagogy and he was extremely articulate. When he had passed
his seventieth birthday he believed he would yet do “a few things
which shall be better than I have ever yet been able to do.” He was
one of those countless old men who go about repeating “I feel just as
I did when I was forty.” It was not vouchsafed him to do any of them.
Dr. Hall prided himself on being a straight, hard hitter. It pleased
him enormously to be called “_l’enfant terrible_” of psychology. He
had not always been able to speak out what had been in his mind, so
he determined to do it in his book. There will be much diversity of
opinion as to whether his reputation shall profit by his frankness.
Solomon was unquestionably right about many things, but Dr. Hall
does not agree with him that humility should go before honour. “In
the view I have attained of man, his place in nature, his origin and
destiny, I believe I have become a riper product of the present stage
of civilisation than most of my contemporaries; have outgrown more
superstitions, attained clearer insights, and have a deeper sense
of peace within myself. I love but perhaps still more pity, mankind,
groping and stumbling, often slipping backward along the upward path,
which I believe I see just as clearly as Jesus, or Buddha did.”
Though not for a moment would I appear to be either a champion of the
use of the word “some” as an adjective, or an habitual user of it, I
maintain that this is _some_ statement. And why leave out Mohammed?
Most of us, subject to hours and days of self-depreciation, inadequacy,
unworthiness, will envy the self-satisfaction and self-complacency of
this retired pedagogue. But in reality it does not suffice him: “As
I advance in years there are few things I crave more, and feel more
keenly the lack of, than companionship.” Even review of successes and
contemplation of accomplishments do not shut out loneliness. There is
no record that Jesus or Buddha was lonely.
From his earliest days Dr. Hall had what the Freudians call an
inferiority complex. His childish self-consciousness, his juvenile
aloofness, his mature bumptiousness, his senescent strenuousness
all testify it. He became aware of it early in life and strove hard
to overcome it. But like the fetters of Hephæstus it could neither
be snapped nor loosened. Like them, its substance was as subtle as
spider’s web and so cunningly contrived that none might see it even of
the blessed gods. The statement quoted above may be construed as a last
effort to extricate himself from the crafty net.
Dr. Hall was an ardent Freudian. “Nothing since Aristotle’s categories
has gone deeper, or in my opinion is destined to have such far-reaching
influence and results,” was the characteristic way he estimated the
Freudian mechanisms. It mattered nothing to him that psychoanalysis and
the study of the unconscious have made small appeal to the majority
of trained psychologists of this or any other country. He attributed
this to the prudish reluctance of his colleagues to face the momentous
problems of sex life. They deny it; at least, his successor at Johns
Hopkins, the professor at Columbia, the successor to William James at
Harvard, and many others do. But the momentous problems of sex life
did not balk Dr. Hall. He confessed to “a love for glimpsing at first
hand the raw side of human life,” and he records the unique thrill he
experienced at the numerous prize fights that he attended “unknown
and away from home.” Moreover the seamy side of life seemed to him as
valuable in some respects as the psychological laboratory. “In many
American and especially in foreign cities, Paris, where vice was most
sophisticated, London, where it was coarsest, Vienna, which I thought
the worst of all, I found, generally through hotel clerks, a guide to
take me through the underworld by night to catch its psychological
flavour.” Some reader, low-minded and altogether contemptible, will be
base enough to believe that there were other motives. It is a dangerous
business anyway. Even Dr. Hall says he had a narrow escape once--his
life, not his morals--in a den of Apaches in Paris. About the year
Dr. Hall was called to Clark University, a clergyman in New York and
a pious vice hunter visited such places and their motives for doing
so were publicly questioned. The clergyman stood the shock, but his
reforming friend went off his head. The reformatory urge, though not
a fundamental one, often needs to be curbed, especially when it is
entangled with a lust of curiosity.
Dr. Hall always had a weakness for new, bizarre, hybrid words, and he
found difficulty in giving adequate vent to his emotions and cognitions
in one language. Therefore one is not astonished to find the present
volume constellated with French, German, and Latin words and phrases.
He frequently speaks of his _éclaircissements_. He had various kinds:
religious, social, political, economic, and even ethical. He has been
very fond of giving _aperçus_, of being irreverent to the _ipsissima
verba_; and he can never quite forget the _hegira_ from Clark
University after the visit of a certain Harper; he still hears the
echo of the _vox clamantis in deserto_; and he will talk of the _vita
sexualis_. It is to be presumed that any one lured by an autobiography
of one of our leading educators will be able to translate these words.
At any rate he is not likely to have any more trouble with them than he
is with some of the sentences in English. For instance, the Professor,
speaking of the necessity of educating the will and the heart as well
as the intellect, says:
“Nothing else can save us and I shall live, and hope to
die when my time comes, convinced that this goal is not
only not unattainable, but that we are, on the whole,
with however many and widespread regressions, making
progress, surely if slowly and in the right directions.”
And again when saying a good word for the “seminary”:
“The rabulist, the sophist, the debater, the man of
saturated orthodoxy, the literalist, and the dullard will
all be held in check if the seminary is rightly pervaded
with the phenomena of altitude.”
Yes, indeed, but what will save the bromide, the smart Aleck, the
hard-shelled--that’s the question. Is there any phenomenon or altitude
that will accomplish that?
I have always understood it was Worcester, not Webster, who said: “It
is I who am surprised; you are astonished,” when he returned home and
saw his mother-in-law being kissed by the butler. I must have been
mistaken, for Dr. Hall says that he was surprised and delighted when
he got an invitation, after some lean years as a tutor, to deliver a
course of lectures in Baltimore. The sensation of the butler and of Dr.
Hall must have been the same, only on the reverse side of the shield.
Dr. Hall wrote this book to find out more about himself than he knew
before. I hope he was successful. I know more about him than I did
before, though I have been fairly familiar with his life in the open
the past quarter of a century. He says many interesting things about
himself. With some of them I find it hard to agree: for instance that
he was a mixture of masochistic and sadistic impulses. It may be so,
but they were not fifty-fifty. One predominated.
Somewhere in the _Tale of a Tub_ Swift says that happiness is a
perpetual possession of being well deceived. Were it true, the writer
of this autobiography rarely experienced happiness save perhaps in
Berlin, where he learned “how great an enlightener love is, and what a
spring of mind Eros can be.”
XIII
PRIZE FIGHTERS
JOHN L. SULLIVAN, by _R. F. Dibble_.
THE ROAR OF THE CROWD, by _James J. Corbett._
The most diverting biography of the year is that of John L. Sullivan,
the man who shared with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson the
widest popularity of all Americans of their times. Mr. R. F. Dibble
does not tell us so much about John L. as a personality, but what
he tells of him as a pugilist and drunkard is amusing and amazing,
inspiring and instructive. John L. Sullivan and Jean de Reszke were
the two artists on whom America concentrated its attention during the
closing years of the nineteenth century. They had no superiors or peers
until Mr. Corbett and Sig. Caruso came along and dislodged them, the
one aided by alcohol, the other by _anni domini_. Their contemporaries
will always believe they had no equals and should posterity perpetuate
that belief, perhaps it will not be far wrong. If the anti-alcohol
league needed a tract to further its cause--but now that it has the
law, it does not need it--one could be made from Mr. Dibble’s book.
Never was the downfall of a great figure so directly traceable to rum
as John L. Sullivan’s and there are few more striking examples of the
efficacity of grace than that furnished by his abstinence and reform.
Regrettably that saving visitation did not come to him until alcohol
had wrought his ruin physically, and in a smaller measure spiritually.
John L. Sullivan was the greatest pugilist of his time--perhaps of all
times. He has been called a brute, but he was not, because he had a
sense of humour; he has been called a moron, but he did not deserve it
because he refused to run for Congress; it has been alleged that he
was tough, but his reverence for the ideal of womanhood contradicted
the slander. He was a strange combination: proud that he was Irish and
fearful lest people should not know that he was a Bostonian. He had
the same reverence for the city of his birth that his biographer has,
and his sincerity was less doubtful; for it will occur to some that
Mr. Dibble had his tongue in his cheek when he penned this sentence:
“And this Boston, the Hub of the Universe, the source of everything
excellent in American manners and customs, the originator of all moral
and literary endeavours, became unwittingly, but most appropriately,
the cradle of modern pugilism.” Most Bostonians are likely to find
“Hub of the Universe” somewhat intemperate and will think that he
should have said hub of the U. S. A. In any event, they were proud
of John L. Sullivan, justly so, for as his friend Theodore Roosevelt
said: “Old John has many excellent qualities, including a high degree
of self-respect ... he never threw a fight ... he has been the most
effective temperance lecturer I have ever known of,” and he might have
added that he possessed supremely a quality that all men are one in
admiring: courage.
Some of Mr. Dibble’s descriptions of the champion’s early battles
are nearly as thrilling as movie reels; some of the narrative of
chance encounters, such as with the bully of Mount Clemens, are most
picturesque; and occasionally quotations of the master’s own words give
spice and substance to the descriptions: “The longest scrap I ever had
went about twenty minutes, and that fellow was on the floor most of
the time. I was never learned to box. I learned myself from watching
other boxers. My style of boxing is perfectly oracular--no, I mean
original--with me.” As all devotees of the art of self-defence know,
John L.’s first great fight was with Paddy Ryan and what Mr. Dibble
has to say about it is interesting, particularly the part about Ryan’s
explanation of his defeat. “The defeated champion burst into print with
a series of statements which insisted that his rupture and his truss
had so crippled him that he was unable to fight with his customary
ferocity.” If Dr. John A. Bodine, one time surgeon in New York, were
still alive, he would be able to say that a similar statement would
be true if Sullivan had made it about his bout with Corbett. There
can be little doubt, I believe, that Sullivan’s trainers made him
enter that contest without a truss. And though alcohol had conditioned
the weakness of the abdominal muscles which promoted the hernia, the
immediate cause of the champion’s fall was due to a condition that
should have been remedied surgically.
Now that the technique of the art known as self-defence has become
elaborate and complicated, it is interesting to hear what it was for
the champion of champions: “His technique was simplicity itself: he
merely kept hammering with ruthless atavistic ferocity at his opponents
until the opponents became insensible.” In view of the legend, current
for a while at least, that John L. had first learned to fight by
whipping his father, “atavistic” does not seem to be particularly a
felicitous adjective. It is a small matter, but Mr. Dibble is not
perhaps as careful of his adjectives as an Instructor in the Department
of English in the University of Columbia should be. Laborious search
would have provided a more appropriate epithet than “cutest” for
Charlie Mitchell.
It is sincerely to be hoped that some of John L.’s retorts and remarks
were not of staircase engendering. Take for instance the following
anecdote:
A policeman, surrounded by an enthusiastic audience, said to him:
“You are drunk, you are under arrest.” “That ain’t true,” snapped
John, “but even if it was I’ll be sober to-morrow while you’ll be a
damn fool all your life.” It must occur even to his greatest admirer
on reading this tale that he may have heard the retort on the stage
where it has been bandied about for generations. However, it is quite
true that he may have stopped in the middle of a fight when he was
urged by a bloodthirsty creature in the audience to “go in and mop up”
his adversary. According to the story, he stepped to the front of the
platform, raised his hand and said: “Gentlemen, this affair to-night is
just a friendly set-to. Some day I may oblige you by killing a man.”
The vernacular may not be Sullivan’s, but the sentiment likely is.
The distressing part of the book is the account of his contest with
John Barleycorn. No one who has not himself a thirst for strong drink,
or who has not lived and laboured with those who had it and succumbed
to it, will be touched by it. But all drunkards, potential and actual,
and all doctors who have witnessed the devastating results of the
intemperate use of alcohol will sympathise with John L. and will
venerate him for the fight he finally made and the battle he won. Had
he been able to exercise a similar control of his appetite for food,
he might still be the living example of reformation. Apparently there
were plenty of friends to tell him that he drank too much, but no one
dared run the risk of making an enemy of him by telling him that he ate
too much, and so he went on adding to his avoirdupois until Fat Men’s
Club elected him to membership and even called him to office. This
offended him enormously and hurt him deeply, for even after he went far
beyond three hundred pounds, he was unwilling to admit that any one was
justified in calling him fat.
He was proud of his strength which was colossal and of his oratory
which was Lilliputian. But if his biographer is to be trusted, and I
think he is, his speeches were often reflective of common sense, or
perhaps it might better be said of common experience: “This talk of
tainted money is all rot. In all my years of wild spending I never
heard of nobody refusing to take the money of John L. Of all the money
I gave to churches, schools and other charities, I can’t remember a
single cent being flopped back to me because it was earned by biffing
some unlucky chap on the jaw. There is no such thing as tainted
money, and I have handled about every kind there is. The preacher’s
hadn’t ought to object to it. They ought to be on the level in their
professions just like us prize fighters always is. If any of you here
has got what you think is tainted cash in your pockets, just drop it in
my hat before you pass out. I thank you one and all very kindly, yours
truly, John L. Sullivan.” Preachers, moralists, uplifters, will find
food for reflection in these words.
Mr. Dibble’s biography is, as I said in the beginning, interesting and
diverting, but he would have been well advised had some one suggested
to him that he delete the epilogue; it is neither worthy of his
scholarship nor of his sensibility.
* * * * *
James J. Corbett, whose dominant ambition was to make his conduct and
appearance consonant with his sobriquet “Gentleman Jim,” has written
as much of his life as he thinks the public should know and he calls
it _The Roar of the Crowd_. Mr. Corbett learned the ninth letter of
the alphabet first and after he had mastered it he convinced himself
there was small need to bother with the others, and besides he had
no time. He must go into training. He must develop his ego; he must
make it go centripetally and centrifugally with equal facility and
he must develop his muscles and increase his weight so that he might
become “Champion of the World.” These things are not taught in school
so he was expelled and took to fighting in a boxstall of his father’s
livery stable. “I instinctively used my head even at that age.” That
is the burden of Mr. Corbett’s story. He always used his head before,
during and after the fight. Before, to put the fear of Corbett into his
opponent; during, to knock him out and gain his respect, and after, to
win his friendship. After he got his ego, his muscles and his weight
behaving satisfactorily, he cogitated, “I mustn’t be modest; all
successful prize fighters are arrogant, self-satisfied and noisy. I
shall be arrogant and self-satisfied, but never noisy.” After he had
fought several successful battles in livery stables, he knocked out Joe
Choinyski in what Billy Delomey, “the most famous of all seconds,”
said, was the fiercest battle he ever saw. And Corbett whipped him with
one hand! He not only admits it but asserts it. “It is a remarkable
feature of this fight that I fought this whole battle with my left
hand.” Having done this, it was easy to convince himself he could whip
Jake Kilrain with two hands, though his backer, Bud Renaud, who ran
a gambling house in New Orleans and was “a splendid character” could
scarcely be persuaded of the probability of it. But not so Gentleman
Jim. He telegraphed his father, “Will whip Kilrain sure.” He did it,
and then telegraphed, “Won with hands down.” Having gone on so well
with his head, aided by one hand up, and both hands down, he determined
to take on Peter Jackson, the great negro fighter from Australia, “a
very clever man,” said Corbett to a friend, “but no cleverer than I
am.” First he must make the negro angry, then get his goat, then whip
him. That would lead the way to John L. Sullivan. Needless to say he
did all these with decency and despatch. Then he “called” Sullivan. The
latter was wont to restrict his challenge to those whose mothers had
cuckolded their fathers. Naturally there were few takers. One evening
when John and Jim were making a round of the saloons of Chicago, the
latter tiring of the other’s boastfulness said, looking him right
in the eye, “Mr. Sullivan, you are the champion of the world, and
everybody is supposed to think that you can whip any ---- in the
world.... I don’t want you to make that remark in my presence again.”
And from what transpired in the next few seconds, Jim knew he had “got”
his man. So it was comparatively an easy matter to go to Florida and
give him the _coup de grâce_. Every one knows that he did. But he soon
had a change of heart. It saddened him that those thousands who came to
cheer the vanquished remained to fawn on the victor, and he said, “I
will be immodest no longer, I will be magnanimous and just, I really
did not whip Sullivan alone, J. Barleycorn and I did it together,” and
then he went to the Southern Athletic, where he took a glass of
milk. “This incident was wired all over the world and was published in
many newspapers.” The _Christian Science Monitor_ and the _Dearborn
Independent_ took no notice of the event. They might well have done
so without involuting their obvious rôles, for here was the birth of
virtue. John L. reformed soon after and James J. figures that “this
moderation helped me to what success I have had.”
[Illustration: J. J. CORBETT]
_Reprinted from “The Roar of the Crowd”
By permission of G. P. Putnam’s Sons_
Soon Mr. Corbett met Mr. Fitzsimmons, but the less said about that
the better. It facilitated his way to the stage which is where he
really belonged. He deserted it now and then to take on a fighter and
finally met Jeffries, who stopped him plentifully and permanently. That
permitted him to devote himself to his café and to his lines.
The most amazing chapter of this biographical narrative is entitled “My
Actor Friends.” Here Mr. Corbett poses as a diagnostician in the field
of psychiatry. “Come to think of it, I have had the misfortune to be
present when six famous stars have lost their reason.” Men lose their
reason as they do their purses or their umbrellas. They drop through
holes in the pocket or they are left in street cars. Dr. Corbett’s
procedure was original, but I find it difficult to believe he used
his head as much in diagnosticating as in fighting. “What’s all this
talk about your going crazy?” said he to a great comedian already
advanced in general paresis who instantly countered with protestation
of complete sanity. The slang comedian with whom he played pool at
the Lambs during his last rational hour “laughed and kidded” in his
familiar way, but Mr. Corbett distinguished the psychic output from
that of irrationality.
A friend and admirer of Mr. Corbett, a journalist, author and literary
promoter says, in a foreword to the book, that the ex-champion did
the book himself. Few will ask Mr. Anderson to prove it. “Jim said he
wanted it as it is, faults and all.” Jim is the man who got what he
wanted. Did he want a biography, that is the question?
XIV
FICTIONAL BIOGRAPHY
ARIEL, by _André Maurois_.
THE DIVINE LADY, by _E. Barrington_.
THE NIGHTINGALE; A LIFE OF CHOPIN, by _Marjorie Strachey_.
Biography, like history, is often the most diverting and truest of
all fiction; but when it is treated severely, it frequently lacks
entertainment. We stand everything save boredom, even prohibition and
fundamentalism. Some who would not read a book entitled _The Life
of Shelley_ might be tempted by a novel called _Ariel_, which is a
delightfully presented and rigorously accurate biography of a great
poet. M. Maurois has not added an iota of imagination to his book; he
has stated the facts with the order and precision of the _Dictionary
of National Biography_. But he has coloured them with the art of the
novelist and he has done it in pastel tone, with a light hand and
warm heart. It seems the consensus of opinion that the hand has been
too light, but one feels between the written words the power of a
soul without a superior; the fascination of an intelligence liberated
from all bonds, unfortunately at times trammelled by the dictates of
a heart that was not liberated. Reading _Ariel_, some will wish that
Shelley had been a Latin; yet, England of doughty prejudices and dour
Puritanism is the country where such strange individuality phenomena
are frequently displayed. One marvels at this, just as one who knows
the Italian people and their profound scepticism, marvels that they had
St. Francis and St. Catherine.
_Ariel_ has had a vogue and has received praise that would not be
granted the _Dictionary of National Biography_. This indicates the
appetite of humans for facts, when they are sugar-coated, disguised or
made alluring by an attractive envelope. Biography presented in the
shape of fiction is one of the best kinds of biography and the most
interesting kind of fiction. Shelley’s life contains material that
would seem exaggerated if found in a novel, and it reveals facts that
would be denied if they were set forth in fiction. Before it appeared
in English translation, the book took France by storm. It did more than
popularise the name of Shelley, it revived an interest in biography
generally and it added allure to retrospects of the past, the past that
had been so neglected and depreciated by partisans of ego-analysis, and
that has been pushed aside by the psychological novel.
The lives of great men contain an inexhaustible fund of invaluable
material which is at the disposal of the novelist. If he does not
choose to be as frank as M. Maurois has been about Shelley, he may do
what Rose Wilder Lane has done in the novel entitled _He Was a Man_
which is a biography of Jack London. She has artfully disguised her
subject while Maurois presents him to his readers with all the data of
identification.
The charm of _Ariel_ resides in the manner in which the story is told;
in the graceful characterisations; in the sobriety of the style; in the
portraits of the women who made Shelley’s life happy or miserable; and
in the brilliant contrast that the author has drawn between his hero
and Lord Byron. The portrait of the latter, though sketchy, has such
emphasis on the shading that the picture is complete and arresting.
_Ariel_ is not the most typical example of fictional biography, for
though it is an account of Shelley’s life it is so faithful as to leave
little room for imagination. Were it not told adroitly and gracefully,
it would be no more picturesque than a record kept on index-cards.
It creates a strange contrast with _The Divine Lady_, a biography
of Lady Hamilton, true, but stamped with the hall-mark of fiction.
E. Barrington (Mrs. or Miss) had the most romanesque subject at her
disposal when she undertook to popularise the figure of Emma Hamilton,
the Emma of Nelson, whose beauty, grace, talent and intelligence kept
Europe astir for the better part of the late eighteenth century. She
deviated from the strict truth in several instances, but it was to
improve on the truth, and to give to her novel the epic quality that
Lady Hamilton’s biographies had not heretofore displayed. _The Divine
Lady_ is more closely allied to fiction than to history, and since the
author has not only great narrative power and an exquisite style, but
the qualities that permitted Théophile Gautier to make _Mademoiselle de
Maupin_ a masterpiece, and genuine capacity for feeling and emotion,
she presents Lady Hamilton in all her “divinity” with passionate need
of admiration and achievement. Lord Nelson is likewise depicted with
a sure hand. His reputation will suffer from the delineation, for
in addition to the way he treated his wife, there was other conduct
inconsistent with unqualified esteem. His _naïveté_ was the seal of his
doom, and it is allowed to no one to condemn a passion such as that
which united Lady Hamilton and Nelson. Those who have not known it
are not competent to judge--and those who have can find apologies and
excuses for it.
Lady Hamilton’s career was Napoleonic in its display, and, all
proportions guarded, it followed the same cycle. Obscure birth, great
qualities of mind (and in her case of body), rapid and miraculous
ascent to high power and reputation followed by an increase of
appetites and ambitions which blurred the straight path and made both
her and Nelson want more than any human being can stand, a slow but
fatal lowering of their stars, then hatred and scorn of the world, and
finally, for her, death obscure even as birth. In a few years, Emma had
run the gamut of all the ambitions and all the tortures; she had known
the greatest ecstasies of love and happiness and the lowest and
most degrading debauches; she had dispensed her favours and received
praises; she had scrubbed kitchens and been worshipped by Queens and
Kings; she had allowed a boor to make a public exhibition of her
charms, and she had sneered at the homage of a monarch.
[Illustration: LADY HAMILTON AS CIRCE]
_From “The Divine Lady,” by E. Barrington
Courtesy of Dodd, Mead & Co._
E. Barrington has made Lady Hamilton come to life once more in the
pages of her novel; she has caught her charm and her personality,
understood her perfections and vices, and she has succeeded even in
so grading her praise and disparagement that the reader is constantly
aware of the scullery-maid masquerading as ambassadress, and of the
demi-goddess hidden in the bosom of the protected _fille de joie_.
Her real place was with the lowly, and she was never more at home
than when she could shed her acquired English and her elegant manners
and indulge in the language and activities that she had loved in her
youth. E. Barrington has made all this clear, and she has given each
startling contradiction in the make-up of the Divine Lady its proper
emphasis--with the result that we wonder at such whims of nature, at
such diversity of characteristics in the same person, without ever
doubting the veracity of the author. It seems scarcely plausible
that Lady Hamilton should have been as adaptable and sensitive to
environment as she appears to have been--that she should have loved
Greville with the loyalty and patient submission which she displayed,
that she should have been so faithful and loving to Lord Hamilton
until she met Nelson, and that she should have felt for the latter the
irresistible passion which was the cause of her ruin. We marvel at the
union of talents that occurred in her; the aristocracy of her singing
voice, the vulgarity of her speaking voice, her mastery of wild horses
and her inborn gift for the terpsichorean arts, her tact and diplomacy,
and all the qualities which made her at the same time a divine lady and
a prostitute.
Her most extraordinary gift was her power to feel the rôle she had to
play in order to win hearts; and the diversity of her accomplishments
made such conquest easy for her. She won hearts, and she lost hearts,
but when we turn the last pages of the book, we have only admiration
for the Lady who inspired Nelson, and carried the renown of her country
beyond its confines at a time when international affairs were nearly as
muddled as they are a hundred years after her death.
_The Divine Lady_ is the kind of biography which makes one care more
for fiction--and the sort of fiction which makes one wonder why
novelists do not write more about historical characters whose lives and
personalities often surpass anything that imagination could dictate.
* * * * *
Miss Marjorie Strachey has written the latest word in the line of
fictional biography: _The Nightingale; A Life of Chopin_. She has
blended the facts of his life with the romance of fiction. By a series
of sketches, of fugitive evocations, she has added to the permanency of
Chopin as a man, and especially as an artist. She has made his genius
permeate his actions, and she has endowed him with the dream-qualities
of poetry and the realised qualities of practical life. Chopin is no
longer an unapproachable genius; he is life itself seen through the
veil of romance.
Miss Strachey has not done for her hero what E. Barrington did for
Lady Hamilton; she has not called attention to his “amours,” not even
the one with George Sand; her task lay, not in giving us the emotional
understanding of the musician, but in creating a true portrait
of him. This she did by interweaving his correspondence with his
conversations; his friends with his surroundings. They all form part
of the background on which he shines all the more brilliantly that it
is never exaggerated, and his life was enough of a romance to impart
to the biography its qualities of ethereal dream without addition or
distortion of facts on the part of the biographer.
_The Nightingale_ is more to be praised for what it does not say than
for what it says. It shows restraint, dignity and poise, which are the
accompaniment necessary to a biography of Chopin.
XV
MISCELLANEOUS
EVERYWHERE, THE MEMOIRS OF AN EXPLORER,
by _A. Henry Savage Landor_.
WHAT THE BUTLER WINKED AT, by _Eric Horne_.
The title of this book should be _Everywhere, Everything, Everybody_,
by I. K. It-All. When Mr. Landor was two years old, he fell through the
air twenty feet and landed on his head. His head swelled, and later he
had epileptoid attacks. The latter forsook him, the former remained. If
one were to estimate him from his last book, one would have to rate him
the vainest author in the world, the world which still numbers Mr. Bok
and Mr. Ford Madox Ford.
Explorer, painter, lecturer, inventor, writer--and supreme in all!
There can be no doubt about it; he says it and calls witnesses from
kings to savages, from queens to chorus girls, to prove it. Garibaldi
caressed him, Marchand of Fashoda embraced him, Wilbur Wright envied
and feared him, d’Annunzio acknowledged that his book on Tibet inspired
_Piu Che l’Amore_, the Cuirassiers of Victor Emmanuel III presented
arms when he went to call on the King, Pope Pius IX said to him: “You
are my beloved son”--and we have no doubt that he was very proud of
him--Roosevelt shouted “Thank God” when he saw him in the reception
room of the White House, and Maude Adams confided to him her great
ambition, which was, “like all American visitors, to be taken to lunch
at the Cheshire Cheese.” There need be no further curiosity about the
retirement from the stage of this gifted actress at the height of her
career; her great ambition was realised. All London worth knowing went
to see Landor’s paintings and stayed to praise them; he was the first
man to enter Pekin in the Boxer outbreak and the last messenger to get
through Antwerp in the Great War; and he alone knows all the secrets of
Tibet and its monasteries. He is strong and brave. He walked a Scotch
gillie “who passed as the greatest walker in the world” off his legs,
while his own remained so fit that later he was able to dangle them
over a precipice six thousand five hundred feet high. In his spare
moments from painting, exploring, inventing, and orienting, he gave
lessons in courage to the lions in Africa. He is the man who has “run
all possible risks from nature and human beings,” and his motto has
ever been “Death or no death, we plunge once more into the unknown.”
Once only this admirable Crichton was stumped, and the experience
shows how easy it is to trip a god when he is off guard. Once the
house in which he was sleeping in London took fire. He was clad in his
blue kimono which bore three huge white fishes on its surface. The
temperature was twelve degrees below zero and the icy winds did blow.
He watched the efforts of the fire-fighters “with the utmost concern
and in attempting to keep the kimono well round me, as there were
ladies present, the longitudinal seam behind, which had deteriorated
in the laundry, suddenly split from head to foot. This compelled
me to remain with my back against a wall until it would please the
conflagration to stop.” A wholly unnecessary tarry or turn on the part
of Mr. Landor. There probably is not a lady in his native land, or yet
even in the whole world, who would not admire him from the soles of his
feet to the top of his head.
Mr. A. H. Savage Landor is a modest violet and the various photographs
of himself which adorn his book testify it. But the world is in his
debt; he discovered General Pershing. When we erect a national monument
to our great General, it is to be hoped that we shall not neglect his
discoverer. In the meantime he is handed the immodesty medal.
* * * * *
The refrain of a song popular a few years ago was “Everybody’s doing
it....” Were it sung to-day, “it” would mean writing biography. It is
a good sign. The more we learn about others, the less repulsive is
our thought, the less enigmatic our conduct. We should particularly
encourage those who see us full-face and at short range, like valets,
maids, nurses, secretaries, doctors, to write about us. M. Brousson
throws more light on Anatole France’s personality than everything that
has been written about him.
If _What the Butler Winked At_ was not written by a butler, the author
had butler ancestors. Eric Horne does what he set out to do and he
states his thesis clearly in the first sentence:
“Now that old England is cracking up, as far as
the Nobility is concerned, who are selling their
estates, castles and large houses, which are being
turned into schools, museums, hospitals, homes for
weak-minded--things entirely different from what they
were built for--it seems a pity that the old usages and
traditions of gentlemen’s service should die with the old
places, where so many high jinks and junketings have been
carried on in the old days, now gone for ever.”
He gives a picture of the “gentry” that is of real value. But the
sentence quoted is more than sufficient cause for digression. It is
a marvel. Who but a butler could be so ample and so involved. It is
a fair sample of the book in many ways. The man can’t write any more
than a babbling child, but he does it all so unconsciously and yet so
purposefully that he arrives somehow. He gets things said--plenty of
them, and that is more than many professional writers do.
His descriptions of the life he knows are real, but more real than
anything else is Eric Horne. He does not try to “reveal himself,” but
his book is a genuine self-revelation--or perhaps a dead give-away.
Probably this man knows more of the form of living than most Americans
dream of--no slight slip in etiquette would have evaded his trained
eye. And yet if there is such a thing as a “middle class” mind, he has
it. Nothing could have made him equal to an exalted position in the
world. Not that he had not brains; he had, and real executive ability,
but it was the texture of his thinking which marked him for his job.
You can’t make chiffon from a meal sack.
Eric Horne was probably what generations of service and of strong class
distinction made him. He was cast in a butler mould. No one thought of
him in any other way. He himself did not aspire very high or long. The
mould was too confining to permit of much moving around. In a thousand
ways the quality of his mind is revealed. His jokes are cheap and flat
and obvious. They are decidedly “back door” humour. He has absolutely
no continuity of thought. He lived between door bells, telephones,
electric buzzers. He thinks that way--jumps all over the place. He
has no sense of getting to the point; he has to pack his master’s
dress clothes first and instruct the under footman. The book shows a
continuous dissatisfaction with the manner of living that the “gentry”
imposed upon their servitors. At the same time, it displays a scorn
of the modern democracy of England. The butler can not think through
his problem or even at it. He knows he does not like them as they
are, but can not reconcile himself to a change. It is all curiously
contradictory, like the thinking of a child.
Yet the Butler is no child. He has a kind of precocious astuteness,
all out of harmony with the general fibre of his mind. He is keen and
clever at times in his writing, though one wonders if he knows it. His
descriptions are enviable. This about a fellow butler: “A ‛mongrel’
I called him. We had to be very careful not to let him see or hear
anything we did not wish to go farther. He put me in mind of a fellow
behind a draper’s counter who measures out yards of elastic.” This last
sentence is as vivid as Sherwood Anderson, only Anderson would have
done it with conscious art; with Eric Horne it was spontaneous.
The book is valuable as a revelation of an individual, but more
valuable as the show-up of an aspect of society largely neglected.
It is like seeing the reverse side of the life that Wells, or even
Galsworthy, writes of. The novel begins; the butler is bringing in the
electric toaster. The mistress enters in an elaborate breakfast costume
and a “pet.” But instead of remaining in her presence, you follow the
butler into the pantry. That is new, and not altogether pleasant. It
is cramped back there. Beds are “let down” in the pantry and there is
not too much freshness about the atmosphere. The cook quarrels with
the housekeeper; the housekeeper spies on the maids. The butler lords
it over the footmen; the footmen cuff the grooms. But they like each
other. They have their dinners and dances where social barriers are
even more strict than among the “gentry.” Living is good--wine is
plenty--if you have the keys.
Life here is quite like that on the other side of the picture, save
that you have no subtleties, no nerves, no intrigues. Everything is out
in the open, static, with a fist fight or so. At the same time there is
a certain style to it. Things must be done properly. The silver is put
in order--if you have to blister your hands--not because you are afraid
of “the sack,” but because of respect for things as they should be and
for the traditions of the house. There is a curious infiltration of
champagne somewhat mixed with dishwater.
As to the pictures of the “gentry,” they are real, and at times
touching. But they have been done before. We know the “gentry” better
than we do their servants. The butler has, until Eric Horne spoke,
been a sphinx to the world at large, so much so that one has been many
times tempted to punch him to see if he is real. He _is_, and once
having broken the traditional silence there is no stopping him. Words
fall over themselves in their haste to get written. This reminds him
of that, which has no connection with what came before it or what is
to follow. The butler is avenged! He has said his say. Let the gentry
writhe if they will, or smile if they can. The butler takes a long
breath--his first--he pops the gold buttons off his braided waistcoat.
Let them roll!
XVI
THE LADIES
MADAMA RÉCAMIER ET SES AMIS, by _Edouard Herriot_.
MY PORTION, by _Rebekah Kohut_.
NOON, by _Kathleen Norris_.
A WOMAN OF FIFTY, by _Rheta Childe Dorr_.
THE MOST FAMOUS BEAUTY OF CHINA, YANG KUEI-FEI,
by _Shu-Chiung_.
Few periods of French History have tempted the pens of biographers and
historians more than that of the Directoire. It was then that political
and literary passions clashed and in the effort to reconcile and unite
them, expression of ideas was encouraged; _salons_ were formed where
the craft of literature, art and statesmanship could be discussed;
and freedom of speech ceased to be a myth. Society was no longer
composed of the exclusive aristocracy; personal merit, intelligence
and wit were now the passports for the man--and charm, vivacity,
culture and kindness for the woman. All of them strove to be numbered
among the élite of the fastidious _salons_. Those who succeeded have
their names permanently written in the annals of the period. Many of
them contributed enormously to the development and dissemination of
literature among the upper middle class in France, and their influence
is still felt among critics and writers. Only two generations separate
us from them, and if Madame Récamier, Madame de Staël and Benjamin
Constant seem like figures of another world, remote and dimmed, their
younger contemporaries like Sainte-Beuve and Napoléon III belong to
modern times. It is not the distance of the Directoire that makes it
part of historical tradition; it is the extraordinary change that
has taken place in manners, in customs and in society, since then.
[Illustration: Mme. RÉCAMIER]
Of all the names that come to mind when the time of the Directoire
and the years following it are mentioned, none carries so much charm,
mystery, fascination and meaning as that of Juliette Récamier. She
personifies the early nineteenth century and as years go by motives
become clearer, and understanding easier; as the vista of time improves
judgment, biographers of Madame Récamier and her circle add to our
knowledge and to our appreciation of the period.
The latest of these is Edouard Herriot, recently Prime Minister of
France, a man of classical education, who attaches much importance
to culture and who has always shown interest in literature. _Madame
Récamier and Her Friends_ testifies to his quality. The mere mention
of her name suggests a world of wit, of beauty, of romance and of
achievement. M. Herriot has neglected none of the facets of her charm.
Indeed he dwells upon them at length; yet he gives to the story of her
life more significance than a mere record of herself; it reveals the
world of the early nineteenth century, and it is through this world
that we contemplate and admire his heroine.
As a study of character, M. Herriot’s attempt is not very successful.
He has failed to make live one of the most living creatures of history;
he has set up a statue which no Pygmalion could call to womanhood;
he has modelled the effigy of a woman who remains cold and lifeless
despite ample evidence of swarming life within. His biography is
neither exclusively descriptive nor analytical. He has followed
narrative order, and arranged his facts chronologically, but when it
is necessary to the understanding of the heroine, he does not hesitate
to anticipate actual events or to pass judgment on later actions.
Obviously M. Herriot’s effort was to make Madame Récamier part of a
whole; her friends, especially toward the latter part of the book, take
the floor constantly and leave her out of our sight and away from our
thought. If the author had succeeded in permeating his studies of her
followers with her influence; if he had left her enough power to be
felt throughout the book, whether or not he was dealing with Madame
Récamier herself, his study would have been more successful. But, not
himself inspired by her charm, viewing the whole period cold-bloodedly
and critically, he has been unable to convey Madame Récamier to his
readers. The advantage of such analytical examination is that it
facilitates judgment.
The great merit of M. Herriot’s book is its judiciality; he often
supports his own conclusions by those of others, qualified and sincere.
Indeed, this is one of M. Herriot’s most distinguishing traits.
Whenever opinions differ, when historians and biographers do not agree,
and when interpretation depends upon personal reactions, the author
effaces himself and allows events and facts to speak for themselves.
The final word has not yet been said of the controversies that were
waged in France after Madame Récamier first dazzled _le monde_, and
M. Herriot does not propose to say it. He has set up the period of
the Révolution, of the Directoire, the tentative monarchy, the Empire
and second monarchy clearly, concisely, specifically. His style is
substantial, unadorned and fluent.
A question of the greatest controversy has always been the
non-conjugality of the Récamiers. M. Herriot devotes a fifth of his
book to discussion of the reasons that have been suggested to explain
it. He calls in physicians and psychologists to bear witness and pass
judgment; he keeps his ears opened to gossip and to malicious chatter;
and he keeps an eye out for any indiscretion behind the curtains of
the _alcôve_, news of which might have trickled through the walls of
time. Discussions of personal relations between husband and wife,
post-mortem investigations and attempts at unveiling the mysteries that
were savagely guarded in life by their participants are in doubtful
taste. M. Herriot seems to uphold the thesis that Madame Récamier was
her husband’s daughter--an opinion which is defendable since he defends
it--but which is too monstrous to be advanced without irrefutable
proofs. The idea does not seem to repel him, and he finds explanations
and apologies for it. The few documents which are left that tell us how
they lived under the same roof he interprets as he chooses. Yet, there
is no suggestion of scandal; he is no bearer of oil to throw upon the
smouldering embers of her marital fire; he gives the results of his
efforts to elicit testimony, to obtain evidence and to submit it to
the world’s jury. All that can be said of the situation which existed
between Récamier and his wife was that, after all, it was their affair.
The fact that they had no conjugal relation may have been due to her
physical condition, or to his, or the result of mutual agreement.
The only right the biographer would have had to dwell at length on
it would be if it had had such bearing on the life of his heroine
that it might be taken as the fulcrum of her reactions and behaviour.
It did not, in Madame Récamier’s case, despite M. Herriot’s comment
that, “perhaps from this medley of abnormal circumstances in which she
had been placed, there remained in her suspicion, a leaning toward
discouragement, fear of love, a sort of resigned serenity, and the
first germ of the _coquetterie_ for which she was so often reproached
by those who did not understand its causes.”
She was no more a coquette than any woman would have been in her
position. She was not a beauty, but her charm and her finesse were such
as to conquer hearts more effectively than any Juno might have done.
She had intellectual powers which raised her far above her sex together
with an unusual capacity for fidelity, tenderness and sympathy; she
hesitated to wound her friends or to refuse them anything in her power
and thus she gave permanency to the affection her charm engendered.
She was wealthy, sought after and beloved; but her chief asset was
goodness. Her admirers and friends, indeed all she admitted to her
heart, were unanimous in praising her goodness, her tireless devotion
to their pleasures, her constant preoccupation with their pains.
M. Herriot is at his best when he discusses Madame de Staël’s influence
over her young friend Juliette. The ex-Premier is by nature and
experience better fitted to understand Madame de Staël than Madame
Récamier. Her political ideas were akin to his; her mind had many
masculine traits, her culture was deep; her talent admitted; her
influence sought. She supplies most of the background of the book, and
many of the anecdotes with which fortunately the book is sparingly
padded.
Now and then M. Herriot paints himself in the picture and all too
rarely expresses his ideas of life and human nature. We like to be
assured that “Women who are pretty and who can not but know it are
neither flighty nor fanciful; they are always self-contained; a
prudent reserve accompanies them even in their weaknesses, which are
never unconscious.” When he defends Madame Récamier against possible
criticisms, he admits that nowhere in her history is there anything
that could be interpreted as unworthy of her situation, or that would
justify her reputation as a woman given to intrigue. It can not be
denied that she opposed at first to the attacks of her admirers a
subtle and world-wise fencing; “but men have perhaps an unjustified
tendency to label ‛_coquetterie_’ all that which, in a woman, obstacles
their pride, or curbs realisation of their desires.”
Characterisations of the heroine are few, and it is obvious that her
latest biographer has not sought to make her stand out particularly
among her contemporaries. But she does, despite all; she was the
shining light around which all the moths swarmed, dazzled by its
brilliancy. Most of the characterisations are quotations from
contemporary authors, particularly Benjamin Constant, who portrayed
a side of Juliette which not all her admirers knew. Speaking of her
conduct toward Lucien Bonaparte, he writes, “She was disturbed by the
unhappiness she created, angry at her own disturbance, reviving hope
unconsciously by the sole aid of her pity, and destroying it by her
carelessness as soon as she had appeased the suffering that her passing
pity had engendered.” Chateaubriand felt the truth here expressed and
made use of most of Benjamin Constant’s material regarding Madame
Récamier, but passed over this particular characterisation of the woman
he had loved. Sainte-Beuve, far-sighted as he was and gifted with
vision, expressed the same idea: “Lucien loves; he is not spurned, yet
he will never be accepted. There is the nuance. It will be the same
with all the men who will rush to her, and with all those that will
follow.... She would have liked to remain in _April_, always.”
M. Herriot first modelled his heroine and after pedestalling her,
proceeded to walk around his statue and survey it. He remodelled here,
shortened there, smoothed this surface and softened that line. He
treated it as photographers treat their plates. By giving it ample
dimension, he has called attention more to the large lines than to
the details. When he finished it he set it up in a vast plaza. This
bigness of scope enabled him to group about her, as a rich background,
the figures of those who were attached to her chariot with ribands
of love and of admiration. The list of them is long; they were all
intellectuals. Madame Récamier, though kind to every one, never
attracted fools or bores, and her salon, which was the _chambre
d’accouchée_ of romantic literature, never sheltered a shallow mind, a
cold heart or an uninteresting soul.
Only once was Juliette really so consumed with love that she hoped a
divorce would free her--to marry Prince Augustus. But there again her
compassionate heart took pity on a husband who had lost his fortune
and who, despite many gallant adventures, harboured tender feelings
for her. Since she could not have Prince Augustus, she would have no
one; and from the episode of Benjamin Constant and of Ballanche, whose
love was most pathetic and devoted, to that of Chateaubriand, we see
Madame Récamier, anxious to please, glad to be able to do it, avid of
admiration which was directed to her mind more than to her body, and
willing to make any sacrifice to insure the success of a friend, the
accomplishment of a plan, the perpetuation of an idea.
The imprisonment of Madame Récamier, during the few days when she was
suspected of plotting against the safety of the State, recalls other
names whose possessors did not escape as gracefully as she did, but
M. Herriot does not allow himself to be distracted. He is telling the
story of Madame Récamier and her friends, and he is not hypnotised by
the high spots of the tragedy. Neither discursive nor willing to pass
judgment, he is the impartial historian, the unprejudiced biographer.
That he admires and loves Madame Récamier there can be no doubt, but
that is unavoidable, and his love is neither blind nor impetuous; it is
a reasoned love, but it is not so engrossing as to exclude criticism
and interpretation.
The merit of _Madame Récamier and Her Friends_ is founded in the
soundness of its conception and the brevity of the narrative. There
is repetition neither of words nor of effects. Few expressions could
be deleted without taking something from the story. It neither offers
suggestions nor makes startling discoveries regarding Madame Récamier.
To write of Madame Récamier in her own spirit and in that of her time
(which she was so influential in moulding) requires more graciousness
than M. Herriot gives; it needs less matter-of-fact handling, and it
should be softened by a great deal of poetry. Others have so described
her and the pictures that they made reveal her idealistically. M.
Herriot deals more with the matter than with the spirit, and what his
biography lacks in poetry it makes up in reality.
The end of the book, which tells in detail of the death of
Chateaubriand, is well rendered. Though filled with emotion, it does
not overflow. Madame Récamier had moved into his apartment that she
might be near him at the end. Blind and old, she showed herself equal
to the demand that was made on her strength and courage; “she was
constantly at the bedside of the dying man who seemed to be dragged for
some time out of his drowsiness by the beautiful days of June. He was
always silent. He could speak no longer; Madame Récamier could see no
longer.”
On the day of his death, “every time Madame Récamier, overwhelmed with
sadness, left the room, he followed her with his eyes, without calling
to her, but with a look of anguish in which was painted the fear of
never seeing her again. She was there at the last minute.”
Her death is related with the same simplicity, but the narrative has a
touch of the grandiose. M. Herriot was wisely counselled to undertake
the biography of Madame Récamier, and his wisdom was to hear and obey.
* * * * *
Rebekah Kohut, a Hungarian Jewess who has lived all her life in America
and who has been closely identified with the Jewish intelligentsia
of this country, believes that she has a story to tell, and that
she should chronicle the emergence of the American Jewess into the
communal life of the country. She has a story; it is an interesting
one and she tells it convincingly. _My Portion_ is the expression of a
personality that has had firm contacts with varied currents of a full
and active life. The daughter of a rabbi of liberal views and the wife
of another, a distinguished scholar, Mrs. Kohut is widely known to her
co-religionists as a woman of heart and determination.
Her story is not a conscious attempt to analyse, dissect, propound,
or in any way enlarge upon the “inner workings” of the intellectual
and emotional elements that go to make the individual. A sentence at
the end of the book conveys the spirit of the writing: “As I turn
the leaves of the past, I find myself growing as interested as though
some one in a book, _not myself_, were the active participant.”
Marie Bashkirtseff would hardly have said that. She would have been
interested because it _was_ herself. Mrs. Dorr would not have said
it, and her reason would have been much the same, though she would
have expressed it differently. Mrs. Kohut’s book is a self-forgetting
autobiography.
Her account of her husband’s life is also the revelation of a
personality. This man lives before us, both he and his work, the _Aruch
Completum_. Of this Mrs. Kohut writes:
“... when I looked forward to the problems of married
life, I counted my future charges as a husband and eight
children. Soon I learned I should have counted them as a
husband, the _Aruch Completum_, and eight other children.
The oldest daughter called the Aruch her oldest brother,
and pretended to be jealous of it. Certainly it received
all the consideration and preference of the traditional
first-born. The rest of us at certain times felt our
secondary importance.”
And Mrs. Kohut was born amid the exactions of scholarship--this was no
amateur’s point of view!
In her account of her husband’s life and work the writer reveals
herself no less than in the parts more directly autobiographical. Here
lay her deepest concerns and interests. As he came first during the
years of her marriage, so he is the most prominent feature of her book.
_My Portion_ is so sincere, straightforward, and genuine that one is
sure the glimpses one gets beneath the surface are true ones. A strong,
active personality pervades every page. You get the revelation, not by
a concentrated, but rather by a pleasantly diffused, light. Mrs. Kohut
sums herself up very clearly in her last sentence:
“For a moment, I stop there and say: ‛That’s all. That
has been my portion.’ But no, life holds even more, and
in that more it has been my portion to share, too. Life,
above all, is a going on, a never resting. And I see
myself always going on, never pausing in the present,
always restless, always straining forward for something
that has not been but should be.”
Is such a book of service to mankind? Decidedly yes. To the
unprejudiced it is a valuable picture of an ever-interesting people.
To the prejudiced it can not fail to bring a feeling of respect by its
dignity and direct dealing. Mrs. Kohut’s early struggle (was it worth
while to be a Jew, frankly and openly, to face social ostracism and
hatred) and her very definite stand can not fail to awaken admiration.
She was born a Jewess, and took her place in the world as a power for
the Jews. She did it very largely for religious reasons. The religious
genius of her people was too strong, too vital, to be abandoned,
whatever the cost. She gives an insight into the religious aspirations
of such men as her father and her husband that is almost Biblical in
its qualities.
Her picture of the family life of the finest Jewish types is eminently
worth while, did the book contain nothing else. They worked for and
with one another despite hardships and varied fates. The tribe still
feels its call and its power in the response to that call. All through
the book one is made to feel a spirit which must have come out very
clearly in one of Mrs. Kohut’s talks. The quotation is long, but it
seems to strike the keynote of the book:
“Later I was asked to address the pupils of the
fashionable and exclusive Ely School. I could see that
these lovely girl pupils giggled when I was presented as
a Jewess. I was determined to have my revenge, and in my
talk made them so homesick that they wept. Then I told
them part of Heine’s _Princess Sabbath_ and the _Rabbi of
Bacharach_, in which the ghetto Jew carries the burden
typical of his race through the ages. On Sabbath eve,
returning from the synagogue and entering his little
home, he finds the table set with snowy cloth and lighted
candles and the Sabbath bread, and becomes transformed,
not only in figure, but in face. The bowed shoulders
straighten, light enters his eyes. Is he not then a
Prince of Israel, and is not his home a palace? The girls
giggled no more at the mention of ‛Jew’.”
What Mrs. Kohut did for those pupils she will do for her readers: give
them a better understanding of the Jews and therefore greater respect.
And aside from the question of race, the book is of real value because
of the wholesome attitude toward life that it constantly presents. It
is an oasis amid the “glowing sands” of erotic literature, and affected
scribbling where to-day we wander.
* * * * *
Of all the persons who have succeeded in attaining fame, wealth and
happiness and who remember with kindliness their years of struggle,
obscurity, poverty and misery, few harbour such tenderness in their
hearts for their hard years of labour as Kathleen Norris shows in
_Noon_, a little autobiographical sketch. It might as well be the
story of all those she has loved and who have contributed to her
self-fulfilment. They are numerous and exceptional--are they perhaps
embellished and polished by love? Have they perhaps taken on a new
aspect with the help of years? Were they really as worthy of admiration
and as near perfection as Kathleen Norris makes them? We have no way of
knowing, but we can make no mistake about one thing: the mother-theme
is the predominant idea throughout the book. It is constantly repeated
with different nuances and cadenzas, but it throbs with life and
reality. The picture Kathleen Norris draws of her own youth reminds the
reader of Miss Louisa Alcott’s _Little Women_. The atmosphere of the
household is not soon forgotten.
They, Mrs. Norris and her husband, suffered the inevitable torments
of young people who come to New York, with twenty-five dollars a week
for all support, and who expect to take the city by storm and climb to
the top of the literary ladder. The way they did it was made easy and
beautiful through love, understanding, good friends, a little planning,
much effort and mutual concessions. Luck was not always with them,
but Kathleen Norris had the good heart not to be discouraged, and she
refused to believe that success was not a natural sequence of work. She
had much to be thankful for, and she knew it.
_Noon_ may not display either genius or much profundity, but it is like
a ray of sunshine; it brightens up a life that too many are tempted to
find futile and unjust and it leaves no room for pessimism.
* * * * *
Mrs. Dorr’s _A Woman of Fifty_ is about as introspective as an account
of a very active king in a chess game might be. It is, in truth, an
account of feminism poured into an autobiographical mould by a clever
reader of the trend of the day toward that form of literature. There
is much in it that is personal, no doubt, but certainly the motive is
in the direction of a “movement” rather than toward an analysis of
individual reactions to that movement. If Mrs. Dorr’s purpose had been
unmixed self-revelation, I have the feeling she would have done it in
a more up-to-the-moment manner; in the hair-splitting, soul-dissecting
fashion of the hour.
As biography, I don’t think it holds water. As a summing up of the
struggle of women toward recognition as entities, it is vigorous,
rather dashing, well put together with a perception of essentials, and
valuable as a record.
The writer becomes more likeable as the book progresses, but the
reader is satisfied that fate has not made his and her paths cross.
At times, he wishes she would either get out of the picture or add
something vital to it. She has made a “go,” but at the same time, in
trying to write a double header, a so-called personal narrative with
a purpose that is far from personal, she has now and then failed; the
individual gets in the way of the subject up for discussion--feminism.
But the book is readable and this is a quality of which not all
biographies can boast.
* * * * *
Chinese ladies have had their day in literature. They have served the
same purpose as European women in building or destroying Empires when
such existed. Reading about them, we do not anticipate that we shall
deepen our knowledge of personality, but we know that we shall be
convinced anew of the potency of pulchritude; of the inconstancy of man.
Yang Kuei-Fei, who lived in the eighth century, was one of a quartette
of famous beauties whose tradition is still alive in the Celestial
Empire; one was known for her beauty, another for her patriotism; a
third for her virtue, but Yang Kuei-Fei, who was the most beautiful of
all, is known to fame for her artfulness. She held, in her lily-white
hand, the fate of the Empire, and, aided by her beauty and her
ambition, she climbed to the high position of Emperor’s favourite
concubine. That she was not successful in steering the ship of state
into a safe harbour may have been partly due to woman’s alleged and
accepted incapacity in political matters--but the story of her life as
told by Mrs. Shu-Chiung shows plainly that it was largely due to her
falling in love with a young Tartar. The Emperor loved her--and his
love was of the sort that blinds its victims so completely as to make
them absurdly credulous--but he was unable to resist the charm of his
former favourite and of the sister of Yang Kuei-Fei. Yang Kuei-Fei
was in love with the Emperor, because he was Emperor, and incapable
of withstanding the ardent love of the Tartar. Orgies and debauches
culminated in tragedy, downfall and death--but as in all Chinese
stories there must be a tenuous element of dream, of etherealness, of
mysticalness--and it relieves the horror of the story and its pathos.
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RECOLLECTIONS OF A HAPPY LIFE
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A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER
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THE LIFE OF GLADSTONE
John Morley. _The Macmillan Company_
MY LIFE
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MY LIFE FOR LABOR
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THE MAN OF TO-MORROW
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FROM IMMIGRANT TO INVENTOR
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THE STORY OF MY LIFE
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THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK RUTHERFORD
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FATHER AND SON
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WILLARD STRAIGHT
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HENRY CABOT LODGE
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THE TRUE STORY OF WOODROW WILSON
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THE ROYAL MARTYR, A NEW STUDY OF THE LIFE OF KING CHARLES I
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INDEX
Adams, Henry, 51, 268.
_Adventure of Living, The_, John St. Loe Strachey, 200.
_Agricola_, Tacitus, 17.
Alcott, Louisa, 326.
_A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu_, Marcel Proust, 50.
_Alexander the Great_, Quintus Curtius, 17.
_Alps and Sanctuaries_, Samuel Butler, 41.
_Ambassadors, The_, Henry James, 91.
_Americanisation of Edward Bok, The_, Edward W. Bok, 190.
Amiel, Henri Frederic, 47.
_Amiel’s Journal_, Mrs. Humphry Ward, 47.
_Anatole France à la Béchellerie_, Marcel Le Goff, 99, 106.
_Anatole France and His Circle_, Paul Gsell, 99, 105.
_Anatole France en Pantoufles_, Jean-Jacques Brousson, 105.
_Anatole France Himself_, Jean-Jacques Brousson, 99, 103.
_Anatole France, the Man, and His Work_, J. Lewis May, 99, 101.
_Ancestry of Abraham Lincoln, The_, Lea and Hutchinson, 162.
Anderson, Sherwood, 63.
Antoine, André, 32.
_Ariel_, André Maurois, 31, 300.
Arnold, Matthew, 108.
_Arrowsmith_, Sinclair Lewis, 59.
Arthur, Sir George, 179.
Asquith, Margot, 59.
Augustine, St., 57.
_Autobiography_, Mark Rutherford, 59.
_Autobiography of a Mind, The_, W. J. Dawson, 202, 206.
_Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin_, 58.
_Autobiography of Harriet Martineau_, 55.
_Autobiography of Samuel Gompers_, 59.
_Autumnal, The_, John Donne, 134.
Aymot, Jacques, 18.
Balfour, Graham, 142.
Barbellion, W. N. P., 46, 134.
Barrie, James, 235.
Barrington, E., 300. 302.
Barton, William E., 161, 242, 259.
Bashkirtseff, Marie, 47, 324.
Bazalgette, Léon, 63, 80.
Benson, Stella, 94.
Berlioz, Hector, 54.
_Bernard Shaw_, Edward Shanks, 40.
Bertrand, Louis, 32.
_Between the Old World and the New_, Miss M. P. Willocks, 39.
Bishop, Joseph B., 266, 274.
Blackwood, Algernon, 59.
Blake, William, 154.
Bok, Edward W., 188, 190, 255.
_Book of American Negro Poetry, The_, James Weldon Johnson, 220.
Bordeux, Jeanne, 225.
Boswell, James, 22, 25, 44.
Brennecke, Ernest, Jr., 38.
_Brigham Young_, M. R. Werner, 242, 251.
_British Poets_, Thomas Campbell, 136.
Brooks, Van Wyck, 63, 80, 89.
_Broom_, Alfred Kreymborg, 152.
Brousson, Jean-Jacques, 99, 103.
Brown, Horatio F., 28.
Brown, Ivor, 40.
Brown, John, 79.
Browne, Sir Thomas, 42.
Browning, Orville, 260.
Bruce, Harold, 147, 154.
Burke, Thomas, 99, 136.
_Burke_, Lord Morley, 29.
Butler, Samuel, 41.
Byron, Lord, 26.
Campbell, Thomas, 136.
Campbell, Mrs. Olwen, 27.
Carlyle, Thomas, 191.
Carnegie, Andrew, 51.
_Casanova_, Maurice Rostand, 32.
Cellini, Benvenuto, 28, 43.
_Chance_, Joseph Conrad, 125.
Channing, William Ellery, 87.
Charnwood, Lord, 24, 260, 265.
Chateaubriand, 114.
_Chita_, Lafcadio Hearn, 70.
Clémenceau, Georges, 188.
Cocteau, Jean, 152.
Cody, Sherwin, 147, 168.
Cohan, George, 225, 235.
Coit, Charles Wheeler, 27.
Coleridge, Hartley, 92.
_Confessions_, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 22, 47.
_Confessions_, Leo Tolstoi, 57.
_Confessions of St. Augustine_, 57, 134.
Conrad, Joseph, 94.
Corbett, James J., 291, 295.
Coulon, Maurice, 177.
Crane, Dr. Frank, 193, 202.
Crane, Stephen, 122.
_Cromwell_, Lord Morley, 29.
Cronwright-Schreiner, S. C., 19, 43.
Cushing, Harvey, 24, 277.
Damrosch, Walter, 213.
Darwin, Charles, 57.
Davis, J. J., 59.
Dawson, W. J., 202, 206.
Delahaye, Ernest, 177.
Descaves, Lucien, 32.
Detaller, Roger, 59.
Dibble, R. F., 291.
_Divine Lady, The_, E. Barrington, 31, 300, 302.
Donne, John, 129.
_Don Quixote_, Cervantes, 206.
Dorr, Rheta Childe, 314, 327.
_Early Life of Mark Rutherford_, 60.
_Edgar A. Poe, a Psychopathic Study_, Dr. John W. Robertson, 147, 170.
_Education of Henry Adams, The_, Henry Adams, 51.
Egan, Maurice Francis, 53.
_Eleonora Duse_, Jeanne Bordeux, 225.
_Eleonora Duse_, Edouard Schneider, 225.
_Elegies_, John Donne, 129.
_Episodes Before Thirty_, Algernon Blackwood, 59.
_Essay in Criticism_, Robert Lynd, 69.
_Essay on Shelley_, Francis Thompson, 127.
_Everywhere_, A. Henry Savage Landor, 59, 308.
_Far Away and Long Ago_, W. H. Hudson, 57.
_Father and Son_, Edmund Gosse, 59.
Fausset, Hugh l’Anson, 99, 125.
_Figure in the Carpet, The_, Henry James, 92.
Firkins, Oscar W., 63, 68.
Fitzgerald, Edward, 154.
_Footlights and Spotlights_, Otis Skinner, 225, 234.
Forbes-Robertson, Sir Johnston, 225, 233.
Ford, Ford Madox, 99, 120.
France, Anatole, 71, 92, 99, 169, 186.
Franklin, Benjamin, 58, 59.
_From a Pitman’s Note-Book_, Roger Detaller, 59.
_From Immigrant to Inventor_, Michael Pupin, 59.
Fuchs, Emil, 213, 222.
_Funeral Elegy, The_, John Donne, 132.
Galton, Francis, 59, 174.
Garland, Hamlin, 59.
Gaskell, Mrs., 30.
Gautier, Théophile, 302.
_Glorious Apollo_, E. Barrington, 27, 31.
_Golden Bowl, The_, Henry James, 91.
Goldring, Douglas, 39.
Gompers, Samuel, 59.
Gorky, Maxim, 115.
Gosse, Edmund, 59, 127.
Gourmont, Rémy de, 70, 108, 190.
Graham, Cunninghame, 120.
Grant, Ulysses S., 58.
Griswold, Rufus W., 173.
Gsell, Paul, 99, 105.
_Guermantes Way, The_, Marcel Proust, 50.
Hall, G. Stanley, 277, 285.
Hamilton, Lady, 302.
Haussonville, Count d’, 108.
Hawtrey, Charles, 225, 231.
Hazeltine, Mayo W., 190.
Hearn, Lafcadio, 69.
Hearn, Mrs. Lafcadio, 70.
Hecht, Ben, 63, 68.
Hedgcock, Dr. F. A., 39.
Hellman, George S., 37.
Henley, Wm. E., 141.
_Henry Cabot Lodge_, William Lawrence, 41.
_Henry Thoreau_, Léon Bazalgette, 63, 79.
Herbert, George, 134.
Herndon, 260.
Herriot, Edouard, 317.
_He Was a Man_, Rose Wilder Lane, 31, 301.
Holland, Josiah, 260.
Holt & Co., Henry, 40.
Horne, Eric, 308, 310.
Houville, Gérard d’, 32.
Howells, Wm. Dean, 73.
Hudson, W. H., 57.
Hueffer, Ford Madox, 91.
Hugo, Victor, 111.
Huxley, Thomas H., 58.
_Ibsen_, Janko Lavrin, 114.
_Illuminations, Les_, Arthur Rimbaud, 177.
_Illustrations to the Book of Job_, William Blake, 154.
_Impressions of Great Naturalists_, Henry Fairfield Osborn, 39.
_Innocents Abroad_, Mark Twain, 74.
_Iron Puddler, The_, J. J. Davis, 59.
_Irving Berlin_, Alexander Woollcott, 46, 213, 217.
Isman, Felix, 225, 239.
James, Henry, 88, 122.
_James Elroy Flecker_, Douglas Goldring, 39.
Jeritza, Maria, 213, 221.
_John Addington Symonds_, Horatio F. Brown, 28.
_John Donne_, Hugh l’Anson Fausset, 99, 125.
_John Keats_, Amy Lowell, 147, 160.
_John L. Sullivan_, R. F. Dibble, 291.
Johnson, James Weldon, 220.
Johnston, Sir Harry, 59.
Jones, Henry Festing, 120.
_Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance_, Ford Madox Ford, 99, 120.
_Joseph Pulitzer, His Life and Work_, Don C. Seitz, 188, 196.
_Journal_, Marie Bashkirtseff, 47.
_Journal of a Disappointed Man_, The, W. N. P. Barbellion, 46.
_Journal of Amiel_, Mrs. Humphry Ward, 47.
_Journal of Discourses_, The, 252.
Joyce, James, 50, 63, 152.
_Joy of Living, The_, John St. Loe Strachey, 174.
Kaun, Alexander, 99, 114.
_Keats; A Study in Development_, Hugh l’Anson Fausset, 127.
Kohut, Rebekah, 315, 323.
_Kokoro_, Lafcadio Hearn, 70.
Krehbiel, Henry E., 69.
Kreymborg, Alfred, 147.
La Bruyère, 111.
_Lafcadio Hearn’s American Days_, Edward Larocque Tinker, 63, 70.
Lamennais, 114.
Landor, A. Henry Savage, 59, 308.
Lane, Rose Wilder, 31, 301.
La Rochefoucauld, 113.
Lavrin, Janko, 114.
Lawrence, David H., 242, 250.
Lawrence, William, 41.
Lea and Hutchinson, 162.
Lee, Robert E., 179.
Lee, Sir Sidney, 26, 46.
Le Goff, Marcel, 99, 106.
_Leonid Andreyev_, Alexander Kaun, 98, 115.
_Less Lonely_, Alfred Kreymborg, 152.
_Letters from Theodore Roosevelt to Anne Roosevelt Cowles_, 242, 275.
_Letters of an Unsuccessful Actor_, 225, 236.
_Letters of Lafcadio Hearn_, Mrs. Elizabeth Bisland Wetmore, 70.
_Letters of Olive Schreiner, The_,
Edited by S. C. Cronwright-Schreiner, 19, 43.
Lewis, Estella Anna, 175.
Lewis, Sinclair, 59, 158.
_Life and Confessions of a Psychologist_, G. Stanley Hall, 277, 285.
_Life and Letters_, Charles Darwin, 57.
_Life and Letters of John Donne_, Edmund Gosse, 127.
_Life and Letters of Macaulay_, Sir George Trevelyan, 26.
_Life of Abraham Lincoln, The_, William E. Barton, 161, 242, 259.
_Life of Abraham Lincoln_, Lord Charnwood, 24, 260.
_Life of Abraham Lincoln_, Herndon, 260.
_Life of Abraham Lincoln_, Josiah Holland, 260.
_Life of Abraham Lincoln_, Nicolay and Hay, 260.
_Life of Abraham Lincoln_, Ida M. Tarbell, 260.
_Life of Alice Freeman Palmer_, George Herbert Palmer, 19.
_Life of Charlotte Brontë_, Mrs. Gaskell, 30.
_Life of Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, The_, Monypenny and Buckle, 26.
_Life of Doctor Trudeau, The_, Dr. Edward L. Trudeau, 51.
_Life of Gladstone_, Lord Morley, 29.
_Life of Hector Berlioz_, Hector Berlioz, 54.
_Life of Jerome Cardan_, Henry Morley, 29, 278.
_Life of John Donne_, Izaak Walton, 22.
_Life of Joséphine_, Gérard d’Houville, 32.
_Life of Olive Schreiner, The_, S. C. Cronwright-Schreiner, 19.
_Life of Pasteur_, René Valléry-Radot, 19, 24, 278.
_Life of Richard Hooker_, Izaak Walton, 22.
_Life of Samuel Johnson_, James Boswell, 25, 44.
_Life of Shakespeare_, Sir Sidney Lee, 26.
_Life of Sir William Osler, The_, Harvey Cushing, 24, 277.
_Life of Stevenson_, Miss Masson, 142.
_Life of Thomas Hardy_, Ernest Brennecke, Jr., 38.
_Life of Victor Horsley_, Stephen Paget, 278.
_Life of Walter Scott_, John G. Lockhart, 25.
_Life of William White_, Agnes Repplier, 278.
_Life on the Mississippi_, Mark Twain, 74.
_Lima Beans_, Alfred Kreymborg, 151.
Lincoln, Abraham, 161, 242, 259.
_Little Angel, The_, Leonid Andreyev, 115.
_Little Women_, Louisa Alcott, 326.
_Lives and Times, Four Informal American Biographies_,
Meade Minnegerode, 35.
_Lives of Famous Men_, Plutarch, 17.
_Livre de Mon Ami, Le_, Anatole France, 106.
Lockhart, John G., 25.
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 266.
London, Jack, 31, 301.
_Lord Wolseley_, Maj.-Gen. Sir Frederick Maurice and
Sir George Arthur, 179.
Louis XIV, 22.
_Louis XIV_, Louis Bertrand, 32.
Lowell, Amy, 147, 160.
_Luck or Cunning_, Samuel Butler, 41.
_Lundis, Les_, Sainte-Beuve, 111.
Lynd, Robert, 69.
_Madame Récamier et Ses Amis_, Edouard Herriot, 315.
_Mademoiselle de Maupin_, Théophile Gautier, 302.
_Many Marriages_, Sherwood Anderson, 67.
_Marceline Desbordes-Valmore_, Lucien Descaves, 32.
Marinetti, F. P., 152.
_Mark Twain’s Autobiography_, 63, 73.
Martineau, Harriet, 55.
Masson, Miss, 142.
Maugham, Somerset, 231.
Mauriac, François, 96.
Maurice, Maj.-Gen. Sir Frederick, 179.
Maurois, André, 300.
May, J. Lewis, 99, 101.
Mayne, Ethel Colburn, 27.
_Memoirs_, Benvenuto Cellini, 28, 43.
_Memoirs_, Margot Asquith, 59.
_Memoirs of an Editor_, Edward P. Mitchell, 136, 188.
_Memoirs of My Life_, Francis Galton, 59.
_Midsummer Night’s Dream, A_, Shakespeare, 194.
Mill, John Stuart, 58, 174.
Minnigerode, Meade, 35.
Mitchell, Edward P., 136, 188.
_Mon Frère Arthur_, Isabelle Rimbaud, 177.
Monypenny and Buckle, 26.
Moore, George, 38, 70.
Morley, Henry, 29, 278.
Morley, John, Lord, 29.
_Most Famous Beauty of China, Yang Kuei-Fei, The_,
Mrs. Shu-Chiung, 35, 315, 328.
Mott, Lewis Freeman, 98, 107.
Motteville, Madame de, 22.
_My Life_, Richard Wagner, 59.
_My Life and Loves_, Frank Harris, 150.
_My Life for Labour_, Robert Smillie,5 9.
_My Musical Life_, Walter Damrosch, 213.
_My Portion_, Rebekah Kohut, 315, 323.
Nicolay, John J., 184.
Nicolay and Hay, 260.
Nightingale, Florence, 56.
_Nightingale, The: A Life of Chopin_, Marjorie Strachey, 31, 300, 306.
_Noon_, Kathleen Norris, 315, 326.
Norris, Kathleen, 315, 326.
_Nun of the Temple of Amida, The_, Lafcadio Hearn, 70.
O’Brien, Frank M., 189.
_Old Maid, The_, Edith Wharton, 262.
_Once There Lived_, Leonid Andreyev, 115.
Osborn, Henry Fairfield, 39.
Osler, Sir William, 95, 186, 277.
_Out of the Past_, Margaret Vaughan, 19, 29.
Oxford, Lady, 59.
Page, Walter, 251.
Paget, Stephen, 278.
Palmer, George Herbert, 19.
_Paternity of Abraham Lincoln, The_, William E. Barton, 261.
Pepys, Samuel, 22.
Perry, Bliss, 68, 169.
_Petit Pierre, Le_, Anatole France, 106.
_Pierre Nozière_, Anatole France, 106.
_Pilgrimage of Henry James, The_, Van Wyck Brooks, 63, 89.
_Player Under Three Reigns, A_, Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, 225, 233.
Plutarch, 17.
_Plutarch Lied_, 235.
_Poe--Man, Poet and Creative Thinker_, Sherwin Cody, 147, 168.
_Pointed Roofs_, Dorothy Richardson, 50.
_Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_, James Joyce, 50.
_Portrait of Zélide, The_, Geoffrey Scott, 25, 31, 32.
_Port-Royal_, Sainte-Beuve, 112.
Pound, Ezra, 152.
_Princess Casamassima, The_, Henry James, 91.
_Problème de Rimbaud, Poète Maudit, Le_, Maurice Coulon, 177.
Proust, Marcel, 50, 65, 139, 210.
Pupin, Michael, 59.
_Queen Victoria_, Lytton Strachey, 26.
_Quest of a Simple Life, The_, W. J. Dawson, 210.
Quintus Curtius, 17.
_Rab and His Friends_, John Brown, 79.
Rabelais, 206, 257.
Rainsford, Dr. W. S., 235.
_Recollections of a Happy Life_, Maurice Francis Egan, 53.
_Religio Medici_, Sir Thomas Browne, 42.
_Reminiscences_, Mrs. Lafcadio Hearn, 70.
Repplier, Agnes, 278.
Richardson, Dorothy, 50.
Rickword, Edgell, 147, 176.
_Rimbaud_, Edgell Rickword, 147, 176.
Rimbaud, Isabelle, 177.
_River of Life, The_, John St. Loe Strachey, 188, 200.
_Roar of the Crowd, The_, James J. Corbett, 291, 295.
_Robert E. Lee the Soldier_, Sir Frederick Maurice, 179.
_Robert Louis Stevenson_, John A. Steuart, 99, 140.
Robertson, Dr. John W., 147, 170.
Rolland, Romain, 55.
Roosevelt, Theodore, 52, 255, 266.
Rostand, Maurice, 32.
_Roughing It_, Mark Twain, 74.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 22, 46, 174.
_Royal Martyr, The_, Charles Wheeler Coit, 27.
Rutherford, Mark, 59, 60.
Sainte-Beuve, 315.
_Sainte-Beuve_, Count d’Haussonville, 108.
_Sainte-Beuve_, Lewis Freeman Mott, 99, 107.
Saint-Simon, 22.
_Samson in Chains_, Andreyev, 115.
Santayana, George, 94.
_Satan’s Diary_, Leonid Andreyev, 115.
Schneider, Edouard, 225.
Schreiner, Olive, 47.
Scott, Geoffrey, 25, 32.
Seitz, Don C., 188, 196.
_Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt
and Henry Cabot Lodge_, 242, 266.
_Seven That Were Hanged, The_, Leonid Andreyev, 115.
Sévigné, Madame de, 22.
Shakespeare, 194.
Shanks, Edward, 40.
Shanks, L. P., 101
Shaw, George Bernard, 264.
Shelley, 300.
_Shelley and the Unromantics_, Mrs. Olwen Campbell, 27.
Sherman, Stuart P., 69.
Shu-Chiung, Mrs., 35, 315, 328.
Skinner, Otis, 225, 234.
Smillie, Robert, 59.
_Socrates_, Xenophon, 17.
_Some Do Not ..._, Ford Madox Ford, 120.
_Songs and Sonnets_, John Donne, 129.
_Son of the Middle Border, A_, Hamlin Garland, 59.
Spencer, Herbert, 56.
Staël, Madame de, 315.
Steed, Wickham, 188.
Stein, Gertrude, 152.
Steuart, John A., 99, 140.
_Story of a Varied Life_, Dr. W. S. Rainsford, 235.
_Story of My Life_, Sir Harry Johnston, 59.
_Story Teller’s Story, A_, Sherwood Anderson, 63.
Strachey, John St. Loe, 174, 188, 200.
Strachey, Lytton, 26, 135.
Strachey, Marjorie, 306.
_Study in Discord, A_, Hugh l’Anson Fausset, 125.
_Sunlight and Song_, Maria Jeritza, 213, 221.
_Swann’s Way_, Marcel Proust, 50, 65.
Swift, Jonathan, 290.
Swinnerton, Frank, 141, 142.
Symonds, John Addington, 44, 60.
Symonds, Margaret. _See_ Vaughan.
Tacitus, 17.
_Tale of a Tub_, Jonathan Swift, 290.
_Talma_, André Antoine, 32.
Tarbell, Ida M., 260, 265.
_Theodore Roosevelt and His Time_, Joseph B. Bishop, 274.
_Thomas Hardy_, Dr. F. A. Hedgcock, 39.
Thompson, Francis, 127.
_Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist_, William Ellery Channing, 87.
_Thought_, Leonid Andreyev, 118.
Tinayre, Marcelle, 32.
Tinker, Edward Larocque, 63, 70.
Tolstoi, Leo, 57.
_Tom Sawyer_, Mark Twain, 74.
Trevelyan, Sir George, 26.
Trollope, Anthony, 58.
_Troubadour_, Alfred Kreymborg, 147.
Trudeau, Dr. Edw. L., 51.
_True Story of Woodrow Wilson, The_, David Lawrence, 242, 250.
_Truth at Last, The_, Charles Hawtrey, 225, 231.
_Turn of the Screw, The_, Henry James, 91.
Twain, Mark, 63, 73, 188, 257.
_Twenty Years on Broadway_, George Cohan, 225, 235.
_Twice Thirty_, Edward W. Bok, 188, 190.
Tzara, Tristan, 152.
_Une Saison en Enfer_, Arthur Rimbaud, 177.
Valléry-Radot, René, 19, 24, 278.
Vasari, 22.
Vaughan, Margaret, 19, 29.
_Vie Amoureuse de Madame de Pompadour, La_, Marcelle Tinayre, 32.
_Vie de Pasteur, La_, René Valléry-Radot, 278.
_Vie En Fleur, La_, Anatole France, 106.
_Virginibus Puerisque_, R. L. Stevenson, 144.
_Volupté_, Sainte-Beuve, 111.
Wagner, Richard, 59.
_Walden_, Henry David Thoreau, 85.
Walpole, Horace, 22.
Walton, Izaak, 22, 127, 133.
Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 47.
_Washington Irving_, George S. Hellman, 37.
Watterson, Henry, 188.
_Weber and Fields_, Felix Isman, 225, 239.
Werner, M. R., 242, 251.
Wetmore, Mrs. Elizabeth Bisland, 70.
Wharton, Edith, 97, 262.
_What the Butler Winked At_, Eric Horne, 308, 310.
White, William Allen, 242.
White, Wm. Hale, 60.
_Why I Am a Christian_, Dr. Frank Crane, 202.
_William Blake in This World_, Harold Bruce, 147, 154.
_William Dean Howells_, Oscar W. Firkins, 63, 68.
Willocks, Miss M. P., 39.
_Wind and the Rain, The_, Thomas Burke, 99, 136.
_With Pencil, Brush and Chisel_, Emil Fuchs, 213, 222.
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 56.
Wolseley, Lord, 179.
_Woman of Fifty, A_, Rheta Childe Dorr, 315, 327.
Woodberry, George E., 173.
_Woodrow Wilson_, William Allen White, 242.
Woollcott, Alexander, 46, 213, 217.
_Writers of the Day_, Henry Holt & Co., 40.
Xenophon, 17.
Yang Kuei-Fei, 35, 328.
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