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Title: The doctor looks at biography
Psychological studies of life and letters

Author: Joseph Collins

Release date: July 14, 2023 [eBook #71193]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: G.H. Doran, 1925

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DOCTOR
LOOKS AT BIOGRAPHY ***

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
In the plain text version text in italics is enclosed by
underscores (_italics_) and Small Capitals are
represented in upper case as in SMALL CAPS.
A number of words in this book have both hyphenated
and non-hyphenated variants. For the words with both
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has been added to the public domain.

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.

NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1925,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

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
Litterateurs:
III 63
American Writers
Sherwood
Anderson
William D.
Howells
Lafcadio Hearn
Mark Twain
Henry Thoreau
Henry James
Litterateurs:
IV 98
Foreign Writers
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
Artists and
IX 212
Musicians
Walter Damrosch
Irving Berlin
Maria Jeritza
Emil Fuchs
Actors and
X 225
Actresses

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
331
Cited
Index 337

PORTRAITS
FACING
PAGE

Mark Twain 74
Anatole France 98
Courtesy of
Edward
Wassermann
Thomas Burke 136
John Keats in his 158
Last Illness
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 302
Circe
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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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:

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