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THE DOCTOR LOOKS AT BIOGRAPHY

o

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

0

NEW St WW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

01

COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

THE DOCTOR LOOKS AT BIOGRAPHY

— B —

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OE AMERICA

To

LIGHTNER WITMER

Psychologist and Educator

TO RECALL STUDENT DAYS IN GERMANY

156903

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The author expresses his thanks to the editors of The Bookman, McNaught's Monthly, The Inter- national Book Review, and The New York Sun for permission to elaborate material used by them into certain chapters of this volume.

[

CONTENTS

Pakt I: BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY

PAGE

I BIOGRAPHY .15

II AUTOBIOGRAPHY 43

Part II: INTERPRETATIONS

III litterateurs: American writers 63

Sherwood Anderson William D. Howells Lafcadio Hearn Mark Twain Henry Thoreau Henry James

IV litterateurs: foreign writers 98

Anatole France Sainte-Beuve Leonid Andreyev Joseph Conrad John Donne Thomas Burke Robert Louis Stevenson

V POETS 147

Alfred Kreymborg William Blake John Keats Edgar Allan Poe Arthur Rimbaud

VI WARRIORS 179

Lord Wolseley Robert E. Lee

VII EDITORS 188

Edward P. Mitchell Edward W. Bok Joseph Pulitzer J. St. Loe Strachey

ix

X CONTENTS

PAGE

Vni CLERGYMEN 202

Dr. Frank Crane \V. J. Dawson

IX AHTISTS AND MUSICIANS 2X2

Walter Damrosch Irving Berlin Maria Jeritza Emil Fuchs

X ACTORS AND ACTRESSES 22$

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

Xn EDUCATORS 277

Sir William Osier G. Stanley Hall

Xm PRIZE FIGHTERS 29I

John L. Sullivan James J. Corbett

XrV FICTIONAL BIOGRAPHY 3OO

Ariel

The Divine Lady

The Nightingale

XV MISCELLANEOUS 30^

A. Henry Savage Landor Eric Home

XVI THE LADIES 314

Madame Recamier Rebekah Kohut Kathleen Norris Rheta Childe Dorr Yang Kuei-Fei

BOOKS CITED 33^

INDEX 337

PORTRAITS

yACING PAGE

MARK TWAIN 74

ANATOLE FRANCE 98

Courtesy of Edward Wassermann

THOMAS BURKE I36

JOHN KEATS IN HIS LAST ILLNESS 1 58

By permission of "The Century Magazine"

JOSEPH PULITZER I96

Courtesy of 'The New York World"

WALTER DAMROSCH 212

Photograph by Gutekunst

ELEONORA DUSE 226

BRIGHAM YOUNG 252

Courtesy of Harcourt, Brace & Co.

SIR WILLIAM OSLER 278

Reprinted from "The Annals of Medical History"

J. J. coRBETT 296

By permission of G. P. Putnam's Sons

LADY HAMILTON AS CIRCE 302

Courtesy of Dodd, Mead & Co.

MME. RECAMIER 314

i

Part I: BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY

r

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 reahsations — 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 environ- ment; 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 inter-

15

16 THE DOCTOR LOOKS AT BIOGRAPHY

est 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 emo- tional 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 influ- ence on the individual and his time; he runs the gamut of emo- tions that are aroused by all good biographies; he suffers vi- cariously, 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 fa- vourably with it. When a biographer studies a character in real life, or when a man writes his own life, he has opportu- .nity, by masterful handling of the theme, to push into the dark- ness characters that have been built by the fancy of the novel- ist, 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

JBIOGRAPHY 17

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 ex- pound his doctrines and principles. Soon, however, fortu- nately 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

18 THE DOCTOR LOOKS AT BIOGRAPHY

birth and the death of their subject. Outside events, revolu- tions, 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 sub- jective, 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 ade- quate 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 sub- ject, 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 mar- ble, nor triumphal arch, nor pillar, nor sepulchre that can match the durableness of an eloquent biography with quali- ties 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

BIOGRAPHY 19

as a rule the creation of such work is a response to the com- memorative 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 under- take 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 stud- ies— such as George Herbert Palmer's Life of Alice Freeman Palmer and Rene Vallery-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 Let- ters 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 fellowmen; and their actions and reactions, which can generally be paral- leled 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 pre-

20 TIIE DOCTOR LOOKS AT BIOGRAPHY

occupations 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 shoulder- ing burdens; if the writer is a Papini, we seek for help to with- stand failure.

All biographers do not use the same method to achieve their ends. All physicians do not use the same method to diagnosti- cate disease. Some do it by painstaking analysis of the symp- toms; others by process of elimination. One biographer re- veals 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 environ- ment; 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 amaze- ment.

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 dis- gust or anything approaching it, there is no law or convention that compels us to continue reading it. Next to poetry, bi- ography is the most satisfactory reading for all ages: instruct- ive 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 Steven- son, "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 read- ing world should be constantly concerned with the manifesta- tion of personality; in no literary field can such manifestation

BIOGRAPHY 21

reveal Itself more conspicuously, display itself more freely, explain itself more fully than in biographies and autobiogra- phies.

Each age has its joys and preoccupations; 6ach epoch its dominant tendencies and interests; these are displayed in con- temporary writings more convincingly than in any other herit- age 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 states- manship, 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 biogra- phies of famous men included especially orators and states- men.

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 dis- tinguished themselves on the battlefield, crusaders and con- querors 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 ar- tistic 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

22 THE DOCTOR LOOKS AT BIOGRAPHY

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 out- standing 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 complete- ness and accuracy as did Walton.

The period of sophistication which the late seventeenth cen- tury saw in Europe is revealed especially by the Memoirs which abounded at the time. Saint-Simon and Madame de Sevigne, Madame de Motteville and Louis XIV, while em- bracing all contemporary history, give minute details of the famous men and women of that period. Later, when sophisti- cation 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 in- trospective. 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 Rous- seau did for himself, lesser men were tempted to do for others, and thus from its most famous life-history, biographical writ-

BIOGRAPHY 23

iDg got its first great stimulus in France. As time progressed and artistic achievement became less important, biographies were replaced by contributions "useful" to civilisation. Bi- ographies 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 externali- sation.

Our conception of personality confronted with modern scien- tific 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 re- sponsibility, to the increasing interest in human immortality, and to the widespread and searching study of abnormal mani- festations of personality, it is not to be wondered that bi- ographical 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. Musi- cians, poets, novelists, artisans, actors, playwrights, moving- picture stars and would-be stars, unfrocked clergymen, prize- fighters, puzzle-makers, chess players, tennis champions, de- throned 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

24 THE DOCTOR LOOKS AT BIOGRAPHY

know about the business of life. Should Gerald Chapman have opportunity to publish his autobiography before 1 ,. 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 CelHni 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 autobi- ographies 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 under- standing.

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 Vallery-Radot's Life of Pasteur, Charnwood's Life of Abraham Lincoln, Cushing's Life of Wil- liam Osier, 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

BIOGRAPHY 25

have real claim to distinction, and none is worthy of com- p^£rison with the great predecessors.

Opinions differ widely as to which is the greatest biography and the greatest autobiography ever written. In all such mat- ters, taste alone does not prevail; opinions are formed accord- ing 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 under- standing, 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 per- sonal 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 qual- ity 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 re- markable 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 Z Slide,

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

26 THE DOCTOR LOOKS AT BIOGRAPHY

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 characteris- tics of the great Scotch writer; it is criticism and bi- ography 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 Beacons field, by Monypenny and Buckle, an illumi- nating, accurate and complete account of a complex person- ality 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 Lyt- ton 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 cred- ible that has been written about Shakespeare and he gave the coup de grace to much that was not only fictitious but mon- strous, particularly about the sonnets. There are few bi- ographies 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

BIOGRAPHY 27

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 per- sonality and its manifestations that it is a difficult task for any biographer to plumb his depth and reveal his intricacies. Al- though 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 role of biographer and novelist, the lat- ter 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 hke 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 Hfe. 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 in- terested in literature knows that the book "Astarte" was writ- ten to vindicate the character of Lady Byron, who left her hus- band, 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 bi- ographies. 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 hght. A martyr he was, indeed — and modest like most martyrs. Mr. Coit has done historical biography a great serv- ice, because his book is more than readable — ^it has charm.

28 THE DOCTOR LOOKS AT BIOGRAPHY

His display of erudition is nowhere overwhelming, but his fine use of English and the poetical turn of his prose make litera- ture of what might have been a textbook. Love and loy- alty 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 particu- larly with the nature and display of the temperament of a man who was a strange mixture of mysticism and practicality, scep- ticism and credulity, piety and sensuousness, emotion and in- tellect; and who had, with it all, extraordinary energy, pains- taking industry, tireless apphcation. Practically a life-long invalid, and without the spur of poverty, he accomplished a stupendous amount of literary work of the first order: biogra- phy, 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 transla- tion of Benvenuto Cellini's Memoirs and his version of the son- nets of Michael Angelo give him a permanent place in litera- ture.

Any one who would fit himself to recognise the neuropathic constitution, the maniac-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 nourish- ing food for thought.

And now comes his daughter to say tactfully and deferen- tially that her father was not at all the kind of man that his

BIOGRAPHY 29

friend the Venetian historian depicted; at least she wants to tell the world that there were important facets of John Ad- dington Symonds' nature that were not revealed by it. Out of the Past is a fascinating biography and it should succeed in re* viving interest in an unusual personality who wore the mantle of Pico della Mirandola with grace and distinction.

Another satisfactory biography is Henry Morley's Lije 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 quahties and the charm of his race, but few of its defects; his life was a constant pursuit of something ethereal and unreal, with, however, defi- nite 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 sensi- tive 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 prepa- ration 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 Lije 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 monu-

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ment 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 in- terpreted as a sign of his time just as they want Lincoln, or Cavour, or Bismarck interpreted.

Mrs. Gaskell's Lije of Charlotte Bronte, after many vicissi- tudes, 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 state- ments 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

BIOGRAPHY 31

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 con- scious crystallisation of Mr. and Mrs. Bloom. He is the Tecla 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 (Edi- pus-complex for Eye Strain.

(Edipus 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, Artel, The Portrait of Zelide, The Nightingale, Glorious Apollo. It is an elaboration of the variety popularised by Mr. Gamaliel Bradford which he calls psychographs. These are psycho- graphs and somagraphs flavoured with time-denatured scandal. They are easy reading, mildly instructive, and moderately di- verting. They are a good substitute for fiction and a fairly acceptable one for history, and they are infinitely to be pre- ferred 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 mat- ters that have to do with artistic or literary manifestations, is not to show partisanship for either side. But books like Ariel, The Divine Lady, Zelide, 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

32 THE DOCTOR LOOKS AT BIOGRAPHY

prominent authors to write the biographies of the ''loves" of great historical characters. The series opened with Marcelle Tinayre's La Vie Amour euse de Madame de Pompadour, and continued with that of Talma, by Andre Antoine; Louis XIV, by his great biographer, Louis Bertrand; Casanova, by the coming great poet, Maurice Rostand; and Marceline Des- bordes-Valmore, by the Goncourt Academician, Lucien Des- caves. The amorous life of Josephine has also appeared, writ- ten in the delightful style and sensitive vein of Gerard d'Hou- ville, the wife of Henri de Regnier. 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 per- sonages solely in their relation to love; and, so far, the experi- ment has been successful.

The Portrait of Zelide, 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 Charriere, developed a reputation for wit, wilfulness and cul- ture that extended far beyond her native or her adopted coun- try. 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 Zelide," and which, as literary self-portraiture, has rarely been surpassed:

BIOGRAPHY 33

"Compassionate in temper and liberal by inclination, Zelide is patient only on principle; when she is indulgent and easy, be grateful to her, for it costs her an effort. When she pro- longs her civility with people she holds in small esteem, re- double your admiration : she is in torture. Vain at first by na- ture, 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 Zelide 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 happi- ness and has devoted herself to goodness. She thus escapes repentance and seeks only for diversion.

"Can you not guess her secret? Zelide is somewhat sensu- ous. 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, Ze- lide would have had the mind of a great man; with less intelli- gence, 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 in- tense for her organism and she lived in perpetual warfare with herself. Profoundly egotistic she delighted in revealing her- self. 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 — in- deed 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 —

34 THE DOCTOR LOOKS AT BIOGRAPHY

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 Zelide was in love with him, and if he could reform her, he intended to marry her. But Zelide had no de- sire or intention to reform. After endeavouring in vain to sup- port 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 Ben- jamin Constant, the nephew of her early friend Hermenches. He was twenty, she was forty-seven. The attraction was mu- tual 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 ex- terior, appears to have made powerful appeal to women; dur- ing his long association with Zelide, he had many amours of which she was cognisant. They did not arouse in her the slightest feehng of jealousy. She feared only intellectual ri- valry. Her love affair with Constant lasted many years and was interrupted and finally shattered by the advent of Madame de Stael. Constant was unable to withstand Madame de Stael. 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 Zelide 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 dis- passionate description of herself; her power of separating her- self from her subject is extraordinary. Above all her predi-

BIOGRAPHY 35

lections, she sought reahty. 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 Con- stant 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 tem- perament is inimical to happiness. Madame de Charriere had health, beauty, charm, wealth, a complaisant husband, an ar- dent 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 Zelide 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. 1569(13

Then there is the form of biograpny uiat is not a portrait of the soul or of the body, nor is it exactly fictional biogra- phy. 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 en- hance 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 —

36 THE DOCTOR LOOKS AT BIOGRAPHY

almost what he thought it would be interesting for them to be.

The book, however, is convincing and that may be its great- est 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, characterisa- tions.

Lives and Times will delight most persons who are in- terested 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 Genet 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 per- spective 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. Charac- ters must take their place in the scenery and are so over- whelmed 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

BIOGRAPHY 37

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 dehghtful 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 Genet seem even less real. The study of Jumel is the most pene- trating of the biographies, though it may be the most blame- worthy 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 de- struction. He holds together, grows and develops, reaches the climax of his own possibiHties 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 personahties and generously inter- spersed with gossip; particularly about Irving's love affairs, perhaps the most interesting thing in the world about which to gossip and to conjecture: 'Tt 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 hterature knows as Wash- ington 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 in- terpretation of Irving's amativeness very entertaining, but it will scarcely add anything to his reputation as the greatest pioneer of American hterature.

Mr. Hellman says, "The present volume has been called 'Washington Irving, Esq.,' and it is in the life of a great and

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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 bi- ographer, his nephew, a black eye, and to include a lot of let- ters 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 men- tion of one and to point out with some specificity its short- comings. But Mr. Ernest Brennecke, Jr., had an unusual op- portunity, 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 per- spicacity. The narrative itself is clumsily composed and awk- wardly 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 back- grounds 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 ac- ceptable 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 rec- torial address: "The pomp and circumstance of war will pass, and all others now alive may fade from the scene, but I think

BIOGRAPHY 39

the quiet figure of Hardy will live on.'' As an antidote, I sug- gest 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 per- manent place in English literature. We should like to forget that his obscenity amounted to a gift; that one of Mrs. Peach- um'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 emo- tions 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 some- what after the manner of the "Roadmakers" series of Small, Maynard and Co. It deserves praise and imitation. Impres- sions 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 con- tact 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 main- tains with the French author that if love is blind, friendship will not see faults; and when friendship is engendered by the

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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 an- other 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, com- bined 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 un- like 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 biogra- phies 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 ex- traordinary 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, be- cause he pitched his song of praise in too high a key. H. G.

BIOGRAPHY 41

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 biographi- cal 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 v/ay 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 fiesh, whimsical and wise, cranky and crabbed, sensitive to beauty but fearful of betraying it, arro- gant 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 un- like 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

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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 biogra- phies and autobiographies are of individuals who have ''suc- ceeded" 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 biogra- phy should continue to be what ]\Ir. 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 band- wagon of progress that their makers can not even hear the music. We should like to have our boys know about Wil- lard 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 book- worms 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 be- tween 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 perfec- tion.

In the first place, the chief merit of autobiography is to be found in veracity and sincerity; these qualities are more im- portant 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 indispensa- ble in autobiography, provided truth is absolute. Cellini's Memoirs which, in its original edition, showed the lack of lit- erary 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

43

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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 ^'litterateurs," 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 per- ceive quickly, to understand readily, to grasp, gather and evalu- ate facts, to fuse his material into a homogeneous mass, to stamp it with style, and mix with his literary qualities a cer- tain 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 nes- tles between its wings. Gracefully and swiftly the swan car- ries 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 immortahty.

The autobiographer, on the other hand, must be subjective above all. His glance and his attention must be turned on him- self; 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

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 45

accomplishment, passion or a particular action is apt to make it appear as though he were nothing but an artist, lover, re- former, 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 re- veal himself emotionally as well as intellectually. It is the emotional revelation that gives atmosphere to his story. Nat- urally 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 be- haviour, 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 autobiogra- pher may be both. The former should have no preconceived idea of his hero. His efforts should be concentrated on pre- senting 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 auto- biographer 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 judg- ments 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 char- acteristics; 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 accomplish- ments.

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

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endeavour; and to-day, overwhelmed with biographies of liv- ing 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 par- tiality, and he must allow a voice to his likes and disHkes. 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 bril- liant 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 bi- ography, a difference which is a resume of these reflections, is that the former works from within outwards, while the latter works from without inwards; and the autobiographer is suc- cessful 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 novehst. 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 in- ner nature. Life for him was a great battle-field, 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 in- terior motives and the explanation of his sentiments, but the

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 47

life he led was not especially conducive to reasoning and in- ternal 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 bi- ography. Even when they are tampered with, as Marie Bash- kir tseff tampered with those of her life, they have their im- portance and interest and nothing that is true should be al- lowed to remain in the darkness. Olive Schreiner wrote, ^'There can be no absolutely true hfe of any one except writ- ten 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 hfe since Jean-Jacques\

If a hfe 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 quahty 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 ex- traordinary gift of its youthful author for writing, painting and music, but it also shows the disequihbrium of an imagination untutored and untrained.

It is doubtful if any Anglo-Saxon will ever parallel the feat of CelHni, 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 im- plantation 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 per- sonalities of their authors. Marie Bashkirtseff 's Journal, though fictional in execution, impresses the reader as contain- ing more forced draught, than Cellini's or Rousseau's. Marie is romanticism itself and her imagination is the battleground on which there & a perpetual struggle between the real and the

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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 aes- thetical for her, and life without the aesthetic element was not tolerable, so she set up a stage and as she was to be the cen- tral 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 ma- terial 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

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 49

tense, at times bored, restless, enthusiastic and depressed, giv- ing a picture of herself, of her own sublimely dissatisfied spirit. The picture is successful in its large lines and in its small de- tails; 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 sin- cerity 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 aesthetic 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 de- manded, 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 con- ception 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 pro-

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foundly; she thought she knew all she was to know about love before she had had much teaching; her instinct and her intui- tion prompted her, inspired her conduct and decided her ac- tions. Her susceptibility to impressions was such that on thenl 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 sub- limest 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 crea- tion: 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 en- titled, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Dorothy Rich- ardson 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,

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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 Rous- seau's Confessions may no longer be rated the greatest auto- biography in existence. These books have had detailed con- sideration 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 act- ing that he has little time for thinking, and if time were vouch- safed 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 rea- sons why this country has furnished few great autobiographies. Another is that until recently we have been bound by tradi- tion of reticence and we have always found self-estimation dif- ficult. 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 Educa- tion of Henry Adams and The Life of Doctor Trudeau, though Andrew Carnegie's story of his life fulfilled- some require- ments. Had the second half of Henry Adams' book kept the pace set by the first, it would likely be called the most satis- factory autobiography of the century. But the account of his life after 1900 shows occasional bewilderment, frequent dis- cursiveness, and an inclination to profitless speculation. Henry Adams was a singularly sane individual, free from ancestor- worship; neither beholden to convention nor enslaved by tra- dition 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 to-

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ward and his reactions to formal education, is an unusually brilliant personality study. His pilgrimages in search of knowl- edge 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 Roose- velt 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 mediaeval 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 over- look 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 pre- dominant 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

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 53

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 ex- traordinary degree: the gift of friendship. He had excep- tional power to attract people to him, to interest them in his work, and in his play. He not only attracted them, but en- ticed 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 through- out the whole country. He spoked the wheel of the juggernaut tuberculosis as few save Koch have done. His presence in- spirited 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 wor- ship 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 ego- tistic 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 atmos- phere 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 vighettes to carefully drawn and finished Gibsons. To justify the word infamous it is only necessary to remind that Egan was Minis-

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ter 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-in- voked for his diversion the memories of the first half of his mature life and jotted them down. *'God had given him mem- ory so that he might have roses in December." He was ar- ranging 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 auto- biography. The average reader will gather that he was cheer- ful, charming, courteous, companionable, kindly, generous, ur- bane— 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 pi 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 autobi- ography, 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, im- provident, impulsive, selfish, jealous, egocentric, amorous and

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 55

inconstant. He was devoid of humour and he lacked all re- ligious 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 re- veal them as no formal autobiography could, for here are his thoughts, feelings, aspirations and disappointments; his sel- fishness, 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 ac- cording to any standard but his own; his soul was too sensi- tive 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 Berhoz whose personality could suffer no comparison. M. Ro- main 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 oj Harriet

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Marttneau who, after Mary Wollstonecraft, was the first doughty champion of ''Rights of Women." Florence Nightin- gale 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 auto- biography should be, and should not be. In twelve pages ap- pended to the two fat volumes, the author makes an estimate of herself and of her work which is quite ideal, but the descrip- tions 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 Mar- garet 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 Macau- lay 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 al- lotment. 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 im- mortality; some do it to clear up their own problems; others do it to facilitate or effect reform; a few like Benjamin Frank- lin 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

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in mental efforts, disregarding the part played by emotions and affections, cold, didactic and impersonal. It forms a strik- ing contrast to the autobiography of Darwin which, though not really a book at all, but a chapter included in his Life and Let- ters, 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 con- science and mind of sins of youth or of hallucinatory memo- ries. St. Augustine's and Tolstoi's Confessions are typical of this kind of self-history. St. Augustine dwells on the disso- luteness 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 re- calling 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:

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"To treat the Confessions of St. Augustine with the same critical coldness of judgment that is brought to bear upon or- dinary 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 Hfe, 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 autobi- ography 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 autobi- ography 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. Liter- ary merit is not in direct relationship to moral or aesthetical 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 rea- sons as its motive.

Many men and women who have made a success of life have been inspired, helped or guided by reading autobi-

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ographies 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 j 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 y 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 Arrow smith 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 en- lightenment 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. Every- where, 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 satis- fying 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

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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 apprehen- sion 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, con- trary to its deserts, has never been a popular book here or in England. It is a fine presentation of the artistic tempera- ment trying to persuade itself to wear the garments of Puri- tan dogma, shedding them in moments of indignation and put- ting 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 prob- lems 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 spaciousness, 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 ex- haust himself. The genesis and development of personality can be conveyed only by words. Palette and brush in mas- ter 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 y and he has drawn a portrait of his father that surpasses Velasquez' Innocent VL

Rarely have autistic and purposeful thinking, revery and directed mental activity, been so skilfully displayed, so suc- cessfully 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 be- haviourists, subjectivists or objectivists, under obligation to

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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 un- conscious, to see strange features in the clouds with Polonius, and faces in the fire with William Blake. No wonder Sher- wood 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 immorahty." 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 in- frequently come. Had Mr. Anderson investigated the fore- bears 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.

AMERICAN WRITERS 65

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 imder- stand 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. Ander- son's or else be a psychiatrist.

A Story Teller's Story is full of portraits, mostly miniature, but here and there is a lifesize done with a few sweeps of the brush. Such is that of Alonzo Berner, from whom Mr. Ander- son 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 con- tempt and how had he escaped getting it?" You got it, Sher- wood, 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 corrobo- rative of their teachings. Fanciful birth, vicarious parentage, fantasying childhood, reverying manhood, sexual fixation, self- observation, unconscious fantasy following in the wake of

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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 au- thorship. 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

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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 Mar- riages, which was the hfe of the author strung on a fictional clothes horse. John Webster's grand geste in fiction is Sher- wood 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 hap- pened 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 rail- road 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 hkely 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 Leon 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 ex- ceeds. 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 hus- band to make their way in the great world, can fail to in-

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terpret 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 makeup into consciousness early in life, he might have earned the immortality of Hawthorne, Howells, or Crane. Had he studied Fielding instead of Whit- man, Chekhov instead of Clemens, he might have been the bell-cow of the Hterary 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 pariali 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

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reads it. ^1 will set down briefly the migrations and occupa- tions 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 Lon- don 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 de- termined to say that Mr. Firkins's book would not have re- ceived 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 undoubt- edly 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 him- self a dreamer of monstrous dreams. The reader who gets

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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 Lajcadio 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 kind- ness was ever accepted that he did not endeavour to repay with cruelty and abuse; no appreciation and praise were ever ac- corded 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 Nim of the Temple of Amdda, attest it. He was a critic in the class of Remy 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

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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 con- tribution 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 idios3mcrasies 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 Wil- son: 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 Wander- lust 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 re- mote Moor; but his sensitiveness came from his wall eye — all his friends say that.

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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 expani siveness tried to break through Arab impassivity, and all tha 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 battle- ground. 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 con- vention. Well, there are others, and I fancy they would deny that their souls are battlegrounds. And this paralysis of con- structive action, how does that show itself? Certainly not in New Orleans, more certainly not in Japan. Perhaps in Mar- tinique? The heat and the atmosphere there make for lassi- tude 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 Cor- coran'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, Caesarean in brevity and Nelsonian in construction: "Dear Hearn, you can go to Japan, or you can go to Hell"

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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 sup- press 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 characteris- tic of all his books. The truth is he was forced to spin gos- samer out of hemp when he could have made it into strong rope.

§

William Dean Howells said that Mark Twain was the Lincoln of hterature. 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 en- hances. 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 beheve 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.

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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 cus- tomary autobiography as Mark Twain was unlike the average man. It does not begin with a tedious narrative of his fore- bears, and tiresome descriptions of their environment. Nor does it dwell upon his mental prodigiousness and moral suf- ficiency, followed by the enumeration of the obstacles he sur- mounted 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-per- cent-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 ^hings 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.

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 ex- cessive amiability puts upon its possessor? But the kohinoor

MARK TWAIN

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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 revela- tory, but the description and analysis of his brother's per- sonality 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 natiirel in his fiction. Orion Clemens was fifty-fifty optimist and pessimist. Aside from the fundamental endowments of hon- esty, 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 wan- ing 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, im- pulsive, explosive, avid of praise, subject to depression and exalt.-^.tion, 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.

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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 ap- parently 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 conspicu- ously than his autobiography. His account of Orion's adven- ture 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 po- tato 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

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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 posthu- mously. 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 Rah 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

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out of his egotism, the meaninglessness out of his paradoxes, the repulsion out of his self-sufficiency. We forget his con- genital 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 hved his hermit- like Hfe. 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, jus- tifies 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 French- man who stresses the Gallic and Celtic strain in Thoreau, and who sympathises with his determination to create and de- velop 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

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poet's thoughts on his peregrinations and pilgrimages. Some of these reflections are infantile, a few puerile, such as the de- scription 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 play- ful 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, 181 7, 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 Ameri- can.

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 unconventionality, his wanderlust, his self- command, his equihbrium 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.

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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 dis- tinctive urge: love of nature, and the most conspicuous fea- ture 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 un- rolled his map of life, suggested them both. His auditors perceived but did not apprehend that the future itinerant sur- veyor had had other engrossments than examinations at Har- vard. 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 affec- tions and the soul." The distinguishing feature of the para- noiac 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 sup- ports 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 tax-

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payer, 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 in- dulged 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

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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 in- dividual 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 con- tempt for public opinion and for those who made it that words are impotent to express. He hked 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 feehng 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 moun- tain 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

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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 hfe. 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."

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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 i8th, 1859, frenzied him. He had met John Brown, he had learned some- thing of his thought and of his plans, without being particu- larly 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, tuber-

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culosis, 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. Harri- son Blake made a hero of him, and Daniel Ricketson of Cape Cod tried to deal with him on terms of equality; but the for- mer'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, fan- ciful, 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 un- derstanding, and the concluding pages of the seventh sec- tion 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 in- terpreter 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 de- void 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-appre- ciation 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

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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 mate- rialists, 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 pleas- ure 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 in- difference 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

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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 stay- ing, 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 humihated, for Henry James himself was more lacking in specificity when he dis- cussed 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 com- prehensive 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 hterature, 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 "fail- ure" 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 al- lowed 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.

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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, in- viting culture; a people who would have urbanity, understand- ing, and charm; an arena where vulgarity of speech and con- duct were rigorously excluded, where they would die of inani- tion 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 Hved 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 be- came the prey of a question: whether he might not have de- veloped 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 ghmmering dawn." He had been in cotton- wool too long, he must experi- ence some of the perils of exposure, otherwise, he would suc- cumb to the first draught; moreover, he was hungry for ma- terial, 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

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school-examiner who sought to humble her beloved school- teacher by posing the question: "Has the sun ever stood still in the heavens ?'' But as I have such esteem of him, of his sin- cerity 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 po- sition 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 con- cern 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 Hstened 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 under- standing 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

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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 infantiHsm; 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 aston- ished at his inability to do it when these powers were under- mined by arteriosclerosis?

The great defect in the makeup of Henry James was in the amatory side of his nature. His amatory coefficient was com- paratively 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 makeup; adult infantilism makes tre- mendously for dissatisfaction with what hfe brings, and a

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low basal metabolic rate which gives rise to a race of fletcher- isers 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 suc- cessful 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 Hfe 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 reinvoked 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 hfe 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 hfe so compelling of admiration in England did not grow from the tree that Henry James

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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 'in- sured, so far as he could, that it should not soon be cut down, by making, a few months before his death, the supreme genu- flection 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 main- tained 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 re- ligion, his politics, and his ^Tatrie." 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

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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 Eng- lish 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 convinc- ing 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 Osier.

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 Hfe, 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 con- trary 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

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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 Cam- bridge, 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 Stafford- shire 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 antici- pate 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 com- forts, and the luxuries, and we can never be sufficiently grate- ful to the country of his adoption for having given them to him without the asking.

Frangois 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

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of years lived far from Paris and that they draw all their wealth from so much poverty and aridity." This constant go- ing back to the years of youth and early adolescence which obsesses Frangois 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 back- yard 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 /. Lewis

May. Anatole France a la Bechellerie, 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 VAnson Fausset. The Wind and the Rain, by Thomas Burke. Robert Louis Stevenson, by John A. Steuart.

ANATOLE FRANCE was picturesque, enigmatic and in- triguing. He attracted illuminators and interpreters. His protracted age gave biographers ample time to pre- pare 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, re- ligious 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.

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From a miniature

Courtesy of Edward Wassermann

ANATOLE FRANCE

Iffi

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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 Eng- lish by Mr. Lewis May who pubHshed 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 under- standing 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 criti- cism, 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 weak- ness of such a nature. He "played all parts in turn and played them all well," but this very versatility shows a lack of inti- mate convictions and standards. A philosophy which consists of having none, a religion which insists on the unsatisfactori- ness 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 in-

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fluence. 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 theo- ries, the principles and the talent of Anatole France, from which we might obtain clear, critical, impartial, sober judg- ment 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 meta- morphosis 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 loath- ing 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 writ- ing was always of life, as it appeared to him through intimacy with ancient masters; through study of history; through con- templation of his time; through deduction and observation of humanity. It is difficult to divorce him from his own per-

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sonality, and the biographers who have succeeded in painting a picture of him that will endure have all recognised this im- possibility.

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 Brous- son 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 Bos- wellised 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 Said, 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

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self-imposed task and working with industrious and pains- taking 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 beheved 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 fever- ish. 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.

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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 multi- coloured skull cap.

Another of his admirers is Paul Gsell, who was a frequent and faithful visitor at the morning meetings at the Villa Said. 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 over- looked 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 interest- ing 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 GselPs book has had imitators and it has given an in- centive to assiduous followers of Anatole France to set down for posterity, some of the memorable conversations and dis- cussions at which they were present. The most successful

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has been Marcel Le Goff, who, in the last ten years of the Master's life, saw him at his country home near Tours, fre- quently 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 Bechellerie." His tastes, and the trivialities which form part of every life, have been di- vulged and even though M. Le Goff is one of France's ad- mirers, 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 Noziere and La Vie En Fleur, They reveal the formation of the clever novelist, of the pro- found 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 maintain- ing the traditions of novels, he is entitled to be called ''roman- tic"; by his love for the perfect phrase, for purity of form and loftiness of sentiments, he proved himself a true son of the an- cient masters; and by his keen appreciation of intelligence,

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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 pas- sage 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, deter- mination and single-mindedness that Dostoievsky or Ibsen dis- played. 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 ridi- cule, 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

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become a sort of sun which hghts 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 tre- mendous changes which have taken place in his country dur- ing that time and which have left relatively little leisure to dis- cuss and estimate the influence and achievement of a con- temporary. Moreover, the French are loath to commit them- selves 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. modem school of criticism, represented by Remy 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 repu- tation here, especially among the younger writers, that he de- serves.

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 responsive- ness 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 Free- man Mott has gathered all the information that previous bi- ographers have given; garnered the most minute details, elab-

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orated and interpreted them. He has followed his subject from birth to death, minute by minute, with closest attention. Mr. Mott's Saint e-Beuve gives an impression of concen- trated 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, pains- takingly 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, in- stead 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 hterature than for talent; that he was constantly seeking truth, that he frowned on falsifi- cation 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 Cenacle of which he was one of the shining lights, together with Alexandre Dumas, Gerard 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, wear- ing 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 dis- appeared from the manners of modern writers. But the

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Cenacle 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 Cenacle is past; the Romantic reversion to the Middle Ages, the solitary inward revery, the detach- ment from reality" have been replaced by sentiment for pro- gressive 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 calcu- lation. Though he sought relief from the passion that pos- sessed 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

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him over and over, and question him at leisure; you make him pose for you; it is almost as though you passed a fort- night 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 tete-a-tete at the same time that it requires strict at- tention, permits much closer familiarity. Soon, an individual- ity 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 disap- pears 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 allure- ment. 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, Volupti, 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 Bruyere'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

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doubts regarding the permanency of Chateaubriand's works, and this despite the affection he had for him, and his promi- nent place in the literature of the day. Mr. Mott's account of Sainte-Beuve's position in the salon of Madame Recamier, 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 Recamier 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 perpetu- ally in conflict with the critic, sentimentality trying to over- come 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 char- acterisation which is all the more welcome because of its rarity. Some critics, even Sainte-Beuve himself, have given the im- pression 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 char- acter. In spite of Volupte 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, imi- versally 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 bi- ographer makes up for his lack of allurement with his pro- found 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 contribu- tion to literature, Les Lundis excepted. The summary Mr.

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Mott makes of the book might apply to his own Sainte- Beuve:

"We would not convey the impression that the book is es- pecially entertaining ... to sit down and labour consecu- tively 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 ad- miration are not synonymous with entertainment.

Mr. Mott creates a relationship between Sainte-Beuve and La Rochefoucauld, and in the examples he has chosen to il- lustrate 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, hke Sainte- Beuve, supplies his books copiously with summaries and with indications of location.

"Not infrequently, a chapter may open or close with a para- graph, 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 fol- low 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.

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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 — emula- tion, self-esteem, charlatanism, log-rolling, intimidation, avid- ity for popularity and gold" still exist.

Artistic preoccupation was one of Sainte-Beuve's distinguish- ing 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 beheving with him was merely a way of understanding. And he in- sisted 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 pubhc under obliga- tions 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 tol-

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erant 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 criti- cism than any of his fellows?" Mr. Kaun's book not only pro- vides the answer but gives a glimpse of literary tendencies in the Russia of yesterday which is as welcome as it is instruc- tive.

Leonid Andreyev was forty-eight years old when he died in 19 19; although he began literary work soon after his admis- sion 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 men- tioned.

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 hfe he attempted suicide; he was addicted to strong drink; he had the naivete and egotism of a child; he was mul- ishly 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

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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 continu- ally shown by Dr. Kaun, who follows him through all the periods of his life. His childhood was gloomy, filled with seri- ous thoughts and arid reading. At times he put aside all his interests in literature and became a ''rough boy." He dis- played a remarkable gift for the stage and an early inclina- tion to draw and to paint. The death of his father, which oc- curred when Leonid was very young, gave him a taste of pov- erty, privation and humility and made him reahse that his future was what he alone would make it. Soon after gradua- tion 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 neces- sity 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 sim- ple language; he has shown the tendencies of Russian litera- ture 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 In- telligentsia may be applied to the unorganised group of Rus-

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sian men and women who, regardless of their social or eco- nomic status, have been united in a common striving for the betterment of material and spiritual conditions."

When Russian hterature 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 so- ciety), the danger was that Russian literature would become "a didactic sermon." But Dr. Kaun hastens to reassure us that "WhaX 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 inter- rogations 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 admira- tion for Gorky; but it is doubtful that he read them, save casually.

One appealing quality in Dr. Kaun as a critic is his un- biased 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

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for his admitted eminence among modern authors in his real- ism, which makes him address the public not as a teacher or a reformer but as an observer from the rank and file, who re- lated 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 quahties that identify him with divinity; but it was the worse side of human nature that chiefly appealed to him, and that he de- scribed 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 peo- ple 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 re- tained his impersonal attitude, probing the conscience of man, "ringing his alarm bell" of man's vices, analysing life, and at- tempting 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 nonconformist to the last degree. He refused consistently to give way to the pubhc'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

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individual and immediate surroundings. But he also general- ised events and expressed opinions that included the v^orld 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 An- dreyev is the very brief period of his creative activity, fifteen years at the most. After 1902 his writings were merely repe- titions 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 direc- tion of hope and encouragement. He was like a man who hur- ries 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 flex- ibility: ''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 in- creasing 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 strug- gling for the rejuvenation of Russia," when he died of arterio- sclerosis, 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.

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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 sys- tematised delusions of grandeur to which his conduct con- forms. He beheves 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 Gra- ham 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 aesthetic 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, in- formative of a soul, not a body; it tells not how many days

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he lived and where he lived, but how he lived and thought; how he dreamed and loved; how he interpreted men's con- duct 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 drama- tist 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 Con- rad. 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 in- trigued his biographer from the beginning. He binds them with tenuous threads to Conrad's hereditary traits and the in- fluence 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 cosmo- politan appearance: considerable British insularity, but more Slav and Eastern in his makeup. 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 contradic- tion of his tastes and he has more friends than enemies. Mr. Ford avows that Conrad hated the sea and disliked to write. '^Un mitier de chieny 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,

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never in English, unless his thoughts were confined to the most common of everyday commonplaces; when they occu- pied a higher sphere they were always in French. It was be- cause of the difficulty with which Conrad was constantly con- fronted 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 bet- ter. 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 per- centage 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 un- familiar 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 valu- ation 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 Frangaise which is devoted wholly to Conrad. There, his col- leagues and admirers, French and English, tell of Conrad's personality and his writings but never a word of his ''collabo- rator." 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 Huef- fer's manner. He patronises Mr. James, he patronises Mr.

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