1
_Abraham Lincoln_
The backwardness of the art of biography in These States is made
shiningly visible by the fact that we have yet to see a first-rate
life of either Lincoln or Whitman. Of Lincolniana, of course, there is
no end, nor is there any end to the hospitality of those who collect
it. Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of
books that never, under any circumstances, lose money in the United
States—first, detective stories; secondly, novels in which the heroine
is forcibly debauched by the hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism,
occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln. But
despite all the vast mass of Lincolniana and the constant discussion
of old Abe in other ways, even so elemental a problem as that of
his religious faith—surely an important matter in any competent
biography—is yet but half solved. Here, for example, is the Rev.
William E. Barton, grappling with it for more than four hundred large
pages in “The Soul of Abraham Lincoln.” It is a lengthy inquiry—the
rev. pastor, in truth, shows a good deal of the habitual garrulity of
his order—but it is never tedious. On the contrary, it is curious and
amusing, and I have read it with steady interest, including even the
appendices. Unluckily, the author, like his predecessors, fails to
finish the business before him. Was Lincoln a Christian? Did he believe
in the Divinity of Christ? I am left in doubt. He was very polite about
it, and very cautious, as befitted a politician in need of Christian
votes, but how much genuine conviction was in that politeness? And if
his occasional references to Christ were thus open to question, what
of his rather vague avowals of belief in a personal God and in the
immortality of the soul? Herndon and some of his other close friends
always maintained that he was an atheist, but Dr. Barton argues that
this atheism was simply disbelief in the idiotic Methodist and Baptist
dogmas of his time—that nine Christian churches out of ten, if he were
alive to-day, would admit him to their high privileges and prerogatives
without anything worse than a few warning coughs. As for me, I still
wonder.
The growth of the Lincoln legend is truly amazing. He becomes the
American solar myth, the chief butt of American credulity and
sentimentality. Washington, of late years, has been perceptibly
humanized; every schoolboy now knows that he used to swear a good deal,
and was a sharp trader, and had a quick eye for a pretty ankle. But
meanwhile the varnishers and veneerers have been busily converting
Abe into a plaster saint, thus making him fit for adoration in the
chautauquas and Y. M. C. A.’s. All the popular pictures of him show
him in his robes of state, and wearing an expression fit for a man
about to be hanged. There is, so far as I know, not a single portrait
of him showing him smiling—and yet he must have cackled a good deal,
first and last: who ever heard of a storyteller who didn’t? Worse,
there is an obvious effort to pump all his human weaknesses out of
him, and so leave him a mere moral apparition, a sort of amalgam of
John Wesley and the Holy Ghost. What could be more absurd? Lincoln,
in point of fact, was a practical politician of long experience and
high talents, and by no means cursed with inconvenient ideals. On the
contrary, his career in the Illinois Legislature was that of a good
organization man, and he was more than once denounced by reformers.
Even his handling of the slavery question was that of a politician, not
that of a fanatic. Nothing alarmed him more than the suspicion that
he was an Abolitionist. Barton tells of an occasion when he actually
fled town to avoid meeting the issue squarely. A genuine Abolitionist
would have published the Emancipation Proclamation the day after the
first battle of Bull Run. But Lincoln waited until the time was more
favorable—until Lee had been hurled out of Pennsylvania, and, more
important still, until the political currents were safely running his
way. Always he was a wary fellow, both in his dealings with measures
and in his dealings with men. He knew how to keep his mouth shut.
Nevertheless, it was his eloquence that probably brought him to his
great estate. Like William Jennings Bryan, he was a dark horse made
suddenly formidable by fortunate rhetoric. The Douglas debate launched
him, and the Cooper Union speech got him the presidency. This talent
for emotional utterance, this gift for making phrases that enchanted
the plain people, was an accomplishment of late growth. His early
speeches were mere empty fireworks—the childish rhodomontades of
the era. But in middle life he purged his style of ornament and it
became almost baldly simple—and it is for that simplicity that he
is remembered to-day. The Gettysburg speech is at once the shortest
and the most famous oration in American history. Put beside it, all
the whoopings of the Websters, Sumners and Everetts seem gaudy and
silly. It is eloquence brought to a pellucid and almost child-like
perfection—the highest emotion reduced to one graceful and
irresistible gesture. Nothing else precisely like it is to be found
in the whole range of oratory. Lincoln himself never even remotely
approached it. It is genuinely stupendous.
But let us not forget that it is oratory, not logic; beauty, not
sense. Think of the argument in it! Put it into the cold words of
everyday! The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers
who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of
self-determination—“that government of the people, by the people,
for the people,” should not perish from the earth. It is difficult
to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in that battle
actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates
who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. What
was the practical effect of the battle of Gettysburg? What else
than the destruction of the old sovereignty of the States, _i. e._,
of the people of the States? The Confederates went into battle an
absolutely free people; they came out with their freedom subject to the
supervision and vote of the rest of the country—and for nearly twenty
years that vote was so effective that they enjoyed scarcely any freedom
at all. Am I the first American to note the fundamental nonsensicality
of the Gettysburg address? If so, I plead my æsthetic joy in it in
amelioration of the sacrilege.
2
_Paul Elmer More_
Nothing new is to be found in the latest volume of Paul Elmer More’s
Shelburne Essays. The learned author, undismayed by the winds of
anarchic doctrine that blow down his Princeton stovepipe, continues
to hold fast to the notions of his earliest devotion. He is still the
gallant champion sent against the Romantic Movement by the forces
of discipline and decorum. He is still the eloquent fugleman of the
Puritan ethic and æsthetic. In so massive a certainty, so resolute an
immovability there is something almost magnificent. These are somewhat
sad days for the exponents of that ancient correctness. The Goths
and the Huns are at the gate, and as they batter wildly they throw
dead cats, perfumed lingerie, tracts against predestination, and the
bound files of the _Nation_, the _Freeman_ and the _New Republic_
over the fence. But the din does not flabbergast Dr. More. High above
the blood-bathed battlements there is a tower, of ivory within and
solid ferro-concrete without, and in its austere upper chamber he sits
undaunted, solemnly composing an elegy upon Jonathan Edwards, “the
greatest theologian and philosopher yet produced in this country.”
Magnificent, indeed—and somehow charming. On days when I have no
nobler business I sometimes join the barbarians and help them to launch
their abominable bombs against the embattled blue-noses. It is, in
the main, fighting that is too easy, too Anglo-Saxon to be amusing.
Think of the decayed professors assembled by Dr. Franklin for the
_Profiteers’ Review;_ who could get any genuine thrill out of dropping
_them?_ They come out on crutches, and are as much afraid of what
is behind them as they are of what is in front of them. Facing all
the horrible artillery of Nineveh and Tyre, they arm themselves with
nothing worse than the pedagogical birch. The janissaries of Adolph
Ochs, the Anglo-Saxon supreme archon, are even easier. One has but to
blow a _shofar_, and down they go. Even Prof. Dr. Stuart P. Sherman is
no antagonist to delight a hard-boiled heretic. Sherman is at least
honestly American, of course, but the trouble with him is that he is
_too_ American. The Iowa hayseed remains in his hair; he can’t get rid
of the smell of the chautauqua; one inevitably sees in him a sort of
_reductio ad absurdum_ of his fundamental theory—to wit, the theory
that the test of an artist is whether he hated the Kaiser in 1917, and
plays his honorable part in Christian Endeavor, and prefers Coca-Cola
to Scharlachberger 1911, and has taken to heart the great lessons
of sex hygiene. Sherman is game, but he doesn’t offer sport in the
grand manner. Moreover, he has been showing sad signs of late of a
despairing heart: he tries to be ingratiating, and begins to hug in the
clinches.
The really tempting quarry is More. To rout him out of his armored
tower, to get him out upon the glacis for a duel before both armies, to
bring him finally to the wager of battle—this would be an enterprise
to bemuse the most audacious and give pause to the most talented. More
has a solid stock of learning in his lockers; he is armed and outfitted
as none of the pollyannas who trail after him is armed and outfitted;
he is, perhaps, the nearest approach to a genuine scholar that we have
in America, God save us all! But there is simply no truculence in him,
no flair for debate, no lust to do execution upon his foes. His method
is wholly _ex parte._ Year after year he simply iterates and reiterates
his misty protests, seldom changing so much as a word. Between his
first volume and his last there is not the difference between Gog and
Magog. Steadily, ploddingly, vaguely, he continues to preach the gloomy
gospel of tightness and restraint. He was against “the electric thrill
of freer feeling” when he began, and he will be against it on that last
gray day—I hope it long post-dates my own hanging—when the ultimate
embalmer sneaks upon him with velvet tread, and they haul down the flag
to half-staff at Princeton, and the readers of the New York _Evening
Journal_ note that an obscure somebody named Paul E. More is dead.
3
_Madison Cawein_
A vast and hefty tome celebrates this dead poet, solemnly issued by
his mourning friends in Louisville. The editor is Otto A. Rothert,
who confesses that he knew Cawein but a year or two, and never read
his poetry until after his death. The contributors include such local
_literati_ as Reuben Post Halleck, Leigh Gordon Giltner, Anna Blanche
McGill and Elvira S. Miller Slaughter. Most of the ladies gush over
the departed in the manner of high-school teachers paying tribute to
Plato, Montaigne or Dante Alighieri. His young son, seventeen years
old, contributes by far the most vivid and intelligent account of
him; it is, indeed, very well written, as, in a different way, is the
contribution of Charles Hamilton Musgrove, an old newspaper friend.
The ladies, as I hint, simply swoon and grow lyrical. But it is a
fascinating volume, all the same, and well worth the room it takes on
the shelf. Mr. Rothert starts off with what he calls a “picturography”
of Cawein—the poet’s father and mother in the raiment of 1865, the
coat-of-arms of his mother’s great-grand-father’s uncle, the house
which now stands on the site of the house in which he was born, the
rock spring from which he used to drink as a boy, a group showing him
with his three brothers, another showing him with one brother and
their cousin Fred, Cawein himself with sideboards, the houses he lived
in, the place where he worked, the walks he liked around Louisville,
his wife and baby, the hideous bust of him in the Louisville Public
Library, the church from which he was buried, his modest grave in Cave
Hill Cemetery—in brief, all the photographs that collect about a man
as he staggers through life, and entertain his ribald grandchildren
after he is gone. Then comes a treatise on the ancestry and youth of
the poet, then a collection of newspaper clippings about him, then
a gruesomely particular account of his death, then a fragment of
autobiography, then a selection from his singularly dull letters, then
some prose pieces from his pen, then the aforesaid tributes of his
neighbors, and finally a bibliography of his works, and an index to
them.
As I say, a volume of fearful bulk and beam, but nevertheless full of
curious and interesting things. Cawein, of course, was not a poet of
the first rank, nor is it certain that he has any secure place in the
second rank, but in the midst of a great deal of obvious and feeble
stuff he undoubtedly wrote some nature lyrics of excellent quality.
The woods and the fields were his delight. He loved to roam through
them, observing the flowers, the birds, the tall trees, the shining
sky overhead, the green of Spring, the reds and browns of Autumn, the
still whites of Winter. There were times when he got his ecstasy into
words—when he wrote poems that were sound and beautiful. These poems
will not be forgotten; there will be no history of American literature
written for a hundred years that does not mention Madison Cawein. But
what will the literary historians make of the man himself? How will
they explain his possession, however fitfully, of the divine gift—his
genuine kinship with Wordsworth and Shelly? Certainly no more unlikely
candidate for the bays ever shinned up Parnassus. His father was a
quack doctor; his mother was a professional spiritualist; he himself,
for years and years, made a living as cashier in a gambling-house!
Could anything be more grotesque? Is it possible to imagine a more
improbable setting for a poet? Yet the facts are the facts, and Mr.
Rothert makes no attempt whatever to conceal them. Add a final touch
of the bizarre: Cawein fell over one morning while shaving in his
bathroom, and cracked his head on the bathtub, and after his death
there was a row over his life insurance. Mr. Rothert presents all of
the documents. The autopsy is described; the death certificate is
quoted.... A strange, strange tale, indeed!
4
_Frank Harris_
Though, so far as I know, this Harris is a perfectly reputable man,
fearing God and obeying the laws, it is not to be gainsaid that a
certain flavor of the sinister hangs about his aspect. The first time
I ever enjoyed the honor of witnessing him, there bobbed up in my mind
(instantly put away as unworthy and unseemly) a memory of the handsome
dogs who used to chain shrieking virgins to railway tracks in the
innocent, pre-Ibsenish dramas of my youth, the while a couple of stage
hands imitated the rumble of the Empire State Express in the wings.
There was the same elegance of turn-out, the same black mustachios, the
same erect figure and lordly air, the same agate glitter in the eyes,
the same aloof and superior smile. A sightly fellow, by all the gods,
and one who obviously knew how to sneer. That afternoon, in fact, we
had a sneering match, and before it was over most of the great names in
the letters and politics of the time, _circa_ 1914, had been reduced
to faint hisses and ha-has.... Well, a sneerer has his good days and
his bad days. There are times when his gift gives him such comfort
that it can be matched only by God’s grace, and there are times when
it launches upon him such showers of darts that he is bound to feel a
few stings. Harris got the darts first, for the year that he came back
to his native land, after a generation of exile, was the year in which
Anglomania rose to the dignity of a national religion—and what he had
to say about the English, among whom he had lived since the early 80’s,
was chiefly of a very waspish and disconcerting character. Worse, he
not only said it, twirling his mustache defiantly; he also wrote it
down, and published it in a book. This book was full of shocks for the
rapt worshippers of the Motherland, and particularly for the literary
_Kanonendelicatessen_ who followed the pious leadership of Woodrow and
Ochs, Putnam and Roosevelt, Wister and Cyrus Curtis, young Reid and
Mrs. Jay. So they called a special meeting of the American Academy of
Arts and Letters, sang “God Save the King,” kissed the Union Jack,
and put Harris into Coventry. And there he remained for five or six
long years. The literary reviews never mentioned him. His books were
expunged from the minutes. When he was heard of at all, it was only in
whispers, and the general burden of those whispers was that he was in
the pay of the Kaiser, and plotting to garrot the Rev. Dr. William T.
Manning....
So down to 1921. Then the English, with characteristic lack of
delicacy, played a ghastly trick upon all those dutiful and
well-meaning colonists. That is to say, they suddenly forgave Harris
his criminal refusal to take their war buncombe seriously, exhumed him
from his long solitude among the Anglo-Ashkenazim, and began praising
him in rich, hearty terms as a literary gentleman of the first water,
and even as the chief adornment of American letters! The English
notices of his “Contemporary Portraits: Second Series” were really
quite amazing. The London _Times_ gave him two solid columns, and where
the _Times_ led, all the other great organs of English literary opinion
followed. The book itself was described as something extraordinary, a
piece of criticism full of shrewdness and originality, and the author
was treated with the utmost politeness.... One imagines the painful
sensation in the New York _Times_ office, the dismayed groups around
far-flung campus pumps, the special meetings of the Princeton, N. J.,
and Urbana, Ill., American Legions, the secret conference between
the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the Ku Klux Klan. But
though there was tall talk by hot heads, nothing could be done. Say
“Wo!” and the dutiful jack-ass turns to the right; say “Gee!” and he
turns to the left. It is too much, of course, to ask him to cheer as
well as turn—but he nevertheless turns. Since 1921 I have heard no
more whispers against Harris from professors and Vigilantes. But on
two or three occasions, the subject coming up, I have heard him sneer
his master sneer, and each time my blood has run cold.
Well, what is in him? My belief, frequently expressed, is that there
is a great deal. His “Oscar Wilde” is, by long odds, the best literary
biography ever written by an American—an astonishingly frank,
searching and vivid reconstruction of character—a piece of criticism
that makes all ordinary criticism seem professorial and lifeless. The
Comstocks, I need not say, tried to suppress it; a brilliant light
is thrown upon Harris by the fact that they failed ignominiously.
All the odds were in favor of the Comstocks; they had patriotism on
their side and the help of all the swine who flourished in those days;
nevertheless, Harris gave them a severe beating, and scared them half
to death. In brief, a man of the most extreme bellicosity, enterprise
and courage—a fellow whose ideas are expressed absolutely regardless
of tender feelings, whether genuine or bogus. In “The Man Shakespeare”
and “The Women of Shakespeare” he tackled the whole body of academic
English critics _en masse_—and routed them _en masse._ The two books,
marred perhaps by a too bombastic spirit, yet contain some of the
soundest, shrewdest and most convincing criticism of Shakespeare that
has ever been written. All the old hocus-pocus is thrown overboard.
There is an entirely new examination of the materials, and to the
business is brought a knowledge of the plays so ready and so vast that
that of even the most learned don begins to seem a mere smattering.
The same great grasp of facts and evidences is visible in the sketches
which make up the three volumes of “Contemporary Portraits.” What one
always gets out of them is a feeling that the man knows the men he is
writing about—that he not only knows what he sets down, but a great
deal more. There is here nothing of the cold correctness of the usual
literary “estimate.” Warts are not forgotten, whether of the nose or
of the immortal soul. The subject, beginning as a political shibboleth
or a row of books, gradually takes on all the colors of life, and then
begins to move, naturally and freely. I know of no more brilliant
evocations of personality in any literature—and most of them are
personalities of sharp flavor, for Harris, in his day, seems to have
known almost everybody worth knowing, and whoever he knew went into his
laboratory for vivisection.
The man is thus a first-rate critic of his time, and what he has
written about his contemporaries is certain to condition the view of
them held in the future. What gives him his value in this difficult
field is, first of all and perhaps most important of all, his cynical
detachment—his capacity for viewing men and ideas objectively. In his
life, of course, there have been friendships and some of them have
been strong and long-continued, but when he writes it is with a sort
of surgical remoteness; as if the business in hand were vastly more
important than the man. He was lately protesting violently that he was
and is quite devoid of malice. Granted. But so is a surgeon. To write
of George Moore as he has written may be writing devoid of malice, but
nevertheless the effect is precisely that which would follow if some
malicious enemy were to drag poor George out of his celibate couch in
the dead of night, and chase him naked down Shaftsbury avenue. The
thing is appallingly revelatory—and I believe that it is true. The
Moore that he depicts may not be absolutely the real Moore, but he
is unquestionably far nearer to the real Moore than the Moore of the
Moore books. The method, of course, has its defects. Harris is far more
interested, fundamentally, in men than in their ideas: the catholic
sweep of his “Contemporary Portraits” proves it. In consequence his
judgments of books are often colored by his opinions of their authors.
He dislikes Mark Twain as his own antithesis: a trimmer and poltroon.
_Ergo_, “A Connecticut Yankee” is drivel, which leads us, as Euclid
hath it, to absurdity. He once had a row with Dreiser. _Ergo_, “The
Titan” is nonsense, which is itself nonsense. But I know of no critic
who is wholly free from that quite human weakness. In the academic
bunkophagi it is everything; they are willing to swallow anything so
long as the author is sound upon the League of Nations. It seems to me
that such aberrations are rarer in Harris than in most. He may have
violent prejudices, but it is seldom that they play upon a man who is
honest.
I judge from his frequent discussions of himself—he is happily free
from the vanity of modesty—that the pets of his secret heart are his
ventures into fiction, and especially, “The Bomb” and “Montes the
Matador.” The latter has been greatly praised by Arnold Bennett, who
has also praised Leonard Merrick. I have read it four or five times,
and always with enjoyment. It is a powerful and adept tale; well
constructed and beautifully written; it recalls some of the best of the
shorter stories of Thomas Hardy. Alongside it one might range half a
dozen other Harris stories—all of them carefully put together, every
one the work of a very skillful journeyman. But despite Harris, the
authentic Harris is not the story-writer: he has talents, of course,
but it would be absurd to put “Montes the Matador” beside “Heart of
Darkness.” In “Love in Youth” he descends to unmistakable fluff and
feebleness. The real Harris is the author of the Wilde volumes, of the
two books about Shakespeare, of the three volumes of “Contemporary
Portraits.” Here there is stuff that lifts itself clearly and
brilliantly above the general—criticism that has a terrific vividness
and plausibility, and all the gusto that the professors can never pump
up. Harris makes his opinions not only interesting, but important.
What he has to say always seems novel, ingenious, and true. Here is the
chief life-work of an American who, when all values are reckoned up,
will be found to have been a sound artist and an extremely intelligent,
courageous and original man—and infinitely the superior of the poor
dolts who once tried so childishly to dispose of him.
5
_Havelock Ellis_
If the test of the personal culture of a man be the degree of his
freedom from the banal ideas and childish emotions which move the
great masses of men, then Havelock Ellis is undoubtedly the most
civilized Englishman of his generation. He is a man of the soundest
and widest learning, but it is not his positive learning that gives
him distinction; it is his profound and implacable skepticism, his
penetrating eye for the transient, the disingenuous, and the shoddy.
So unconditioned a skepticism, it must be plain, is not an English
habit. The average Englishman of science, though he may challenge the
Continentals within his speciality, is only too apt to sink to the
level of a politician, a green grocer, or a suburban clergyman outside
it. The examples of Wallace, Crookes, and Lodge are anything but
isolated. Scratch an English naturalist and you are likely to discover
a spiritualist; take an English metaphysician to where the band is
playing, and if he begins to snuffle patriotically you need not be
surprised. The late war uncovered this weakness in a wholesale manner.
The English _Gelehrten_, as a class, not only stood by their country;
they also stood by the Hon. David Lloyd-George, the _Daily Mail_, and
the mob in Trafalgar Square. Unluckily, the asinine manifestations
ensuing—for instance, the “proofs” of the eminent Oxford philologist
that the Germans had never contributed anything to philology—are
not to be described with good grace by an American, for they were
far surpassed on this side of the water. England at least had Ellis,
with Bertrand Russell, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, and a few others in the
background. We had, on that plane, no one.
Ellis, it seems to me, stood above all the rest, and precisely because
his dissent from the prevailing imbecilities was quite devoid of
emotion and had nothing in it of brummagem moral purpose. Too many of
the heretics of the time were simply orthodox witch-hunters off on an
unaccustomed tangent. In their disorderly indignation they matched the
regular professors; it was only in the objects of their ranting that
they differed. But Ellis kept his head throughout. An Englishman of
the oldest native stock, an unapologetic lover of English scenes and
English ways, an unshaken believer in the essential soundness and
high historical destiny of his people, he simply stood aside from the
current clown-show and waited in patience for sense and decency to be
restored. His “Impressions and Comments,” the record of his war-time
reflections, is not without its note of melancholy; it was hard to
look on without depression. But for the man of genuine culture there
were at least some resources remaining within himself, and what gives
this volume its chief value is its picture of how such a man made use
of them. Ellis, facing the mob unleashed, turned to concerns and ideas
beyond its comprehension—to the humanism that stands above all such
sordid conflicts. There is something almost of Renaissance dignity in
his chronicle of his speculations. The man that emerges is not a mere
scholar immured in a cell, but a man of the world superior to his race
and his time—a philosopher viewing the childish passion of lesser men
disdainfully and yet not too remote to understand it, and even to see
in it a certain cosmic use. A fine air blows through the book. It takes
the reader into the company of one whose mind is a rich library and
whose manner is that of a gentleman. He is the complete anti-Kipling.
In him the Huxleian tradition comes to full flower.
His discourse ranges from Beethoven to Comstockery and from Spanish
architecture to the charm of the English village. The extent of the
man’s knowledge is really quite appalling. His primary work in the
world has been that of a psychologist, and in particular he has
brought a great erudition and an extraordinarily sound judgment to the
vexatious problems of the psychology of sex, but that professional
concern, extending over so many years, has not prevented him from
entering a dozen other domains of speculation, nor has it dulled his
sensitiveness to beauty nor his capacity to evoke it. His writing was
never better than in this volume. His style, especially towards the
end, takes on a sort of glowing clarity. It is English that is as
transparent as a crystal, and yet it is English that is full of fine
colors and cadences. There could be no better investiture for the
questionings and conclusions of so original, so curious, so learned,
and, above all, so sound and hearty a man.