The reader who knows of Donne from Campbell’s British Poets will, after

reading Mr. Fausset’s book, be likely to agree that “the life of Donne

is more interesting than his poetry.” It is indeed, and it becomes more

interesting after each biographer has had his turn at it. The last word

has not yet been said but the best that has been said is the last.

* * * * *

Thomas Burke, a young Britisher who has familiarised readers of English

with the East End of London and its motley inhabitants, who writes

about unclean things in a clean way and of vicious people wholesomely,

and who has rare talent for creating literary atmosphere, calls his

biography _The Wind and the Rain_. Next to Mr. Anderson’s story it

is the most captivating narrative that I have read in a long time.

Scarcely are these words written before pages of the _Memoirs of an

Editor_ by Edward P. Mitchell are reflected in the mirror of memory.

[Illustration: THOMAS BURKE]

Thomas Burke says nothing of his parents; I fancy he did not know them.

His first recollections are of his uncle, a gardener with a sense of

humour, and of a Chinese with an appearance of mystery who was later

deported because he trafficked in opium and morals. He got from the

latter what Dostoievsky got from epileptic attacks: a sense of time

arrested, crystallised; a sense of eternity; a fancy that always,

behind the curtain of time, the joy of the moment had been. The secret

that Pater attributed to Mona Lisa he learned from Quong Lee. Though

Tommy was but ten years old, he knew all the beauty and all the evil of

the heart of Asia: its cruelty, its grace, its wisdom. And the contact

generated a writer, for from his sixteenth year he has been animated

by a single motive: to express in writing one moment in a London side

street. He has not yet succeeded to his own satisfaction. As Marcel

Proust seeks to revive the memories and reveries associated with

incidents and experiences of childhood and youth, Mr. Burke struggles

to make come again “the pins-and-needles sensation in the back of my

neck” and to have the soul feeling that accompanied it when Quong Lee

beckoned him to his shop and gave him a piece of ginger.

Mr. Burke’s life seems to have been without remarkable event.

He stalked poverty, and he fell in love with a snob who had an

understanding friend of her own sex who shared a flat with her; he

made a half-hearted attempt to get on in the City and a whole-hearted

one to be a bohemian; and he saw the seams of the seamy side of life

burst wide open now and then. But he also met men with hearts, like Mr.

Creegan who gave him his first leg-up. This benefactor rescued him from

_une maison de joie et de jeux_ where he cleaned boots and ran errands

after he left the orphanage; fed him, clothed him, lodged him, got him

a job, and started him on the road that led to hobnobbing with Caruso

and reminiscing in Monaco. And he met Gracie Scott. If he treated

Gracie as he says in his book he did, it will be one of the sweetest

memories of his life when that of Cicely shall have gone forever and

that of Cosgrove shall have faded.

One of the many precious lies that grown-ups like to tell themselves

is that the days of their youth were happy days. Mr. Burke is not

addicted to that sort of story-telling. “I had little happiness then,

partly because I was young, and partly because I had no friends, no

money, bad food, and no hope. There was just one thing I had then which

belongs to all youth, however miserable. Though utterly joyless, I

had a tremendous _capacity_ for joy.” One may share that tremendous

capacity--for he still has it--by reading _The Wind and the Rain_.

* * * * *

“It is better to be beggared out of hand by a scape-grace

nephew, than daily hag-ridden by a peevish uncle.”

R. L. S.

Mr. John A. Steuart has written two large volumes to explain our legacy

from Robert Louis Stevenson, which was “a delightful contribution to

the romantic literature of the world and an example of courage that

will continue to inspire men to remote generations.”

A generation has come and gone since Stevenson died. Of the one

now on the threshold even those gifted with imagination and those

who understand the impulsiveness of their countrymen, will find it

difficult to understand the esteem in which he was held in America in

the beginning of the present century. To form any conception of the

appreciation, praise and adulation that were bestowed on his writings,

they will have to turn to contemporary criticism.

The British “discovered” Stevenson after we revealed him, but when it

came to approbation they surpassed us. Then there was an earthquake

in the literary world. Henley, the intimate of his early maturity and

the doughty champion of his genius, who more than any one else made a

public for him, published an article in the _Pall Mall Magazine_ which

seemed to give the _coup de grâce_ to Stevenson as a great writer. The

blow glanced off Stevenson and stunned Henley; the spectators howled

and called the latter traitor, and ghoul. When the excitement subsided

dispassionate witnesses reflected upon the matter. Some of them were

moved to re-read Stevenson. Others to read him for the first time. The

result was that devotees of Stevenson grew less numerous. However, when

in 1914 a temperate and generous critic, a novelist of established

reputation, Frank Swinnerton, published a critical study of Stevenson

which was adverse to his candidacy to immortality, it precipitated a

shower of abuse, less inundating than that which submerged Henley, but

still disagreeable. However, since that time, indiscriminate adulation

of Stevenson has given place to critical estimation. The result to-day

is that most judges agree with Swinnerton that it is no longer possible

for a serious critic to place him among the great writers because in

no department of letters--save the boy’s book and the short-story--has

he written work of first-class importance. His latest biographer would

seem to agree, though it is difficult to say just what Mr. Steuart

believes, for his writing is so overladen with verbiage, so surcharged

with platitudes, so interpolated with irrelevancies and so replete

with alleged inside information that one can not see the wood for the

trees. But he does not agree that Stevenson was not a “great” man for

when “he is summed up, when his qualities, mental and moral, have been

analysed and tabulated, it will be found that a superb courage crowns

all and from that master-quality flows other virtues in which he was

conspicuous--chivalry, generosity, love of justice, an eager humanity,

a passion for the happiness of the race. It is valour more than aught

else that enchants, inspires, and endears him to the people of two

hemispheres.” Probably no one will contest Mr. Steuart’s statement,

but surely it is an extraordinary reason for a critical biography. No

one would think of writing a life of Meredith or of Heine because they

displayed courage that excites our envy and elicits our admiration. Was

the courage of Heine or of Meredith inferior to that of Stevenson and

what was the quality of Stevenson’s that made it so distinguished?

Heine had a disease which, at the time, was never known to end in

recovery, Stevenson had only a disease (so far as his latest biographer

seems to know) that frequently is cured and nearly always tends to

quiescence when given half a chance. Why has John Addington Symonds’

courage not been estimated properly as an asset of greatness?

In truth Mr. Steuart takes himself too seriously. He has not advanced

Stevenson’s reputation an atom. Mr. Graham Balfour’s biography of

Stevenson may be a barley-sugar effigy of him, and it may make him out

a seraph in chocolate as Henley claimed, and the portrait may have been

touched up to please the family as Mr. Steuart maintains, but taken in

connection with Mr. Swinnerton’s book, Miss Masson’s _Life_, and the

publications of the Bibliophile Society of Boston, it is a competent

account of his life and accomplishments.

There is a feature of Stevenson’s personality that has never been

touched upon, but which, now that Mr. Steuart has woven a crown of

oak leaves for him, must be discussed, and that is his infantilism.

It was his curse as it was in a large measure his shame. It showed

itself in many ways: in his relationship to his mother, to Alison

Cunningham, “Cunny, my second mother,” to Lady Colvin and to his wife;

in his speech, dress, manner and imitativeness; in his gestures; in

his emotional reactions and determinations; and more than anything

else in his inability to display common sense and ordinary prudence.

He was always under the dominion of women older than himself and he

enjoyed it; they all mothered him. He had no more capacity to get along

without mothering than a ten-year-old child has. He was as interested

in his appearance as Narcissus. “He could not be in the same room

with a mirror but he must invite its confidence any time he passed

it; he was never so much in earnest, never so well-pleased, never so

irresistible as when he wrote about himself,” Henley wrote and all his

biographers agree. That this is a childish trait, no one needs to be

told. His speech, manner and dress never failed to attract attention

and he took great pains that they should not. Yearning for notice and

efforts to secure it are equally well-known infantile traits. Many

children invent fictitious parents and forebears. Stevenson was one of

them. Mr. Steuart has discovered that one Margaret Lizars of French

descent was his great-grandmother, and he naïvely remarks that this

explains Stevenson’s oddities. His imitativeness is testified to by

the way he taught himself to write and this incident is discussed

in the book under consideration in a chapter entitled _The Sedulous

Ape_. It would be difficult to say which was the most childish of all

Stevenson’s _beaux gestes_, but I shall say, harmonious with heredity,

the one he did not make; this incident suggests another illustrious

victim of adult infantilism, Shelley. All admirers of that genius know

that he went single-handed and inexperienced to Ireland to redress her

wrongs. Stevenson, on hearing that a Kerry farmer had been murdered by

“moonlighters” and his wife and children boycotted, proposed to rent

the Curtis farm and to proceed there with his family!

His dealings with his father, his meeting and courtship of Mrs. Fanny

de Grift Osbourne, his break with Henley, all conform to the teachings

of child psychology and are harmonious with child-behaviour, and they

are even more suggestive of infantilism than are the playing with

tin-soldiers, and the setting up and operating a toy press, which was

his diversion at Davos when, in his thirty-first year, he sought health

there a second time.

But nothing shows his infirmity so conspicuously as his inability

to look after his impaired health. It is one of the most pathetic

chapters in all biography, Stevenson’s imbecilic neglect of his

health. No sooner was he benefited by a stay at Bournemouth, Hyères,

Davos, Adirondacks, South Sea Islands, than he, with what looks like

deliberation, went somewhere or did something which any one but a child

would know was suicidal. The climate of Hyères suited him; in later

years he declared that it was the only time in his life that he was

really happy. He was lazy, yet at the same time productive, and he

felt well. But he must go home, and the reason for going was that “he

was yearning to get back to her who had so often and so effectively

comforted him.”

Time after time he did the same thing. In fact he was on his way home

from Samoa and he had reached Sydney when symptoms developed that made

further flight impossible. His reason for selecting Samoa instead

of Tahiti or Honolulu was supremely childish, “it was awful fun.”

It must be borne in mind that adult infantilism displays itself far

oftener in the emotional side of the individual’s make-up than in the

intellectual. Geniuses, particularly in the realm of the fine arts, are

often emotionally infantile. It accounts in a measure for the quarrels,

tantrums and vagaries of artists, and entirely for their reputation of

being neither practical nor provident.

Any one who would convince himself that many emotional and a few

physical characteristics of infancy clung to Stevenson in his maturity

should read the Essay _Child’s Play_ in the volume _Virginibus

Puerisque_.

Mr. Steuart harbours the delusion that he has brought to light

something new about Robert Louis Stevenson. One person familiar with

everything that Stevenson wrote and practically everything that has

been written about him fails to find it. To be sure he found out the

name of the bonny lass with whom Stevenson fell in love while she was

an earning guest of Mrs. Warren in Edinburgh, but he should be ashamed

for having published it. He found out also that Stevenson did not live

a strictly continent life, either before or after marriage. That is no

business of Steuart, and it does not concern readers of Stevenson.

One feels on reading the chapter in which “Claire” is introduced that

writing it, Mr. Steuart experienced a kind of salacious exaltation and

his apology in behalf of Stevenson makes one creep. Why Wordsworth

is dragged in, no one save the author knows. He must be aware that it

was not pruriency or pathological inquisitiveness that gave rise to

the Wordsworth-Vallon story. Critics and interpreters had sought for

explanation of obscurities in the philosopher-poet’s work. The story

explained them.

Mr. Steuart is satisfied that he did a Sherlock Holmes turn about the

Henley-Stevenson break. Let us admit it. How do the details that he

gives make Stevenson’s personality clearer to us? Mrs. Stevenson did

not like Henley, just as Mr. Steuart does not like Mrs. Stevenson.

Henley wrote Stevenson a letter and requested that it should not be

shown to anybody, a thing which would indicate that, though he was

captain of his fate and master of his soul, he did not know the a. b.

c. of the matrimonial game. Stevenson showed it to his wife and “der

Tag” dawned for her. The battle was fought and Stevenson won, but at

the expense of his peace of mind and happiness. The reparations have

not been made. No one can yet tell who will finally be called the moral

victor, but unless all signs and portents are to be distrusted it is R.

L. S.

Mr. Steuart’s book is interspersed with homilies on education and on

British valour; bromidic reflections: “As all the world knows, the

Casino at Monte Carlo is the centre of life and excitement to that gay

community”; platitudinous moralisations: “In such matters fathers are

apt to forget they were once young themselves”; and “adversity, it

has been said, is the true test of manhood”; meticulous explanations

such as the varieties of solicitor in Scotland; and studied padding,

as an example of which may be cited seven-eighths of what he says

about George Meredith. Some people may be glad to hear what he thinks

of Meredith as a novelist and as a person, but there will be fewer

probably after his book on Stevenson has been read.

“It is certain,” writes the author, “that Vailima, with its ever

increasing strain, did much to kill Stevenson.” Not nearly so much as

these two volumes, which were intended as a monument to him, have done!

Had Mr. Steuart talked with every old woman in Scotland who had ever

seen Stevenson, had he searched the register of every lupinaria of

Stevenson’s day in Edinburgh, and had he spent twice as much time as

he has in reverence before a bust of Henley, he could not understand

Stevenson the man or Stevenson the romancer.

Finally there is something patronising and condescending in his

attitude toward Stevenson, something contemptuous toward Mrs. Stevenson

and something studiously neglectful of Lady Colvin that is very

irritating. The reader who can rise from Mr. Steuart’s volume without

feeling that the author takes himself with sibylline seriousness is

fortunate, and the reader who can peruse the closing line without a

smile should take a cholagogue. His salute of Stevenson makes one think

of a wood-pecker taking leave of an eagle.

V

POETS

TROBADOUR, by _Alfred Kreymborg_.

WILLIAM BLAKE IN THIS WORLD, by _Harold Bruce_.

JOHN KEATS, by _Amy Lowell_.

POE--MAN, POET AND CREATIVE THINKER, by _Sherwin Cody_.

EDGAR A. POE, A PSYCHOPATIC STUDY, by _Dr. John W.

Robertson_.

RIMBAUD, by _Egdell Rickword_.

Despite the number and varieties of biographies published every year,

we rarely come upon one that is so interesting that it can not be put

down until the last page is read, one that grips us like a novel such

as _The Constant Nymph_ or _Tono Bungay_. Alfred Kreymborg, a maker of

verses without rhyme or capitals, some of which have great emotional

range, has succeeded in writing a story of his life that rivets our

attention. And he has pitched it in a key that persistently revives

pleasant memories. Reading it, one feels that it is the faithful

portrait of a soul in its adventures through life. Mr. Kreymborg is an

uncommon individual: a modest artist. He is content that his artistry

shall dawn upon us gradually, that we shall discover it as it were. He

does not proclaim it in the first chapter and reiterate it in all the

succeeding ones.

Neither our country nor its metropolis has been considered favourable

breeding ground for artists, nor is our atmosphere congenial to the

artistic temperament. It is difficult to conceive of more sterile

soil or environment for the growth and display of the emotional and

intellectual endowment that constitute artistry than those in which Mr.

Kreymborg found himself at his birth and during his formative years.

Indeed, he can not even be said to have been fortunate in his parents,

though his father, a German cigar packer, had a sense of humour, liked

Jews, and detested Tammany Hall; and his mother played the Butterbrod

Walzer and was optimistic. But that his talent was nevertheless “in the

family” on his mother’s side is testified by his Aunt Isabelle, who

went to the library every day, and was devoted to things called ideals.

The author does not dwell upon the locus and environment of his early

days; he spares us the minutiæ of his drab and sordid surroundings,

but we get a picture of them that is more informative than if it

were painted in vivid colours. Years ago I saw it every day, that

German-American home in the middle East Side, I ministered unto

those who constituted it, and I gained an esteem and an affection

for its members that required a world-calamity to alter. Now that it

is presented to me anew through verbal medium my recollections are

refreshed, my affections renewed and I praise the dexterity of the

artist’s pen and the accuracy of his memory.

The picture he gives of New York is the thing that will give the

book whatever permanency it will have. When Mouquin’s and the Hotel

Algonquin shall be replaced with a Rotonde and a Café Michaud; when

there will be a Boulevard Saint-Michel instead of a Greenwich Village;

a rue la Boëtie instead of a 57th Street; when pagan practice shall

have succeeded puritanic principle--then hedonists and students of

manners and customs who would know what New York was like while big

with the twentieth century, may turn to _Troubadour_ for enlightenment.

When poets, now considered radicals or rhythmicals, shall have taken

on conventionality, or professorships, and would tell their fellows or

their students of the birth and early days of their art and show them

the incubators in which the punies were put for development, they will

take them for a walk in 14th Street and they will read to them from

_Troubadour_. The latter will be more agreeable than the former for

Kreymborg’s prose has much of the elusive loveliness of his poetry;

for like his friend Sherwood Anderson, he knows how to string words

together so that they make music for the reader; and Fourteenth Street

is down at the heels, frayed at the cuffs and woozy in the head.

The author bears unnecessarily hard on the _forte_ pedal when he

renders his hardship selections. It does not add anything to our

picture of New York’s Bohemia to be told about the “awful stench one

could never quite grow accustomed to” in Kiel’s Bakery, and one reader

at least has not been able to guess the riddle of the Fourteenth Street

studio. The occupant had been working at Æolian Hall and had progressed

to orchestrelle leader, apparently content with his prospects. Then

Eve came in ostensibly to buy some rolls for her pianola. They called

her Tommy. She was twenty-seven or eight and “scarcely what worldly

folks would have designated a sophisticated person but with one or two

indisputable claims in the direction of Plymouth and the Mayflower.”

“Krimmie” learned about women from her. I suspect it was to facilitate

deeper knowledge rather than to gestate his art that he resigned his

sinecure for the sake of a thing so quixotic as a studio, “not even a

studio, but a room, less than a room--up the stairs of a dismal rickety

building on West 14th Street.”

Be that as it may, it was from that day that he began to get that

intimate knowledge of the habits of the wolf called want, which his

autobiography shows us that he possesses, and of the world frequented

by the wolf’s readiest prey. He reduced the beast to fictitious

pacification by throwing him his winnings at chess and as he had become

an expert player they were often considerable, and his germinating

worldly love he embodied in a story called _Erna Vitek_, which brought

him a mild _succès de scandale_. As strange a trio as could be

assembled in New York at the time--George Francis Train having left

Madison Square for the beyond--came forward to defend him. They were

Frank Harris, Rev. Percy Grant and Dr. Frank Crane. Mr. Kreymborg

observes parenthetically that he has not met the author of _My Life

and Loves_ to this day. It is gratifying to know that amidst all the

blows that he received in his quarter century of struggle, there was

occasionally a caress!

Krimmie did not exactly tire of Tommy, nor did Tommy exactly tire

of Krimmie. But the latter went West and the former East and the

experience gave the lie to the poet who sang about the effect of

absence on the heart. In East Lyme or thereabouts, Christine threw a

dazzling light across Krimmie’s path. It flabbergasted him for a moment

so that he could not distinguish her from others, but as soon as his

eyes became adjusted to the illumination he knew the die was cast,

the seal was set. He hastily sought a scrap of paper and embodied his

emotion in six words, each a monosyllable:

Till you came,

I was I.

Thus did he disregard his oft-repeated admonition that simplicity

should occur at the end of a long line of tradition. It reminds me of

a picture that _Life_ published many years ago: a small boy gazing

intently at a child’s garment (the name of which it is improper to

mention in polite American society) hanging on the line of a tenement

backyard and uttering ecstatically: “They’re hern.”

And so they were married. Krimmie did not distinguish then between

infatuation and love, and Christine had no idea how rough the road

would be from romance to reality, especially the part through

Grantwood, N. J. So after a year of many detours they decided to try it

alone--for a time at least. A young man whose adolescence was pitted

with piety had returned from Rome whither he had gone to have love’s

scars removed. He was keen to take Christine into his _matriomonale_

Ford in which he had invited her to ride before the priesthood

beckoned to him. Day by day, in every way, Krimmie’s affectivity

resembled more and more that of the late Mr. Barkis. It is not clearly

apparent why Mr. Kreymborg gave up Christine with such readiness. I

suspect she had an infantile personality, much like Dora who stole

little Emily’s lover away. Adult infantilism and matrimony make an

unpalatable emulsion.

One of the many fragments of knowledge that years bring is that man

consoles himself readily, often quickly. Krimmie got a job in a Wall

Street office as literary secretary to a Hungarian fourflusher, “high

in the counsels of the Democratic Party,” to compose superfine notes,

commensurable with the calling of the Boss. He had not been there long

when he met Dorothy. If _Troubadour_ did not give us anything besides

the picture of a person who looked like one of Goya’s ladies, and who

had the gentleness of Ruth with the constancy of Penelope, it would

still be a precious document. When I think of the many perfect wives

of artists that I have known: Mark Twain’s Livy, James Joyce’s Lady;

Paderewski’s alter ego, I shall always have a fancy that I have known

Dorothy in the quick. One of the first things she did for him after

orienting him on life’s pathway was to save for the world his “most

quasi-popular composition,” _Lima Beans_. Then she married him and his

days began to lengthen as his heart began to strengthen. They went

West, he to intone his poems, and climb Parnassus on the lake; she to

pull the strings of his marionettes and to encourage him when his feet

slipped on the mountain.

Krimmie’s rejuvenation was more complete than anything Steinach has

accomplished. He wrote plays, walked securely amongst the Provincetown

Thespians, fraternised intimately with literary _arrivistes_

and puppet-people, encouraged youngsters who were yearning for

self-expression and struggling against starvation, earned the good will

of the _Dial_, “now the leading æsthetic periodical of the soil,” and

gained the confidence of the young man who was to facilitate him in a

long dreamed-of gesture: the founding of an international Magazine of

the Arts which would stress the efforts of young Americans. So Krimmie

and Dorothy went to Italy and brought forth _Broom_. Incidentally,

they met Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Jean Cocteau, Tristan Tzara, the

daddy of _Dada_, Gertrude Stein, the mammie of gibberish, and Gordon

Craig, the master of marionettes, and others too numerous to mention.

Krimmie liked them and they all liked Krimmie, or if they did not, one

would never suspect it from Mr. Kreymborg’s book; I fancy they did for

obviously he has a genius for friendship. If they did not like Dorothy,

good taste has deserted the _habitués_ of the Quarter.

Among the many engaging episodes of their European trip none is

more delightful than the description of their encounter with the

world’s most famous poetic clown, Signor F. P. Marinetti, unless

it be the meeting with the pompous Pound. Marinetti directing his

fellow-players, totally oblivious of the vegetables that were hurled

at him, insensitive of their obvious decay, deaf to the insults and

imprecations that came from every quarter of the theatre, was a man

risking his life for a reputation. Mr. Kreymborg knew the habits of

the wolf, but he knew little of bears or their garden and he had never

visited the Parliament of Italy when the House was in session. Later,

when he was informed that the civil warfare which he had witnessed had

been arranged by Marinetti in the subtle behalf of publicity--that he

always hired a number of desperados to open the attack on the stage,

and to arouse the audience to an emulation of activity, he realised

that he had had a lesson in finesse. Such lessons are given nowhere in

the world better than in Italy.

Krimmie came home a better man. No change was to be discerned in

Dorothy on her return. She was the same as when she went: a bit of

perfection. Then he published his latest book of poems _Less Lonely_,

which caused some of his friends to fear that it indicated the

consecration of approaching middle age. The verses observe too many

maxims too carefully; they are too regularly iambic; their plethora

of monosyllables cause them to lose the nuance of accent, etc. Others

thought they showed the effect of Italian atmosphere so favourable to

every form of classicism. He “made up” with Louis Untermeyer; and wrote

the story of his own life. For one of these accomplishments, we can

never cease to be grateful. It has contributed to our pleasure, our

instruction and our welfare. Any one who will read _Troubadour_ will

love his fellow man more easily, and more intensely.

_Troubadour_ is an album filled with pictures big and little of people

we have known or would like to have known. Some of them are vignettes.

Some are life-size portraits, all of them testify to the facile and the

tender heart. There are few who have figured in the artistic life of

this country in the past twenty years who do not come in for mention

or characterisation. They all had to do in some way with the genesis,

birth and development of his urge for expression,--an urge which is

upon him imperiously and which no one, so far as may be judged from

the text, has tried to impede. Indeed one of the striking features of

the book is that it reveals no skunner against puritanism, no grouch

against democracy, no belief in the existence of a cabal to strangle

artistry, no ideas of persecution on the part of the author. The world

has treated him fairly enough. If ever there was a writer who had no

preparation for writing it was Alfred Kreymborg. What he learned he

taught himself. If he had learned the piano or the violin without

instruction or direction he would have had no fewer long days or lean

nights than he has had.

It is a pity that Alfred Kreymborg could not have gone to Columbia

University instead of Æolian Hall. Had he been judiciously advised and

properly guided he might have been thrown into currents that would have

carried him more quickly to success, as he would have developed his

artistic consciousness more smoothly and harmoniously and would the

more easily have been able to guess the poet’s secret: to be happy in

his heightened power to see and feel.

The era of self-made men is passing; many regret it and amongst

them are those who get pleasure from struggle, and happiness from

contemplating it. As Mr. Kreymborg says, recalling the days when

he first went to Fourteenth Street to the “studio:” “And there was

absolutely no joy like it--nothing like it.” Writers and artists have

no “corner” on that joy.

* * * * *

Writing in 1833, six years after William Blake, the poet-artist,

had gone to immortality, Edward FitzGerald said, “To me there is

a particular interest in this man’s writing and drawing, in the

strangeness of the constitution of his mind.” That is the interest of

William Blake to-day when his poetry fails to thrill or to inspire, and

when his highest claim to be considered an artist rests on a series of

drawings and engravings called _Illustrations to the Book of Job_.

William Blake had visual hallucinations. At least, he had the capacity

to see the creations of his imagination with the same vividness as if

they had been before his eyes, and he maintained that they were before

his eyes. He contended that things whose reality cannot be proved,

such as angels, people deceased for ages, and buildings demolished for

centuries, presented themselves in his visual field. He maintained it

with sincerity and determination and he drew what he said he saw. But

the fact that a man has hallucinations is not sufficient to label him

“insane.” Conduct that is prejudicial to others’ happiness, welfare,

and comfort is an essential condition, and none of William Blake’s

biographers or commentators has described such conduct. To many

psychiatrists like myself, Mr. Bruce’s effort to show that William

Blake was sane will undoubtedly seem an unnecessary labor, but a

gratifying one, for sympathetic hero handling is a kindly thing to

observe.

We never cease to marvel that persons who are “mad” can create or copy

so masterfully that the admiration of contemporaries is compelled and

the gratitude of posterity earned. This, despite the long list of

accomplishments in the world of art and letters by men who have been

potentially or actually mad.

Mr. Bruce opens one of his chapters with the sentence: “Blake, in

other words, was neurotic.” Now, the word “neurotic” must have some

very specific meaning for our young author, otherwise he would not

declare himself in this dramatic way. If William Blake was neurotic,

there is no indication of it in Mr. Bruce’s book. William Blake was

psychotic. He had what is called for purposes of facile designation a

manic-depressive temperament. The manic-depressive temperament can be

described with the same specificity as pneumonia; practically the only

thing about it that we do not know is its cause, but it is only very

recently that we have known the cause of pneumonia. I do not consider

that this is the proper place for the disquisition on the individual

psychic functions, particularly on the one known as affectivity, which

would be necessary were I to make a readily comprehensible description

of the manic-depressive psychosis, whether it reveals itself in shadowy

outlines or majestic proportions. Mr. Bruce writes, “To say confidently

that Blake suffered from mythomania, or from automatism, or from

occasional hyperæsthesia, or from manic-depressive tendencies, or that

he did not tend toward a definite schizophrenia is to add polysyllables

rather than illumination to the discussion of his state.” This is an

attitude of preciosity on the part of Mr. Bruce that is very offensive

to me. If he does not know what “schizophrenia” means, then he should

consult a dictionary and not display his infirmities to the world.

If he knows a better word, that is a more comprehensive or a more

descriptive word for personality cleavage, I suggest that he submit

it. What further illumination concerning the mental processes of an

individual can be desired than is conveyed in the statement that he is

a manic-depressive personality, or that he displayed the manifestations

of the mental disorder known as the manic-depressive psychosis?

A few years ago, in a book entitled _Idling in Italy_, I said anent

Giovanni Papini (who in 1920 was quite unknown to the American

public) that no one unfamiliar with the disorder of the mind called

manic-depressive psychosis could fully understand him.

There is no one more sane and businesslike than the

former Futurist, yet the reactions of his supersensitive

nature have great similarity with this mental disorder,

present, in embryo, in many people. In every display

of the manic-depressive temperament, there is a period

of emotional, physical and intellectual activity that

surmounts every obstacle, brushes aside every barrier,

leaps over every hurdle. During its dominancy, the victim

respects neither law nor convention; the goal is his only

object. He does not always know where he is going and

he is not concerned with it; he is concerned only with

going. When the spectator sees the road over which he has

travelled on his winged horse he finds it littered with

the débris that Pegasus has trampled upon and crushed.

This period of hyperactivity is invariably followed

by a time of depression, of inadequacy, of emotional

barrenness, of intellectual sterility, of physical

impotency, of spiritual frigidity. The sun from which

the body and the soul have had their warmth and their

glow falls below the horizon of the unfortunate’s

existence and he senses the terrors of the dark and

the rigidity of beginning congelation. Then, when hope

and warmth have all but gone and only life, mere life

without colour or emotion remains, and the necessity

of living forever in a world perpetually enshrouded in

darkness with no differentiation in the débris remaining

after the tornado, then the sun gradually peeps up,

illuminates, warms, revives, fructifies the earth, and

the sufferer becomes normal--normal save in the moments

or hours of fear when he contemplates having again to

brave the hurricane or to breast the deluge. But once

the wind begins to blow with a velocity that bespeaks the

re-advent of the tornado, he throws off inhibition and

goes out in the open, holds up the torch that shall light

the whole world, and with his megaphone from the top of

Helicon shouts: “This way to the revolution.”

I contend that any one who will read even the summaries of the chapters

of Mr. Bruce’s book will need no further evidence to be convinced that

William Blake, who had “everywhere the poet’s firm persuasion that

things were so, who stuck to a choice that was contemned, to a taste

that was laughed at”; who was as immune to ridicule as a tortoise is to

admonition; who spoke his mind on all occasions even when it clashed

with authority; who, like the master potter, knew, knew, knew; who

swung backward and forward from high exaltation to pits of melancholy;

who listened to messengers from heaven daily and nightly and composed

under their dictation a poem which he considered the grandest that this

world contained, even though he was never able to find one purchaser;

who received Richard Cœur-de-Lion at a quarter past twelve, midnight,

and painted his portrait though he had been dead several centuries;

who displayed a persecutory state of mind when he was depressed, and a

self-sufficiency that brooked no curbing when he was exalted; who took

no thought for the morrow and was as unable to take care of himself

as a two-year-old child, was of manic-depressive temperament. That

he escaped being sent to Bethlehem Hospital, vulgarly called Bedlam,

entitles him to our belated congratulations.

When Mr. Bruce ceases to be annoying about adjectives, he is both

amusing and amazing. “William Blake had the neurotic’s need for

dependence on some one outside himself.” A neurotic is an individual

who has some nervous disorder or disease, functional or organic. A

typical nervous disorder is migraine, sick headache. I could easily

enumerate a score of the world’s great men and women who were thus

afflicted. What was their need for dependence on some one outside

themselves? “He had the neurotic’s sense of time.” What can that

possibly be? Was it the sense of time that Dostoievsky had just

before the convulsions appeared that attended his epileptic attacks?

Dostoievsky was a neurotic--one of the most typical that ever lived,

perhaps. He maintained that the few seconds previous to the motor

manifestation of an attack were a timeless eternity. If it lasted

another fractional part of a second, he could not possibly survive it.

Did William Blake have this kind of sense of time?

He could not tolerate a pedantic, pretentious, stupid, pachydermatous

patron, William Hayley. According to Sinclair Lewis there are only

two races of people, the neurotic and the stupid: William Hayley was

stupid, William Blake was neurotic. At least, it can be said of this

reasoning that it offers a better foundation for Mr. Bruce’s thesis

than that which he has heretofore provided.

William Blake was a happy man, for he believed in himself. He was

a lucky man--his wife believed in him. He was a courageous man: he

threw a trespassing sailor, emboldened by strong drink, out of his

garden and was tried for high treason. Yet he patiently tolerated the

inquisitive visits of the greatest bore of his time, Crabb Robinson,

without even threat of assault. He did not get his just deserts from

his contemporaries, but posterity has more than made up for their

niggardliness, and Mr. Bruce has given posterity a leg-up. Had he dwelt

more on the value and significance of Blake’s art and less on his

“neurosis” he would have served us better. But his book is a snappy,

concise, readable account of a man who had faith in himself and who,

finally, compelled others to acknowledge his merit.

* * * * *

Students of Keats’ poetry and personality are not likely to admit that

a new life of him was called for, in view of Sir Sidney Colvin’s

searching and critical study which has just appeared in a third

edition. Amy Lowell’s reason for putting forth a new biography was that

she had new material; but what I say elsewhere about Barton’s _Lincoln_

applies here: the new material justified a brochure, not a life.

Miss Lowell wanted to write a life of Keats; that, aside from anything

else, was reason enough for her. She had a vicarious mother-feeling for

him and she was determined to display it. Her last book is an enduring

monument to her industry, patience and perspicacity. She had a relish

for criticism, but at times she confounded it with abuse and when she

championed an individual, a cause, or a movement, she did it in the

manner of a fellow-townsman, John L. Sullivan: with all her might and

main. She “never trembled like a guilty thing surprised,” or if she did

it was only when she was enraged by the stupidities and ignorance of

others--those who did not agree with her.

[Illustration: JOHN KEATS IN HIS LAST ILLNESS]

From the sketch by Joseph Severn, January 28, 1821, which

Charles Cowden Clarke characterised as “a marvellously

correct likeness.”

_Engraved by Timothy Cole and reprinted by permission of

“The Century Magazine”_

Keats is a fascinating figure and always will be. The son of a

stableman, the doors of the best literary society in London were opened

wide to him; though he had but few years of mortal life, and few months

of literary activity, he has become one of the greatest English poets.

It was not the pathos of his existence, the diseases that ravaged him,

the hopelessness of his love, or the relative isolation in which he

was morally steeped that focusses our interest. It is his conception

of poetry, his flight into the world of dreams untinged by reality,

and the wondrous rapidity with which he scaled the heights of imagery.

They made him immortal. In “the Armour of Words and with the Sword

of Syllables” he fought a great battle and won. His personality had

many facets and they were nearly all made to arrest attention, enlist

sympathy and inspire admiration; but poet though he was, he was a man,

and his human side is as deserving of study as his poetical nature;

in the latter, there is primarily genius, and genius is not to be

explained or understood, still less studied. In the former, there is

the weakness of a mere mortal and the strength of an intelligence;

the misery of bad health, and the victory of will-power; the alleged

resignation to death and the desire to live; the heart break of the man

whose ambitions were never fulfilled, and the exaltations of the lover

who believes his love to be reciprocated; the grimace of the lip which

finds gall in the cup from which it drinks, and the satisfaction of the

heart which has faith in the world and confidence in friendship. All

these aspects of the poet Amy Lowell has followed day by day, almost

hour by hour, with the persistency of a detective. From the slightest

cue, she lays a course which soon leads her to the exact day and the

approximate hour when Keats accomplished the action she describes, and

with the support of a clear conscience and the encouragement of proofs,

to her irrefutable, she opposes the judgment of other biographers, and

fearlessly and categorically contradicts them. This scarcely justifies

her assertion “We may say, with something like certainty, that we know

everything he did; for which reason, it is safe to assume that what

we do not know of, he did not do.” I have encountered many foolish

statements in literature; the one quoted is not the least of them. It

would be far truer to say that we know every thought he had, and how

foolish that would be! His letters reveal his sensations, his emotions

and his thoughts, but they are singularly silent about what he did.

It would take a thorough knowledge of all the documents Miss Lowell

brings to light, and require a deep study of all that has ever been

written about Keats either to refute or to accept all her conclusions.

Many of them will seem to the average reader an aggregation of useless

details rather than an approach to the subject from a new angle, having

a bearing on Keats the poet, or Keats the man. The task of discussing

the foundation of her conclusions must be left to other biographers or

students of the poet, of whom there are legions; and it can not be

attempted at all until after the publication of all the notes of the

poet’s friend, Brown.

John Keats’ brief life was singularly full, and the best of his record

is to be found in the letters he wrote to friends, and to his brothers

and sisters. Written from the fulness of the heart and with no other

object than to relieve his mind and convey news, these constitute the

most complete and comprehensive characterisation of the poet. Keats was

modest about his genius, but he had an insatiable appetite for praise

and love. And every one who knew him loved him and believed in him. It

was the public that failed him. And sensitive as he was, its disdain,

and the scorn of Lockhart and other critics, caused him profound

suffering. To say that it killed him, as has been said countless times

the past three generations, is to utter an absurdity. He had two most

serious infectious diseases, and he had the kind of temperament that

facilitates the progress of both of them.

Amy Lowell thinks that had he lived, he would probably not have been

as great a poet as Browning. There seems small foundation for such

a statement, and in this prophetless age, such pronouncements are

worthless. What Keats produced in three years of poetic work, and less

than one year of real inspiration, suggests at least that he would

have been all the greater had he lived. He might not have developed

emotionally, nor intellectually, but there is very little question that

he would have developed critically and that his sense of values would

have taken on keenness and profundity. Even as he was, his creative

faculty was considerable. He could turn an inspirational current on

at will. When it stopped flowing, or when it began to flow feebly, he

could turn it off; then, while the Olympic dynamo was generating, and

the Parnassian battery storing the divine fluid, he could turn on the

light of criticism. Not all great poets can do that.

Early in life Keats lost his mother, who, by her attachment,

represented for him the ideal of motherly love. For such love, he

unceasingly sought. He had what the Freudians call a mother-complex.

He needed the constant watchfulness, the untiring devotion and the

profound understanding that a mother alone can bestow on a man. In

Fanny Brawne, he found youth and beauty, brains and brilliancy, but

none of the fondness and constancy that his nature demanded.

It was Miss Lowell’s unquenchable thirst for justice and honesty that

made her attempt such thorough rehabilitation of Fanny Brawne. The

effort seems useless and rather irrelevant, without much justification

or foundation. Fanny Brawne’s love for Keats was such that, had he

not been under the stupefying influence of the little Greek god who

blindfolds his victims, he would have seen that Fanny was of similar

calibre to the other women whose lack of motherly feeling for him

prevented them from taking a permanent place in his heart. Miss Lowell

realised the limitations of Fanny when she wrote: “One of the many

reasons for Keats’ failure in his relations with Fanny Brawne was

that he sought in her a mother as well as a lover, and she had not

yet grown up enough to stand to him in both capacities.” This is the

judgment of a mind, not of a heart; the judgment of a critic, not of

a psychologist; the judgment of one who believes that years bring in

their trend qualities and characteristics that do not exist in the

embryo of maturity. A woman need not be of mother-age to be maternal

any more than a pianist need be able to play Russian music at first

sight to be an artist. The maternal instinct, when it exists, is

revealed in childhood, and a love like that which united John Keats

to Fanny Brawne, should have been the spark which caused her love to

blaze. The letters of Fanny which have been published do not help to

build a shrine around her and to rehabilitate her, since they were

practically all written after Keats’ death--when memories and remorse

might have vied to make her appreciate what she had lost. Moreover

Fanny, who pretended to love him, did little to prove it; and none of

Miss Lowell’s arguments can convince one reader that, had she really

been seized of the same passion that possessed Keats, she would not

have married him, when marriage meant happiness and bliss for him.

Of course, Keats was ill, very ill, but no one knew it to be a fatal

illness, and it may be safe to assume that either of Shelley’s wives

would have surmounted the obstacle. Miss Lowell says: “Fanny lived in

an age when well-brought-up daughters in her class of life did not jump

over the traces and marry offhand; and suppose Fanny had happened to do

this, neither she nor Keats had the money to run away, and was it to be

contemplated that Fanny should move next door and let Brown support the

pair of them! The idea is absurd. Fanny was not Harriet Westbrook, and

Keats was no Shelley. They each did the best they could, as I think any

one not hoodwinked by an unreasoning love for Keats can see.”

It was lucky for Keats that Fanny was no Harriet Westbrook, but what

a pity she had not some of the virtues and qualities that made Mary

Godwin the exquisite creature and inspirer that she was! Furthermore,

there is no indication in Miss Lowell’s book that the question of

marriage had ever been brought up for family consideration. It seems

just to say that Fanny, with her limitations and light-heartedness, did

the best she could, and was no heroine; but what we would have liked

to see would have been a Fanny “hoodwinked by an unreasoning love of

Keats,” who combined pulchritude and intelligence with a magnificent

heart.

The picture that Miss Lowell paints of Keats is idealised. He is not

vulgar as Watson said, not a howler and a sniveller as Swinburne

said, and not “unmanly” as many said and thought after reading the

Brawne letters. We are ready to believe he was none of them, but it is

too much to ask that we shall believe “that the pure poet is a pure

poet because he is a pure man.” White-washing poets is the meanest

occupation in the world next to census-taking.

However, she has interwoven and blended the man with the artist in

such manner that the one overlaps the other constantly, and the result

is a homogeneous and substantial whole. When the man dominates, Keats

is delightful; when the artist has the upper hand, he is admirable.

She has rendered exquisitely the humanity of the poet who had belief

in nothing but what he learned for himself, and who could be himself

always. What she failed to convey was his profound self-consciousness

and sensuousness, and how they influenced, one might almost say shaped,

his life and his poetry.

Keats underwent a religious experience, conversion one may call it,

that influenced his life and his work; so that one may cite him as

evidence that poetic comprehension can not be complete unless it

includes religious comprehension. It is to be regretted that Miss

Lowell did not discuss this episode.

However, she made the most of her documentation, and of her subject

from an intellectual and objective point of view. She has written a

biography which is as powerfully conceived as it is intelligently

realised, and it can never be repeated too often that, above all, Amy

Lowell was an intelligence. Her capacity for work was astounding; her

painstaking and thorough study an achievement of labour that reminds

one of the monks of the Middle Ages who spent their lives in cells and

cubicles, illuminating prayer books with the most exquisite figures

and colours, bringing to their task the patience of angels, the piety

of saints and the skill of artists. But her industry was as naught

compared with the tenacity of her opinion and the legitimacy of her

judgment.

From a subjective and emotional point of view, _John Keats_ is far from

perfect; for the biographer has not made sufficient allowance for the

fact that she was writing of a genius. She took his measurements with

the same tape she would use if she were measuring William J. Bryan, and

she would probably have approved of James Barrie’s _Tammas Haggart_ and

his ideas in regard to “geniuses.” She did not allow for the spread of

Keats’ wings, or the aureole of his genius. She explained his motives

and his achievements with everyday words, and she brought to bear on

her task the illumination of medicine and the testimony of psychology.

She achieved a work of the head, not of the heart, and John Keats was

above all a heart. In several instances she is at a loss to understand

her subject, especially toward the end of his life, which takes in

centuries of achievements in a few months of actual life. Keats moves

too fast for her; his feet are too winged, the empyrean too rarefied.

She can not understand how life could have been “painful” for him since

he had almost everything he needed, and had not received more than his

share of misfortunes; and unless one attempts to read in the heart of

Keats, nothing in his external life can corroborate the statement that

his life was a tragedy. Human and material blessings are not enough to

make life bearable, and Keats had not an excessive amount of either.

It may be a comfort to think that nothing on earth would have made him

really happy--save perhaps to possess Fanny as wife, but it is safe to

assume that, unless such a marriage accomplished the miracle, Fanny

bound to Keats would have failed him. Better for him in this instance

to live in hope than to realise it.

Few things are more convincing of Miss Lowell’s inability really to

appreciate the heart of her subject than the comment on one of Keats’

letters to Fanny in which she says that few persons could endure much

longer the agonies and uncertainties which she was “so peculiarly made

to create.” Miss Lowell follows this quotation with “Nobody with a

grain of medical sense can fail to see this is delirium.” Perhaps not,

but to use medical sense to judge John Keats is a mistake. It was agony

of a sort that no medicine could relieve, and which no amount of sense

could subdue.

Miss Lowell said that “Endymion suddenly finding his empty uplifted

arms clasped about a naked waist is a beautiful flight of imagination

astringently absorbingly expressed.” Her _John Keats_ is astringently

absorbing, but its expressions are sometimes corrosive.

* * * * *

We may not know all Poe’s virtues and infirmities; time may be dealing

too harshly or too leniently with him; it is possible that short-story

writers do not acknowledge their indebtedness to him, and that students

of style do not study him sufficiently; and it may be that some do

not admit that he is one of a very small group constituting the

world’s great writers. But none of these injustices of mind or heart

will be remedied by Mr. Sherwin Cody’s book. The author may possess

qualifications for writing a life of Poe, but his book does not testify

them. The art of narrative has eluded him; style, which must give

flavour and substance to all biography, seems to be beyond his reach,

and he has no critical judgment in the use of the vast material that

Professor Harrison and many other students of Poe have collected. The

only qualification he would seem to have is “a confessed sympathy with

Poe’s difficult personal character.” Even though this sympathy embraced

Poe’s impersonal character, it would not suffice him as biographer.

It would be easy to characterize Mr. Cody’s book, but I shall refrain

and call attention only to his intemperance of statement and his

disregard of the rules governing grammatical construction. “Poe stood

absolutely alone among American writers.” “It is probable that Poe has

been the most venomously hated man of letters in the whole range of

history. W. C. Brownell in his cold, impersonal way discusses Poe with

a hatred as intense as Griswold’s.”

“Poe died of nervous breakdown rather than of the effects of

over-indulgence in intoxicants.”

“Poe wrote but few poems the next fifteen years, but every one is a

masterpiece.” There are scores of statements of similar texture, but

none of them is true.

As an example of Mr. Cody’s lack of critical judgment and

understanding, the following is offered: “The writer has in mind two

young friends who, in recent times, struggling to attain literary

recognition as Poe did, though with far less accomplishment than his,

sank under the mental strain and died, one of paresis, one of apoplexy,

and a careful study of literary history would reveal scores of such.”

Paresis has one cause, and only one; apoplexy in early life has two,

and one of them is the same spirochete that causes paresis.

There is a finality about the author’s statements that is at first

irritating, then depressing. “No very excitable person, such as Poe

was, could possibly give us calm and placid judgment that would

harmonise with the crude impressions of common men and women.” Anatole

France was a very excitable person, and he gave very calm and placid

judgments, and it is up to “common women” to say whether such judgments

harmonise with their “crude impressions” or not. Not all of Mr. Cody’s

book is irritating. Some of it is amusing. Commenting on some of Poe’s

well-known lies (his personal mendacity he calls it) he says, “Possibly

he regarded this romancing about himself as harmless in itself and of

some value as advertising, but the thoughtful critic can not refrain

from severely blaming him.” Here speaks the author of _Business

Correspondence and Advertisement Writing for Business Men_ and the

critic who is not only thoughtful but moral!

The publishers say that Mr. Cody received a letter from Bliss Perry

which contains the sentence, “You have done a real service to

literature.” It is more difficult to believe, even, than many of the

statements of his book.

Doctor Robertson says his study of Poe “contains something new which

attempts to harmonise and to present in new aspects old and well

established facts, and which further makes plain the neurosis from

which he suffered.” The facts about Poe were stated temperately and

judiciously forty years ago by a man whose labours have ornamented

American letters, and few facts have been added since the time George

E. Woodberry wrote:

“Poe, highly endowed, well-bred, and educated better

than his fellows, had more than once fair opportunities,

brilliant prospects, and groups of benevolent,

considerate, and active friends, and repeatedly forfeited

prosperity and even the homely honour of an honest

name. He ate opium and drank liquor; whatever was the

cause, these were the instruments of his ruin. He died

under circumstances of exceptional ugliness, misery and

pity. He left a fame destined to long memory. On the

roll of our literature Poe’s name is inscribed with the

few foremost, and in the world at large his genius is

established as valid among all men.”

To call his infirmity “dipsomania” and his genius a “neurosis” does not

more securely enhance Poe in the hearts of his countrymen, or add to

the lustre of his name.

The thesis of the psychopathic study is that Poe was the victim of a

hereditary “neurosis,” which, the author claims, differs essentially

from alcoholism; and that this neurosis rendered him at intervals

non-responsible for his acts, at the same time giving him a personality

as unlike his own in his normal condition as certain familiar forms

of insanity are universally admitted to do. Entirely apart from the

correctness of the author’s claims, they throw no additional light on

the events of Poe’s life, nor do they add interest to his writings,

either from the standpoint of literature or of psychopathology. It may

be comforting to some of Poe’s admirers to think of him as a psychopath

instead of a drunkard; an irresponsible victim of an inherited

handicap, instead of a moral weakling who, under the influence of

alcohol, sometimes committed dishonourable acts.

Dr. Robertson says: “Only those who are experienced in the study of

patients thus afflicted, and who have had personal association with

them, can fully understand and appreciate the nature of the neurosis

from which Poe suffered and the difficulty in overcoming such

obsessions.” A neurosis is a nervous disease not associated with or

dependent upon alteration of the nerves demonstrable during life or

after death. Dr. Robertson believes that Poe had such disease, that

it was inherited, and that it was beyond his will or determination

materially to influence or control it. What neurosis did he have?

Was it periodic “spreeing,” called dipsomania? If so, one might

legitimately, perhaps, call it a psychosis, if he is bound to give it

a name. But “neurosis” seems to be wholly beyond justification. Just

what he means by “the difficulty in overcoming such obsessions” is not

evident, or to me conjecturable. Psychologists and psychiatrists use

the term obsession to indicate a state of siege or torment which seeks

to control the individual and to condition his conduct. I have never

heard the word obsession used synonymously with impulsion to drink or

compulsion to yield to the desire to drink.

“Dipsomania necessarily is an alcoholic inheritance.” It is to be

presumed that Dr. Robertson means to say that individuals who have

an uncontrollable desire to drink periodically are descended from

stock who had similar desires and succumbed to them. But that does

not advance us any further in our conception of what this so-called

dipsomania is. The unwarrantable liberty the author of this book takes

is that he speaks of dipsomania as if it were a definite disease which

psychiatrists recognise and describe. Dr. Robertson is a bibliomaniac.

I have Ruskin’s authority for saying if a man spends lavishly on his

library, you call him mad, a bibliomaniac. If some of Dr. Robertson’s

ancestry bought books when their more material neighbors thought they

should have bought shoes, his neurosis might be called a bibliophilic

inheritance. This characterisation would not particularly advance our

knowledge of Dr. Robertson’s personality or aid us to interpret his

conduct.

Alcohol plays an important rôle in the causation of mental diseases.

Statistics seem to show that about 12 per cent. of the certified

insane in this country were addicted to the intemperate use of

alcohol. But it does not follow that their insanity was due to such

addiction. It is but one of the many causes of insanity, and not the

most important. “Dipsomania is a disease, and those suffering from it

should be given such medical consideration as we give the insane.” This

is purely a gratuitous assumption on the part of the author. Certainly

dipsomania is Dis-Ease if you emphasise the etymology of the word (a

thing which Dr. Robertson enjoys doing, as he is at some pains to point

out to us that genius is derived from _genere_, to beget): but if the

purpose is to convey that dipsomania is a mental disease, such as one

of the manic-depressive psychoses, paranoia, or other recognisable

and described mental diseases without anatomical foundation, it is

both unjustified and misleading. Dr. Robertson quotes Spitzka, “one

of our well-known authorities on insanity,” in support of some of his

statements. The lay reader might legitimately infer that Spitzka was

an authority of the present day, whereas in reality the science of

psychiatry has been revolutionised since he wrote. The modern textbook

of psychiatry has no chapter on dipsomania, nor does it recognise it as

a distinct variety of insanity. Modern psychiatry recognises many forms

of alcoholic insanity and it calls them alcoholic dementia, alcoholic

pseudo-paresis, alcoholic pseudo-paranoia, alcoholic hallucinosis, etc.

Dipsomania is used by the modern psychiatrist to indicate a periodical

impulse to drink. So far as the writer knows, no one has ever denied

that Edgar A. Poe had dipsomania. Why belabour this admission when he

has been comfortably seated on Parnassus for half a century?

Again it might be asked, what medical consideration do we give the

insane that dipsomaniacs should have? We deprive them of their liberty

for their own benefit and for the benefit of the community, but

that is a judicial consideration. We do not deprive dipsomaniacs of

their liberty because we are not permitted to do so, though it is

self-evident that it would be to their advantage and to the benefit

of those dependent upon and associated with them. Dr. Robertson seems

to think that it is not generally accepted that an uncontrollable

inclination to drink is inherited, and that he must prove it. In order

to prove it he feels that he must first prove that genius is inherited.

The teachings of biology are against him.

As a rule biographers deem that they have completed their

work of establishing hereditary predispositions on which

later accomplishments depend, when they have constructed

a genealogy blazed with quarterings, and all the more

ornamental if marked with the bend sinister. They know

nothing of the Mendelian laws of heredity.

How Dr. Robertson can possibly know that biographers know nothing

of the Mendelian laws of heredity is beyond any surmise on my part.

I should say that if a biographer like Woodberry should indicate in

his writing or allow it to be inferred that the Mendelian hypothesis

was known to him, it would be safe to lay a handsome wager on it. But

when Griswold, Poe’s first biographer, wrote his appreciation, or as

Dr. Robertson would prefer to call it, his calumny, Gregor Mendel,

the Austrian priest and Abbot of the Augustine Convent of Brünn,

was quietly working in his garden making those observations that

permitted him to formulate a law which has revolutionised our view of

the principles of fertilisation in plants, and which may eventually

revolutionise our ideas of heredity in higher organisms. He published

a paper about them in the Natural History Society of Brünn, but it was

lost sight of for many years and not until the principles of it were

rediscovered in 1899 by De Vries, by Corens and by Tschermak was the

epoch-making work of Mendel recognised. Although Dr. Robertson does

not say it in so many words, he leaves the reader to infer that the

Mendelian hypothesis is accepted and that it is the foundation of our

theories and facts of heredity. In reality, however, the theories of

heredity that must still be reckoned with are those of Darwin, Cope and

Weismann, respectively, or the theories of pangenesis, perigenesis and

the theory of the continuity of the germ plasm.

Biographers [says the author] ignore the fact that great

genius like that of Cæsar or Napoleón, or such mental

gifts as were bestowed upon Milton and Shakespeare, are

the results of what horticulturists call a sport and

occur only as an abnormality.

Biographers may ignore the alleged fact, but in doing so, they are

in the company of such biologists as Francis Galton and his pupil

and successor, Karl Pearson, to whom we owe much of our knowledge of

heredity, acceptable and accepted.

Dr. Robertson has a way of making an arbitrary statement which savours

of arrogance. For instance, “Genius develops early and is characterised

by precocity.” I suppose Pasteur was a genius. He was the founder of

the science of bacteriology, the architect of a diseaseless world.

There is every reason for believing that he was not precocious. Few

people would deny that Thomas Edison is a genius. He certainly was not

precocious. Though the names of youthful dullards in the roll of men of

achievement are not legion, I recall those of Davy, Linnæus, Humboldt,

Watt, Fulton, Schiller, Heine, Goldsmith, Beecher, Whistler, Patrick

Henry and Rousseau.

“Precocity of necessity foretells early decline,” says the author.

John Stuart Mill, for instance, who could read Plato and Demosthenes

with ease when he was eight and began a thorough study of scholastic

logic when he was twelve! J. St. Loe Strachey is still going strong,

and any one who doubts that he was precocious is referred to _The Joy

of Living_. “I view brilliancy in the child as an abnormal heredity

that must pay the price of premature decay.” Shades of Beethoven and

Alexander Pope! No one would deny artistic genius to Richard Wagner.

At the age of thirteen he translated the first twelve books of the

Odyssey for amusement; at seventeen his first production as a composer

was performed at the Leipzig theatre; and at sixty-nine the music of

“Parsifal” was completed.

Dr. Robertson is bound to show that Poe did not die of delirium

tremens, and he characterises the statement of Dr. J. J. Moran, who

was resident physician of the Washington University Hospital, where

Poe died, as “an intelligent statement covering the details of a death

due to brain inflammation or engorgement.” But brain inflammation

or engorgement is the condition of the brain and its membranes that

is found in every case of delirium tremens that comes to autopsy,

especially when the delirium has occurred in an individual whose

resistance to alcohol has been impaired by prolonged use of that

intoxicant or of drugs. The plain truth is that our greatest poet used

alcohol intemperately and opium indiscreetly; that he died of delirium

tremens; that his father drank excessively; that his conduct, drunk or

sober, did not meet with the approbation of all those who knew him,

possibly even not of the majority. But he put the United States of

America on the literary map and he put it there more indelibly than any

individual who preceded him or who has so far followed him. This is

not the opinion or judgment of the writer, but of countless students

and critics who have written of him during the past half century. Why

whitewash the crown that posterity has put upon his brow? Why not leave

the golden shimmer of the original burnish?

Merely to expose the quality of the whitewash which Dr. Robertson has

applied to the poet’s crown, and not from any desire to call attention

to the weakness of the man who wears it, one incident may be cited of

Poe’s action as a critic. This is his estimate of Estelle Anna Lewis, a

Brooklyn poetess, of whom he wrote:

All critical opinion must agree in assigning her a high,

if not the highest, rank among the poetesses of her land.

Her artistic ability is unusual; her command of language

great; her acquirements numerous and thorough; her range

of incident wide; her invention generally vigorous; her

fancy exuberant; and her imagination--that primary and

most indispensable of all poetic requisites--richer

perhaps than any of her female contemporaries.

Such an estimate could only go to prove that critics often make

mistakes and that Poe as critic was not the peer of Poe as poet and

story-writer, were it not for the fact that this poetess, prior to the

appearance of the notice in which the quotation appeared, had paid Poe

one hundred dollars to review one of her books, and when she complained

of his failure to do so he remarked that if he reviewed her rubbish it

would kill him.

Such incidents could be multiplied. But to what purpose? Poe was a

genius and he is immortal. As a man he was a pathetic figure, a moral

weakling. It can not add to the lustre of his immortal genius to expose

the pitiful skeleton of the man over whom the dust of time has spread

a merciful veil and the radiance of his crown has cast an indulgent

shadow. Nor can Dr. Robertson enhance the world’s estimate of the

writer by piling up words to convince it that Poe, the man, was full of

fine qualities only, but at times committed acts for which he could not

be held responsible because he was under the temporary influence of a

“neurosis”; and that this “neurosis” had no effect upon the quality of

his writing.

* * * * *

Edgell Rickword’s biography of Arthur Rimbaud, the decadent, is too

laudatory, too apologetic, too condoning; but it reveals penetrative

insight, sympathetic understanding, and a measure of critical acumen.

Rimbaud was a contentious, bumptious, conceited, selfish, pigheaded,

insensitive young hobo who in three years of his youthful life wrote

the best poetry of France since Baudelaire. He printed only one

book, _Une Saison en Enfer_, an epitome of his mind’s life. When

he was eighteen he stopped writing and began wandering, scoffing

at literature, regretting his part in its creation, and scorning

recognition of a position among the writers of his country.

He tramped, he travelled with a circus, he was overseer in a stone

quarry, and finally landed in Africa where he lived the last nineteen

years of his life, pioneering, exploring, merchandising. Then, just

as he was about to secure a modest competency and to see his dream

of fireside and family come true, a parasite possessed him. When he

reached Marseilles the surgeons amputated a leg, and he died soon

after, in the odour of sanctity and in his thirty-eighth year. His

devoted, pious sister, Isabelle, has told of his last days with fervid

affection in a booklet _Mon Frère Arthur_, and Ernest Delahaye, who

knew, understood, loved, and tolerated him perhaps more than any one,

published in 1923 a volume which pleased both the critics and Rimbaud’s

friends. About the same time an industrious critic of French letters,

Maurice Coulon, published a volume, _Le Problème de Rimbaud, Poète

Maudit_.

Rimbaud has been dead nearly thirty-five years. His literary output

is the smallest on record. His poetry, although generally admitted to

stand beside that of Hugo, Vigny, and Musset, has no human interest;

he does not sing of love, he does not chant the virtues of his

country or its people. Probably not one reader in twenty is touched

by _Les Illuminations_, and not one in ten discerns his thesis or his

philosophy in _Une Saison en Enfer_.

What then is the explanation of this sustained interest in him? Why

does posterity extol him and neglect Gérard de Nerval, who brought to

the light of day a long hidden pediment of literature: the æsthetics of

symbolism? The answer is easily given. His “affair” with Verlaine is

the human interest of Arthur Rimbaud. People like to read about him as

they like to read _Town Topics_ or _Le Cri de Paris_. Mr. Rickword is

to be congratulated on rendering the theme with his foot on the soft

pedal. Had he called his book _The Taming by Time of an Antinomian_, it

would have been a comprehensive and a just title.

The wide dissemination of the Freudian theories is responsible in

a measure for the keen interest of the reading public in sexual

fixations, their manifestations and liberations. Rimbaud apparently got

stuck on third base in the game of life, but there are many indications

that he was stealing home when the bell rang.

VI

WARRIORS

LORD WOLSELEY, by _Maj.-Gen. Sir Frederick Maurice_ and

_Sir George Arthur_.

ROBERT E. LEE THE SOLDIER, by _Sir Frederick Maurice_.

The biographies of men who make history are as a rule more remarkable

for the “action” they display than for the thought they invite. History

is not made by thinking about it: it requires the combination of

thought and deeds. When a man is endowed with the capacity for both;

when he lives at a time in which his country needs the intelligent

effort of its children to carry on its traditions, and when fate has

been kind enough to call one of them to service at such a time, the

story of that man’s life must be inviting, instructive and inspiring.

All this is true of Lord Wolseley. Early in his career, at the time of

the Civil War, Wolseley was sent to Canada to prepare for a possible

war with the United States, which Abraham Lincoln, in his wisdom,

prevented. Garnet Wolseley, from the time of his ensign’s commission in

1852 a diligent student of warfare, availed himself of the opportunity

to study it first-hand which a visit to General Lee offered him. He

rated Lee’s military ability very high and from this meeting dated a

friendship between the two, founded on admiration, which lasted until

Lee’s death. The biographer of Lord Wolseley is also the biographer of

Robert Lee and some of the unqualified praise of Lee with which Sir

Maurice sprinkled his book had its origin in Wolseley’s admiration of

the Southern leader.

But Sir Maurice is not alone responsible for this biography of Lord

Wolseley; he collaborated with Sir George Arthur, and the combination

of a military man with a literary student seems to have been a happy

one.

It is perhaps unjust that the present generation should know Kitchener

better than it does Wolseley; that it should place the one on a high

altar of martyrdom and sacrifice, and practically ignore the other.

Kitchener had all the odds in his favour; he was _the_ man when the

World War started; his death or disappearance reacted on popular

imagination in extraordinary fashion, and the mystery of his end

appealed to our taste for the fantastic and the incredible. But what

Lord Kitchener did for the British Army, was started by Lord Wolseley;

Kitchener put together the stones that his predecessor in the highest

military rank in Great Britain, had assembled, and he built on the

foundations which Lord Wolseley dug and prepared. At least, this is the

statement of his biographers who surveyed the subject with apparent

impartiality and integrity. Some authoritative authors have already

passed judgment on the quality of the British Army during the days of

the Boer War, and it may not be in all points favourable to the memory

of their Chief; but if the courage and efficiency of the Army as these

qualities were displayed in the Great War, were the result of Lord

Wolseley’s love for, and intelligent attention to, the needs and ethics

of the Army which fought under the Union Jack, all our gratitude, our

admiration and our praise should go to the man whose influence was

still felt in 1914. Never could an Army, got together with the rapidity

with which the British Army was formed in those days, as untrained as

it was, and as large as it grew, have done what it did, in the way it

did it, if some great heart and illumined mind had not been present

at its early formation and at its origin. Lord Wolseley reorganised

the British Army, he fought with all his power the “wicked” practice

of buying commissions in the Army, he prepared a real system of

mobilisation; he remodelled the machinery for supplying the Army with

food and munitions; he gave a stirring impulse to military education

and practical training, and he directed the attention of statesmen to

the problems of national defence and made them, as well as the soldiers

and sailors, concentrate on it. His activities were incessant; his

public life was long in years and rich in deeds.

Lord Wolseley was the typical example of the velvet glove covering a

hand of steel. His outward appearance was that of a dandy, of a man

more occupied with the cut of his clothes than with the fate of the

world. Judged by his photographs he was precious and self-conscious,

outwardly complaisant, inwardly arrogant; but his actions belied

his appearance, although he harboured within himself a sort of dual

personality. He had a keen inward sense of world-strangeness with a

great desire to be in communion with the world; he had the tenderness

of a woman, a devotion to and dependency upon his wife that was

balanced by his happiness when he was at war; he had the strength of

a lion in a frail body; the tenacity and obstinacy of a bull-dog and

an indomitable courage; and withal he possessed the qualities of the

thinker. He was neither boastful nor honour-seeking, yet he had taken

his own measure early in life and without humility; he knew what he was

worth to his country and to history, but he could not find it in him to

push himself save by his own merit. He had one of the most important

offices in the British Government, when he was still a very young man,

and he did not attempt to use power or influence to raise himself to

any undeserved honours.

The book takes in most of the great historical events of the fifty

years that saw Wolseley active in his career, and as a survey of

British history, no achievement could be at once more entertaining and

more instructive. But what his biographers did not do was to explain

some of the contradictions that Wolseley’s personality displayed. They

leave the reader with the impression that he had great powers, but also

great limitations. The latter may have been a puzzle to those who

were intimate with him, but his biographers should have studied and

explained them if they could. He may have inherited his “prettiness”

from the grandmother “whose face was her only fortune” and his strength

not only from the Wolseley side of his family which boasted of many a

good officer, but also from his mother who had never been ill in her

life and whose death left a gap in Wolseley’s heart that nothing could

fill. She was strong, but she was pious too, and she brought up her

son in such fervour of the Church that his biographers say he never

spent a day without reading the Psalms. He found a second mother in

his wife, Louisa Erskine, to whom he was profoundly beholden. “When

they were parted the hours were carefully counted until he should hold

her hand again.” All these made for manifold contradictions in his

nature. Deeply religious, he thirsted for blood and war; adoring his

wife, he accepted long periods of separation in the name of service;

pre-eminently a man of action, he was capable of deep thought and

vision.

Years before the War, he foresaw the power of Germany and he warned

against it; he advocated the adoption by his country of some of

Germany’s methods which, interpreted with the common sense of his

people, would have minimised fear of the growing Teutonic power and

enabled them successfully to deal with it. But his voice was not always

heard and his perception of the future not often heeded.

The biographers of Lord Wolseley have mixed a good dose of hero-worship

in their book; but they have done it with a sure hand, and with so much

discrimination and taste that it is never offensive. Sir Frederick

Maurice was his companion for several years, his _alter ego_ during

the campaign of Africa, and his devoted friend when sickness and

trouble came to Lord Wolseley. Thus, Sir Frederick’s information was

obtained directly, went through no deforming, exaggerating or reshaping

process. Despite the gaps that occur now and then in the mental and

moral formation of the hero, the book is invaluable to the student of

modern English history. It should prove illuminating to military men

and diverting to the general reader. But the story is of a soldier not

of a man. There must have been something particularly interesting to

say about him as a man; there is about all childless husbands. And the

foundations of his admiration for the novels of Rhoda Broughton might

have been unearthed and re-pointed.

Some day we shall have a book on the religiosity of great warriors.

Lee, Wolseley, Gordon, Cadorna, de Castelnau, will figure in it

conspicuously.

* * * * *

Major General Sir Frederick Maurice has given a firm grip to the hands

across the sea. His book does not purport to be a life of Lee but an

appreciation of his generalship. Regrettably, however, he paints a

picture of him as son, husband, parent and citizen, which his kin will

perhaps not recognise, and which I believe is not a good likeness.

General Maurice has been studying for more than twenty years the

military life of Lee, the campaigns he conducted and the battles he

fought. Therefore it can not be said that he has indulged in hasty

conclusions or snap judgments. For a soldier of his distinction, a

student of military science of his information to say that the name of

Robert E. Lee must be added to the roster on which are inscribed the

names of those who guessed the secret of the art of war: Alexander,

Hannibal, Cæsar, Gustavus, Turenne, Eugène and Frederick is praise

indeed. A British soldier who places Lee above Wellington as a

commander must be sure of himself and of his facts. Appreciation and

estimation of this sort is food that nourishes the _Entente Cordiale_.

It is so much more palatable and assimilable than the “one blood,

common language” variety.

After a brief chapter on the Lees of Virginia, the burden of which

is that the family had all the virtues save humour and the immortal

descendant all save the one that Hermes had to a superlative degree, he

takes up at once Lee’s training as a soldier, stressing his experience

in the war of 1845. “No matter how sure a man may be of his nerves, he

is the better soldier when those nerves have been tested under fire and

found reliable and the better leader from the confidence in himself

which such experience provides.” Lee’s nerves were tested and found

perfect at Chapultepec. He returned from Mexico at the age of 42 with

a reputation established. “And it was not confined to his own country.

Representatives of the Cuban junta offered him the command of an

expedition to overthrow the Spanish control of the island. Instead of

accepting, he hastened to inform the Secretary of War of the proposal

and his reasons for declining it.”

Commenting on trained and untrained commanders, General Maurice

writes, “Courage, physical and moral, common sense, readiness to

accept responsibility, the power to grasp quickly the essential of a

situation, and to form speedy decisions, these are not gifts which are

confined to regular soldiers nor have many regular soldiers possessed

all or even most of these gifts. The possession of them will make

any man a leader whether in peace or in war.” He quotes with fullest

approbation General Forrest’s explanation of his successes: “I get

there fustest with the mostest men,” and adds, “We have in those eight

words the gist of many volumes of Jomini and Clausewitz.”

Discussing John G. Nicolay’s explanation of Lee’s action in April,

1861, in resigning from the army and accepting command of the Virginia

troops, an action which, according to Nicolay, came from selfish

motives, General Maurice comments, “It would be difficult to compress

into a similar number of words a greater misrepresentation of fact.”

His latest biographer says of Lee’s decision and conduct, “He had but

one thought, ‛What is my duty?’ No motive of self-interest entered his

mind. He was prepared to make any and every sacrifice.”

He takes up briefly the problems of the Confederacy. In the author’s

opinion the Civil War throws valuable light on what should be the

nature of the relation between the statesman and the soldier in a

modern democracy at war. The claim that the soldier should be left in

free and complete control is ridiculous. The general direction of a war

should be in the hands of one man, and in democratic countries that man

must be a statesman and his supreme qualification should be the ability

not only to co-ordinate military, naval and air forces but to develop

and co-ordinate all the physical and moral resources of his country.

Lincoln, after he had been taught by experience, was the model of such

a statesman. Lee was the model of the perfect soldier. General Maurice

then proceeds to prove the latter statement by describing the Defence

of Richmond, the first offensive, the first Maryland campaign, the

battle of Chancellorsville and the second invasion of Maryland.

Before recounting Lee’s catastrophe, General Maurice interpolates a

most interesting chapter on Delay as a Weapon of War. After Lee had

given up hope that the defeat of the Army of the Potomac on Northern

soil was possible, his strategy sought new aim. He no longer attempted

to thrust battle on the enemy, on the contrary he sought delay that he

might exhaust their patience: “If the campaign of 1862, from Richmond

to the Potomac, is a model of what an army inferior in numbers may

achieve in offence, the campaign from the Wilderness to Cold Harbour is

equally a model of defensive strategy and tactics. Some commanders have

excelled in the one method, some in the other; few in both and amongst

these few must be remembered Robert E. Lee.”

Pleasant reading for an American, this book by Britain’s foremost

military writer. Some will shrug their shoulders and say: “The English

were always sympathisers with the South,” but this book is not the

product of a biased mind. It was not conceived in emotion, generated

by bitterness, or prompted by prejudice. It is the deliberate judgment

of a man temperamentally adapted to the task he set himself and

intellectually fitted for it by his training and experience. So long

as he sticks to the field in which he is expert he is persuasive and

convincing, but when he goes into history or psychology he is neither.

General Maurice would have been wisely counselled had he confined

himself to Lee, the Soldier, as the title of the book intimates was

his intention. He may have taken his measure correctly as a warrior,

but I am sure there is little justification for “Lee was never what

is called a man’s man. He did not drink, he did not smoke, he had no

taste for the ordinary amusements and weaknesses of the male sex.” If

he were that sort of a man, the less said of it the better. It is a

man’s human side that testifies his godship. Some one should enumerate

the “weaknesses of the male sex” that there may be no doubt in readers’

minds what they are.

General Maurice would have us believe that Lee was a studious,

serious, silent, solitary, superman who devoted his nights to study

and contemplation, his days to action and prayer. He was probably not

so playful as Osler and more of an anchorite than Anatole France;

it is likely that he was more abstemious than Grant and that he had

less humour than Lincoln; but he had some of all their qualities in

miniature and it is a pity he was not more liberally endowed for then

he would have had imagination or vision. That was the great hiatus in

the personality of Robert E. Lee; he lacked vision. He could run a

complicated machine, he could get great efficiency out of it, he could

keep it going even when it seemed to be worn out, but he could neither

design nor assemble it.

Many will seek to fathom the process of reasoning, or find the source

of information that led General Maurice to write: “He not only espoused

but was the main prop of a cause history has proved to have been wrong.

That is the tragedy of his life, and his conduct after the war makes it

clear that he realised that it was tragedy ... the whole tenor of his

life from the surrender of Appomattox to his death is evidence that he

believed in his heart of hearts that his State was wrong in seceding.”

This is neither evidence nor testimony. It is merely rhetoric.

His country has already selected Lee for its greatest military

executive and it is pleasant to witness a General of another great

nation laying the oaken crown on his tomb, and it is gratifying that he

can write: “Distinguished as was Lee’s conduct while an officer of the

Army of the U.S.A., splendid as was his career in the field, nothing in

his life became him more than its end.” He heard Lincoln’s charge to

bind up the Nation’s wounds and he hearkened to it.

VII

EDITORS

MEMOIRS OF AN EDITOR, by _Edward P. Mitchell_.

TWICE THIRTY, by _Edward W. Bok_.

THE RIVER OF LIFE, by _J. St. Loe Strachey_.

JOSEPH PULITZER, HIS LIFE AND LETTERS, by _Don C. Seitz_.

Editors and publishers of powerful newspapers have unique opportunity

to make their lives interesting. Many of them do. Some of them, like

Henry Watterson, Wickham Steed and Georges Clémenceau write about

their experiences, when they no longer take the world’s pulse, shape

public opinion and re-order society. Their memoirs and lives are of

the most entertaining of all biographic literature; they know the art

of writing; all their lives, they have been observing and studying

character, heralding and shaping events; it has been their self-imposed

duty to sit in judgment and the self-advancement urge of their fellows

brings them into intimate contact with the important persons of their

period. Small wonder they write entertainingly when their sun begins to

set.

Few have reviewed their experiences more delightfully than Edward P.

Mitchell, for many years Editor-in-Chief of _The New York Sun_.

When I read Mr. Mitchell’s _Memoirs of an Editor_ every page made

firmer the conviction that I was companioning a great mind and a kindly

heart. I recalled something that Mark Twain said of Anson Burlingame:

“His outlook upon the world and its affairs was as wide as the horizon,

and his speech was of a dignity and eloquence proper to it. It dealt in

no commonplaces, for he had no commonplace thoughts. He was a kindly

man, and most lovable. He wrought for justice and humanity. All his

ways were clean; all his motives were high and fine.” That is Edward P.

Mitchell if I may estimate him from his autobiography. If he has any

fault, it is that he is too affable. He is a tiny bit too polite. There

have been proprietors of the _New York Sun_ within the memory of man

who did not have _all_ the virtues, but no one would suspect it from

Mr. Mitchell’s book. The _Sun_ that he writes about most entertainingly

and instructively is the _Sun_ for which Charles A. Dana got all

the credit. Mr. Mitchell does not hint that the credit was unjustly

allotted, but no one can read the chapters “How I Went to the Sun” and

“The Newspaperman’s Newspaper” without being convinced that it was. The

_Sun_ could not have been what it was in the days of its ascendency:

a beacon light of newspaperdom, a stimulus and a joy to thousands, a

scourge to scores, had it not been for Francis P. Church, Fitz Henry

Warren, and William D. Bartlett.

But it is not the story of the _Sun_ that Mr. Mitchell set out to

write. His colleague Frank M. O’Brien did that, and any one who

believes he could improve on it would be as daring or demented as the

artist who believes he can improve on the Mona Lisa. O’Brien’s story

reflected the spirit of that newspaper as the portrait mentioned above

reflected the soul of her who reminded Pater of Leda. However, Mr.

Mitchell could scarcely tell us of himself without telling the story of

the _Sun_ too.

The volume is replete with personality studies of sages and cranks,

philosophers and buffoons, experts and amateurs. Any one who is

interested in the spirit of the Puritan, the pioneer, the pathfinder;

any one who is intrigued by guessing at the truth, will be helped by

reading the pages on Goldwin Smith. Any one who would like to clarify

his hazy notions of paranoia will be aided by perusal of the pages

on George Francis Train; any one who would make the acquaintance of

a critic of letters to whom his countrymen should have accorded the

esteem that the French accorded Rémy de Gourmont and the British George

Saintsbury, should read what Mr. Mitchell says of Mayo W. Hazeltine;

any one who would learn of the forces that did more than anything else

to deliver us as a nation from the spirit of parochialism should read

his pages on Bunan-Varilla, the French engineer, who made possible the

Panama Canal.

It is a book for a rainy day and a starry night; a book to be read

in Watchapey and Washington; to accompany one on Lake Louise or the

Atlantic. The author’s wish has come true. It was that here and

there some kind friends unknown might find in his book something as

interesting for them to read as it was for him to remember. If he had

as much pleasure in writing it as they have reading it, Edward P.

Mitchell is a giant joy-creator.

* * * * *

Mr. Mitchell is a modest man. That can scarcely be said of Mr. Edward

W. Bok. He is proud of his accomplishment as editor, prouder of

his success as uplifter and proudest of the masterfulness which he

displayed in piloting his ship of life through troubled waters and

adverse currents to a safe port and serene haven. A few years ago

he told about these various successes in a fat volume entitled _The

Americanisation of Edward Bok_. Now he rewrites his autobiography

and calls it _Twice Thirty: Some Short and Simple Annals of the

Road_. Simple is a more appropriate adjective than short. Mr. Bok

is pleased with himself. He was well born; he is of a nation that

has been a parent in most things. It invented golf; it was the

founder of the modern school of music; it furnished us with our

fundamental institutions; our Federal Constitution; the Declaration of

Independence; our State constitutions; our freedom of religion; our

free public schools; our free press; our written ballot; our town,

county and state system of self-government; the system of recording

deeds and mortgages; the germinal idea of the _Ladies Home Journal_,

New York City and the Hudson River. In fact, it would be difficult to

name anything or any one save the Ku Klux Klan and Mayor Hylan that the

Netherlands did not originate. And it contributed a man who never knew

fear: Mr. Bok.

Thomas Carlyle wrote that he could get a far more penetrating insight

of a writer’s personality from a portrait of the man, photographic or

oleographic, than from his writing. I was never convinced that the sage

of Chelsea was in the right until I saw the frontispiece in the book

under consideration. It is labelled “At Twice Thirty.” The legend could

be replaced by “Self-Satisfaction” and beneath it, this quotation from

the text might be pasted: “I have had too distinct a leaning toward

looking for and discovering the faults in persons and then of becoming

possessed with a mad desire to correct those faults.” But neither

from gazing at the portrait nor from reading the text am I moved to

objurgation similar to that of the Apostle: Mr. Bok is not a hypocrite;

though he believes it is the beam that is in his brother’s eye and the

mote that is in his own. Nevertheless it will occur to some that at

times he goes dangerously close to hypocrisy; for instance, “This book

is written for my two sons.” If Mr. Bok’s pineal gland were opened and

the day book diary of his soul extracted, it is safe to assume that the

magician who could read it would find there an entry, “October 9th,

1924. Decided to publish _Twice Thirty_ so that the world might have my

four pages of biographical data from a reliable source.” Then there is

that chapter entitled “My Most Unusual Experience,” in which Mr. Bok

relates how he rescued a young American girl from the jaws of the lion

and dragged her from the Coliseum, the jaws being a salacious Frenchman

and the coliseum the promenade of the Empire in London. The _beau

geste_ reflects great credit on Mr. Bok, and he intended it should.

That is the reason he published it. There can be no other. He does not

cotton to axioms even though they are of divine origin. His right hand

has always known just what his left was doing.

Mr. Bok quotes Henry Ward Beecher as saying to him that wisdom comes

at sixty, not before. Job said it before Beecher. Storing up treasure

in Heaven has always been considered an indication of wisdom. Even

in Heaven, I fancy, you can’t have your cake and eat it. You can not

insist upon having your reward now and also having it put to your

credit in the hereafter. In fact we have the word of the Master to that

effect.

I recall some years ago when I was in London Mr. Bok was much concerned

about the street walkers of the Strand. A more vulturesome variety

swarmed in Piccadilly Circus, but if my memory serves me it was those

addicted to London’s most famous street that engaged his reformatory

urge at the time. I have looked in vain for some account of it in this

book and in the “Americanisation.” I am disappointed, for it would make

an interesting companion chapter to “My Most Unusual Experience.” The

same title might have been used were the prefix lopped from the third

word.

This matter of hypocrisy and Edward Bok intrigues me; indeed I may say

it engrosses me, for the moment. In one of the most _naïf_ chapters

that adult ever penned, the author points out that the Edward Bok,

Editor of the _Ladies Home Journal_, and Edward W. Bok, “creator of the

American Peace Award of $100,000, Donator of a window in The Nieuwe

Kerk at Delft, and Knight of the Netherland Lion” are two different

personalities. The tastes, outlook, and manner of looking at things of

the former were totally at variance with those of the latter. In fact,

the two personalities waged incessant warfare. “My chief difficulty

was to abstain from breaking through the Editor and revealing my real

self. Several times I did so, and each time I saw how different was the

effect from that when the editorial Edward Bok had been allowed sway.

Little by little I learned to subordinate myself and let him have full

rein.”

Mr. Bok (the present one, for Editor Bok “has passed out of being

as completely as if he had never been”) says it was a case of dual

personality, and cites the notorious Miss Beauchamp sponsored by Dr.

Morton Prince to support his contention. It won’t wash. Edward W.

Bok knew that the things that Editor Bok did were oftentimes cheap,

sensational, undignified, unworthy of his heritage, birth, nationality,

accomplishments, ideals. But he knew also that when the Bok that was

worthy of them dominated the _Ladies Home Journal_ for six months

and its sales dropped eighty thousand, that it was up to him to let

some yellow into his lily-white character, or else lose his job. And

he turned on the saffron spigot. No, Mr. Edward W. Bok, that is not

dual personality, and I who say it gave as many years to the study of

double personality and cognate subjects as you did to journalism. Some

will say it was hypocrisy. I say it was expediency, and it was your

contribution to popular hedonism. You and another great journalist, Dr.

Frank Crane, had found out what “the people” want and you gave it to

them good and plenty. By so doing, you and he have set back the clock

of culture in this country about a hundred years.

The average reader, with a mind of his own as to what constitutes

good and bad literature, does not have to be warned as to the danger

of books like Mr. Bok’s _Twice Thirty_. As a matter-of-fact, it is so

unmeaning as to leave the reading public indifferent, but there is a

latent danger in taking such writings indifferently. The same can be

said of Dr. Crane’s books. They are harmless in themselves, but the

public is already too much inclined to take short cuts to every goal of

life; short cuts to fortune, to health, to taste and to culture. It is

the duty of the critics to show the hollowness and the danger of taking

Mr. Bok’s _Twice Thirty_ seriously; of taking Dr. Crane’s Talks as

guides in life; and of taking radios, victrolas and pianolas as forms

of high art. Feeding the public what it wants is not always working for

its best interest.

Diligent, careful reading of _Twice Thirty_ has sufficed to convince me

that Mr. Bok has never done anything that merited his disapproval. He

may be sorry that he had a big head when he was born for it cost his

mother a year on crutches, but he is not sorry he has one now. He is as

satisfied with himself, his accomplishments and potentialities as was

Nick Bottom, the weaver of _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_. In truth Mr.

Bok reminds me of Mr. Bottom. He could play Pyramus, and Thisby, and

the roaring lion, and like Bottom he can take pains, be perfect.

There is a certain amount of irony in the quotations Mr. Bok has chosen

to put at the head of each chapter, possibly to give the book an

atmosphere of culture. The most irrelevant one, the least _à propos_,

is Plutarch’s sentence, “Oh, that men would learn that the true speaker

is he who speaks only when he has something to say.” If Mr. Bok had

written this as an epitome at the beginning of his book, and if he had

meditated the advice of Plutarch and applied it to his own case, we

would certainly have been spared _Twice Thirty_.

Occasionally, an amusing experience, an interesting anecdote, or a

touching remembrance form a high spot in the book, but they are few and

far apart. What interest or originality is there in “There must be a

to-day before there is a to-morrow.” “Life may depart, but the source

of life is constant.” Or, “To-day I can and do sleep the clock around

once and sometimes twice a week”? Most of the incidents in his book are

of the sort that ask to be forgotten, and when they are related with a

lack of style which makes them flat, with a lack of humour which makes

them pathetic, and when they all tend to moralise and preach--the case

is hopelessly lost. In fact, it may be true to say that, had Mr. Bok

a spark of humour or a particle of wit, he would never have written

_Twice Thirty_, nor would he have published the “Letter that his father

slipped Tom when he left his mother for ‛Somewhere in France’.” This

letter is the most ludicrous and ridiculous thing that ever was done

in a sober mood. It is meant of course to be touching, elevating,

inspiring and to serve as a _vade mecum_ to the young soldier, as an

exorcism in time of temptation, and as a reminder of the “home-spirit”

when the flesh should show itself weaker than the will. As it is,

coming seven years after the end of the War, when the memories of the

way in which the American soldiers understood the meaning of the word

“leave” and the way in which they got acquainted with “life” is not yet

gone, it is the most out of place document in the book.

It must be a satisfaction to know that, throughout his life, with

only one exception, he has stood on the right side of it; that he

has pointed out the right way; that he has been the good Samaritan

to abandoned women, the successful prophet in his dealings with

Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the man of good judgment in

his editorship of the _Ladies Home Journal_, the paragon of domestic

qualities and the ideal father; yet, for our part, we feel that

although Mr. Bok may be sincere in what he says, he does not say all,

and what he does not say is exactly what we would like to know. There

again we can point to the lack of harmony between his quotations and

his achievement. “The author,” wrote Tolstoi, “who succeeds in his work

is he who describes the interesting and significant things which it

has been given him to observe and experience in his own life.” But the

successful author is also he who reveals a soul to his readers, and

that is where Mr. Bok fails lamentably. He reveals well enough the man

a photograph would reveal, providing the photograph were taken at a

time when he was ready to moisten his lips and look pleasant.

Mr. Bok has recorded his struggles and successes with evident veracity

and truthfulness, but how much more interesting they would have been

to us if he had transplanted them a notch higher in the field of the

emotional and intellectual efforts. The price he paid for the plot of

land on which his house stands, and the seven bath-rooms he had built

in it mean much less than the development of his ego from the point

when a ride on a truck which saved him a five-cent fare constituted

happiness for him, to that he reached later when he wanted the best

of everything and was in a position to demand it. It is a common

occurrence to be born in poverty and it is an achievement to rise above

it, especially when the advance has been made honestly and in the open;

but the soul should develop in proportion as the opportunities afforded

by better connections and associations increase, and that is just what

Mr. Bok does not reveal in his book; his mind is still on the same

level as that of the young messenger boy in the Telegraph Company and

his soul is still contented with a ride on a truck, as it were.

Bok’s motto was “The good that I would I do; but the evil which I would

not, that I do not,” a drastic revision of Paul’s confession.

The last chapter of _Twice Thirty_ bears the heading, “Is It Worth

While?” “Scarcely,” is the answer, “if _Twice Thirty_ is the antecedent

of the pronoun.”

* * * * *

A few years ago it would have been said that a career such as Joseph

Pulitzer’s could not have been staged anywhere save in this country.

M. Coty, Lord Rothmere, Sig. Bergamini are examples of similar careers

in France, England and Italy. Joseph Pulitzer galvanised the New York

_World_ into life, made it a power in the land and gathered about him a

group of clever men, one of whom has written his life.

[Illustration: JOSEPH PULITZER]

_Painted by John Singer Sargent

Courtesy of “The New York World”_

Mr. Don C. Seitz’s book is not a satisfactory biography, but it is

readable and it engenders thought and reflection. It neither reveals

nor suggests the mystery and secret of a dominant personality. He

calls Joseph Pulitzer the Liberator of Journalism. For many years

he was called the Libertine of Journalism, and worse than that.

He deserves the one as richly as he deserved the other, no more

so. The biographer, like the witness in court, should state facts,

not conclusions. Joseph Pulitzer was an unusual man and he had an

extraordinary career. Hungarian emigrant, without background or

adventitious aid, he acquired within a quarter of a century, power,

influence and wealth that were felt not only throughout this country

but in Europe as well. Politics was his passion, property his obsession

and power his ambition.

He was vouchsafed twenty years of public influence; he moulded minds,

shaped opinions, conditioned decisions, germinated ideals; and they

were twenty years of personal misery and decrepitude. Dying, he

perpetuated his name by the establishment of the School of Journalism

at Columbia University. It can scarcely fail to be interesting to

learn about such a man. Mr. Seitz with the instinct and experience of

the expert journalist, gives the information in the first chapter,

which he entitles “Characteristics.” He moulds the clay, then animates

it. As he hurls virtues into the receptive mass, he calls out their

names loudly; as the limitations and defects steal in, he whispers

or remains silent. Joseph Pulitzer had a genius for journalism and

he was saturated with belief in liberty, equality, and opportunity;

he was courageous, affectionate, hospitable, generous, indulgent and

just; but he was also vain, arrogant, domineering, verbose, bulimious,

tyrannical, self-sufficient, personally hypersensitive but insensitive

to others’ feelings; he was devoid of humour, and he wore a mask that

fell off on the slightest encounter. He had acquired a dexterity in

regaining it which often prevented adversaries from seeing that it had

fallen. The sea of his life was always turbulent. When he was on the

crest of the wave, his speech and conduct were hypomaniac; when in the

trough, he was taciturn, unapproachable, uncommunicative, inert. He had

a firm intellect and an infirm temper; firm energy and an infirm body;

a keen æsthetic sense and a contempt for his fellow man because he

would not make himself in Joseph Pulitzer’s image. “I have no friends,”

said he to one of his secretaries. “And this was in a great measure

true,” adds his biographer. He has friends now, and he will have more

in the future; Mr. Seitz’s book will make hundreds for him, and the

institutions he founded, thousands.

* * * * *

It is natural enough that editors should like to talk about their

doings. They have been compelled to be impersonal so long that they

are impelled to gambol and frolic, to shout and sing, when they burst

the barriers of their sanctums and do not have to return to them. John

St. Loe Strachey has not ceased to be editor of “The Spectator,” but

then he was never impersonal. The volume devoted to himself, published

a year or so ago, called _The Adventure of Living_, amply testified

it. Now he has published a new volume about himself called _The River

of Life_. He does not give a portrait of himself, and he eliminates as

far as possible enumeration of facts, positive statements, sequence,

logical or chronological, and conclusions. His diary is of the sort

that might have been written for the pleasure of the soul and the

contentment of the heart, with no further motive. He tells of his likes

and dislikes, as they are brought to his mind by travel and reading;

he does not indulge in ratiocination or in plans for the future. He is

content to see life as a river, flowing constantly, everlastingly the

same, everlastingly different, and his diary leaves the impression of

a walk through a flower garden. One stops at interesting points, picks

here and there a flower which will be kept as a memento, and which,

being seen again, will recall a pleasant day.

In an antescript, Mr. Strachey writes: “If I am not careful, some

votary of the New Psychology will get busy on my Diary and prove that

I am suffering from an inferiority complex.” Not a chance of it! A lot

of derogatory things about the Freudians may be said; yet though they

are deluded, they are not imbecile; they are priority fanatics, but not

blind. They know a superiority complex when they see it.

VIII

CLERGYMEN

WHY I AM A CHRISTIAN, by _Dr. Frank Crane_.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A MIND, by _W. J. Dawson_.

An editor once said to Dr. Frank Crane, who spent the first twenty-five

years of his adult life as a Methodist and Congregational minister

and the next twenty-five as a journalist: “If you will write a book

on _Why I Am a Christian_ and tell the truth it ought to be mighty

interesting.” Dr. Crane says he has told the truth. I say it is

not interesting. Dr. Crane is a Christian because it is pragmatic,

because it is usable. That is not a good or sufficient reason. One

may be a Mahommedan or a Jew for the same reason. His species of

Christianity is, he says, one hundred per cent practical. Mr. Ghandhi’s

or Mr. Tagore’s species of Hinduism has a similar percentage. “I am

a Christian simply because I like it and I find it conducive to my

happiness and my general welfare.” That is a good reason for being a

Jew.

Dr. Crane prides himself on his large-mindedness; he is beyond pride

or prejudice. “If you should ask me whether I am a Trinitarian or a

Unitarian, a Catholic or a Protestant, Fundamentalist or Methodist

or Baptist, you might as well ask me whether I am a Guelph or a

Ghibelline.” When a man is omnipotent and omniscient he is all these,

and none. He is not only the trunk of the tree of which these are

branches (some of them gnarled, others withered), but he is the roots

as well. In one of his daily sermons he says he left the church in

search of adventure. Fortunately for him he left it while the going was

good.

“I am happier here and now when I follow the principles of Jesus. I am

wretched here and now when I reject them or doubt them.” Does Dr. Crane

think that any of his 25,000,000 readers believe that he practices the

principles that Christ enunciated to His disciples on the mountain?

If he does, such readers are incredibly credulous even for feeders on

denutritionised mush. He took thought for the morrow when he shifted

to a profession that pays him more in a week than he got in a year

labouring in the Lord’s vineyard. I am not contending the right to

shift was not his. I am pointing out the obvious hypocrisy of his boast.

His reasons for being a Christian have very little to do with Christ.

Indeed, for him Christianity is a point of view, an attitude of mind.

It needs no God and very little divinity. His idea of Christianity

is so largely matter-of-fact and so little emotional that his

confession--which he wants us to remember is not an argument--can not

make much appeal.

Reading _Why I Am a Christian_ is like listening to a lawyer who has

a fluent, persuasive vocabulary and who knows how to obtain the best

effects from his argument. He carries his auditors along and they want

to agree with him, but when he stops his monologue, rationalism claims

its rights and the case is decided against him.

It is evident that a church which has had some of the greatest minds

of the world at its head, which has lasted through centuries and wars,

is based on a foundation more solid than one which could be destroyed

by the argument of one of its members. Dr. Crane is a member of the

church, but he refuses to recognise the authority of an organised

religion. The fear of eternal punishment or the hope of never-ending

beatitude have no bearing, he maintains, on his decision, because he

finds the former foolish, the latter boring. Dr. Crane thinks he is the

first man to shudder at the thought of an eternity spent in heaven,

in a state of semi-stupor, singing forever to the music of harps. The

church itself encourages no such belief, but since the real meaning

of paradise is unknown to man, a symbol has been adopted which no one

tries to offer as dogma.

It is not because Christ is God that Dr. Crane believes in Him. It

is because He has shown the author what sort of a person God is. It

is malicious and pernicious for “a man with a million friends” to

express such doubts as to the divinity of Christ. The world does not

need a superman, the world needs God, and the figure of Christ is more

important as a foundation for the church than any other doctrine of

Jesus as a man could be. And there is no denying that the world needs a

church.

It is the personality of Christ, what He represents as a man, the idea

He gives of what God should be, what He has made of Christianity and

the energy He has put into it, the universality of His doctrine and of

His appeal and the beautiful story of His life which make Dr. Crane a

Christian. He does not ask Christ to help him, to succour him, to save

him and to give him happiness; he asks Him to give him enough force

to help himself, enough energy to resist falls and enough strength

to fight for his own happiness; he does not follow or wish to follow

Christ and imitate Him, but he wishes Christ to show him how to get

along on his way in the manner which is most pleasing to Him and of

which He would approve.

Dr. Crane has made a note of most of the standardised beliefs of the

world, of their ideals and fears. He labels them “delusions” and

proceeds to smash them in their very foundation. That human nature

is evil is a delusion of which reflection has purged him. Punishment

and reward are delusions; goodness to be real must be positive; the

fact that a man never lies, cheats nor hurts any one, never deceives

his wife in thought or act, never does any of the things he should

not do, is no proof that he has any goodness in him. The belief that

competition is necessary to progress, which has been proved time

after time, amounts to naught in Dr. Crane’s estimation; there is no

superior class and the idle members of the community, those who have

no need of working for a living, have been accursed by God. Dr. Crane

thinks also that it is a delusion to believe that happiness resides

in riches or in high positions; he advocates looking for happiness

every day, as we go along, instead of storing up treasures on earth or

happiness for the morrow.

All this leads us to wonder how much of the “Confession” is Dr. Crane’s

and how much has been gathered from the wisdom of centuries. Most of

his arguments are old and familiar; he writes a long chapter, for

instance, on the text of Abraham Lincoln: “God must have liked the

common people, He made so many of them.”

Dr. Crane has been writing pontifically so many years that he has come

to believe that whatever he says is true. It is true because he says

it. There is no discussion or argument about it; he knows. He is a

gushing fountain of knowledge and adjectives. He is an oracle whose

truth is not to be tested, but accepted.

“To be good, according to Christ’s program, is to fight here; to take

up one’s cross daily; to fear not; to love much; to hold on, and to put

forth vigour in every way.” Had Dr. Crane added “and to get the money

for doing it” it would be his own programme, admitting that writing

four hundred words of twaddle daily is the equivalent of taking up

one’s cross. To fight here, indeed! “Take no thought for your life,

what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink, nor yet for your body, what

ye shall put on.”

His reasons for belonging to a church are naïve to the point of

childishness. They are: because it is imperfect; because its purpose is

to disseminate the most important idea in the world; because he likes

it and likes the kind of people that belong; because it is the oldest,

most imposing and most beautiful of all the institutions of humanity.

“It is in the church that we must seek the origin of every great

movement for human welfare.” I suppose it is universally admitted that

the French Revolution and the English industrial revolution were the

two great modern movements making for human welfare. My information

is the church did not have much use for the encyclopedists, and if

Hargreaves, Arkwright, Crompton, Cartwright and Watt were of the

church, history does not say anything about it. The church had nothing

to do with Pasteur’s discovery, which was the origin of a movement for

human welfare which has lengthened the span of life nearly twenty years.

Here and there throughout the book, like freckles on the face of Juno,

are sprinkled gems of wisdom. “All the great literature of the past

has been tragic”--_Rabelais_ and _Don Quixote_, for instance. “The

fundamental insanity believed by the majority of the world to-day to be

the truth is that the work of the world is to be done by defectives who

are not clever enough to escape from work.” How pleasant it must be to

be so omniscient! Dr. Crane must admit that Lenine and Trotzky did not

have that fundamental insanity. And how sane Mussolini is!

* * * * *

Mr. Dawson is a clergyman and the leaves on his tree of life are sere

and yellow. When they were green they were smudged by the smokes of

London and Glasgow where he pumped up emotion in Methodist Chapel

and peddled rhetoric in Presbyterian Church, and thereby gained such

fame as pulpit orator that he was called to Newark, N. J., where he

ministered unto the needs of the parishioners of the Old First Church

for twenty years or thereabouts. Now one of the dreams of his youth has

come true; he is living in a simple house near a flowing stream, and

the sound of its running water lulls him to sleep and its garrulous

voice calls him at dawn. The other, that one day he would become a

great writer, he knows will not materialise, but he continues to write

because that which was nearly an agony for Flaubert and an exhausting

labour for Anatole France is not only a joy but a necessity for Mr.

Dawson. To him, it is nearly a fundamental urge. Early in life while

he was attending to the spiritual needs of the Wesleyans in the small

towns of Devon and Cornwall he wrote poetry by the ream to save himself

from the soporific effect of the thick, stagnant atmosphere of dulness

that enveloped him. Fate made him a preacher, but his secret aim was

to make himself a writer. If authorship of forty books entitles one to

such designation, Mr. Dawson is a writer. Another writer whose career

closely parallels Mr. Dawson’s, save that Dr. Algernon S. Crapsey had

the notoriety of a trial for heresy, recently wrote that he had never

seen nor heard Mr. Dawson’s name until the publisher sent him _The

Autobiography of a Mind_ for review. That is the only experience that

Dr. Crapsey and the writer have had in common so far as I know save

that we both read the book through in one sleepless night. But it

provoked neither tears nor laughter in me as it did in his colleague.

It provoked in me a series of interrogations. Why did he call his

book the _Autobiography of a Mind_? Why did he stay in the Church

upward of half a century? How did he reconcile his practices and his

preachings? Why did a man so beholden to the ideas of intellectuality

not do anything concrete to realise them? Why has a man who has written

so extensively and has lived so conspicuously in the public eye been

unsung?

To answer these questions it is not sufficient to say it was because he

lacked humility; because he did not love his fellow-man, because he had

a superiority complex. Many men who have made a permanent impression

upon their time bore with similar limitations and suffered similar

infirmities; it must be that Mr. Dawson lacked the talent which his

personality, conditioned by his conscious mind, proclaimed. Were his

book a biography of the mind he would have analysed his failure to

obtain the success as a man of letters which he believed his talent

justified.

The truth is Mr. Dawson is an emotionalist, not an intellectualist. So

far as I can judge from his autobiography he never did any constructive

work to fit himself for a writer. Early in life, he began to

externalise emotional states in writing and he has continued to do so

ever since. Emotional states, unless they are panoplied such as those

of Shelley, Rimbaud, Poe, Dostoievsky and countless others, interest

only the possessor and those who love him or are beholden to him.

It is passing strange to hear a young Methodist minister of robust

health say: “I can not imagine how I could have endured life had I

not found early a means of self-expression in my pen. Life would be

unendurable for most of us without some means of escape from ourselves.

Some find it in golf, others in collecting stamps, others in netting

butterflies.” Others find it in cheerful labour in the Lord’s vineyard

and that is where it is becoming for all clergymen to find it. If their

quest is unsuccessful then they should find other employment. _Tedium

vitæ_ is the most unbecoming disease for a priest, and if he has it he

should not talk about it.

Mr. Dawson’s father, hard-shelled, self-sacrificing, saturated with a

spirit of service, was able, largely through the resourcefulness of

an industrious, pious, tireless wife to put aside every year a few

shillings. When the legacy came to his son, then pastor of a Church

in London, it was quite a tidy sum. He promptly gambled with it and

lost. “It was a very pious man of most gracious manners who first

persuaded me that it was a foolish thing to buy shares and stocks for

honest investment when I could buy a hundred times as many shares on

margin. So I bought shares in a gold mine in Africa and a coal mine in

Australia.” There is a _naïveté_ about this that is equalled only by

his account of his exaltation on the discovery of the word ineluctable

and the pleasure he had in using it.

Mr. Dawson had the conventional Christian attitude toward avarice,

holding that it is the root of all evil; but he also realised that

without money there was no flowering of the softer and more delicate

amenities of life. How much mental misery might have been spared the

poetic pastor had he, in one of his trips to Italy, “whither I went on

all possible occasion,” come upon the story of one Francis Bernardone.

One day while Francis was still a boy he had an emotional crisis which

in its genesis was not unlike that which Mr. Dawson had when he became

conscious that something mysterious was happening to himself. “I--the

essential Ego, the thinking Self--was passing out of my body.” Some of

Francis’ constant joyousness might have crept into his soul, and the

enthusiastic love of poverty which was the keynote of the character

of the Poverello of Assisi might have heartened him in many hours of

apprehension. But though he had long loved Francis and year by year

sought his shrine, and even lectured in his own monastery he would

never have succeeded in assimilating his spirit.

When Mr. Dawson approached his fiftieth year, he had an emotional

experience of a kind that has often been described; some call it

conversion, others seeing a light. He who had an insatiable appetite

for pleasure now learned that there was a great difference between

pleasure and happiness. For the first time in his life he was

completely happy: he had discovered the poor and the sinful and he

was moved to deliver them, to succour them, and to purge them. For

the first time, he found himself invaded with a spirit of service. He

coveted martyrdom for the uplifting of the South London poor. He would

devote his strength and the remainder of his days to put in the way of

recovery those who had been bruised and battered out of human shape

by a terrible misfortune or more terrible vices, and those past cure,

he would absolve from their sins and bury. It was all a wonder and a

wild delight--while it lasted. But like all emotional states it was

transitory.

Perhaps nothing conveys Mr. Dawson’s subjugation to the emotional

states like his experience with Roosevelt. The latter talked to him of

the virtues of one of his books, _The Quest of the Simple Life_, which

apparently impressed the President as did Pastor Wagner’s classic. The

author was forced to the humiliating confession that he had totally

forgotten it. The phase of thought and feeling which had produced the

book was past. The late Marcel Proust and Mr. W. J. Dawson would not

have been congenial! The twelve years that he spent as pastor of the

Congregational Church in South London added to his reputation as a

pulpit orator and he says that they were marked by great intellectual

growth. We have to take his word; there is no display of it in his

autobiography.

At the end of this period he came to the United States to lecture. He

looked upon Newark and saw that it was a company of horses in Pharaoh’s

chariot. New Jersey’s metropolis said, “Rise up, come away,” and he

came. Whether he found it the rose of Sharon or the lily of the valley

we shall not know until his next book is published, but it is safe to

assume that he liked it better than South London. We trust he found

there “that rare kind of friendship which is rooted in intellectual

intimacy,” and that he encountered people interested in the kind of

thoughts most vital to him, so that he was not forced, as he was in

London, “to relatively low levels of conversation.” Had Mr. Dawson

called his book _Recollections of Emotional States_ it would have

been far more fitting than _The Autobiography of a Mind_. The reader

who can divine the writer’s mind from this book has perspicacity and

penetration that I do not possess.

From the photograph of the frontispiece, and from the lines of the

book, I gather that Mr. Dawson was leonine externally and feline

internally; that he had great sensitiveness to verbal intoxication and

that always logorrhœa threatened to exhaust him; that there was within

him a big hedonist and a little puritan, that the latter sat in adverse

judgment of the former at all times, and tried to trip him when Mr.

Dawson was not watching his step; that he was sensitive as a child and

self-conscious as a man; that his ear was not attuned to the reproofs

of life and that his eye constantly mistook the comb for the honey.

IX

ARTISTS AND MUSICIANS

MY MUSICAL LIFE, by _Walter Damrosch_. IRVING BERLIN,

by _Alexander Woollcott_. SUNLIGHT AND SONG, by _Maria

Jeritza_. WITH PENCIL, BRUSH AND CHISEL, by _Emil Fuchs_.

Neither Mr. Damrosch nor Mr. Berlin may admit that he likes to be

bracketed with the other, but expediency suggests that it be done here.

_My Musical Life_ does not profess to be an autobiography though it

is a more revealing one than many that purport to be autobiographies.

Leopold Damrosch, the father, was forty years old when he determined to

find out if a living and a career could be made for him and his family

in the land of the free, and in the home of the brave, so he came to

the U. S. A. The way Walter, the author of this book, feels about the

country of his adoption may be gathered from the opening sentence, “I

am an American musician and have lived in this country since my ninth

year.” Judged from his book his life has been an interesting one. He

has been on terms of intimacy with all the great figures in the world

of music; we read that Liszt, Wagner, von Bülow, Clara Schumann,

Taussig, Joachim, Auer, Haenselt, Rubinstein, when they were in

Breslau, generally stayed at the Damrosch house, and he has known most

of the great musicians that have favoured us with their talent.

Of it all he makes a charming kaleidoscopic picture, in which nearly

every musician of note the past fifty years passes in review:

[Illustration: WALTER DAMROSCH]

_Photograph by Gutekunst_

“It was not until midnight that we accompanied Liszt

through the park and the lovely Goethe Garden back to

his house. It was a gentle summer night with a hazy moon

giving an indescribable glamour to the trees and bushes,

and suddenly Liszt laid his hand on my shoulder and said

‛Listen!’

“From the bushes came the song of a nightingale. I had

never heard one before and stood spellbound. It seemed

incredible that such ecstatic sweetness, such songs of

joy and sorrow, could come from the throat of a little

bird, and to hear it all at twenty-four years of age and

standing at the side of Liszt! Dear reader, I confess

that to-day, thirty-five years later, I still thrill at

the memory of it.”

The chapter on Lilli Lehmann is delightful. He draws a picture of the

stately Lilli in Pittsburgh, dressed in white, ready for her appearance

as Brünhilde, covered from head to foot with soot, and at the same

time he gives us an example of ready wit and graceful gesture. Lehmann

insisted it was not Frau Engelhardt’s fault though she perpetrated the

outrage, and that it was wrong of Damrosch to discharge her:

“Slowly I allowed myself to be persuaded and at the

psychological moment gently left the dressing room,

giving Frau Engelhardt a comprehensive glance which she

understood.”

We realise what a diplomat was lost to the service when we read:

“Outside the dressing room I found my faithful Hans, son

of my prompter, Goettich. I gave him some money and told

him to run to a florist and buy a bunch of the whitest

flowers that he could find and to bring them to Madame

Lehmann with my compliments.”

We get interesting glimpses of the tribulations attached to the life of

a musician in New York over fifty years ago:

“I enjoyed my weekly rehearsals in Newark immensely,

although horse-cars, ferry-boats, and trains made

the trip in those days a cumbersome one. But after

each rehearsal, Mr. Schuyler Brinkerhoff Jackson, the

president of the Society, Mr. Shinkle, the secretary,

my dear old friend Zach Belcher, enthusiastic tenor and

music lover, Frank Sealey, my pianist and since then for

so many years accompanist and organist of the New York

Oratorio Society, used to go with me to a nice German

beer saloon near the railroad station where, over a glass

of beer and Swiss-cheese sandwiches, we waited until

train time and discussed the welfare of the Harmonic

Society and music in general.”