In his efforts to familiarise the American public with Wagner’s music,

he had many amusing, discouraging and thrilling experiences. Great

singers there were in those days--Fischer, Sachs, Brema, Alvary and

Gadski. With the coming of Melba, a successful combination of the

French and Italian was made with the German school and we read of that

remarkable group of singers, Jean and Edouard de Reszke, Bispham,

Nordica, Schumann-Heink, and of performances of “Tristan,” “which came

as near perfection as I ever hope to witness.... At the close we were

so elated that all concerned kissed each other ecstatically after the

last curtain fell.”

And how touching his account of a concert in Monte Carlo:

“Jean de Reszke was in the fifth row of the parquet,

and as I came to the ‛Prize Song in the Meistersinger

Overture which he had sung so often and so ravishingly

in New York, I could not help but turn around to look at

him. He gave me an immediate smile, but the tears were

running down his face.”

Mr. Damrosch may accept the assurance that he is wrong in thinking

many of the happenings described may prove dull reading; there is not

a word in the book most readers would be willing to part with. He did

not need Mr. Roosevelt’s letter to establish his Americanism. But as a

cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world, we must tell him that the little

fireman he brought from the wings with Materna could not possibly have

said “Be jabbers.” Occasionally Irishmen will say “Be jabers,” but the

introduction of the extra “b” is a reflection on the good English they

justly pride themselves on using.

Up until the time _My Musical Life_ appeared, we believed editors and

statesmen had a monopoly of writing the most interesting reminiscences;

but Mr. Damrosch’s book suggests that the belief is not well founded.

* * * * *

As Irving Berlin IS American music, this biography is as much the story

of the development--or rather, the birth of national music--as it is

of its creator. It is more a panegyric than a biography. The fact

that Irving Berlin, Izzy Baline, was born in Russia and brought to

this country when he was a few years old, after his village had been

destroyed by fire, makes him all the more an American figure. He had,

blended in him, the characteristics of his race which have given to his

music the touch of sadness and the occasional suspicion that its author

is feeling sorry for himself--self-pity being, in Mr. Woollcott’s idea,

one of the fundamental qualities of the Russian Jew--and he has added

to his inherited qualities the “pep” the “jazz” and the optimism of his

adopted country.

_The Story of Irving Berlin_ has been written by a friend, and friends

despite the adage have a way of being kind and indulgent which is all

to their credit, but which lessens somewhat the value of the adjectives

of praise they are tempted to use. According to Mr. Woollcott’s study,

Irving Berlin is as nearly perfect as a human being can be. He has the

detachment, the disinterestedness, the temperament, the lack of sense

of time and the etherealness of the artist. With those, he combines a

business acumen, a practicality, a flair and a knowledge of the value

of publicity of one who is determined to make a success in business,

and to have an income larger than he can spend. These qualities do not

clash in Irving Berlin; they make concessions to each other, and the

result is a quiet, keen, sensitive looking young man, who seldom raises

his voice and never hurts the feelings of any one--whose eye surveys

the acting of his characters on the stage and the credit and debit list

of his company’s returns with equal comprehensiveness, whose ears are

sensitive to good music but refuse to be “sold” to a piece that will

not be popular, and whose soul is everlastingly travelling from Florida

to Europe, from Virginia to Atlantic City. He is a composer and a

musical publisher. The two functions can be made to work hand in hand:

Irving Berlin has done it. As a composer he publishes his own music,

and as a publisher he accepts only his own compositions: they are sure

to sell.

Mr. Woollcott lingers lovingly on Irving Berlin’s youth. These early

years, spent in the tenement house of Cherry Street, are well pictured.

We like the devoted mother who had a sense of responsibility and a

sense of humour. She had to laugh at this absurd country which was

paying handsomely for her youngest child’s music while she, industrious

and economical, had a hard time to keep together the bodies and souls

of five hungry children. When she went after much effort to hear Irving

Berlin play on Broadway--after he had shed for good his waiter’s

coat--and heard the applause and saw the little figure of her son on

the stage, she went home with the impression that somehow New York was

“picking” on her Benjamin. These years were hard ones for young “Izzy.”

He had to contend with the sense of inferiority engendered by his

meagre earnings; he had to stand the rebuke of the young emigrants who

feel as Sophomores feel toward Freshmen; they have just been through

the period of acclimatisation, and no sooner have they found their way

about in the new land than they turn and scowl at those who come after

them.

A characteristic trait of Irving Berlin was the manner in which he was

accidentally drowned in the East River. When he woke up in Gouverneur

Hospital, his fist was firmly closed on the five pennies he had just

obtained from the sale of newspapers. This is the story of Irving

Berlin in miniature. He would be drowned mentally in the composition of

his music--at the same time, he would never lose sight of his material

achievement. His music must sell.

Mr. Woollcott has no timidity about saying that Irving Berlin is a

genius, and we are nearly ready to agree with him when we hear that

the greatest of American composers can neither read nor write music.

Some who have heard his compositions will say “I knew it.” Homer

could neither read nor write, and his poetry has stirred the hearts

of thousands of generations. But if Carlyle was right that genius is

unconscious of its excellence, Mr. Berlin would not qualify. Yet it is

genius more than art which has made Irving Berlin so popular. And his

popularity is due, largely, to his sense of the apropos. He catches a

familiar American expression, he allows it to say itself in music in

his mind, and when he has caught the rhythm that will make feet, young

and old, want to beat time to it, he has created a “best-seller.” His

genius rests on his musical interpretation of American everyday life.

His songs are a monument to American language; they are as national

as baseball and chewing gum; Irving Berlin is the pioneer of modern

American music, and not only Mr. Woollcott, but a few of the great

musical critics are hoping that his composition in the form of an

operatic score may some time be heard in the Metropolitan House. But,

of course, that would be in the distant future, and those who love

real music will be thankful that they will be spared the ordeal. Mr.

Woollcott would never call it that, however. He believes in Irving

Berlin, not only as a successful interpreter of a passing craze, but

as one who will live. He thinks that the musical historian of the year

2000 will find the birthday of American music and that of the creative

ignoramus Irving Berlin to be the same. And if it be objected that

he was born in Russia and can not be really American, his admirers

will reply, probably, that if the musical interpreter of American

civilisation came over in the foul hold of a ship, so did American

civilisation.

Little of the qualities of heart and mind of Irving Berlin are

discussed in this biography. Mr. Woollcott has been so intent on the

cortex of Mr. Berlin’s life that he has forgotten to show us the

marrow of it. He is too young, says his biographer, to be loaded with

the usual embellishments that human kindness lavishes on those who

have just passed away, to give him as Philip Guedella said somewhere

“the studied discourtesy of a premature obituary,” but throughout we

can feel that Irving Berlin’s qualities of heart are numerous, that

his kindness is great, that his friends are many and his friendship

valuable.

When Mr. Woollcott gets into his subject, he becomes less and less

self-conscious, and more and more likeable. He has touches of

sentiment, of humour and of keen observation which come on the reader

unaware and are therefore the more delightful. The story might have

been entitled, “From Rags to Riches,” undoubtedly; but it would have

given an idea of something spectacular, and that was unnecessary.

But like all biographers who are prompted by friendship while

their subject is still alive, and who are chiefly preoccupied with

the personal side of their effort, Mr. Woollcott has lost a real

opportunity to point out the value of the contribution of the negro to

ragtime music; this would have afforded a certain amount of colour, of

which the book is sadly in need. He is a musical critic and undoubtedly

has definite views about the subject, and he could readily have got an

incentive from the preface to James Weldon Johnson’s book, _The Book of

American Negro Poetry_. He might equally well have attempted a summary

of the birth and growth of jazz. Opinions are widely split on the value

of such music. To some it appears as part of the American nation, and

they can see beyond it, a taste for achievements higher than mere

material comfort; but others shake their heads, discouraged. They do

not believe that jazz is the way to anything worth while or lasting;

they lament the efforts of American composers to deprave the taste of

their countrymen, and shudder at the success attending the efforts.

Mr. Woollcott would have earned our gratitude, had he expressed some

views on the question. But then, he might have had to admit that the

only picture he could give of Irving Berlin was that of a business and

social success.

* * * * *

It is the fashion among the famous artists and actors of our time

to write their lives which, appearing while they are at the apogee

of their success, promote their artistic and business interests,

and reveal the personality of the writer at the time when his name

is constantly in the eyes of the public. As Maria Jeritza says in

_Sunlight and Song_ there is no denying that reminiscences are fresher

when “the laurels are green, and personalities and events described

are alive in the public mind.” Why should an artist wait until his

career is finished to write his memoirs? But the point which might be

contested is the desirability of publishing such writing when it is

without merit and when it can interest only the person who writes it,

or those mentioned or discussed in it.

_Sunlight and Song_ is one of the most uninteresting narratives of

stage life that has ever been published. It is neither more nor less

than a record of Maria Jeritza’s creations and interpretations,

comparisons of her waistline to those of other prima donnas, assurances

that her hair is all her own, except of course when she wears a

black wig--and even then she has her own--and auto-appreciation and

repetition of the flattering things that others have said of her.

There is no intimate or personal recollection, no confession or

avowal. Of her own life, not a word, so that neither the reports of

gossip nor the known facts about her personal record are denied or

sanctioned; and despite oft-repeated beliefs that artists should not

meddle in politics, and that “art and politics have nothing in common,

but sometimes they have” we have more of the too-well-known story and

tragedy of the Emperor of Austria and his family than we care to have,

especially as it is viewed from an altogether prejudiced angle. To

crown the insipidity of _Sunlight and Song_, either Maria Jeritza or

the translator has strewn it with the American use of superlatives, so

that a good teacher is always a wonderful teacher, a wonderful singer

and a wonderful woman.

It would be harmful to the career of a prima donna in her full

maturity, with a prospect of many years of success ahead of her and

a valuable list of successes behind her, to tell the truth about her

fellow-artists or even about herself. So with one exception Frau

Jeritza gracefully avoids the subject. She knows that a giantess could

scarcely play the rôle of the heroine in “Madame Butterfly,” so she

willingly admits it would be impossible to do it better than Farrar did

it.

However, Madame Jeritza is no poorer an autobiographer than her

semi-countryman, Emil Fuchs. Both in their different lines succeed in

obstructing their personality under the bulk of the personal pronoun

“I,” and neither reveals anything not known already.

* * * * *

Mr. Fuchs’ book mentions art occasionally, but most of the large

volume is devoted to himself, his material success, his influential

friends, his successful ascent of the ladder of fame. We do not expect

the life of an artist to read like an Almanach de Gotha, or a Blue

Book--made readable by the addition of gossip and the personal memoirs

of their editor. Mr. Fuchs takes his readers through the years of his

prosperity, without more than a passing glance at his youth, at his

formative years, at his friendships and enmities. His life has been

a series of successes, and he is well aware of it. The accounts of

his royal friends, of his noble admirers and wealthy patrons smack of

the _nouveau riche_. Mr. Fuchs knows it is not good taste to appear

conceited or vain--so he tries to be as genially simple as he can, but

all the time he makes one feel he is on the point of exploding with

pride. It is useless to deny that he has some reasons to be proud.

He has made his name synonymous with other things than success--his

work is art, and his art has a method, a tradition, and a foundation

in painstaking love, in culture and in thorough understanding of his

craft. It is because Mr. Fuchs could have given us a book on the artist

which would be something more than the creation of a social puppet

that we complain. Many authors can tell us of royalty and the English

peerage, but few can make a contribution to art. It is to be admitted,

however, that the former find a more ready market for their wares, but,

since Mr. Fuchs’ book was first written in the form of articles for the

readers of the _Saturday Evening Post_ who no doubt enjoyed them to the

full, why did not the author, in collecting these articles into a book,

revise them, leave out half the social world and allow his pen free

play to discuss Art? What he has to say of art comes as a reward, it

seems, after one has waded through the first half of the book.

“Art and music tend to supplement each other and to

blend with and relieve one another--like the cold and

warm hues on the palette of the painter. Or like the

major and minor chord. In fact, creation was founded on

this principle of positive and negative; it pervades

everything, commencing with the colours of the rainbow

... each needing its contrasting counterpart for the

formation of a homogeneous entity, the structure of

existence.”

Later, he expands a little, but not generously, on the art of

sketching:

“It is the gift of expressing with a few well-defined

strokes a hasty impression; and if each of these strokes

testifies to the mastery of the artist, the sketch often

stirs the imagination by its freshness and spontaneity to

a greater degree than the finished work. But to look at a

sketch by a dauber is like having to read a sentence with

every word misspelled.”

This, with a few lines on art criticism, ends practically Mr. Fuchs’

effort to write a book on the life of an artist. He has told us much we

do not care to know, and little that interests us.

No one is expected to have whole-hearted love for one’s competitors,

but at times Mr. Fuchs oversteps the limits of _bon ton_ by the

pleasure he takes in pointing to the mote in his neighbour’s eye!

X

ACTORS AND ACTRESSES

ELEONORA DUSE, by _Jeanne Bordeux_.

ELEONORA DUSE, by _Edouard Schneider_.

THE TRUTH AT LAST, by _Charles Hawtrey_.

A PLAYER UNDER THREE REIGNS, by _Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson_.

FOOTLIGHTS AND SPOTLIGHTS, by _Otis Skinner_.

TWENTY YEARS ON BROADWAY, by _George Cohan_.

LETTERS OF AN UNSUCCESSFUL ACTOR.

WEBER AND FIELDS, by _Felix Isman_.

Arthur Symonds once spoke of Eleonora Duse as “a chalice for the

wine of imagination.” She was just that, from the time of her birth

in a railway carriage near Venice, to the day when she lay, dressed

in white, in the mortuary chapel in Pittsburgh, and that she will

remain for those who knew her, and for those who will know her

through tradition and fame. None of those who heard her recite can

forget her--none of those who did not should cease to regret it. Her

personality was art come to life, and her life was devoted to her art,

to love and to the theatre.

It has been said that no one ever _knew_ Eleonora Duse. She, who

unfolded her soul on the stage, remained a mystery to her friends;

nevertheless, since her death, several biographies have been published,

each giving personal recollections, “intimate views” and character

studies of the greatest actress Italy ever produced. Of these

biographies, two stand out more conspicuously than the others: Jeanne

Bordeux’s for its irrelevancy; Edouard Schneider’s for its revelatory

qualities.

The former is an objective and impersonal life of Duse. The author

speaks of herself only at rare intervals, and with a detachment which

shows how engrossed she was in her subject. She focussed all her

lights on the “grand artist” as she likes to call her. All the rest

is incidental and serves only as background and contrast. The whole

life of Duse is held within its covers, and yet it is not a life; it

is an after image of some one who must have been great, but who is not

obviously so under the pen of the author. The most touching part of the

book is the end. We see Duse, a pathetic and lonely figure, fighting

with all the strength of her exhausted body to return to Asolo where

she had left all she loved. As she realised that the hope of seeing

her beloved “Patria” again was becoming more remote, she mustered

unsuspecting energy. All in vain. She was to die in America.

Jeanne Bordeux tells us in her preface that no one really knew Eleonora

Duse--and we can see no justification for her amendation “no one in the

world ever succeeded in knowing her as I did.... Each of her friends,

intimates and actors, saw her in a different light; I saw her in all

those lights merged in one, as from birth she unfalteringly followed

her destiny, magnificently, humbly following the mission for which

she was sent into the world.” We should have preferred Jeanne Bordeux

to tell us in what way she knew Duse--in what capacity she approached

her--what special privilege of intimacy or confidence she enjoyed with

the person who had few intimates, and those well-known.

[Illustration: ELEONORA DUSE]

Duse was one of the most subtle and difficult persons to understand

that ever lived in the public eye. Jeanne Bordeux gives no proof,

either by quoting Duse’s words, or by contributing a particularly

enlightening biography, that she either knew or understood her heroine.

Duse combined successfully a public life with a secretly guarded

private life; no one ventured to trespass on what she considered her

own garden; no one dared ask questions; few drew conclusions from what

they imagined to be the truth. Jeanne Bordeux did none of these things,

and for that she should be thanked. But why colour her statements

of what may have been facts with the hue of gossip, the _nuances_ of

scandal? Hero-worship should not be carried too far, but there seems

little necessity for reviving old affairs which may never have existed,

especially when they serve only to whet the curiosity of gossip-lovers.

It does not serve the memory of Eleonora Duse to discuss at length her

relationship with d’Annunzio. The only high spot in the book, however,

is connected with that, but might have been deleted of the unsavoury

revelations which precede it, and the portrait of the artist left for

our observation would not have suffered by the omission. It is said

that long after her separation from d’Annunzio, Duse had an interview

with him; at the end of the conversation, d’Annunzio said, taking her

hand in his, and kissing it: “Not even you can imagine how I loved

you!” And the Duse, serious, with that charming graciousness all her

own, replied, “And to-day, not even you can imagine how much I have

forgotten--you!” Apocryphal perhaps, but worth recording.

Despite her love for Eleonora Duse, Jeanne Bordeux will not see her as

anything but a woman of genius in her chosen line--of ordinary talent

in others. She brings out petty faults and weaknesses of temper which

can not counteract what we know of her character and of her virtues.

Whatever may be said about Duse, her admirers will not lose sight of

the genius under the human form; of the suffering under the brave brow;

of the tragedy in the soul; of the fundamental goodness and humility of

a woman who could have had the world at her feet, and chose to carry it

in her heart.

Jeanne Bordeux’s book is not a contribution to literature, because her

style is too tenuous, too thin, and she has few of the qualities of pen

and of heart that make for good writing. In beauty, sentiment, style

and grace, it can not compare with Edouard Schneider’s biography. The

latter is of so different a nature, so superior an attitude that it

should be translated into English as it is already into German. It

seems a pity that Madame Bordeux’s book should be the only one to speak

of Duse to the American public.

M. Schneider’s biography has no relation with Jeanne Bordeaux’s.

Indeed, it takes an altogether different viewpoint. It constitutes a

testimony of psychological, moral and spiritual order; it is not the

work of a foreigner who is unable to discern between truth and fiction

in tales gathered here and there. Rather is it the direct story of an

intimate friend of Eleonora Duse’s last years; he was bound to her by

bonds of absolute confidence of the mind and of the heart; and it is

important that the English reading public should be confronted with M.

Schneider’s biography of Duse, important to establish the basis of a

dignified admiration and attachment to the memory of the actress.

If Jeanne Bordeux has given the bulk of Duse’s life, Edouard Schneider

has supplied the flavour; she has worked on the warp and woof of the

plain fabric; he has incontestably woven his dreams and embroidered

his phantasy. His inspiration comes from his love for Duse, and his

love has served him as proof, as canvas, as basis. His personal

recollections of her have sufficed to make a beautiful book, and he

has written it from the fulness of his heart, and from the wealth of

his memory; his eyes still lingering on her picture; his ear still

thrilling with the music of her voice; his mind still astir with the

beauties she has revealed to him; his heart still under the influence

of her genius for friendship.

His presentation of Eleonora Duse is the best adapted to the picture we

seek of her; he has avoided the personal element; the human weakness;

the hardships of everyday life; all he has wished to remember was

the beauty of Duse’s genius. At least, that is all he has wished to

remember in this biography, but it calls for another one, from the

same author. The mine from which he has drawn his inspiration, his

memory, must be rich yet in wealth. M. Schneider has not insisted

on biographical facts, but every modulation of Duse’s voice, every

expression of her incomparable hands, and every utterance of her lips

impressed him. He is a playwright of great talent, a poet of renown,

and thanks to his magic qualities of pen, he has dramatised for us the

poetry of Eleonora Duse’s life. He loved her not as a woman, but as a

goddess, and his book is redolent of self-contained emotion, of bashful

adoration, of unlimited admiration.

He was not present at her end, but Pittsburgh and its realities are

there; the contrast he has drawn between the woman and Pittsburgh, of

all cities, where she was destined to die is one of the most inspired

parts of the book. The last chapter has the touch of the poet--and Duse

herself would have been pleased with it.

* * * * *

A clever actor who achieved greatness, an incorrigible gambler who

never knew satiety, a big heart, a winning personality and a modest

man are revealed in _The Truth at Last_, the record of Charles

Hawtrey’s life and achievements. As far as life is concerned, the

actor-manager-gambler is reticent and diffident. His autobiography

is carried along the most objective of lines, and the few words with

which Mr. Somerset Maugham introduces and closes the book are more

illuminating of Charles Hawtrey the man, than the complete and detailed

story of his life as told by himself. It is not a model autobiography,

though it tells with a certain amount of humour the failures and

successes of the subject--and the failures are certainly the most

attractive feature of the tale--but it is so impersonal an achievement,

treated with such indifference that the reader feels the vanity there

would be in trying to put more of himself into the reading than the

author has put into the writing. It is well-known that Charles Hawtrey

accepted fame as an actor with a nonchalance that showed how little

acting was his true vocation; but his reminiscences show to what

height of success good will, tact, charm, personality and the lack of

anything better to do, can take a man. The number of times he found

himself and his company in the hands of the bankruptcy solicitors

is only paralleled by the number of times he pulled himself and his

company out of total failure by bold and intelligent backing of a horse.

Horse-races and stage-management, work and gambling, filled his life.

The three graces that appealed so to Martin Luther played no part in

Hawtrey’s life so far as can be judged from _The Truth at Last_. Only

those who knew and admired Charles Hawtrey will be able to enjoy the

book with unmixed pleasure. They will have but to recall his ease and

grace, his smile, his utter lack of affectation (or so it seemed on

the stage) to find excuses for the stilted and unbending presentation

of his autobiography. Evidently, Charles Hawtrey was no writer, and

self-consciousness, which was unknown to the actor, was his constant

companion when “he took his pen in hand.” And then too, he lacks a

sense of proportion although this may be due to his determination not

to allow his personality, his emotions, likes and dislikes to creep

into the record of his life. He devotes the same number of words to the

death of his father, of whom he was very fond and to whose guidance he

owed the best there was in him, as he does to the purchase of a blanket

used on board a steamer; he mentions his second marriage, the War, the

impressions left on him by Rome and America, much more casually than

he does the receipt of a cheque from Australia, and his first marriage

is mentioned only by way of reference. Timidity, self-consciousness,

delicacy, lack of self-absorption? Probably a combination of all of

them, and an extreme desire to live, to live rapidly, an unchecked

interest in the display of life, in horses and in the life of the stage

are responsible for that lack of _laisser aller_ which is the greatest

charm of autobiographies. It is _The Truth at Last_, and a truth that

can probably compare point by point with facts, but it is not the

truth about the man who was one of England’s most beloved actors.

* * * * *

To read _A Player Under Three Reigns_ immediately after _The Truth at

Last_ is like going from a dark cave where one gropes one’s way around,

into the sunlight and the open. Where one author is cramped by a pen

and hampered in the choice of the words that make writing the natural

expression of thought, the other allows words and ideas to blend in

interesting, amusing or touching homogeneity, always harmonious and

always natural.

Forbes-Robertson is fundamentally an artist and it is interesting to

know that his first calling was to be a painter, a calling in which

he displayed gift and talent and which he followed in his spare time.

His reminiscences are of great interest not only because of the

personality of the author, which is never accentuated in the written

words but becomes fascinatingly evident between the lines, but also

because Forbes-Robertson has known practically all the people who

made art, literature and history in his generation; he has known them

personally, some intimately, and his book is almost as much a review of

the late years of the nineteenth century in England, in France and in

America, as the record of his own life. He is never afraid to add to

his memoirs a touch of emotion, an expression of a heartfelt sentiment,

and when he does, he is more charming than ever. The layman possibly

thinks that all the members of the theatrical world are jealous and

envious of each other; occasionally, a movement is set afoot to help

some actor who finds himself in poverty after a life of semi-luxury;

benefit performances are given to procure a comfortable few years

to a man who has given his talent without thinking of the future;

but these movements are always in favour of one whose competition is

no longer to be feared; and the general opinion is that theatrical

people are heartless, selfish and shallow. How quickly this impression

is dispelled when we read the tributes Sir Johnston offers to his

confrères of the stage. He must have had enemies, but he is careful to

avoid wounding them and those whom he has liked have their names and

their deeds lauded in _A Player Under Three Reigns_.

Some points of artistic or ethical interest are discussed

comprehensively--one, probably the most important, is the author’s

contention regarding the appropriateness of actor-managers. He was one

for years, not from choice, but from comparative necessity and his

opinion is not only valuable, but based on experience.

Humour, wit, lightness, grace and knowledge of facts form a good

foundation upon which to build an autobiography; these qualities fell

to Sir Forbes-Robertson’s share, and in so far as actor-biographers are

concerned they seem to be the lion’s share.

* * * * *

_Footlights and Spotlights_ is a diverting autobiography which has

much interest, reveals frankness and humour, and serves the reputation

of Otis Skinner, but it will not enhance it. Its author is one of the

intellectuals of the American stage and he could have written a better

book. However, he is very much alive in its pages and so are the great

number of people he has met and liked or disliked. His career has not

been a series of successes, and he makes no attempt to conceal it.

Apparently he took his troubles with optimism and cheer and he has

woven these qualities into his narrative, which unrolls itself as

a panorama of the stage-life of the past fifty years. A refreshing

feature of the book is the author’s appreciation and praise of others.

He is generous, often magnanimous, always charitable. He has not liked

every one, and those he has disliked get their deserts in moderation.

Otis Skinner’s life has been a full and varied one, and it is a

delightful journey to take with him through countries and behind

footlights, travelling and acting, and praying with him that the new

show may be a big success.

Mr. Skinner’s book is another of those which suggests there is a

great deal to be said in favour of writers who delay publication

of their autobiographies until after their death. Undoubtedly all

autobiographies would gain in quality if their authors devoted some of

the years of their lives, given to preparation of what James Barrie

calls “the greatest adventure of life,” to shaping and perfecting

the document. They would gain in objectivity if they waited until

the fading of their star; they would gain in charm and in honesty if

their pens were not guided by fear of the impression they will make

and how it will affect their career; and meanwhile they may weave into

the work, at leisure, the interesting information that those who make

history, literature or art should transmit to posterity, and that so

often needs the shadows of death to veil and envelop it.

* * * * *

Recently there has appeared in France a book entitled _Plutarch Lied_.

I have no doubt he did, like all mankind save George Washington, but

he was truthful when he said that the man who writes his life embraces

the opportunity to celebrate certain moral qualities. The quality

that George M. Cohan celebrates in himself is courage. He also prides

himself on his industry. He was long of courage from his birth, or at

least he was before he drained the tank so lavishly. Mr. Cohan is less

engaging when he tells how he achieved his success, than when he is

actually achieving it on the stage. He uses the personal pronoun, which

Pascal said was hateful, more frequently than any author I recall, save

Doctor Rainsford in his _Story of a Varied Life_. _Twenty Years on

Broadway_ reads like the inventory of a shop; so many pounds of tea, so

many ounces of bromide, so many packages of ginger. Nothing is said of

their origin, their prices or their uses. The possessor owns them, it

is his business how he got them, what they cost him in money and effort

and what he is going to do with them.

Any one seeking enlightenment about personality, its perfections or

defects should not go to autobiographies of actors: “I guess I am a

ham, all right” said Mr. Cohan to himself after he had been mildly

echoed by some of his fellow Thespians. I don’t know exactly what a

“ham” is but if he is one, he is an amusing one on the stage. In the

past twenty years he has written, signed and produced thirty-one plays

of his own. It is regrettable that he did not get some one else to tell

how he did it.

What Mr. Cohan’s book lacks more than anything else is the revelation

of an ideal of life--an ideal other than the ambition to “put

Broadway in his pocket.” It may be said in his defence that he was

not at a school where such ideals form part of the daily and hourly

preoccupations, and that his childhood was spent in an atmosphere not

conducive to taking thought of one’s fellow-man’s spiritual needs and

welfare. But there is a code of ethics which is particularly that of

theatre-people and which is as altruistic in its conception as the

Golden Rule; Mr. Cohan may conform his conduct to it, but one would not

surmise it from reading his book. I admit he is a dramatist who has

set a new style, a popular songwriter with a large following, a clever

comedian, a resourceful theatrical technician, and that he knows a lot

about the emotional wants of his fellow-citizens; but I am equally sure

he knows little about himself, and what he knows he does not know how

to tell.

* * * * *

A spiritual biography by one who prefers to withhold his name has

recently been published under the title _Letters of an Unsuccessful

Actor_. Although it is replete with shrewd observations, timely

comment, and evidence of sound thinking and wide reading, R. M. S.,

to whom the letters were addressed and who is responsible for their

publication, should have interpolated the word “self-satisfied” between

the last two words of the title.

There are fifty-six letters, and in one or another of them most of

the famous players of the last thirty years are discussed. It would

seem to be quite fitting that the first letter is in praise of R. M.

S. and the last an attempt to answer the question: Is acting merely

interpretative? From them both, and from the others, a comprehensive

idea may be gained of the man who wrote them and why he was a failure

in his profession. It is likely he would not admit he was a failure.

“Unsuccessful” probably means that he did not gain the position his

talent deserved, nor recognition similar to that accorded Lawrence

Barrett, Henry Irving, Dion Boucicault, Beerbohm Tree, John Hare,

Charles Hawtrey and scores of others who reached the top during his

lifetime. Self-consciousness undoubtedly was his stumbling block, and

over-readiness to sit in judgment with a predilection for the adverse

aided it. Possibly he was too original to be imitative; too immobilised

by ideas to be plastic and malleable; too assertive to be taught and

schooled. That is the impression one gets from reading this unusually

interesting gossipy book which should appeal to all actors, divert many

theatre-goers, and instruct some historians of the stage.

The writer is a man of opinions, most of them positive and difficult

to dislodge, but the reader should keep in mind that they were written

for a sympathetic, indulgent eye. This will suggest to him that many of

the judgments may be discounted. “The theatre of the early nineties was

dull as ditch-water.” That may be, but it was as sparkling and bright

as a noisy brook compared with the theatre to-day. “The ideal training

for an actor is no longer possible to obtain.” Was it possible

ever to obtain? Certainly not since the days of Hellenic supremacy.

“Garrick undoubtedly was a man of culture and accomplishment, a master

of the social art and full of parlour tricks. His anecdotes, his

imitations, his studies of various types of bumpkinhood were cameos of

characterisation. As a mimic he was supreme, but he was a charlatan

and he mutilated Shakespeare.” Posterity is even more tenacious of her

opinions than is the Unsuccessful Actor, and they are better founded.

His pronouncements are not by any means all drastic and destructive.

Many are mild, sensible and philosophic. “The greatest artist is he

who obtains greatness in his portrayal of the greatest conceptions” is

not original but it is felicitously expressed. Those who bemoan the

decline of manners and morals will be likely to sympathise with him

when he says: “With me manners were ever more important than morals.” I

fancy all members of his profession will agree. “It is when immorality

flaunts its bad manners that I won’t tolerate it.” Such intolerance

would be becoming to nearly every one, and no one will dissent from his

statement that “a good play is one in which a credible, an interesting

story is unfolded by means of living characters, psychologically

developed by incident.” If it were _either_ credible or interesting

most of us would vote it good!

The author occasionally indulges in prophecies and some of them have

already come true. In 1918 he wrote: “Once let the Germans get the

Allies talking around a table, during an armistice and they, not we,

will have won this War, and within a few years will start preparing for

the next.”

He has something interesting to say about dramatic criticism, about

democracy, about Lloyd George and about love. It is one of the most

interesting books to pick up and read for a few minutes, that has

emanated from the stage in a long time.

* * * * *

_Weber and Fields_ is not to be judged by biographic standards. It

is not a biography at all. It is a torrid narrative of the triumph

of two Jewish boys who, unaided by education, training or influence,

went from a cellar in East Broadway to their own theatre on Broadway

and who furnished during ten years wholesome amusement to more people

of this city and country than any two men of their time, not even

excepting William Jennings Bryan and Rev. John Roach Straton. No one

could reduce to writing the genius of Weber and Fields. It defies

verbal characterisation but Mr. Isman makes an excellent attempt. That

he does not quite succeed in conveying how side-splitting were their

conversations and antics, is not his fault. But he has succeeded in

giving some good pictures of the time, and some excellent likenesses

of many who were associated with the two comedians: of De Wolf Hopper

as Hoffman Barr; of Lillian Russell as the Wealthy Widow, and of David

Warfield as the Talking Doll. No one who knew Peter Dailey will fail to

approve this thumb-sketch of him:

“Oh, rare Pete Dailey! Inimitable Peter! Born comedian,

the quickest-witted man that ever used grease paint;

splendid voice; an acrobat and agile dancer despite his

two hundred and fifty pounds; no performance ever the

same; needing neither lines nor business, but only to be

given the stage; convulsing his fellow actors as well as

the audience with his impromptu sallies; an inveterate

practical joker; a bounding, bubbling personality.”

Things have changed since the heyday of their success! When thugs want

your money in New York, nowadays, they knock you down and take it;

or if it is jewellery they fancy, they enter your house or shop and

blackjack you if you seek to stay their quest. There was more finesse

in the good old days. The man who guessed your weight--“No charge if I

fail”--spoke in a code intelligible only to his accomplices. As he ran

his hands over a candidate he talked, seemingly to no purpose, but his

“I think your weight is,” translated, meant, “His money is in his right

trousers pocket.” “I guess your weight to be” located the victim’s

purse in the hip pocket, and “I say your weight is” the inside coat

pocket.

If Chicago were articulate she would probably deny that she now

harbours hostelries such as Joe Weber and Lew Fields were obliged to

patronise.

“For the period of the Chicago stay Grenier boarded out

his troupers by contract. Joe and Lew were assigned to a

boarding house with the freaks. The bearded lady sat at

Lew’s left and drank her coffee from a moustache cup. The

fat man occupied the next three chairs on Joe’s right,

and never missed the middle one when Joe removed it, as

he did at every opportunity. Directly opposite, on a high

chair, sat the armless wonder. What that unfortunate

lacked in arms, he made up in prehensile cunning of

his feet. With these he helped and fed himself, and

manipulated knife, fork and spoon as matter of factly as

the elephants used their trunks. The bearded lady had a

reputation as a wit to uphold and it was her pleasure to

shout ‛Hands off!’ at least once at every meal when the

wonder reached for some dish. At the first breakfast Lew

asked that the biscuits be passed. They lay nearest the

wonder. He thrust forth a leg with a biscuit clutched in

his foot. Lew did his own reaching from then on. They ate

dinner sometimes at the Palmer House, Chicago’s pride,

where a jar of stick candy stood beside the catchup

bottle and the vinegar cruet in the center of each

table, and there were nineteen choices of meats on the

seventy-five-cent table d’hôte menu that read like an

inventory.”

The sun of Weber and Fields stayed in its zenith about five years. Then

John Stromberg, their musical genius, died, and it set rapidly; and in

the twilight, Hopper, Collier, Bernard, Mitchell and his wife, Bessie

Clayton, strayed. Innocent slaughtering of the English language began

to jar the ears of those who slaughtered it themselves; the quality of

the Metropolis’ population changed rapidly; theatres began to spring

up like mushrooms after a rain and music-halls made way for Follies.

Numbered were the days of the Music Hall, which reserved the character

of the Daudet heroine, and rechristened her Sapolio in token of her

having consecrated her life to the task of making Paris a spotless town

morally--the old Music Hall, where Dailey was Jean Gaussin, unwilling

victim of Sapolio’s high moral purpose; Warfield, Uncle Cæsaire who ate

moth balls to conceal his alcoholic breath; Fields, a comedy servant

girl who, ordered to serve the capon en casserole, cooked it in castor

oil; Joseph, Fanny Le Grand’s perfect little gentleman of a child,

became in Weber’s hands, a kicking, brawling, tobacco-chewing brat;

Harry Morey, now a Hollywood hero, a concierge with an Irish brogue.

And such dialogue! Foolish, oh, yes, but of such is the kingdom of real

laughter.

A precious book for a melancholy mood, for an hour of convalescence,

or for ten minutes of waiting while your wife makes obeisance to her

mirror.

XI

STATESMEN

WOODROW WILSON, by _William Allen White_.

THE TRUE STORY OF WOODROW WILSON, by _David Lawrence_.

BRIGHAM YOUNG, by _M. R. Werner_.

THE LIFE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN, by _William E. Barton_.

SELECTIONS FROM THE CORRESPONDENCE OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT

AND HENRY CABOT LODGE.

LETTERS FROM THEODORE ROOSEVELT TO ANNE ROOSEVELT COWLES.

William Allen White has the qualities that fit him to write about

Woodrow Wilson entertainingly for his contemporaries, illuminatingly

for posterity. He is versatile and perspicacious; he has a sense of

humour and he is colossally industrious; he is sensitive and sensible,

and has been disciplined in the art of verbal expression, by intuition

and experience. He is a man of ideals and ideas; the former are

realisable, the latter not persecutory; and he has a tender spot in his

heart for the Irish.

Posterity and its spokesmen will render the verdict on Woodrow Wilson

that will endure. I do not agree with Mr. White that his place in

the history of the world will not be determined by his character.

It will be determined by his character, not by his characteristics,

just as George Washington’s was and just as Abraham Lincoln’s was.

Nor do I agree that “the relation between character and fame is not

of first importance” though I am aware that “many good men live and

die unknown.” They do, indeed, but many good men have very little

character. “Character” and “good” are not synonymous. A “good” man is

a man who does not disobey the commandments nor transcend conventions.

A man with “character” frequently does both. Woodrow Wilson did and I

have no doubt George Washington did, despite the cherry tree story.

The greatest of all commandments is, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour

as thyself.” If he had affectionate feeling for Dean West, President

Hibben, Senator Lodge and others “too numerous to mention” he

successfully concealed it. He was undoubtedly a truthful man, but he

said he had written the preface to Dean West’s publicity brochure

without reading it, and later, when it was shown that he had read it,

he said he had written it good-naturedly and offhand, which was again

at variance with the truth, for it carefully and lucidly expressed

his attitude to the school. He told the Senate Committee on Foreign

Relations that he never had seen the secret treaties, though there is

documentary evidence to the contrary.

He had character: he was firm, fearless and free, and he had vision. He

showed these qualities in Paris. In his vision it was revealed to him

that from the sanguineous and agonising travail of the war a child had

been born; that it did not resemble its parents; that many called it

monster, others Bolshevism; and that it subscribed to none of our rules

of bringing-up or behaviour. He saw that it was lusty, growing like the

traditional weed, that it threatened to shut out our sunlight and our

source. He realised that we must deal with communism, and gradually,

day by day, the world is realising it. Woodrow Wilson was “good”

enough, but unfortunately for him, for his peace of mind and happiness,

he had “characteristics” and they fettered him.

Mr. White bears heavily on Woodrow Wilson’s ancestry, too heavily some

will think, or too indiscriminatingly.

It may have been the Woodrow in him that told Colonel Harvey that his

advocacy of him as a presidential candidate was injuring his prospects

and it may have been the Wilson in him that charmed the “bawling mob,

hot, red-faced, full of heavy food and too much rebellious liquor”

which nominated him for Governor of New Jersey; but it was Woodrow

Wilson that met the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the White

House in June 1919, when he made the misstep that lamed him for his

remaining mortal days, and dislodged his country from the saddle of

world-leader, in which it seemed to be riding a winning race.

Mr. White would have us believe that Woodrow Wilson got his intellect

and obstinacy from the Woodrows, his emotions and charm from the

Wilsons. What did he get from Ann Adams, his lynx-eyed grandmother

whose mouth dropped at the angles and who neither saw nor forgave a

daughter after she married beyond her approbation? From her, I suppose,

he got the capacity to treat Colonel House, his polar star for the ten

years of his fruition, as though he were a Judas, and Joseph Tumulty,

who served him with dog-like fidelity and intelligence from the

beginning of his political career to its zenith and beyond, as though

he were not only mangy but had rabies as well?

The chapter entitled “The Miracle of Heredity” might more appropriately

and truthfully be labelled, “Teachings of Heredity Exemplified by the

Appearance, Conduct and Career of Woodrow Wilson.” The author would

have us believe that environment had much to do in conditioning his

limitations. He writes:

“If only there could have been in his life some

shanty-Irish critic with a penchant for assault and

battery, some dear beloved sweetheart to show his notes

around the playground, some low-minded friend to fasten

upon him the nickname ‛four eyes,’ calling brutal

attention to his spectacles, or some other nickname in

thinly veiled obscenity which would reveal a youthful

weakness and so make him truckle to the baser nature of

his gang that he might remove the black curse of his

sobriquet--what a world we should have to-day!”

Alas, that I should disagree again with one who has given me hours

of pleasure from which enduring admiration has developed! Woodrow

Wilson would have been the same had he budded in Hoboken, flowered in

Montmartre and fructified in Tahiti.

If one can say there is a disappointing chapter in the book it is

one entitled “The Development of Youth.” The study that will throw a

penetrating light on Woodrow Wilson will be one that concerns itself

chiefly with the years between 1874 and 1885, from the time he went

to Columbia, South Carolina, until he left Johns Hopkins University,

where “he was known as a friendly cuss in the American vernacular

and never a grind.” In his school and college days he met, worked

and played with other boys who were destined to become successful

Americans. Perhaps there was a rule amongst them taking notes which

he will print. If there was, he is the one to unleash the bridegroom

“coming forth rejoicing as a strong man to run a race” better than his

brother-in-law, Stockton Axson, whom Mr. White quotes.

Woodrow Wilson’s presidency of Princeton University has probably never

been outlined more accurately and attractively than in the chapters,

“The Lecturer Becomes the Administrator” and “Going Through the First

Fire.” Not only is the chief leading actor sketched by the hand of a

master, but there is a Hogarthian vignette of Dean West, and a portrait

of Colonel House which is so perfect that I must quote it:

“A man of slight figure, perhaps five feet six in height,

of a thin, oval cast of countenance, adorned by a short,

grey, stubby moustache over a firm and yet sensitive

mouth which in turn is carved above a strong chin. The

whole countenance bursts into illumination with beaming,

kindly eyes below a rather higher brow than one expects

from the remainder of the face; and the voice, when it

comes from this gentle, interesting, and intelligent

face, is soft and low and modest. A certain almost

Oriental modesty, a Chinese self-effacement, abides with

the personality of Colonel House. He seems to be in

constant and delightful agreement with his auditor. And

this delightful agreement, as one knows him, expresses

itself in a thousand ways in an obvious and unmistakable

desire to serve. He is never servile, but always serving;

gentle without being soft, exceedingly courteous with the

most unbending dignity. He is forever punctuating one’s

sentence with ‛that’s true, that’s true’; and stimulating

candour among men, which is the essence of friendship.”

Mr. White is an impartial partisan, a pleading judge. These desirable

qualities of the biographer are revealed most conspicuously in the

narrative of Woodrow Wilson’s first great struggle with his most

deforming limitation: inability to bear and forbear, to do team work,

to play the game according to the rules. No doubt he felt that he had

gained a moral victory at Princeton, but the trustees were glad to see

him leave.

How he got the nomination for Governor of New Jersey, how he

short-circuited the political machine, how he inoculated the Democratic

party of his adopted state with liberalism and how, gradually but

surely, the immunisation that resulted was felt throughout the country

are told most interestingly. The chapters are interspersed with

pleasant references to three women who influenced his life: he got

understanding, loyalty, indulgence and devotion from Ellen Axson and

from Edith Boiling; from Mrs. Peck he got appeasement of his latent

hedonism, encouragement of his ambition, justification of his conduct,

and praise which was to Woodrow Wilson what manna was to the Children

of Israel. She, “of exquisite spiritual prowess and facile charm,” is

supposed to have enjoyed his confidence to a remarkable degree. Her

recently published story does not tend to prove it. Until his letters

to her are published, I shall continue to believe he got nothing from

her save what I have enumerated.

Woodrow Wilson’s nomination and election to the Presidency of this

country and the accomplishments of his first administration are passed

over rather briefly. All will not agree “that when his four years’

work are considered as a whole, when they are viewed retrospectively

they may be seen as the fastest moving four years in our economic and

social history.”

It was in 1916, when he was renominated by his party without

opposition, and re-elected, that President Wilson became a world

figure. His dealings with Germany, his restraint in bringing this

country into the war, the way in which he developed public opinion

to back him up when there was nothing to do save to join up with the

Allies, are told with candour and simplicity. Then come the glad and

the sad chapters: the President’s gestation of the League of Nations

plan, and his abortive attempts to deliver himself; his European

odyssey; his encounter with the sirens; his shipwreck; the shattering

of the raft that he got together to take him before the people when the

Republican Senators convinced him they would not accept the treaty; his

final illness and his tiresome wait for the ring down of the curtain

are told with gratifying impartiality and in satisfactory _résumé_.

The relation of Woodrow Wilson’s illness to his great failure: his

inability to get his country to accept the League of Nations idea

and membership in that product of his brain, has never been properly

recognised nor publicly discussed. But it has a definite and a pathetic

relation. Mr. White says:

“He brought with him to the White House a stomach pump

which he used almost daily and a quart can of some sort

of coal-tar product--headache tablets; they were giving

him incipient Bright’s disease until the White House

doctors took hold of him and stopped the tablets. The

tinkering with his intestines proved the frailty of the

man.”

Alas, how frail man is, and how many men and women are frail if

“tinkering” with their intestines proves such frailty!

Before he went to the White House and while he was still governor

of New Jersey, and possibly even before that, Woodrow Wilson showed

distinct symptoms of the disease to which he finally succumbed:

arteriosclerosis. The disease was detected first in his retinal

blood vessels by a famous ophthalmologist of this country and he was

instructed to a régime which, subscribed to and followed, is adequate

frequently to bring about a cessation of the progress of the disease.

Perhaps “tinkering” with the intestines does not felicitously or

appropriately describe the essential features of that prophylaxis,

but if it embraces what is meant by overcoming fermentation and

putrefaction in the digestive tract, then “tinkering” is the word to

use and it is to be regretted that “White House doctors” were not

“tinkers” too.

One day, some one will point out that President Wilson’s irascibility,

obstinacy, mental inflexibility and emotional inelasticity, which he

displayed so frequently, painfully to himself and humiliatingly to his

people while in Paris on his second European venture, and here when he

took his plan to the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and finally

to the people at large, were mainly due to the arteriosclerosis, which

at that time had made great inroads on the nutrient channels of the

brain. It accentuated his limitations and minimised his possessions. It

immobilised him like a hephæstic fetter, and there was no one strong or

courageous enough to break the links before the fibre of the web had

annealed.

Mr. White’s concluding chapter is entitled “The Assessment,” and it

contains these words with which every one must agree:

“If Fame does not come to him through the conjunction of

time and chance working upon the genius of the race to

preserve the structure which he previsioned in his hour

of trial, Fame will find a man here--a clean, brave,

wise, courageous man--ready-made for heroic stature.”

How unfortunate it is that Mr. White could not have interpolated the

adjectives “understanding, kindly, compassionate, loyal!”

In another connection Mr. White says: “And we must not forget that from

the bottom of his Irish heart always the motive which most surely moved

Woodrow Wilson was the love of his kind.” Against this statement I set

the following extract from my own writings:

“Woodrow Wilson does not love his fellow men. He

loves them in the abstract, but not in the flesh. He

is concerned with their fate, their destiny, their

travail en masse, but the predicaments, perplexities and

prostrations of the individual or groups of individuals

make no appeal to him. He does not refresh his soul by

bathing it daily in the milk of human kindness. He says

with his lips that he loves his fellow-man, but there is

no accompanying emotional glow, none of the somatic or

spiritual accompaniments which are the normal ancillæ

of love’s display. He does not respect his fellow’s

convictions when they are opposed to his own. He does

not value their counsel when it is adverse to his own

judgment.... In contact with people, he gives himself

the air of listening in deference, and indeed of being

beholden to their judgment and opinion, but in reality

it is an artifice which he puts off when he returns to

the dispensing centre of the world and of the law just

as he puts off his gloves and hat.... Woodrow Wilson

attempts to mask, with facial urbanity and a smile in

verbal contact with people, and with the subjective

mood in written contact, another deforming defect of

character; namely, his inability to enter into a contest

of any sort in which there is a strife, without revealing

his obsession to win. When he attempts to play any

game, his artificed civility, cordiality, amiability,

are so discordant with the real man that they become as

offensive as affectations of manner or speech always

are, and instead of placating the individual for whom

they are manifest, or facilitating the _modus vivendi_,

they offend and make _rapport_ with him impossible....

Mr. Wilson is a brilliant, calculating and vindictive

man; brilliant in conception, calculating in motive and

vindictive in execution.... Were he generous, kindly and

humble, it would be difficult to find his like in the

flesh or in history.”

That was my deliberate judgment after having studied Woodrow Wilson

from the psychological point of view, and that is my judgment now

after having read and re-read Mr. White’s book.

It is by his possessions, not by his limitations, that Woodrow Wilson

will be estimated. The campaign is on. It is not a noisy one. No one

can say what the outcome will be, but the straw vote now being taken

suggests that his election to membership in the Academy of the World’s

Immortals is assured.

* * * * *

Another journalist, David Lawrence, has written what he calls _The True

Story of Woodrow Wilson_. Either the adjective should have been deleted

from that title, or the indefinite article should have been substituted

for the definite.

Mr. Lawrence was the correspondent of the Associated Press at Princeton

from 1906 to 1910, the closing years of Wilson’s pedagogical life and

the opening years of his political career. For the past fifteen years,

he has done journalistic work in Washington which has brought him in

close contact with the pattern makers of our national destiny. He has

had therefore unusual opportunity to observe, and he is a trained and

trusted interpreter of events. Small wonder that his book is readable,

interesting and instructive. Were he as trustworthy an interpreter of

souls as he is of events, his book would deserve high rating.

The satisfactory life of Wilson must be written from his letters,

messages, memoranda and books after the disappearance of the emotional

states engendered by his presence and personality, which are

prejudicial to correct estimation and inimical to sound judgment. Such

states of popular feeling never disappear in one generation. It is only

now that we begin to realise the majesty of Lincoln’s mind, the harmony

of his soul.

Mr. Lawrence’s opening sentence is “Woodrow Wilson died as he

lived--unexplained and unrevealed.” He was more “explained” than any

man of his time, and neither Mr. Baruch nor Mr. Bridges would, I fancy,

admit that he was unrevealed. He may have been improperly explained,

and insufficiently revealed, but there are thousands who saw and met

him who will not believe it.

Mr. Lawrence states that his purpose was to put on record a

dispassionate narrative of the man who, equipped only with the

qualities of personal magnetism and intellectual power, made the

unparalleled ascent from College Professor to Moral Leader of the

world. Every unprejudiced reader must admit that success crowned his

effort.

When Admiral Grayson shall publish his diary; when the archives of

Colonel House’s mind are accessible; when all Walter Page’s letters

are available, and when Mr. Robert Bridges, Mr. Norman Davis, and

Mr. Bernard Baruch shall testify the qualities that the world denied

him--qualities of heart--we shall be in position to estimate Woodrow

Wilson and to assess his career. Had Mr. William Jennings Bryan shifted

the focus of his mind from fundamentalism to fact, and told us of his

intimacy with Woodrow Wilson, it would have served a useful purpose.

* * * * *

It was said of Brigham Young that he was a Cromwell in daring, a

Machiavelli in intrigue, a Moses in executive force, and a Bonaparte

in ruthlessness and unscrupulousness; and William H. Seward said that

America has produced few greater statesmen. These testimonials and the

universal admission that he gave Mormonism whatever permanency it has,

and that he was the parent of its material prosperity prove that he was

a man of uncommon personality.

Personality analysis and portrayal are the Elysian field of the

biographer. Here is a man who was to the system of polytheism called

Mormonism what Paul was to Christianity: preacher, organiser,

administrator. A farmer lad without background or education, he

supported himself by painting and glazing until he undertook the

dissemination and direction of the doctrines revealed by God to Joseph

Smith, Jr., who devoted all the succeeding days of his life, until his

neighbours killed him, to their promulgation. Religion took the place

of education in Brigham Young and aroused his latent qualities and

power. It led him to the Governorship of Utah and to the Presidency of

the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; and before he died

nearly a half a million people were convinced that he, like Christ and

Mohammed, partook of divinity.

He has only recently been called to his reward; fifty years ago, he

was a power in the land; for more than a quarter of a century every

word that he said that was fit to print was printed and archived; his

life is thoroughly documented. He should be a fascinating subject for

a biographer. It would be fulsome praise to say that M. R. Werner has

written a satisfactory or a successful biography of him. It reveals

neither diligent research nor careful reflection; it is neither

skilfully composed nor effectively told; there is scant evidence in it

that the most important source of such a biography, _The Journal of

Discourses_, has been deeply studied or adequately transcribed. But

its most serious shortcoming as a biography is a possession, not a

lack, and that possession is the engulfing, overwhelming background.

Mr. Werner says it is impossible to write the life of Brigham Young

without also writing the history of Mormonism, and it is impossible

to write the history of Mormonism without writing the life of Joseph

Smith, Jr. I fancy few will agree with him. I should go so far even

as to say that no one can write the history of Mormonism and the

lives of its author and proprietor and of its administrator and

perpetuator, simultaneously. To do the first of these alone would be

an interminable task. It would require a discussion of the religious

instinct, explaining why this instinct is so rarely appeased by

what the wisdom of God and the ingenuity of man have to offer. And a

detailed, specific statement of the system of polytheism which the Book

of Mormon professes to teach and the Book of Doctrine seeks to justify,

would require examination of the status of prophecy, of miracles, of

the imminent approach of the end of the world, of personal contact

with God through sight or hearing at the present day, of liberty of

private judgment in religious matter, and of scores of other tenets

of the Mormon creed. Moreover, it would require an explicit statement

of the Mormon hierarchy, an extremely complicated structure, and a

summary of the Mormon’s form of government. No biographer, however

facile, could interpret Joseph Smith, Jr., who is not familiar with the

psychopathology and experienced in the ways of the psychic deviate.

Concerning Mr. Werner’s apology regarding the necessary scope of this

book, it would be just as legitimate to say that the life of Francis

of Assisi could not be written without writing at the same time the

history of the Catholic Church and the story of the life of Ignatius

Loyola.

[Illustration: BRIGHAM YOUNG]

_Reprinted from “Brigham Young,” by M. R. Werner

Courtesy of Harcourt, Brace & Co._

In brief, Mr. Werner bit off more than he could chew. However, one gets

more from a second reading of the book than from the first. That is a

poor recommendation for a book these days when people are insisting

that they be enlightened by electricity. By careful and persisting

digging, the reader may get a notion, form a concept, of Brigham

Young’s personality, particularly if he concentrates on the chapter

entitled “Sinai.”

Brigham Young said with his lips that he believed in God, but with his

heart he said he believed in himself. He was self-sufficient, but not

self-satisfied.

He was about as fearless as man can be. His conduct all his life

testifies that he was as devoid of fear as the words of Edward W. Bok

testify that he is. Brigham Young and Theodore Roosevelt had the same

brand of courage and about the same supply.

Young understood the primitive and the acquired urges of man as few

understand them. He curbed those of others and indulged his own; and

he was the only man of his country, save Benjamin Franklin, who really

understood women.

He was ruthless, and he had a vein of cruelty in him that came

to the surface with increasing frequency. He imposed his will

and determination upon friend and foe; he brooked no denial, no

contradiction. Cast in the mould of Joshua, he firmly believed every

place the sole of his foot trod was his, for the Lord had given it to

him.

With it all, he had a sense of humour and he loved children. Small

wonder that orators in the throes of self-excitation liken him to

Pericles and Cromwell, and frenzied preachers liken him to God.

One has but to study the various photographs of Brigham Young and

to keep in mind one thing he said about his father in order to be

able satisfactorily to solve the mystery and guess the secret of his

personality: “It was a word and a blow with Father, but the blow came

first.” And Brigham Young’s method was the same. He wanted to keep

polygamy as the strong link in the chain of the hierarchal organisation

that was such a brilliant economical success; he kept it there until

the Government imprisoned him, and when he died, seventeen wives and

forty-four children were at his funeral.

He had his own way in everything save with Amelia Folsom. To her

determination not to bend the knee, he owes the preservation of his

character. Another young woman whom he took to wife when he was

sixty-six attempted to discipline him, but without success. Even if she

had not failed, his character would have been safe; that possession can

not be ruined after sixty.

Like Achilles, Brigham Young had one vulnerable spot, but it was his

heart, not his heel. Women acted upon him as the lamp does upon the

moth. It was not face or figure, intelligence or charm that lured him.

It was sex. Casanova was to him what a candle is to a phare. The

illusion that most men develop when they approach senility, viz., that

they are still attractive to young women, seized him early. When he was

fifty-six years old, he said, preaching to his flock: “You think I am

an old man? I could prove to this congregation that I am young, that I

could find more girls who would choose me for a husband than any of the

young men.” His experience would seem to justify the boast, but with

all his understanding of women he forgot that women marry for different

reasons, some for position, some for protection, some for title. But

what is Princess or Duchess compared to Goddess?

“I am a great lover of good women. I understand their nature, the

design of their being and their work.” Had Brigham Young left out

the only adjective in that sentence and added: “Once it mattered not

to me that they were old or young, homely or plain, temperamental or

indifferent, but now that I am old, I like them young and pretty,” it

would have been an epitome of what women meant to him in the twilight

of his life, as the following sentence epitomises his general estimate

of them: “Let our wives be the weaker vessels and the men be men, and

show the women by their superior ability that God gives husbands wisdom

and ability to lead their wives into His presence.” After looking

at the pictures of scores and more of Brigham Young’s wives, one is

convinced that Mark Twain was right when he said the man that marries

one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitled him to

the kindly applause of mankind, and the man who marries sixty of them

has done a deed of open-hearted generosity so sublime that the nation

should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.

The hiatus in Brigham Young’s personality was on the æsthetic side.

He had no feeling for beauty in any form or display and he could not

distinguish between vulgarity and refinement in conduct, thought or

speech. Rabelais alone outranks him in putridity of speech, and his

sermon of the first Sunday of September 1861, when he talked to his

flock about how they should dress, is offered in evidence.

Shrewdness, cruelty and industry were his dominant possessions. They

radiate from the daguerreotype made of him when he was fifty, like

scent from a lily. He was hirsute, heavy-jawed, thin-lipped and the

corners of a mouth, that seemed framed for an oath or an obscenity,

dipped deeply into his cheeks. He was thick-necked, barrel-chested and

his hands and feet did not fit him, but they were adapted to a man

who ruled with a rod of iron. The secret of his success he said was

“I am a Yankee. I guess things and very frequently I guess right.” If

he had added, “I see straight; I know that original sin is fear and

that all mankind is born in it; and that the real pleasure of life is

in gratifying the fundamental urges,” neither his personality nor his

success would be enigmatic.

It would help the searcher after explanation of Brigham Young’s success

as proselyter, exhorter, guide, executive, lover and tyrant to know

about his parents and his brothers and sisters. They were all steeped

in seriousness and saturated with religiosity. His father, who became

the right-hand man in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,

was an unreasoning Methodist, an uncompromising moralist. His brother

Joseph “was solemn and praying all the time and he had not been seen

to smile for four years or to laugh for two.” His brother Phinias

was a preacher who saw visions and his sister who mediated him to

Mormonism was the wife of the Reverend John P. Green. He lived in a

recreationless community to which a new religion was what the County

Fair, Circus and Cinema are to remote rural communities to-day.

It was as natural for Brigham Young to go into Mormonism as for a duck

to go into water. When he got in, he soon found it was a quick and safe

way to prosperity, power and posterity. He put his religious enthusiasm

out at compound interest and in twelve years it made him a Prophet, a

Seer, a Revelator and a Realtor. He pitched his economic tent in the

desert plains of Utah and he directed his co-religionists to thrust

fertility upon them through irrigation and bent backs. Having no

capacity for spending money, he soon began to experience the feelings

of Crœsus. He realised that the surest way to wealth is to be a big

earner, a small spender, and a prudent investor. He urged his flock to

those ends and said: “I am your avatar.”

There were two things he liked to do: to dance and to make love. He

was strangely susceptible to rhythmical movement and he loved to marry

women and to beget children. He acknowledged twenty-seven of the former

and fifty-six of the latter.

The day Mormonism was purged of polygamy, it ceased to be an object of

popular interest and likely it will remain so unless the Ku Klux Klan

or the Fundamentalists can be persuaded to concentrate on it, when it

shall have again its day in court, but there will never be such days as

those of Brigham Young.

Mr. Werner says he is convinced that Mormonism is a perfect example of

religion carried to its illogical conclusions. If he would only tell us

what religion carried to its logical conclusion is, it might help us to

fathom his meaning. But nothing will help us understand what he means

by “demented frog” and “neurotic horse” or why one of Joseph’s sisters

was _enceinte_ and not pregnant, or what there was about Brigham Young

that made him “constitutionally, and by habit, incapable of languor,”

for languor shall always mean for me feebleness, faintness of body,

oppression from fatigue, disease or trouble. Brigham Young was a god,

but he was also a mortal.

* * * * *

Dr. Barton’s reasons for writing another life of Lincoln are three:

he has some new facts, he wishes to correct misstatements in extant

biographies, and fifty years of clearing weather have added to the

visibility and luminosity of the atmosphere through which the Great

Liberator is to be seen. Moreover, fifty years is the gestation period

of judiciality.

There are few more puerile chapters in biography than Chapter I

entitled “The Birth of Abraham Lincoln,” with its trivialities

and platitudes on the birthplace of eminent men, Christ included;

discourses on log cabins, their shape and size and construction;

homilies on the comfortlessness of Nancy Lincoln’s bed and the

relationship of plains and woods to Presidents; reflections on the

relationship of child culture to sanitation; the description of Nancy’s

smile when she was told that she had brought forth a man child; and

the astonishing statement that the author has ridden in the Kentucky

mountains many miles side by side with a doctor who died soon after

1809. Any one who can get through the first chapter, brief though it

is, will be able to read the book.

Abraham Lincoln held biographies in slight esteem and could scarcely

be persuaded to read them. He wanted the truth about people. Hence he

read the Bible. He would probably have found Dr. Barton’s three books

about him far too eulogistic, but eulogy comes naturally to clergymen.

“This book attempts to tell the truth about Abraham Lincoln.” So did

Nicolay and Hay’s, so did Lord Charnwood’s, Miss Tarbell’s, Herndon’s,

Josiah Holland’s, and others “too numerous to mention.” Dr. Barton has

no corner on truth. His new facts are important, but not so important

as he thinks. Aside from putting it beyond question that Abraham

Lincoln was born to Nancy Hanks while she was wedded to Thomas Lincoln,

there is nothing new of importance except perhaps certain emotional

sidelights. He has unearthed some documents that bear directly on

Lincoln’s ancestry, but we are no more interested in his grandfather

than in his great-grandfather and in him no more than the grandfather

who had eight or eighty grands before his father-appellation. He has

had access to the diaries of Orville A. Browning, once United States

Senator, but I should not consider his Excellency George Harvey’s

diary a repository of facts about Woodrow Wilson. Although Senator

Browning was reputed to have known Lincoln intimately, he and Judge

David Davis, discussing the Nation’s loss the day after Lincoln’s

death, agreed that no one knew him through and through. Moreover, Mr.

Browning was a pious man and piety is a parent of prejudice.

The writer who has new facts about Abraham Lincoln should state them in

plain language at the beginning of each chapter. Dr. Barton has written

an enormous book, two volumes, 500 pages each, about America’s inspired

statesman, of which the only interesting portion is that which treats

of the parents of Lincoln, and he had already treated that subject in a

book entitled _The Paternity of Abraham Lincoln_.

Dr. Barton writes that now for the first time he is able to give the

true story of the Hanks family from which our greatest President

descended. It has the hallmarks of a true story, and henceforth it

must be accepted. The investigations that the author has made of the

Sparrow family have been fruitful and they should forever close the

controversy concerning Lincoln’s parentage. The records of Mecklenburg

County, Virginia, and of Mercer County, Kentucky, have told Dr. Barton

the truth about it. We could wish that he might have told it with more

brevity, directness and felicitousness. He is far stronger in research

than in narrative power. Digression, circumlocution, overtake him on

every page.

Joseph Hanks’ eldest daughter was Lucy. She came to young womanhood in

a period of license and revolt that followed the Revolutionary War,

similar to that which followed the Great War. Dr. Barton thinks this

explains, but does not justify her conduct. She bore a child when

she was 19 and she called it Nancy. The father has been conjectured,

but history does not name him. Seven years later she married, and

though she “was behaving like a perfect lady when her father died, he

disinherited her.” He could not forget her seven years of sin. After

she had been indicted for fornication and branded publicly “with an

unpleasant name,” Henry Sparrow made his beau geste. He married her and

thus vested her with virtue. The indictment was quashed. From that time

Lucy was known as Nancy’s Aunt. Readers of Edith Wharton’s _The Old

Maid_ will know just how Lucy felt about it. Let us hope that Elizabeth

Sparrow, the real aunt, was as good a vicarious mother as Delia Lovell,

and let us also hope that some day Mrs. Wharton may write her story.

Discussing the parents of Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Barton takes occasion to

say that Lea and Hutchinson’s book, _The Ancestry of Abraham Lincoln_

is not _always_ wrong. That is Dr. Barton’s idea of high praise.

Thomas Lincoln married Nancy Hanks and a photograph of the marriage

certificate which adorns Dr. Barton’s book convinces us that it was a

_bona fide_ marriage. Whether Nancy’s mother was there we are still in

doubt. Dr. Barton concludes this chapter with two brief paragraphs:

“I wonder if she was there.”

“I wonder if she could keep away.”

When I read those lines, I found myself murmuring, “I wonder”; and

then “I wonder why I wonder.” All readers of _The Old Maid_ will say

“I’ll say she was there,” and indeed Dr. Barton says so in the fourth

chapter, which is devoted to the Hankses and the Sparrows.

Dr. Barton strangles the Mary Shipley myth. The Shipleys now fade

out of the Lincoln picture. Abraham Lincoln, the pioneer who went to

Kentucky from Virginia, was alleged to have married twice; first in

leisure to Bathsheba Herring; then in haste to Mary Shipley. It is not

true. Bathsheba was his one and only wife. Everything that has been

found out about her is to her credit. Her fourth child, Thomas, was

selected by Providence to father him who was to purge the world of

slavery. He had no idea that he had been selected, but had he known,

he could not have improved on his selection of Nancy Hanks; from her,

Lincoln got his heart and his humour. His other great possession,

his capacity to learn by experience, he got from the Bathsheba. The

Lincolns only passed on the chromosomes, but it is now forever settled

that they did that and for it they shall be glorified eternally.

Dr. Barton gives Nancy and Thomas good characters. The former was

serious, but emotional, industrious, a good housekeeper and a better

mother. The latter was not the shiftless, improvident migratory

vacillator that he has been reputed to be, but he liked water better

than land. He did not have an uncontrollable urge for work, nor did

he starve himself or his family to swell a savings bank account. “He

accepted his situation, and when his day’s work was done, he rested and

visited and took life as comfortably as he was able.” To be sure he

was evicted from Knob Creek farm, but that was due to a failure which

he had in common with many others: foresight inferior to hindsight. Of

Abraham Lincoln’s childhood at Knob Creek little is known. Dr. Barton

indulges in some pleasant conjectures and it is known that the future

saviour of the Nation did write verse in his youth. So his biographer

may also be right in these surmises.

An illuminating and convincing chapter is entitled “Lincoln’s

Kentucky,” for it shows that the slavery question was brought

frequently and dramatically to the plastic mind of Abraham, and it

reveals a people of primitive prejudices, of intense antipathies, of

violent intolerance, of cowardly superstitions. Abraham Lincoln may

have laid the foundation of his fair-mindedness, tolerance, kindliness,

sympathy and sanity in those years; built the structure in Indiana

and furnished it in Washington. Lincoln was nine years old when his

mother died, but he was of a maturer mind than many boys of fourteen.

A year later, he was given a stepmother. “She transformed the home of

the cheerless widower into a spot of pleasant associations and happy

memories.” That epitaph should satisfy any stepmother. Lincoln’s

schooling is an old story. Retelling it does not improve it. Mrs.

Allen Gentry’s recollections that were given to Herndon are still the

most interesting. It is safe to assume that the world will always be

interested in Abraham Lincoln’s love affairs, but until the ideas

of George Bernard Shaw are accepted and we have acquired, like the

French, an acceptable sex language, we shall not be able to appease the

interest. Even then the story will have to be told by some one who had

limitations and experiences similar to Lincoln’s or by some one to whom

privileged communications are made--and who is invested with the power

of inspiring confidence.

Dr. Barton’s treatment of John McNamar, who was the first to fan Ann

Rutledge’s amatory smouldering fire into flame, will be approved by

his readers. John was a poor thing and it is a pity his path ever

crossed Ann’s. Posterity has aureoled the love of Ann and Abraham

and time does not tarnish it, indeed brightens it. The permanency of

love is a lost illusion. Even had Ann lived to marry her lover, their

love might not have lasted their years. I can think of few subjects

that lend themselves to discussion with less grace than “did Abraham

Lincoln love Mary Todd when he proposed to her and when he married

her?” I do not know--nor do I know any one who does know, but reams

have been written about it. I have an opinion, but like so many others

it is valueless to any one but myself. If he was in love either with

Mary Owens or Mary Todd, he had strange ways of showing it. His love

letters to the former, especially those indicating willingness to

marry, are masterpieces of frigidity and would put out any heart-fires

that were ever ignited; and the person who, reading _any_ account of

Lincoln’s conduct the day set for his marriage with Mary Todd, can say

he was in love certainly never has been in love himself nor has he even

observed at close range any one in the throes of the divine passion.

Whether he “went crazy as a loon” when he bolted the expectant bride,

as his friends alleged, or whether his heart failed him is beside the

question. Sane men in love sometimes act as he acted. I doubt if there

is a neurologist whose professional experience does not encompass an

example of such conduct. It is astonishing the thoughts and convictions

that come to sensitive, self-conscious men confronted with the

obligation of obeying God’s first Command. Partisans of his head may

say that he was not in love, of his heart that he was not sane.

He married Mary and his treatment of her indicates that he learned to

love her, and no wonder if the account Dr. Barton gives of her is true.

His conduct in this respect reflected his common sense and uncommon

judgment. If Abraham Lincoln’s reputation had depended upon his

knowledge of women and his proficiency in the _ars amandi_, it would

not have outlasted his days.

Dr. Barton is a fine example of researcher: patient, industrious,

indefatigable, determined. Certain investigations led him to frame

a hypothesis about the ancestry of Abraham Lincoln. Then he set to

work to prove that the assumptions of the hypothesis were facts. He

succeeded to an astonishing degree. If Lord Charnwood will now make a

few corrections, interpolate a few facts, it will be an almost perfect

biography of Abraham Lincoln, and if Miss Tarbell will do the same and

make a few deletions as well, it will be on the whole the most readable.

From the time Lincoln was elected President of the United States, he

begins to elude his latest biographer, or perhaps it would be more

just to say that Dr. Barton does not make his knowledge of Lincoln’s

later motives and conduct so impressive or so convincing as he does

when he writes of the twenty pre-and post-natal years. However the

last chapter, most infelicitously entitled “Mr. Lincoln,” is a model

of catholic taste, commendable restraint and good judgment. Deleted of

its last sentence, it would be an ideal summary by a man who makes no

claim to being a biologist, psychologist or personality expert and who

is neither biographer nor historian by temperament. Here he pitches his

pæan of praise in the right key, and he does not distract the listener

with gossipy interpolation or jejune ejaculation.

* * * * *

Physicians whose concern it is to estimate and adjudge their fellows’

mental balance find frequently that they get more information from the

writings of the individual whose sanity is in question than from his

speech. It is more self-revelatory especially if it is thrown off in

emotional white heat. Theodore Roosevelt was an intensely emotional man

and he was the most prolific letter-writer of his time; and perhaps

of all time. His biographer, Mr. Joseph B. Bishop, estimated that he

wrote during his public career more than 150,000 letters--an average

of more than 10 letters a day. It seemed beyond belief when we were

first told, but gradually one gathers credulity as volume after volume

of his letters are published. “Writing is horribly hard work to me,”

he wrote in a letter dated March 26th, 1887. He liked hard work. He

loved few people and it was essential to his happiness and welfare

that, with these few, he should share his emotional states and discuss

his intellectual preoccupations. Hence, the number of his letters. His

friendship with Henry Cabot Lodge did not date from school or college

days. In the Spring of 1884, when he was a member of the New York

State Legislature, he was addressing him as “My dear Mr. Lodge”; in

the Summer as “My Dear Lodge” and telling him he is one of the very

few men he really desires to know as a _friend!_ in the Autumn as,

“Dear Old Fellow” and assuring him he is the salt of the earth whose

people shall one day become cognisant of his savour, and by Winter as

“Dear Cabot” and testifying his admiration, affection and spiritual

intimacy. A quarter of a century later he wrote “from the Spring of

1884 Cabot Lodge was my closest friend personally, politically, and

in every other way, and occupied toward me a relation that no man has

ever occupied or ever will occupy.” In his entire political career he

maintained that he had never formulated a policy or made an appointment

without seeking the counsel and guidance of this friend. The letters in

the volumes entitled _Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore

Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge_ give ample proof of this friendship

and intimacy. Roosevelt poured out his heart and his mind to Lodge and

thus furnished us material for estimating the kind of man he was; his

conscience, morality, patriotism; his sincerity, affection, hypocrisy;

his imagination, intellect, culture; his idealisms and realisms; his

body and his soul. Here is first-hand information, awaiting indeed

inviting interpretation. Perhaps no one ever better illustrated the

fact that basically every mood is the mental transformation of a bodily

state than Theodore Roosevelt.

The beginning of any understanding of him must be made in his “stunts”:

cow-punching, cross-country riding, big game hunting, endurance tests,

soldiering, exploring. It is generally known he was a delicate youth

and it is alleged he went West seeking invigoration. He went West for

the same reason the Sun goes: it was a part of the divine order. Chains

could not have thrust inactivity upon him. Physical activity was as

fervently in his blood as lust in the blood of a normal man; no one

can read his letters from Little Missouri, from Elkhorn Ranch, Dakota,

or his account of participation in a fox-hunt with battered head and

broken arm, and need further proof of his indomitable energy. He knew

minutes of physical peace, but they were thrust upon him by mental

activity; he had hours of bodily rest, but they were stolen from his

urge that he might display or convey his emotional state. He had to a

singular degree the capacity to concentrate all his energies on the

job in hand, the task undertaken; to do it and fulfil it with all his

might and main, to tolerate no distraction, to suffer no interruption,

to brook no interference. Whether he was playing tennis, orienting the

Civil Service Commission, directing the New York Police Department,

scorning Mr. E. L. Godkin, organising the Rough Riders, framing the

policies and administering the affairs of his country, or reading

a book, he did it with all the punch there was in him and when his

punch-exchequer got low he sought the services of a trainer. He liked

to drink the wine of life with brandy in it, he says in one of these

letters, and the brandy he used is now not even outlawed. As Henry

Adams says, “Roosevelt more than any other man living within the range

of notoriety showed the singular primitive quality that belongs to

ultimate matter--the quality that mediæval theology assigned to God--he

was pure act.”

The next most characteristic feature of Theodore Roosevelt is that he

took himself, his beliefs and convictions with great seriousness. Early

in life he convinced himself that he had come upon a brand of honesty

that he must popularise and persuade his fellow-citizens to use. If

they would not use it after they had been appraised of its quality and

source they were perfect asses like Vilas, malicious and dishonest

scoundrels like Godkin, demented mugwumps like John Fiske, dogs like

Carl Schurz, hypocrites like George W. Curtis and accessories to the

deeds of the German governmental murderers both before and after the

facts like Woodrow Wilson. G. W. Smalley’s attitude was contemptible,

he would like to put the editors of the _Evening Post_ and of the

_World_ in prison. President Eliot made himself ridiculous by his stand

on civil service and ballot reform; and it would be a pleasure to shoot

or thrash his colleague Parker. Only he and Cabot were right: straight

talkers and hard hitters.

Theodore Roosevelt had a keen and profound sense of duty to his

country, to his community, to his family and to his friends and he had

a superhuman facility for conveying recognition of it to every one who

saw him or heard him. To that and to his reputation for fearlessness

he owed a popularity which has never been equalled in this country.

He was the embodiment of the American ideal: fearless, impetuous,

resourceful, self-confident, ready to throw his hat into any ring and

to follow it up with a smile on his face and the exclamation, “This is

bully,” escaping from his lips. He could inoculate his fellow-citizens

with his ideas more quickly than any man of his time and he could

galvanise them into greater activity and more sustained determination

than any President we have ever had. His qualities may outlive the

children of those who knew him. One of the astonishing confessions of

these letters is that he had few friends and fewer intimates. I have

had friends who were convinced they knew him fundamentally and were

in close communion with his thought and determination. From their

conversation I could readily believe that he rarely made decisions

without consulting them. Their names are not even mentioned in his

correspondence.

Any one who has been inclined to doubt Roosevelt’s sincerity, _i.e._,

to consider that he sometimes affected an enthusiasm which he did not

feel, will have his doubts appeased by reading this correspondence.

He believed in himself but he was not vain; he rated his abilities

high, but his conduct displayed no arrogance; he valued his mental

and physical possessions, but he was not proud. If he ever doubted

his ability to do any job that presented itself, his most intimate

correspondence does not betray it. What he doubted was that the

opportunity would not be vouchsafed him.

The man to whom these letters were written was vain. It flattered his

vanity that he had seen Theodore Roosevelt on the road to the White

House while he was Police Commissioner, and that he had told him so

with assurance; thus discharging in advance the obligation he was to

incur by receiving such evidences of trust as the letters betray from

so great a man as Roosevelt. He saw his own thoughts disseminated and

his convictions popularised by his friend who knew how to gauge the

feeling of the people and to raise their temperature; and in some

inexplicable way there steals upon the reader a thought that when Lodge

made up his mind that Roosevelt was going to the top he also made up

his mind that he would link his name with that of the rising star in a

correspondence that the world would not let perish.

Roosevelt was a many-sided man. He was gifted with foresight and

hindsight. There has never been a President save Lincoln who had

such capacity for learning by experience. For a man so emotional, he

was a good judge of men and he could do team work. These qualities

distinguished him from the man upon whose head he poured the vials of

his wrath the last few years of his life and who may get from posterity

both the laurel and the oak-leaf crowns. Scores of instances could

be cited from this correspondence in support of his power to size up

men, but none serves better than his letter to John Hay urging him

to persuade the President to appoint General Wood to the command of

all Cuba. “Wood is a born diplomat, just as he is a born soldier.

I question if any nation in the world has now or has had within

recent times any one so nearly approaching the ideal of a military

administrator of the kind now required in Cuba.” No recorded prophecy

has ever come truer than that.

Roosevelt was not a modest man, but he had a sense of propriety

and fitness that was very becoming. His letters to Lodge about the

hesitation on the part of the War Department to recognise his military

service in Cuba by giving him the Medal of Honour, are dignified and

straightforward. There is no pumped up humility. He did a good job and

the labourer is worthy of his hire. In the same way his letters, when

he was being groomed for the nomination of running mate to McKinley,

are full of good sense and sound reasoning. He is satisfied with what

he has accomplished as Governor of New York, and so were the people.

What he would really like, would be to be re-elected Governor with a

first-class Lieutenant-Governor, and then be offered the Secretaryship

of War for four years. He knew what he wanted, and he got it, the

Presidency, but the letter that describes his visit to Buffalo after

McKinley had been shot should be ample testimony to convince any one

that he did not want it the way it came. Any one keen to learn the

tricks of the political game will be aided by perusal of the letters

written from the New York State Capital. They may also observe how

statesmen develop. Roosevelt’s letters from the White House are just

as frank, intimate and revealing as were those from New York Police

Headquarters and from Albany: full of praise for Lodge’s potential

and actual accomplishments; of proffered suggestions and requests

for counsel; of enthusiasm about exhausting rides and the fording of

turbulent streams, “altogether it was great” or “bully fun,” full of

vigorous comment and of plain characterisation of men. Discussion

of literary matters which was so conspicuous in the early letters

has now practically disappeared, though occasionally he makes brief

comment when relating his diversions. In September, 1903, he writes,

“I have been reading Aristotle’s politics and Plutarch’s miscellany

and as usual take an immense comfort out of the speeches of Lincoln.”

It is extraordinary how his partisanship determined his likes and

dislikes even in literary matters. “The more I study Jefferson the more

profoundly I distrust him and his influence.” Lodge writes to him on

returning the proof of his first inaugural address, “Literary form is

after all the salt that keeps alive the savour of the thoughts we would

not willingly have die.” Indeed his “form” had improved enormously

since he wrote the life of Thomas H. Benton in 1887, when he stated “my

style is very rough and I do not like a certain lack of _sequitur_ that

I do not seem able to get rid of.” That sentence alone is proof of the

first allegation, but he bettered it before he reached the White House,

and the lack of _sequitur_ disappeared forever.

Though his letters to Lodge are chiefly concerned with his political

activities, realisations and prospects; with justification of his

conduct, refutation of the allegations of their opponents, and comment

on their sinister motives and malign trends--there is much sentiment in

them and not a little play. Commenting on something Lodge wrote about

the death of John Hay, he says: “It should not make us melancholy.

He died within a very few years of the period when death comes to us

all as a certainty, and I should esteem any man happy who lived till

sixty-five as John Hay has lived, who saw his children marry, his

grandchildren born, who was happy in his home life, who wrote his name

clearly in the records of our times, who rendered great and durable

services to the Nation, both as statesman and writer, who held high

public positions, and died in the harness at the zenith of his fame.

When it comes our turn to go out into the blackness, I only hope the

circumstances will be as favourable.” His hope was realised, save that

he was four years younger when his turn came to go.

There are many high spots in the correspondence that reveal Roosevelt’s

character; one of them is his appointments to ministerial and

ambassadorial positions and the comments on the appointees; they are

all scratch men; he never nominates a man with a handicap and he

submits the name first to his friend. Another is the genesis of the

thought that led to his bringing Japan and Russia to the council table

at Portsmouth, the development and maturity of it, and its success. A

third is his break with Lodge that came when he decided to seek the

nomination of the Republican Party, and when that was shown to be not

available to the Progressive Party--his own creation. Lodge’s political

conduct in the last ten years of his life alienated many admirers, but

it is in a measure offset by his conduct in the trying year of 1912.

He was opposed to the constitutional changes advocated by Roosevelt,

therefore he could not support him; “but as for going against you that

I can not do. There is very little of the Roman in me for those I love

best.” There was a lot in him for those he did not love! Finally the

student of political events misses the inside story of the Progressive

Party. It is likely there is a series of letters to some one else on

that subject.

Another thing that he misses is an explanation of his break with

Taft. There is a strange and inexplicable absence of any illuminating

reference to it in these letters, the place where it should be.

Unquestionably our Chief Justice has hundreds of Roosevelt’s letters

which will one day be published. Until then we must curb our curiosity;

but there has been something in Taft’s conduct since he became

ex-President and in his speeches, that leads one to believe that, when

the facts are submitted to the public, it will be seen that he was not

responsible for the break or for the hard feeling it engendered.

Some day also the President of Columbia University, who was once a

“bully fellow,” will publish the scores, perhaps hundreds, of letters

he received and they will throw a revealing light on Roosevelt’s

loyalty. Mr. Bishop in a recent book, _Notes and Anecdotes of Many

Years_, has given some personal recollections of him and his humanness

which are illuminating.

If one asks men conversant with public affairs of the past thirty

years, “What specifically did Roosevelt do while President that

entitles him to be classed with the Immortals?” they find it very

difficult to be specific in their responses. They will mention the

taking of Panama and the organisation of the Commission to construct

the Panama Canal, his interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine when

Germany was pressing her claims on Venezuela, his vigorous enforcement

of the Sherman anti-trust law, and the Peace Conference at Portsmouth.

These were most creditable accomplishments, but scarcely epoch-making.

It was a beautiful gesture to bring Japan and Russia to the Council

table, but it takes from the glamour to know that the suggestion came

from the Japanese. And the breaking up of interlocking directorates,

the unloosening of the hold of corporate influences on the government,

required courage, judgment and self-reliance; but the historian of the

future will be puzzled when he reads that Congress was insisting in

1924 that the railroads should do what they were prosecuted for doing

twenty years before. Victory in the Northern securities case may prove

finally to be the equivalent of defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt was essentially a great actor, but he wrote his own

lines and submitted them to Cabot Lodge for deletion, addition and

correction. Stunts of every kind appealed to him. He had a natural

talent for accomplishing them which was enormously enhanced by

practice. He got away with nearly everything he undertook. Had he given

permanency to the Progressive Party, history would credit him with

few failures. He knew how to make acquaintances feel that they were

friends, and friends that they were loved.

Taken all in all, the features of his personality that attract me

most are those revealed in the letters published by Mr. Bishop in

the volume called _Theodore Roosevelt and His Time_, in the letters

to his children and in the letters to Anne Roosevelt Cowles. This is

possibly because he does not there reveal so much bitterness, so much

contempt, it must indeed be said, so much hatred, as he reveals in

the last letters to his dearest friend: hatred of his successor in

the Presidency. Possibly the word “hatred” is not the right one. He

despised Wilson, he commiserated the country that was obliged to suffer

him, it was a disgrace to continue him in office; he knew less about

the conduct of War than he knew about anything, and he knew nothing

save academics. Wilson could do no right. But he did one thing which

took the check-rein off Roosevelt’s inhibitions. He ignored him; he

took no heed of his counsels, his detractions, his desires.

Roosevelt was just as sincere in this belief as he was in others,

and he had a legion of sympathisers and supporters, at the head of

which stood the man to whom the letters were addressed. Every one

is entitled to, and has, his own opinion of the merits of the two

Presidents as men and statesmen. Those to whom the one appeals are

repelled by the other; but every one will agree that one was more

lovable than the other; that he understood the heart of man and that he

had one himself. Theodore Roosevelt was one of Nature’s wonders and he

should take a place among the great Presidents because of what he was

rather than what he did.

It must be admitted that the Roosevelt-Lodge letters leave a taste--not

quite bitter, not quite acrid, but slightly disagreeable. It can be

removed quickly by reading for a few minutes the volume entitled

_Letters from Theodore Roosevelt to Anne Roosevelt Cowles_. Here he

is revealed as the affectionate brother, the indulgent father, the

sympathetic friend of children, especially those of Roosevelt blood.

Loyalty to his family and confidence in himself radiate from most of

the letters. Fancy a civilian of thirty writing, “‛La Guerre et La

Paix,’ like all Tolstoi’s works, is very strong and very interesting.

The descriptions of the battles are excellent, but though with one or

two good ideas underneath them, the criticisms of commanders, and of

wars in general are absurd.”

On the eve of declaration of war with Spain, when McKinley seemed bent

on peace, he wrote: “I’d give all I’m worth to be just two days in

supreme command ... I’d have things going so nobody could stop them.”

And that was what Theodore Roosevelt always wanted to do, to get things

going so that nobody could stop them.

He always wanted to start something. He never disclaimed the children

of his brain; they were all legitimate. He never mistrusted the

potency of his brawn, it never failed him. Courage, self-confidence,

self-belief, facilitated the conviction that he was a man of destiny.

Though he was not such actually, he scaled the flaming ramparts of the

world more gracefully and successfully than any man of his time.

I have never been able to convince myself that Southey was right when

he said, “A man’s character can more surely be judged by the letters

his friends address to him than by those he pens himself, for they are

apt to reveal with unconscious faithfulness the regard held for him

by those who knew him best.” If Theodore Roosevelt’s character were

estimated from Cabot Lodge’s letters one would have to call him a god,

not a man--a god who nodded once, in 1912.

XII

EDUCATORS

THE LIFE OF SIR WILLIAM OSLER, by _Harvey Cushing_.

LIFE AND CONFESSIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST, by _G. Stanley Hall_.

Sir William Osler occupied a unique position; he was the most widely

known and best beloved physician in the world. He made an indelible

impression on the teaching and practice of medicine in three

countries--Canada, the United States and England. He lived the number

of years allotted to man by the psalmist, and each succeeding year of

his life he added to his mental stature by taking thought, and to his

emotional profundity by doing deeds of kindliness.

He was the son of an Anglo-Saxon pioneer parson, Featherstone Lake

Osler, and of Ellen Free Pickton, a Celt who went from Cornwall to

the Province of Ontario in 1837. His spiritual parents were Hermes

and Minerva, and he had three godfathers--a parson, Arthur Johnson; a

physician, James Bovell, and a professor, Robert Palmer Howard--to them

he dedicated the most widely read textbook on the practice of medicine

ever written.

He had a genius for friendship that was nearly unique; he had a

capacity for quick and accurate observation which is not vouchsafed

to one man in a thousand; he had a prehensile mind to which synthesis

and logic appealed; he had a liking and a capacity for work that

resembled those of Theodore Roosevelt; he had an inborn understanding

of humanity; and he loved his fellows. When they were ill, he added

great tenderness to his love. He was playful, prankful and guileless,

with the face of a sphinx and the expression of an ascetic. He was a

scholar without pedantry, a scientist without pretension, a wit without

venom, a humanist without scorn. Small wonder that he was the man

without an enemy.

One of his most beloved friends and esteemed colleagues has written

his biography and at the same time achieved one of the most difficult

of all tasks: he has kept himself out of the book and refrained from

eulogising the subject. There are many biographies of physicians that

merit the designation “great”; among them, Henry Morley’s _Life of

Jerome Cardan_, René Valléry-Radot’s _Vie de Pasteur_, Stephen Paget’s

_Life of Victor Horsley_, Agnes Repplier’s _Life of William White_ and

to the list must be added Harvey Cushing’s _Life of William Osler_.

Osler did three great things for medicine: he conceived and effected

bedside teaching; he demonstrated the value of history as a pedagogical

agency and of culture as a humanising one, and he succeeded in making

the medical world heed that cure meant prevention. He had but one

fundamental dislike: chauvinism; one abiding disdain: insincerity; one

supreme contempt: pretence. He could not abide a faker, unless he were

feeble minded; then pity facilitated tolerance.

On his seventieth birthday his former pupils and intimate colleagues

of this country sent to Oxford two memorial volumes made up of

contributions to the science and art that he had fostered and

developed. Replying to his fellow Regius professor of medicine in

Cambridge, who made the presentation, he said:

[Illustration: SIR WILLIAM OSLER]

_Reprinted from “The Annals of Medical History”_

“Among multiple acknowledgment I can lift one hand to

heaven that I was born of honest parents, that modesty,

humility, patience and veracity lay in the same egg, and

came into the world with me. To have had a happy home in

which unselfishness reigned, parents whose self-sacrifice

remains a blessed memory, brothers and sisters helpful

far beyond the usual measure--all these make a picture

delightful to look back upon. Then to have had the

benediction of friendship follow one like a shadow, to

have always had the sense of comradeship in work, without

the petty pinpricks of jealousies and controversies,

to be able to rehearse in the sessions of sweet, silent

thought the experiences of long years without a single

bitter memory--to have and to do all this fills the heart

with gratitude. That three transplantations have been

borne successfully is a witness to the brotherly care

with which you have tended me. Loving our profession,

and believing ardently in its future, I have been

content to live in and for it. A moving ambition to

become a good teacher and a sound clinician was fostered

by opportunities of an exceptional character, and any

success I may have attained must be attributed in large

part to the unceasing kindness of colleagues and to a

long series of devoted pupils whose success in life is my

special pride.”

There is the man, modest, grateful, appreciative. He attributes his

material success to what others have done for him; his spiritual to his

inheritancy. Had he added that, early in life, he had a vision and had

striven heroically and worked laboriously to make it concrete for the

benefit of mankind, and that extraordinary success had attended his

efforts, he would have explained William Osler and his career.

What more need be said of his parents? They struggled successfully with

the virgin soil in a primitive civilisation; the father ornamented

his profession, and the mother fulfilled bounteously her destiny; she

mothered eight children, four of whom became famous. The youngest, the

subject of this biography, was in nowise remarkable as a child or boy:

“I started in life with just an ordinary everyday stock

of brains. In my schooldays I was much more bent upon

mischief than upon books, but as soon as I got interested

in medicine I had only a single idea: to do the day’s

work that was before me just as faithfully and honestly

and energetically as was in my power.”

And this he did to the day of his death.

He was steered into medicine by a strange mixture of scientific and

pietistic ardour, James Bovell, and he studied and graduated at McGill

Medical School, then a proprietary institution at the head of which was

R. Palmer Howard, who by possessions and conduct influenced Osler’s

life, for he said of him thirty-five years later: “I have never known

one in whom was more happily combined a stern sense of duty with the

mental freshness of youth.”

Osler went abroad and while increasing his knowledge of medicine laid

the foundation of friendships and intimacies which years later, after

he had become a famous teacher, facilitated a call to one of the most

ornamental professorships in Great Britain. At twenty-eight he had a

chair in his alma mater. In ten years he went to the top. Then began

that series of calls to colleges and universities here and abroad which

did not cease so long as he lived. He refused them all save those of

the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins. In the former he

stayed five years; in the latter fifteen. The temptation to respond

favourably to the call from New York was very great, and greater

still that from Edinburgh. But temptation for Osler was created to be

resisted and there was a star that guided him as it guided the Wise Men

of the East; he had but to follow it at night, and to be counselled

during the day by the voice that once had counselled Socrates to reach

his goal, viz., a true knowledge of himself and of his relations to his

fellows, and, having reached it, to plant there his banner bearing the

masterword in medicine: work. And he worked industriously, honestly,

patiently, persistently.

Then came the call to Oxford. He had been in the harness actively for

thirty years and the load had begun to drag; the burdens that he had

not only willingly borne, but sought, had begun to bend him, and the

unfinished literary material of many years clamoured for academic

leisure and favourable environment. Oxford was the place and Osler

was the very man! Going for good meant farewells, and out of one of

them flowed a stream of notoriety which, for a time, threatened to

drown him. He took leave of his students, colleagues and trustees in

an address in which he discussed many problems of university life;

particularly the danger of staying too long in one place, and the

danger of not thrusting opportunities and responsibilities upon young

men--and at this point he inadvertently remarked that he was not sure

whether it was Anthony Trollope who suggested that there should be a

college into which men of sixty retired for a year’s contemplation

before a peaceful departure by chloroform, but there was much to be

said in favour of it. The journalese rendering of this was “Osler

recommends chloroform at sixty.” The storm gathered during the night.

It broke in the East the following morning and by the evening it had

spread throughout the country.

Every man and woman above sixty, or approaching it, would seem to have

been affronted. Following the acrimonious discussions of the newspapers

and the caustic cartoons, came the studied magazine articles proving

that Enoch not only begot Methuselah after he was sixty, but walked

with God; that Edison was in the heyday of his inventive activity;

that Ford would practicalise flying after the chloroform age and that

Clémenceau would save the world for democracy, perhaps for socialism.

For a short time it looked as if the man without an enemy had lost his

distinction. Again, his inner voice counselled him wisely. He did not

attempt to explain; he could not be persuaded to refute the alleged

statement. He had said the truth, and the truth sufficed William Osler

to the end.

Of the many extraordinary things in Dr. Cushing’s adequate and

appealing biography, none is more arresting than the account given

of the birth of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and

the part that Osler unconsciously played in it through his textbook.

A young man who had access to the ear and the purse of John D.

Rockefeller read it and was appraised of the fertile field awaiting

planting by preventive medicine. The crops that have been harvested

have been enormous, but they are as naught compared with those

about to be garnered. How little it is generally appreciated that

the colossal success of the Panama Canal was due as much to Gorgas

as to Bunau-Varilla, and that Osler mediated his appointment to the

Commission, and still less is known of the leading part Osler played in

decapitating the gorgon typhoid fever in this country thirty years ago.

In England, Osler added to his cultural fame. He was made president of

the Bibliographical Society, of the Ashmolean Society and, to cap them

all, of the Classical Association, an honour which probably pleased

him as much or more than any that had ever come to him. His address of

acceptance, which embodied the whole spirit of his ideal, cost him the

greatest labour of his life.

He found great joy in England, but he found also his greatest sorrow,

for his son, a singular combination of his mother’s suaviter and his

father’s fortiter was killed in the war. It did not kill Osler, it only

killed his desire to live. Like his master, Sir Thomas Browne, he knew

that oblivion is not to be hired and that the night of time suppresseth

the day. He had lived every moment of his day, and every hour had been

joyous save one, and he had never stopped to compute his felicities. He

died as he had lived, like a marathon runner taking the hurdle.

Dr. Cushing’s biography is documented and detailed. It is the kind

of biography of Osler that should exist, but there should be another

made from it: the story of his life and the charm of his personality

in narrative form followed by interpretation, characterisation and

estimation. The present one will be received gratefully by his former

pupils and colleagues, by his connections and associates, and by

libraries; but the general reader, the one who wants to find out

without reading hundreds of letters and without wading through 1,500

pages, what Osler was like, how he acquired primacy of the medical

world, how he made himself a savant in literature while climbing to

the top of his own profession, will seek a book where these are told

informatively and entertainingly.

Such a biography of William Osler is bound to come in time. I venture

to say that, when it does come, it will dwell at far greater length

on the first half of his life. Those who knew Osler intimately will

be astonished to find scant reference in Dr. Cushing’s book to the

interesting Francis family, with whom he lived for so many years in

Montreal, or to Nancy Astor, to whom he was legal guardian. There

is almost no allusion to the playful side of his nature. To make

a man into a saint, though he deserves it, does not always do him

justice. William Osler had extraordinarily great qualities, but he

was passionate in his likes and dislikes; he was often indiscreet,

sometimes tactless to an unbelievable degree; he could not and would

not suffer fools; and he exacted unqualified devotion, while preserving

the freedom to go his own way. He loved practical jokes, but he was not

at all happy when they were played on him. For all this, his feet were

less of clay than those of most men. One of the great charms of Osler

was that he was so human, and had so much love and understanding of

humanity. It is as a man that his friends remember him, and it is as

man and teacher that he shall be known to posterity.

* * * * *

Thirty-five years ago a Yankee wagonmaker, who had gone to California

as a “forty-niner” and piled up a fortune, thought to immortalise

his name by founding a university in Worcester, Massachusetts. This

University should be a beacon light to other educational institutions,

the object of their emulation and envy. Realising that he was lacking

concrete pedagogical ideas, that he was devoid of, even antipathic

to the principles of organisation and co-operation, and, at least,

suspicious of his prejudices, Jonas Gilman Clark was persuaded by his

counsellor and friend, the late Senator Hoar, to ask a young professor

of psychology at Johns Hopkins University, a froward, self-confident,

energetic man of promise, to plan and steer his venture. In the book

which he called _Life and Confessions of a Psychologist_ G. Stanley

Hall tells us how he did it, and how his forebears and parents, his

education and environment, permitted him to do it.

The story is an interesting one, and besides revealing the personality

of Dr. Hall, as it was meant to do, no doubt that he might better

understand himself, it throws a light upon the road that education has

travelled in this country the past third of a century, a light that

is illuminating though not dazzling. Stanley Hall often filled the

lamp that generated it, and he swung the reflector with great skill.

It is possible that the coming generation will say that he was the

soundest psychologist of his time and that he broke more virgin soil

than William James. He was an important and tireless worker in the

field of pedagogy and he was extremely articulate. When he had passed

his seventieth birthday he believed he would yet do “a few things

which shall be better than I have ever yet been able to do.” He was

one of those countless old men who go about repeating “I feel just as

I did when I was forty.” It was not vouchsafed him to do any of them.

Dr. Hall prided himself on being a straight, hard hitter. It pleased

him enormously to be called “_l’enfant terrible_” of psychology. He

had not always been able to speak out what had been in his mind, so

he determined to do it in his book. There will be much diversity of

opinion as to whether his reputation shall profit by his frankness.

Solomon was unquestionably right about many things, but Dr. Hall

does not agree with him that humility should go before honour. “In

the view I have attained of man, his place in nature, his origin and

destiny, I believe I have become a riper product of the present stage

of civilisation than most of my contemporaries; have outgrown more

superstitions, attained clearer insights, and have a deeper sense

of peace within myself. I love but perhaps still more pity, mankind,

groping and stumbling, often slipping backward along the upward path,

which I believe I see just as clearly as Jesus, or Buddha did.”

Though not for a moment would I appear to be either a champion of the

use of the word “some” as an adjective, or an habitual user of it, I

maintain that this is _some_ statement. And why leave out Mohammed?

Most of us, subject to hours and days of self-depreciation, inadequacy,

unworthiness, will envy the self-satisfaction and self-complacency of

this retired pedagogue. But in reality it does not suffice him: “As

I advance in years there are few things I crave more, and feel more

keenly the lack of, than companionship.” Even review of successes and

contemplation of accomplishments do not shut out loneliness. There is

no record that Jesus or Buddha was lonely.

From his earliest days Dr. Hall had what the Freudians call an

inferiority complex. His childish self-consciousness, his juvenile

aloofness, his mature bumptiousness, his senescent strenuousness

all testify it. He became aware of it early in life and strove hard

to overcome it. But like the fetters of Hephæstus it could neither

be snapped nor loosened. Like them, its substance was as subtle as

spider’s web and so cunningly contrived that none might see it even of

the blessed gods. The statement quoted above may be construed as a last

effort to extricate himself from the crafty net.

Dr. Hall was an ardent Freudian. “Nothing since Aristotle’s categories

has gone deeper, or in my opinion is destined to have such far-reaching

influence and results,” was the characteristic way he estimated the

Freudian mechanisms. It mattered nothing to him that psychoanalysis and

the study of the unconscious have made small appeal to the majority

of trained psychologists of this or any other country. He attributed

this to the prudish reluctance of his colleagues to face the momentous

problems of sex life. They deny it; at least, his successor at Johns

Hopkins, the professor at Columbia, the successor to William James at

Harvard, and many others do. But the momentous problems of sex life

did not balk Dr. Hall. He confessed to “a love for glimpsing at first

hand the raw side of human life,” and he records the unique thrill he

experienced at the numerous prize fights that he attended “unknown

and away from home.” Moreover the seamy side of life seemed to him as

valuable in some respects as the psychological laboratory. “In many

American and especially in foreign cities, Paris, where vice was most

sophisticated, London, where it was coarsest, Vienna, which I thought

the worst of all, I found, generally through hotel clerks, a guide to

take me through the underworld by night to catch its psychological

flavour.” Some reader, low-minded and altogether contemptible, will be

base enough to believe that there were other motives. It is a dangerous

business anyway. Even Dr. Hall says he had a narrow escape once--his

life, not his morals--in a den of Apaches in Paris. About the year

Dr. Hall was called to Clark University, a clergyman in New York and

a pious vice hunter visited such places and their motives for doing

so were publicly questioned. The clergyman stood the shock, but his

reforming friend went off his head. The reformatory urge, though not

a fundamental one, often needs to be curbed, especially when it is

entangled with a lust of curiosity.

Dr. Hall always had a weakness for new, bizarre, hybrid words, and he

found difficulty in giving adequate vent to his emotions and cognitions

in one language. Therefore one is not astonished to find the present

volume constellated with French, German, and Latin words and phrases.

He frequently speaks of his _éclaircissements_. He had various kinds:

religious, social, political, economic, and even ethical. He has been

very fond of giving _aperçus_, of being irreverent to the _ipsissima

verba_; and he can never quite forget the _hegira_ from Clark

University after the visit of a certain Harper; he still hears the

echo of the _vox clamantis in deserto_; and he will talk of the _vita

sexualis_. It is to be presumed that any one lured by an autobiography

of one of our leading educators will be able to translate these words.

At any rate he is not likely to have any more trouble with them than he

is with some of the sentences in English. For instance, the Professor,

speaking of the necessity of educating the will and the heart as well

as the intellect, says:

“Nothing else can save us and I shall live, and hope to

die when my time comes, convinced that this goal is not

only not unattainable, but that we are, on the whole,

with however many and widespread regressions, making

progress, surely if slowly and in the right directions.”

And again when saying a good word for the “seminary”:

“The rabulist, the sophist, the debater, the man of

saturated orthodoxy, the literalist, and the dullard will

all be held in check if the seminary is rightly pervaded

with the phenomena of altitude.”

Yes, indeed, but what will save the bromide, the smart Aleck, the

hard-shelled--that’s the question. Is there any phenomenon or altitude

that will accomplish that?

I have always understood it was Worcester, not Webster, who said: “It

is I who am surprised; you are astonished,” when he returned home and

saw his mother-in-law being kissed by the butler. I must have been

mistaken, for Dr. Hall says that he was surprised and delighted when

he got an invitation, after some lean years as a tutor, to deliver a

course of lectures in Baltimore. The sensation of the butler and of Dr.

Hall must have been the same, only on the reverse side of the shield.

Dr. Hall wrote this book to find out more about himself than he knew

before. I hope he was successful. I know more about him than I did

before, though I have been fairly familiar with his life in the open

the past quarter of a century. He says many interesting things about

himself. With some of them I find it hard to agree: for instance that

he was a mixture of masochistic and sadistic impulses. It may be so,

but they were not fifty-fifty. One predominated.

Somewhere in the _Tale of a Tub_ Swift says that happiness is a

perpetual possession of being well deceived. Were it true, the writer

of this autobiography rarely experienced happiness save perhaps in

Berlin, where he learned “how great an enlightener love is, and what a

spring of mind Eros can be.”

XIII

PRIZE FIGHTERS

JOHN L. SULLIVAN, by _R. F. Dibble_.

THE ROAR OF THE CROWD, by _James J. Corbett._

The most diverting biography of the year is that of John L. Sullivan,

the man who shared with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson the

widest popularity of all Americans of their times. Mr. R. F. Dibble

does not tell us so much about John L. as a personality, but what

he tells of him as a pugilist and drunkard is amusing and amazing,

inspiring and instructive. John L. Sullivan and Jean de Reszke were

the two artists on whom America concentrated its attention during the

closing years of the nineteenth century. They had no superiors or peers

until Mr. Corbett and Sig. Caruso came along and dislodged them, the

one aided by alcohol, the other by _anni domini_. Their contemporaries

will always believe they had no equals and should posterity perpetuate

that belief, perhaps it will not be far wrong. If the anti-alcohol

league needed a tract to further its cause--but now that it has the

law, it does not need it--one could be made from Mr. Dibble’s book.

Never was the downfall of a great figure so directly traceable to rum

as John L. Sullivan’s and there are few more striking examples of the

efficacity of grace than that furnished by his abstinence and reform.

Regrettably that saving visitation did not come to him until alcohol

had wrought his ruin physically, and in a smaller measure spiritually.

John L. Sullivan was the greatest pugilist of his time--perhaps of all

times. He has been called a brute, but he was not, because he had a

sense of humour; he has been called a moron, but he did not deserve it

because he refused to run for Congress; it has been alleged that he

was tough, but his reverence for the ideal of womanhood contradicted

the slander. He was a strange combination: proud that he was Irish and

fearful lest people should not know that he was a Bostonian. He had

the same reverence for the city of his birth that his biographer has,

and his sincerity was less doubtful; for it will occur to some that

Mr. Dibble had his tongue in his cheek when he penned this sentence:

“And this Boston, the Hub of the Universe, the source of everything

excellent in American manners and customs, the originator of all moral

and literary endeavours, became unwittingly, but most appropriately,

the cradle of modern pugilism.” Most Bostonians are likely to find

“Hub of the Universe” somewhat intemperate and will think that he

should have said hub of the U. S. A. In any event, they were proud

of John L. Sullivan, justly so, for as his friend Theodore Roosevelt

said: “Old John has many excellent qualities, including a high degree

of self-respect ... he never threw a fight ... he has been the most

effective temperance lecturer I have ever known of,” and he might have

added that he possessed supremely a quality that all men are one in

admiring: courage.