_Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin._ By JAMES PARTON. New York: Mason
Brothers. Two Volumes. 8vo.
To appreciate the importance of this work, we must remember that it
covers more than three-fourths of a century full of great events, if not
of great men; that it begins with Boston and Philadelphia as small
provincial towns, and leaves them the thriving capitals of independent
States; that it finds colonial energy struggling with metropolitan
jealousy and ignorance; that it follows the struggle through all its
phases, until the restrictions of the mother became oppression, and the
love of the children was converted into hatred; that it traces the
growth and expansion of American industry,--the dawn of American
invention, so full of promise,--the development of the principle of
self-government, so full of power,--the bitter contest, so full of
lessons which, used aright, might have spared us more than half the
blood and treasure of the present war.
To appreciate the difficulty of this work, we must remember that the
inner and the outer life of the subject of it are equally full of
marvels; that, beginning by cutting off candle-wicks in a
tallow-chandler's shop in Boston, he ended as the greatest scientific
discoverer among those men renowned for science who composed the Royal
Society of London and the Academy of Sciences of Paris; that, with the
aid of an odd volume of the "Spectator," used according to his own
conception of the best way of using it, he made himself master of a
pure, simple, graceful, and effective English style; that the opinions
and maxims which he drew from his own observation and reflection have
passed into the daily life of millions, warning, strengthening,
cheering, and guiding; that he succeeded in the most difficult
negotiations, was a leader of public opinion on the most important
questions, and, holding his way cheerfully, resolutely, and lovingly to
the end, left the world wiser in many things, and in some better, for
the eighty-four years that he had passed in it.
Nor must we forget, that, among the many things which this wonderful old
man did, was to tell us half the story of his own life, and with such
unaffected simplicity, such evident sincerity, and such attractive
grace, as to make it--as far as it goes--the most perfect production of
its class. Then why attempt to do it over again? is the question that
naturally springs to every lip, on reading the title of Mr. Parton's
book.
Mr. Parton has anticipated this question, and answered it.
"Autobiography is one of the most interesting and valuable kinds of
composition; but autobiography can never be accepted _in lieu_ of
biography, because to no man is the giftie given of seeing himself as
others see him. Rousseau's Confessions are a miracle of candor: they
reveal much concerning a certain weak, wandering, diseased, miserable,
wicked Jean Jacques; but of that marvellous Rousseau whose writings
thrilled Europe they contain how much? Not one word. Madame D'Arblay's
Diary relates a thousand pleasant things, but it does not tell us what
manner of person Madame D'Arblay was. Franklin's Autobiography gives
agreeable information respecting a sagacious shopkeeper of Philadelphia,
but has little to impart to us respecting the grand Franklin, the
world's Franklin, the philosopher, the statesman, the philanthropist. A
man cannot reveal his best self, nor, unless he is a Rousseau, his
worst. Perhaps he never knows either."
The basis of Mr. Parton's work is, as the basis of every satisfactory
biography must be, the writings of its subject. "After all," he says,
"Dr. Jared Sparks's excellent edition of the 'Life and Works of
Franklin,' is the source of the greater part of the information we
possess concerning him.... The libraries, the public records, and the
private collections of England, France, and the United States, were so
diligently searched by Dr. Sparks, that, though seven previous editions
of the works of Franklin had appeared, he was able to add to his
publication the astonishing number of six hundred and fifty pieces of
Dr. Franklin's composition never before collected, of which four hundred
and fifty had never before appeared in print. To unwearied diligence in
collecting Dr. Sparks added an admirable talent in elucidating. His
notes are always such as an intelligent reader would desire, and they
usually contain all the information needed for a perfect understanding
of the matter in hand. Dr. Sparks's edition is a monument at once to the
memory of Benjamin Franklin and to his own diligence, tact, and
faithfulness." We take great pleasure in copying this passage, both
because it seems to illustrate the spirit which Mr. Parton brought to
his task, and because the value of Mr. Sparks's labors have not always
been so freely acknowledged by those who have been freest in their use
of them.
To a careful study of those volumes Mr. Parton has added patient and
extensive research among the newspapers and magazines of the time, and,
apparently, a wide range of general reading. Thus he has filled his work
with facts, some curious, some new, and all interesting, as well in
their bearing upon the times as upon the man. He is a good delver, a
good sifter, and, what is equally important, a good interpreter,--not
merely bringing facts to the light, but compelling them to give out,
like Correggio's pictures, a light of their own. He possesses, too, in
an eminent degree, the power of forming for himself a conception of his
subject as a whole, keeping it constantly before his mind in the
elaboration of the parts, and thus bringing it vividly before the mind
of the reader. Franklin's true place in history has never before been
assigned him upon such incontrovertible evidence.
If we were to undertake to name the parts of this work which have given
us most satisfaction, we should, although with some hesitation, name the
admirable chapters which Mr. Parton has devoted to Franklin's diplomatic
labors in England and France. In none of his good works has that great
man been more exposed to calumny, or treated with more barefaced
ingratitude by those who profited most by them, than in bringing to
light the dangerous letters of Hutchinson and Oliver. Even within the
last few years, the apologetic biographer of John Adams repeats the
accusation of moral obliquity in a tone that would hardly have been
misplaced in a defence of Wedderburn. Mr. Parton tells the story with
great simplicity, and, without entering into any unnecessary
disquisition, accepts for his commentary upon it Mr. Bancroft's wise,
and, as it seems to us, unanswerable conclusion. "Had the conspiracy
which was thus laid bare aimed at the life of a minister or the king,
any honest man must have immediately communicated the discovery to the
Secretary of State: to conspire to introduce into America a military
government, and abridge American liberty, was a more heinous crime, of
which irrefragable evidence had now come to light."
Never, too, was philosopher more severely tried than Franklin was tried
by the colleagues whom Congress sent him, from time to time, as clogs
upon the great wheel which he was turning so skilfully. And this, too,
Mr. Parton has set in full light, not by the special pleading of the
apologist, but by the documentary researches of the historian.
There are some things, however, in this work which we could have wished
somewhat different from what they are. Mr. Parton's fluent and forcible
style sometimes degenerates into flippancy. We could cite many instances
of felicitous expression, some, also, of bad taste, and some of hasty
assertion. "_Clubable_" is hardly a good enough word to bear frequent
repetition. "This question was a complete baffler" is too much like
slang to be admitted into the good company which Mr. Parton's sentences
usually keep. We were not aware that "Physician, heal thyself" was a
stock classical allusion. We do not believe--for Dante and Milton would
rise up in judgment against us, even if the vast majority of other great
men did not--that "it is only second-rate men who have great aims." We
do not believe that the style of the "Spectator" is an "easily imitated
style"; for, of the hundreds who have tried, how many, besides Franklin,
have really succeeded in imitating it? We do not believe that Latin and
Greek are an "obstructing nuisance," or that the student of Homer and
Thucydides and Demosthenes and Plato and Aristotle and Cæsar and Cicero
and Tacitus is merely studying "the prattle of infant man," or "adding
the ignorance of the ancients to the ignorance he was born with." We
believe, on the contrary, that it was by such studies that Gibbon and
Niebuhr and Arnold and Grote acquired their marvellous power of
discovering historical truth and detecting historical error, and that
from no modern language could they have received such discipline.
But we not only agree with the sentiment, but admire the simple energy
of the expression, when he says that "Franklin was the man of all others
then alive who possessed in the greatest perfection the four grand
requisites for the successful observation of Nature or the pursuit of
literature,--a sound and great understanding, patience, dexterity, and
an independent income." Equally judicious and equally well-expressed is
the following passage upon the Penns:--"Thomas Penn was a man of
business, careful, saving, and methodical. Richard Penn was a
spendthrift. Both were men of slender abilities, and not of very
estimable character. They had done some liberal acts for the Province,
such as sending over presents to the Library of books and apparatus, and
cannon for the defence of Philadelphia. If the Pennsylvanians had been
more submissive, they would doubtless have continued their benefactions.
But, unhappily, they cherished those erroneous, those Tory notions of
the rights of sovereignty which Lord Bute infused into the contracted
mind of George III., and which cost that dull and obstinate monarch,
first, his colonies, and then his senses. It is also rooted in the
British mind, that a landholder is entitled to the particular respect of
his species. These Penns, in addition to the pride of possessing acres
by the million, felt themselves to be the lords of the land they owned,
and of the people who dwelt upon it." And in speaking of English ideas
of American resistance:--"Englishmen have made sublime sacrifices to
principle, but they appear slow to believe that any other people can."
And, "George III. sat upon a constitutional throne, but he had an
unconstitutional mind." It would be difficult to find a more
comprehensive sentence than the following:--"The counsel employed by Mr.
Mauduit was Alexander Wedderburn, a sharp, unprincipled Scotch
barrister, destined to scale all the heights of preferment which
shameless subserviency could reach."
It would be easy to multiply examples, but we have given, we believe,
more than enough to show that we look upon Mr. Parton's "Franklin" as a
work of very great value.
_The Maine Woods._ By HENRY D. THOREAU, Author of "A Week on the Concord
and Merrimack Rivers," "Walden," "Excursions," etc., etc. Boston:
Ticknor & Fields.
The steadily growing fame of Thoreau has this characteristic, that it
is, like his culture, a purely American product, and is no pale
reflection of the cheap glories of an English reprint. Whether he would
have gained or lost by a more cosmopolitan training or criticism is not
the question now; but certain it is that neither of these things went to
the making of his fame. Classical and Oriental reading he had; but
beyond these he cared for nothing which the men and meadows of Concord
could not give, and for this voluntary abnegation, half whimsical, half
sublime, the world repaid him with life-long obscurity, and will yet
repay him with permanent renown.
His choice of subjects, too, involves the same double recompense; for no
books are less dazzling or more immortal than those whose theme is
external Nature. Nothing else wears so well. History becomes so rapidly
overlaid with details, and its aspects change so fast, that the most
elaborate work soon grows obsolete; while a thoroughly sincere and
careful book on Nature cannot be superseded, and lives forever. Its
basis is real and permanent. There will always be birds and flowers,
nights and mornings. The infinite fascinations of mountains and of
forests will outlast this war, and the next, and the race that makes the
war. The same solidity of material which has guarantied permanence to
the fame of Izaak Walton and White of Selborne will as surely secure
that of Thoreau, who excels each of these writers upon his own ground,
while superadding a wider culture, a loftier thought, and a fine, though
fantastic, literary skill. All men may not love Nature, but all men
ultimately love her lovers. And of those lovers, past or present,
Thoreau is the most profound in his devotion, and the most richly
repaid.
Against these great merits are to be set, no doubt, some formidable
literary defects: an occasional mistiness of expression, like the summit
of Katahdin, as he himself describes it,--one vast fog, with here and
there a rock protruding; also, an occasional sandy barrenness, like his
beloved Cape Cod. In truth, he never quite completed the transition from
the observer to the artist. With the power of constructing sentences as
perfectly graceful as a hemlock-bough, he yet displays the most wayward
aptitude for literary caterpillars'-nests and all manner of
disfigurements. The same want of artistic habit appears also in his
wilful disregard of all rules of proportion. He depicts an Indian, for
instance, with such minute observation and admirable verbal skill that
one feels as if neither Catlin nor Schoolcraft ever saw the actual
creature; but though the table-talk of the aboriginal may seem for a
time more suggestive than that of Coleridge or Macaulay, yet there is a
point beyond which his, like theirs, becomes a bore.
In addition to these drawbacks, one finds in Thoreau an unnecessary
defiance of tone, and a very resolute non-appreciation of many things
which a larger mental digestion can assimilate without discomfort. In
his dealings with Nature he is sweet, genial, patient, wise. In his
dealings with men he exasperates himself over the least divergence from
the desired type. Before any over-tendency to the amenities and luxuries
of civilization, in particular, he becomes unreasonable and relentless.
Hence there appears something hard and ungenial in his views of life,
utterly out of keeping with the delicate tenderness which he shows in
the woods. The housekeeping of bees and birds he finds noble and
beautiful, but for the home and cradle of the humblest human pair he can
scarcely be said to have even toleration; a farmer's barn he considers a
cumbrous and pitiable appendage, and he lectures the Irish women in
their shanties for their undue share of the elegancies of life. With
infinite faith in the tendencies of mineral and vegetable nature, in
human nature he shows no practical trust, and must even be severe upon
the babies in the Maine log-huts for playing with wooden dolls instead
of pine-cones. It is, indeed, noticeable that he seems to love every
other living animal more unreservedly than the horse,--as if this poor
sophisticated creature, though still a quadruped and a brother, had been
so vitiated by undue intimacy with man as to have become little better
than if he wore broadcloth and voted.
Yet there was not in Thoreau one trait of the misanthrope; his solitary
life at Walden was not chosen because he loved man less, but because he
loved Nature more; and any young poet or naturalist might envy the
opportunities it gave him. But his intellectual habits showed always a
tendency to exaggeration, and he spent much mental force in fighting
shadows, Church and State, war and politics,--a man of solid vigor must
find room in his philosophy to tolerate these matters for a time, even
if he cannot cordially embrace them. But Thoreau, a celibate, and at
times a hermit, brought the Protestant extreme to match the Roman
Catholic, and though he did not personally ignore one duty of domestic
life, he yet held a system which would have excluded wife and child,
house and property. His example is noble and useful to all high-minded
young people, but only when interpreted by a philosophy less exclusive
than his own. In urging his one social panacea, "Simplify, I say,
simplify," he failed to see that all steps in moral or material
organization are really efforts after the same process he recommends.
The sewing-machine is a more complex affair than the needle, but it
simplifies every woman's life, and helps her to that same comparative
freedom from care which Thoreau would seek only by reverting to the
Indian blanket.
But many-sided men do not move in battalions, and even a one-sided
philosopher may be a boon to think of, if he be as noble as Thoreau. His
very defects are higher than many men's virtues, and his most fantastic
moralizings will bear reading without doing harm, especially during a
Presidential campaign. Of his books, "Walden" will probably be
permanently reckoned as the best, as being the most full and deliberate
exhibition of the author's mind, and as extracting the most from the
least material. It is also the most uniform in texture, and the most
complete in plan, while the "Week" has no unity but that of the
chronological epoch it covers,--a week which is probably the most
comprehensive on record, ranging from the Bhagvat-Geetha to the "good
time coming,"--and the "Excursions" no unity but that of the covers
which comprise them, being, indeed, a compilation of his earliest and
latest essays. Which of his four volumes contains his finest writing it
would really be hard to say; but in structure the present book comes
nearest to "Walden"; it is within its limits a perfect monograph of the
Maine woods. All that has been previously written fails to portray so
vividly the mysterious life of the lonely forest,--the grandeur of
Katahdin or Ktaadn, that hermit-mountain,--and the wild and adventurous
navigation of those Northern water-courses whose perils make the boating
of the Adirondack region seem safe and tame. The book is also more
unexceptionably healthy in its tone than any of its predecessors, and it
is pleasant to find the author, on emerging from his explorations,
admitting that the confines of civilization afford, after all, the best
residence, and that the wilderness is of most value as "a resource and a
background."
There yet remain for publication Thoreau's adventures on Cape Cod; his
few public addresses on passing events, especially those on the Burns
Rescue and the John-Brown affair, which were certainly among the very
ablest productions called forth by those exciting occasions; his poems;
and his private letters to his friend Blake, of Worcester, and to
others,--letters which certainly contain some of his toughest, and
perhaps also some of his finest writing. All these deserve, and must one
day receive, preservation. He who reads most books reads that which has
a merely temporary interest, and will be presently superseded by
something better; but Nature has waited many centuries for Thoreau, and
we can hardly expect to see, during this generation, another mortal so
favored with her confidence.
_Jennie Juneiana_: Talks on Women's Topics. By JENNIE JUNE. Boston: Lee
& Shepard. 12mo. pp. 240.
Great are the resources of human invention, and the tiresome passion for
alliterative titles may possibly have culminated in some name yet more
foolish than that of this little green and gold volume. If so, the rival
has proved too much for the trump of Fame to carry, and has dropped
unnoticed. In the present case, the title does perhaps some injustice to
the book, which is not a silly one, though it contains very silly
things. It seems to be written from the point of view afforded by a
second-rate New-York boarding-house, and by a person who has never come
in contact with any refined or well-bred people. With this allowance, it
is written in the interest of good manners and good morals, and with
enough of natural tact to keep the writer from getting far beyond her
depth, although she does talk of "Goethe's Mignion" and "Miss
Werner,"--whoever these personages may be,--and of "the substantial fame
achieved by the unknown author of 'Rutledge.'" It is written in the
prevalent American newspaper-style,--a style which is apt to be graphic,
piquant, and dashing, accompanied by a flavor, slight or more than
slight, of flippancy and slang,--a style such as reaches high-tide in
certain "popular" native authors, male and female, and in ebbing strands
us on "Jennie June."
Of course, writing from the windows of Mrs. Todgers, "Jennie" manifests
the usual superfluous anxiety of her kind not to be called
strong-minded. She is prettily indignant at the thought of female
physicians: there is nothing improper in having diseases, but to cure
them would be indelicacy indeed. Girls out of work, who wish for places
in shops, are only "patriotic young ladies who desire to fill all the
lucrative situations at present occupied by young men." She would even
banish Bridget from the kitchen and substitute unlimited Patricks, which
will interest housekeepers as being the only conceivable remedy worse
than the disease. Of course, a female lecturer is an abomination:
"Jennie" proves, first, that a "strong-minded woman" must be either
unmarried or unhappy in marriage, and then turns, with rather illogical
wrath, upon Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown, for being too domestic to
make speeches since their marriage. To follow the court phraseology,
"This reminds us of a little anecdote." When the fashion of long,
flowing wigs was just vanishing in Boston, somebody wore one from that
town down to Salem, where they were entirely extinct. All the
street-boys ran after him all the morning, to ask him why he wore a wig.
He, wishing to avoid offence, left it in the house at dinner-time; and
was pursued all the afternoon by the same boys, with the inquiry why he
did _not_ wear a wig. These eloquent women find it equally hard to
please their little critic by silence or by speech. The simple truth
probably is, that they hold precisely the same views which they always
held, and will live to trouble her yet, when the epoch of the nursery is
over. The majority of women's-rights advocates have always been wives
and mothers, and, for aught we know, excellent ones, since that dear,
motherly old Quakeress, Lucretia Mott, first broached the matter; and
the great change in our legislation on all the property-rights of that
sex is just as directly traceable to their labors as is the repeal of
the English corn-laws to the efforts of the "League." If, however,
"Jennie" consoles herself with the reflection that the points made in
this controversy by the authors of "Hannah Thurston" and "Miss Gilbert's
Career" are not much stronger than her own, she must remember her
favorite theory, that all foolishness sounds more respectable when
uttered from masculine lips.
1. _Woman and her Era._ By ELIZA W. FARNHAM. In Two Volumes. New York:
A. J. Davis & Co.
2. _Eliza Woodson; or, The Early Days of one of the World's Workers._ A
Story of American Life. New York: A. J. Davis & Co.
In the three and a half centuries since Cornelius Agrippa, no one has
attempted with so much ability as Mrs. Farnham to transfer the theory of
woman's superiority from the domain of poetry to that of science. Second
to no American woman save Miss Dix in her experience as a practical
philanthropist, she has studied human nature in the sternest practical
schools, from Sing-Sing to California. She justly claims for her views
that they have been maturing for twenty-two years of "experience so
varied as to give it almost every form of trial which could fall to the
intellectual life of any save the most favored women." Her books show,
moreover, an ardent love of literature and some accurate scientific
training,--though her style has the condensation and vigor which active
life creates, rather than the graces of culture.