Recent Biography

OUR American life is somewhat unfavorable to the cultivation of the privacy of genius. It is not so much that there is an inherent desire for publicity, for the disclosure of one’s powers, as that, in the mobility of society and the constant pressure of the whole body upon each member, one who is conscious of gifts seldom finds himself so shut in by circumstance that he quails before the necessity of making fight against fortune, and absconds into the secluded inclosure of a private life. It is when society is more rigid, and the individual is left more to himself, that such cultivation of privacy is frequent. It supposes, to be sure, a certain extreme sensitiveness in the person, accounted by some weakness of will, and finding expression often in eccentricity, but exhibiting also, at times, a very highly developed personal consciousness. One sees this truth illustrated in the historic New England life, when the provincial selfcontent was most complete. Scarcely a village but had its " characters,” as they were significantly termed, — men and women who failed to find a regularly adjusted place in the community, who were not fools, were often indeed very shrewd, but who had, in their own fashion, withdrawn themselves from classification, and asserted in a vague way an independence of convention. Mrs. Slosson’s ingenious Seven Dreamers illustrates this phase of character, and Miss Wilkins’s penetrating genius has singled such persons out for presentation in her stories. But besides and above these strays and waifs of society, mostly persons of insignificant position socially, there were in the same place and period men and women, well born and bred, whose nature inspired them to the cultivation of their gifts, but not to the exhibition of them : private theologians in the midst of a generation of official theologians; keen publicists, who contented themselves with political speculation, but never had ambition for affairs ; scholars, who accumulated, but never published.

What has been the case in New England in such limited sense as a proyincial civilization affords is emphatically illustrated in England. The story still lingers of that unhappy heir to an earldom, who, vainly struggling in the meshes of fortune which forbade him to be anything but an earl, finally broke away altogether, took another name, shipped before the mast, and sought independence by absolute suppression of his inherited self. That was an exceptional case in its outward rebellion, but it was typical of a class easily recognizable by any one familiar with English social life. In a less ungovernable form, the temper finds expression in the eccentricity which appears frequently in the English man of wealth and social position, but more significantly, though less noticeably, in the lives of men and women who are not in rebellion, but simply are, so to speak, non-resistants ; who oppose to the demands of society an effective inertia, and are not only content to live far from the madding crowd, and forbidden by their lot to read their history in a. nation’s eyes, but positively shape their lives after ideals which magnify their simple occupations and seem to set their being in a large place.

Some such figure one may discover in James Smetham, whose name is known incidentally to students of William Blake literature by a thoughtful article which he contributed to an English periodical as a review of Gilchrist’s Life of Blake, and which Mrs. Gilchrist reprinted in the second volume of the new edition of that Life. In referring to this article, Mr. D. G. Rossetti, in this new edition, wrote as follows : " Some personal mention, however slight, should here exist as due to its author, a painter and designer of our own day, who is in many signal respects very closely akin to Blake ; more so, probably, than any other living artist could be said to be. James Smetham’s work, generally of small or moderate size, ranges from Gospel subjects, of the subtlest imaginative and mental insight, and sometimes of the grandest coloring, through Old Testament compositions and through poetic and pastoral themes of every kind, to a special imaginative form of landscape. In all these he partakes greatly of Blake’s immediate spirit, being also often nearly allied by landscape intensity to Samuel Palmer, in youth the noble disciple of Blake. Mr. Smetham’s works are very numerous, and, as other exclusive things have come to be, will some day be known in a wide circle. Space is altogether wanting to make more than this passing mention here of them and of their producer, who shares in a remarkable manner Blake’s mental beauties and his formative shortcomings, and possesses besides an individual invention which often claims equality with the great exceptional master himself.”

This was written presumably in 1880, or thereabout, when Smetham had passed into that mental eclipse which is so delicately referred to in the volume of Letters¹ which constitutes the fullest record thus far published of his career. We quote it because, brief as it is. it sets Smetham forth upon his artistic side somewhat more sharply than the book itself, which is more fully occupied with a presentation of Smetham’s intellectual and religious nature. The brief introductory memoir by Mr. Davies — himself, we suspect, to be classed under the head of private geniuses — maybe read profitably after as well as before the reader has become directly acquainted with Smetham through the letters.

These letters, extending over a score of years, and addressed mainly to the writer’s intimate companions, though a few were written also to men like Ruskin and Rossetti, who valued him for his gifts in art, but scarcely belonged in the inner circle of his friends, impress the reader by their exceeding delicacy of form, and slowly reveal a nature very rare in its fineness of spirit. Evidently they are drawn from a much larger mass, and they must be taken also as differing only in outward form from a considerable body of notes upon life, literature, art, and religion, accumulated by Smetham in the course of a patiently laborious and loving life led on simple lines. To the world looking on casually he was a not over-successful painter, a teacher of drawing, an occasional contributor to periodicals. To the world brought more closely into contact with him he was a devout man, a class-leader in the Methodist connection. To his immediate friends he must have been a grave but not austere man, tremulously susceptible to the faintest suggestion of beauty, whether in life, in nature, or in art; giving expression in conversation and in writing to searching, suggestive thought, and putting into his pictures a depth of meaning which cost him a travail of spirit.

Indeed, without knowing his pictures save by description, we cannot avoid the conclusion that, though the simple domestic subjects, conscientiously painted, brought a genuine pleasure to the painter, the more serious pictures made such demands upon his sensibility that he chose, almost from necessity, to throw his thought and feeling rather into his writing, and that thus his writing became, through long practice, more firm and expressive. One seems to discover, as the years lengthen, a deeper tone to his writing, and yet a more confident touch, as though the pen came to be his preferred implement. Yet with all this there appears to have been little craving for publicity, and his letters and memoranda continued to be for himself and his dearest friends.

Be this as it may, the reader comes to be indifferent to Smetham’s fame, and even to his artistic production, and takes an extraordinary satisfaction in intercourse with this privacy of genius. With him he is willing to leave the outer world, and take his pleasure in the cool shades of a reflective life. The sincere humility which characterizes Smetham’s connection with the plain people to whom he was a religious teacher and leader does not seem another or incongruous element in a nature which was keenly susceptible to beauty. Rather, one is disposed to regard it as only another phase of that reverential attitude which Smetham took toward art. The penetrating, often very subtle observations which he makes to his friends on religious themes could scarcely, we may think, have formed the staple of his instruction to his humble disciples, yet there is an utter absence of anything like condescension in his habit of speech regarding these disciples. The rare blending of lofty thought, acute criticism, and gentle, affectionate interest in common things and common men so marks the entire nature of this delicately organized man that superficial incongruities disappear, and the unworldliness which confronts us is integral, not conventional. We make no quotations from these letters, though it would be easy to do so, but we advise all who have not lost their taste for elevated thought, shy pleasure, gentle humor, and pure sentiment, touched throughout with an unaffected, simple, but deep piety, to linger for themselves over the pages of this unusual book.

During the last twenty years the South has been fruitful in writers of novels and short stories. Cable, Harris, Page, and Miss Murfree, for instance, have done work which, in their own lines, has not been surpassed. It has been much less fruitful in writers of a more serious kind; and hence we welcome with especial pleasure a book so excellent alike from the literary and the historical standpoints as Professor Trent’s biography of the almost forgotten South Carolina novelist, Simms.² Mr. Trent is evidently not only a man of wide reading and a close student of literature, but also, what is much more important, a man of originality and of historic insight, capable of seeing the facts as they are, and fearless enough to state his conclusions as he sees them. His book is a credit to the scholarship of the South, and is a real addition to the list of American works which deal with both our literary and our political history; and this means, of course, that it is a real addition to English literature, using the words in their larger and proper sense.

Simms was much the most considerable of the Southern school of writers in the years before the war, — for Poe belongs to no school and no section, — and he was the most prolific novelist, essayist, and (Heaven save the mark !) poet this country has ever produced. Yet he is now almost completely forgotten. It is probable that most people, even among those who are fairly well read, do not so much as know the name of an author some of whose books, at least, are well worth a permanent place on our bookshelves. It is a pleasure to record the fact that a faithful few have always remembered him, and that in the Atlantic Monthly itself there appeared, a couple of years ago, an appreciative review of his novels.

Mr. Trent has prepared himself for his task very carefully and faithfully. He has searched out all the available material, printed or in manuscript, dealing either with Simms’s life or his writings. He possessed two great advantages at the outset, — a thorough acquaintance with American literature, and an intimate knowledge of old-time life in the Southern States. Finally, to a very real and affectionate sympathy with and regard for Simms, a sympathy and regard which his readers are sure in the end to share, he has added a noteworthy clearsightedness and impartiality of judgment which give his criticisms of men and events a permanent value. He has thus been able to produce a book which stands high even in so excellent a series as that in which it appears, — a series which, in Lounsbury’s Cooper, has given birtli to the best piece of literary biography that has been produced anywhere of recent years.

Simms was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1806, and died in 1870. All his literary work which was worth doing was done between 1834 and 1856. Throughout his life his home was in South Carolina, but he made repeated trips to the North and to the Southwest. He traveled and sojourned for months at a time among the Creeks and the Cherokees, and he lived much with the hardy white borderers ; he was therefore familiar with Indians and frontiersmen as they really were, knowing both their faults and their virtues. Moreover, he knew well “ the wealth of beauty and charm hidden away in the chronicles and traditions of his native State.” He had the good sense to see the rich and virgin fields which lay open to him, and he made these fields his own. Of his poems, polemics, and historical and literary essays nothing need be said here. He made his mark in the two series of border and of historical romances. In the former he is not at his best, though in them he gives some valuable sketches of backwoods life, and draws some striking pictures of typical backwoods characters. His really excellent historical romances, such as The Yemassee and The Partisan, are the works upon which his title to lasting fame must rest. To begin with, these romances possess the merit of being eminently readable, — no slight virtue, though some modern bookmakers apparently look upon it rather in the light of a defect. In the next place, though of course a disciple in the school of Scott and Cooper, he did original work in a line which no one else had taken, and which was well worth taking. His romances dealt with certain picturesque phases of Carolinian history which had fired his imagination. His mind was saturated with the legendary and historical lore of the Carolinas, while he had been born and brought up in the very localities about which he wrote. He was therefore “ following out the universal principle of literary art which requires that a man shall write spontaneously and simply about those things he is fullest of and best understands.” He tried to charm his readers with a true picture of the deeds and the times by which he had himself been charmed ; and he succeeded. He was equally successful in describing the warfare waged by the early colonists against the Indians, and the bitter, harassing struggle between Tarleton’s red dragoons and the weather-worn troopers of Marion.

Unfortunately, his faults were many and grave. His natural talents were great, but his education was very defective, and he lived in a society totally devoid of a creative literary atmosphere. He had no idea of such qualities as thoroughness, finish, and self-restraint. His style is hurried and slipshod ; many of his passages are wooden or bombastic ; and his petulant impatience of criticism forbade his gaining any profit by experience. At one time he was foolish enough to make ventures in the field of European romance, only to meet deserved and dismal failure. Yet, in spite of all these failures and shortcomings, Mr. Trent is right in stating that Simms has fairly won his place among American men of letters.

Of Simms the man Mr. Trent writes most interestingly. He shows us a brave, dogmatic, generous - hearted man, who went wrong politically, as all his associates did, but who was incapable of a mean or cowardly action ; a man of genuine even if misguided patriotism; an indefatigable literary worker; and in the days of sore trial after the war a pathetically courageous spirit, toiling unceasingly, in the teeth of overwhelming disaster, for the welfare of his children and friends ; in short, a man who commands our heartiest respect. Mr. Trent realizes that no biography is complete unless not only the man, but his surroundings, are clearly outlined ; and he describes very appreciatively, and sometimes humorously, the now utterly vanished life of the old South. He grasps the essential features with remarkable clearness ; and his sketch abounds in many interesting details. the letters to and from Beverley Tucker offering a case in point. There are one or two small and unimportant slips : for instance, in one place he seems to confound two of the Bonhams, and occasionally his English is too colloquial ; it is difficult to defend the use of such a word as “vim.” But these are merely trivial errors.

The most valuable portion of the book is that portraying Simms’s relation to the political movements which culminated in the civil war. Mr. Trent strikes his true theme when he writes as a historian ; and if he fulfills the promise of tins book he will eventually stand in the first rank of our politico-historical writers. He possesses the rare quality of “ seeing veracity,” as Carlyle phrased it; he knows things as they really are, and recognizes their true significance. He understands that men may believe in a cause with a touching earnestness and sincerity of conviction, and may battle for it with a valor so heroic as to make all their right-thinking opponents doubly proud that they can still call them fellow-countrymen ; and that nevertheless this same cause may be historically indefensible. He goes straight to the root of matters, and, in fixing on what really brought about the civil war, he brushes aside with good-humored contempt the cobwebs of childish sophistry which some well-meaning but not over clear-headed writers still persist in trying to spin around the subject. He has far too much common sense, he possesses a mind too well trained in the consideration of historic problems, and he has studied too deeply, to waste his time in seriously discussing such propositions, for instance, as that a battle for human slavery can really be a battle for civil liberty ; and he has too keen a sense of humor to pay heed to the re-thrashing of constitutional theories which are now of as little interest as the theses over which the mediæval schoolmen wrangled, or as the seventeenth-century dogmas concerning the divine right of kings.

In sum, Mr. Trent has produced a work of excellent performance, which contains the promise of still better things to follow.

The power which the mind of a great man may impart to the mind of a young man may some day be the subject of investigation in scientific hypnotism. Certain it is that there have been great instructors in the world who seem to have given to their pupils impulses, or ideas, or qualifications, or ambitions, by which the latter have risen into prominence. Certain it is that two of our American colleges, small, obscure, and exceedingly poor in material equipment, have produced beyond their due proportion men possessed of the faculty of becoming prominent, and that these successful men have ascribed their success, with wonderful unanimity, to two great teachers. That is to say, two microscopic specks upon the chart of population, hardly discernible by the unassisted eye, have suddenly thrown off judges, generals, governors, legislators, members of the cabinet, and even Presidents, — not perhaps abstract thinkers or scholars, but men who have become eminent in contact with other men. It is also noticeable that the greater minds seem to be those which are most deeply impressed by the great teacher. At the beginning of the civil war, Mr. Seward was, we will not say the greatest or wisest of Americans, but certainly the American statesman most prominent in both Europe and America. The boyish exclamation of the Prince of Wales in 1859, “ Mr. Seward, I have heard so much of you in England that I am very glad to see you before I leave this country,” evidenced the position he had obtained under the most adverse conditions, and in the most trying political period of our history. The graduate of Williams who is best known to his countrymen, and indeed to the world, is, of course, President Garfield ; and the lives of these two Americans seem wonderful instances of self-construction. Yet each attributed his success in life to his college president, held him in the greatest reverence, deferred to him, sought his counsel, and warmly declared him to be the greatest, wisest, and best of men.

It is manifest that one who could so profoundly affect the minds and lives of some of the greatest men of our time cannot have the story of his long life fully told in this small volume³ of the Religious Leaders series. In strictest terms, Dr. Hopkins was not a leader of religious thought. We should reckon as such, Luther, Calvin, Loyola, Knox, the Wesleys, Edwards, Channing, Pusey, Newman, — men who, right or wrong, led, and led upon new religious lines. We might indeed turn back a century in the same family, and properly take Dr. Samuel Hopkins as a leader of religions thought. But the late president of Williams was possessed of a great and contented mind. The fifth chapter of Matthew formulated his theology ; and if all the religious writings in the world had been obliterated save the Gospel of Matthew he would have been the same theologian that he was. The religious leaders of the world have been non-contented men, unsatisfied with theology or religious life as they found it, and have led the way to different and, as they believed, to better things. Dr. Hopkins was a man who feared God and hated iniquity, but he was a man who saw the good in everything that constituted his earthly or spiritual environment. Instead of organizing departures to new religious realms, he planted new germs of religious thought; and the tendency of his nature was to teach men that they already possess, or can possess, all of the spiritual hopes and treasures of the universe, if they will but accept what the great Beneficence has given. Love and duty were the two great elements of his theology as of his life and character; and his theological instruction may be analyzed by saying that it was to teach the individual man to open his heart to the impulses of the one, and to direct his eyes to the pathway of the other.

The extraordinary contentedness of Dr. Hopkins’s nature, and his absolute submission, as it may be termed, to love and duty, may be seen in the manner and methods by which he solved the problem of his own life. Given a young physician, appointed professor of moral philosophy and rhetoric at the age of twenty-eight, elected president of a poor and poorly managed college in a remote mountain hamlet at the age of thirty-four, the college for thirty years never far from the verge of insolvency, — with such gigantic improbabilities of success, what would the ordinary solution be? Undoubtedly, the aspiring young professor would take the first “ better place ” that came in his way, and leave the insolvent college to take care of itself. Familiar as we are with the life of Dr. Hopkins, we confess to astonishment at the number of “ better places ” that beckoned him away. In 1844 it was Plymouth Church, Brooklyn ; in 1847 it was Andover: in 1850 it was the chancellorship of the University of New York ; again, in 1850, it was the Union Theological Seminary; in 1851 the Mercer Street Church in New York; in 1852 the presidency of the University of Michigan ; in 1853 a church in Philadelphia ; in 1858 the Chicago Theological Seminary. But Williams College needed him, and he no more thought of abandoning it than of abandoning his children. A good workman does not find fault with his tools. In the struggles of the struggling college he rose to eminence, and had at his feet some of the greatest and best of our time and country.

Dr. Hopkins was one of those men whose lives it is not easy to portray. We are often confounded, in the records of human nature, by finding much where we expected little, and by finding nothing where we expected much. General Sheridan, subjectively the most reserved and reticent of our generals, for a long time refused to write his own life, and indeed began by having somebody write it in the third person ; yet we do not recall another autobiography of a great soldier which so unconsciously takes the reader into the inmost recesses of the writer’s confidence, into his hopes and apprehensions, into his petulance and diffidence. Dr. Hopkins was frank and genial, sympathetic and unreserved; yet his writings portray his thoughts, and not his life. The death of his daughter was the great, the incomparable bereavement and sorrow of his life. She was his firstborn, his companion, critic, counselor, and friend. Knowing the anguish which shook him as he saw her going, day by day, down the sharp decline of her last illness, and the wonderful tenderness and sympathetic nature of the man, it is inconceivable to us that in less than a fortnight he could have written of the affliction to his oldest and most intimate friend, and have said absolutely nothing of himself. “I have known no one who seemed to me to come nearer to my conception of a saint,” is all that escapes from the wounded heart of the father as expressive of his individual loss. It seems as if a writer, to depict his life or himself graphically to other men, must have the element of egotism, consciously or unconsciously, as a large ingredient of his nature. This ingredient was not in Dr. Hopkins. As a matter of judgment, he knew accurately what he could do and what he could not do, and to his mind, to use one of his own phrases, “ that was all there was of it.” A great address on a great occasion never took away his appetite or disturbed his night’s rest. When pressed by his children or his friends to write the story of his early life, he could say, in all sincerity, “ Pooh! I went to school and to college, as other boys did, and studied medicine, and was called to a professorship here, and that was all there was of it.”

He moved in a calm, leisurely, deliberate way, yet performed an immense amount of work. During the six months in which he wrote his work on the Evidences of Christianity he preached every Sunday, conducted college prayers at least once a day, heard two recitations a day, and carried on the correspondence and much of the administrative work of the college. His house was the hostelry for college visitors. His study door was never locked. By nature he was a student and thinker, a philosopher; but he was strong physically, mentally, morally, courageous, cool, and ready, and he could have been anything, — a general, a judge, an eminent lawyer, an eminent statesman, — anything but a physician. It is an extraordinary fact that, like one of the greatest of American lawyers, Horace Binney, and one of the greatest of American jurists, Mr. Justice Miller, he chose for his work in life this profession for which he was not fitted. Two of these three were diverted from the path which they had chosen, each by other influences than his own judgment; the third rose to distinction in two professions, and to eminence on the bench of the highest judicial tribunal In the world.

The work of President Carter may be defined as being the exact opposite of Boswell’s Life of Johnson. It consists of one small octavo volume ; it is one of a religious series ; it deals chiefly with the thoughts of a great thinker as expressed in his written words. Within these limitations President Carter, we think, has done his work well. The greater portion of Dr. Hopkins’s writings relates to three abstruse subjects, — mental philosophy, moral philosophy, and the deepest currents of religious thought. Such writings may not be hard to understand, but they are easy to be misunderstood. To handle them intelligently, and to bring the views of such a writer clearly within the vision of the ordinary reader, of the readers of this series, and to do so in the brief space allowed, is no easy task for a biographer. In a word, the book places before the reader clearly and comprehensively, if not fully, the thoughts of the man, but not the man. The anecdotes are few, the traits indistinct, the personality meagre. The chapter entitled The Friend is made up entirely of letters from Dr. Hopkins, and they are letters to a single individual, and relate almost entirely to a single theme, — the literary work of the two men. Of the events in the chapter on the College Rebellion President Carter was an eye-witness ; he there drops into the character of annalist, and it is the most living chapter in the book. In the intellectual fields — the ethical, metaphysical, and theological — President Carter’s lines are clear and strong. His delineation of the views of Dr. Hopkins, of their growth, development, and perhaps modification, is admirable. The student of other days will find not only that the book revives memories, but that it discloses views which he did not then truly perceive. The reader who acquires his first knowledge or impressions from it will understand why it was that so unobtrusive a man was such a force among thinking men, and will perceive the strength, sincerity, and simplicity which were the chief elements of his nature. President Carter has shown, with commendable disapproval, how the office of president is changing, in our American colleges, from a moral and intellectual to an administrative power ; and not the least interesting portions of the book are those which show his own growth in respect and appreciation from the time when he entered the college, a “thoughtless boy.” to the time when, as the president of Williams College, he delivered the affecting eulogy at the funeral services of his teacher, friend, and predecessor.

But the students of Williams, and the great army of the American Board, and missionaries in foreign lands, and scholars in mental and moral science have been supposing, in a vague way, that there was a Boswell lying in wait through this long life to record the humorous stories, witty rejoinders, shrewd incisive thrusts, the serene wisdom, and the hardly spoken admonitions of a great and good man. The Boswell is not here. If he exists, he has given no sign. Nevertheless, while the most we know, biographically, of Dr. Hopkins is seen through the cold medium of an intellectual atmosphere, the radiance of his lofty and tender character is felt, if not portrayed. Mr. Lowell, with the insight of poetic genius, perceived the fact when he wrote, “ His personal character is a possession valued by all his countrymen ; ” and, in the words of one of the ablest governors of Massachusetts, we may still “ claim his long life as a glorious part of our moral public riches.”