Biographical

THE orators and literary historians who must soon look to the sources of preparation for the Hawthorne centenary will be confronted with no embarrassment but that of riches. To all the autobiography of his own volumes the members of Hawthorne’s immediate family and his closest friends have steadily added what they could. In Hawthorne and His Circle¹ Mr. Julian Hawthorne appears for the second time as his father’s biographer. Hawthorne Abroad would have been a little more accurate title for the volume, since four fifths of it has to do with the years of the Liverpool consulship and foreign travel. These, for the author of the present volume, were the years between seven and fourteen. The remembered observations of a youth of this age would of course have scanty value; but one need not read far to learn that the boy’s memory has been abundantly reinforced by the man’s study of his father’s Note-Books and other important memorials of the period. It cannot, then, be said that the book contains much that is at once new and important. The story of Hawthorne climbing the nut tree at Lenox produces, for example, a vivid sense of the fellowship between the father and his children; but the same sense has already been produced by the same anecdote in Mr. Julian Hawthorne’s Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife. There are such occasional traces of carelessness as the unhappy conversion of Bennoch into Bannoch in the name beneath a good man’s portrait, and the grave omission of an index. It is to be feared also that Mr. Hawthorne is careless in saying (page 52) that the manuscript of The Scarlet Letter was destroyed by James T. Fields’s printers. There is, on the contrary, excellent authority for the statement that when Hawthorne, who gave Mrs. Fields the manuscript of another novel, was asked what had become of The Scarlet Letter, he said, “Oh, I put that up the chimney, and now I wish I had n’t.” But these — in any larger view of the book — are trivial matters. Taking it for precisely what it is, — the embellished remembrances of the first fourteen years in the life of a great writer’s son, — it has its own distinct value, together with an individual and positive interest. It confirms for those who are familiar with existing records many delightful impressions of Hawthorne through an important period of his life. To others it will clearly bring these impressions for the first time. The lapses from good taste are infrequent, and the book as a whole is eminently readable. out all others. He displays a rarely human quality in recognizing the same weaknesses and strengths in the soldiers, high and low, of both armies. For all the inherence of this unusual temper, it may be doubted whether any one could have written just such a book twenty-five years ago. At that time it might have done incalculable good. Yet the day of its usefulness is by no means past. It is precisely through such utterances of a common feeling that the new South and North must come to understand each other better.

It needs no approaching centenary to give a quality of timeliness to General Gordon’s Reminiscences,² for it seems only yesterday that the illustrated papers were helping the country at large to realize how solemnly the state of Georgia mourned one of her foremost soldiers and legislators. If one’s knowledge of later American history had no deeper background than that which General Gordon’s own book provides, it would still be possible to understand his holding so secure a place in the affections of the South; for in his own portrait he cannot help drawing a lovable man. Relate him, however, — merely through a list of the great military events in which he bore a part, — to the history of the cause for which he fought, and the deeper significance of his life stands clearly forth. But it is less for any of the momentous facts which he records than for the temper of his record that his volume is exceptional. It has become the custom to ascribe every manifestation of a national spirit in a Confederate soldier to the Spanish war, and to detect even in the color of khaki a blending of blue and gray. The spirit of General Gordon’s Reminiscences bears the marks of a slower growth. It is not an acquired generosity toward a foe which his pages reveal, but something of sympathy and understanding which were a part of the man at the very time when the martial virtues might have been forgiven for blotting

It is not often that one who deserves so full and satisfactory a biography as The Life of Horace Binney ³ is left so long with the biography unwritten. Mr. Binney died in 1875, ninety-five years old. The story of his active life might have been written some years before that time. He had long held in Philadelphia the place, as it were, of an historic figure. His triumphs at the bar — notably in the defense of Stephen Girard’s will — had won him the highest distinction in his profession. He was not of the class which established for the “Philadelphia lawyer" that reputation for “smartness” which, in its accepted sense, was not wholly flattering. He represented rather the dignity, the scholarship, the high tradition of the legal calling. His Federalist dislike for Jefferson found its utterance in a declaration which also reveals a fine jealousy for the law: “ He has been the steady, undeviating, and but for his recent death I would say insidious enemy of my profession in its highest walks, the bench, the judiciary.” When the Federal party disintegrated, Horace Binney joined himself to no other, but, with a rare independence through a long period of keen partisanship, held himself free — like the Mugwump of a later day — to vote as he might choose. Sympathizing the more frequently with the Republican party, after its formation, he could yet, at the age of ninety - four, stand up against the unworthy candidates of the local “machine.” As his biographer well says: “The sight of an aged Federalist in a Republican stronghold, braving the chill of a wintry day to vote the Democratic ticket for lack of a better, was a striking lesson in non-partisanship.” In the last analysis is not such independence the peculiar attribute of the gentleman, — the man whose standards are carefully chosen and do not admit of compromise ? The portrait of Horace Binney which his grandson has drawn in this volume is preëminently the portrait of a gentleman. It is drawn with the reserve and sense of proportion which the subject demands. It shows him in the various departments of life, professional, domestic, religious, intellectual, patriotic, which the wellrounded men of the nineteenth century impartially adorned ; and the total impression is that of a type which our civilization should be loath to leave behind.

M. A. De W. H.