Significant Books: American Biography

THERE is nothing more significant in a collection of new American biographies than that their subjects should present all the diversity one finds in the occupants of an American railroad car. It would be a rare vehicle — unless indeed a football game were its destination —which should contain at one time poets, fighters, diplomatists, statesmen, reformers, and historians. But, wherever we meet our fellow citizens, we must even take them as they come. Here let us begin with the poets.

The poet who after Poe may be taken as the most eloquent and characteristic voice of the South surely deserves what he has now received, — a biography ¹ worthy to stand amongst the best of the American Men of Letters Series. A cardinal distinction of the book is closely related to the distinction of its theme. Lanier came to his appointed place by steps memorably different from those of practically every other conspicuous writer in America. Mr. Mims has therefore a highly individual story to tell. A boyhood in the South on the verge of war, a young manhood in the camps and on the battlefields of the Confederacy, a subsequent period of finding himself, artistically, as a fluteplayer in a Baltimore orchestra, — here was a unique progression to the place of poet and interpreter of literature to the young men of Johns Hopkins University. It was a progression, however, which accounts for two of the most interesting points which the biographer emphasizes in his estimate of Lanier’s life and work: the part which music played in his equipment and achievement, and his constant utterance of a national as opposed to a sectional spirit. In the pages setting forth these two aspects of Lanier, as in the no less important passages dealing with Lanier’s feeling for music, not only as a source of pleasure but as a civilizing influence of the first importance, Mr. Mims has shown himself possessed of no mean powers of appreciation and interpretation. The passages of the broadest significance in all the book are perhaps those which reveal Lanier as one of the earliest representatives of the spirit of the New South. To hold the attitude he held thirty years ago toward the problems of a reunited country was to encounter more of loneliness than such an attitude would involve to-day. His place was among the pioneers of the new spirit. Through the chaos and confusion of the years immediately following the war, it must indeed have required something of the poet’s vision to foresee a new and tolerable cosmos. “ He was national,” says Mr. Mims, “rather than provincial,open-minded not prejudiced, modern and not mediæval.”

That Lanier had the poet’s vision it is of course a part of Mr. Mims’s task to point out. Here again he shows himself a biographer worthy of his theme. There was a time when the Southern critic was hardly expected to write with moderation about the Southern author. Our national habit of labeling

seems to have persisted longer in the Southern states than in any other region, with the possible exception of Indiana. But there is in Mr. Mims’s estimate of Lanier as a poet the same substitution of national for provincial standards which characterized Lanier himself. The limitations of his poetry are as clearly recognized as its peculiar merits. The prose is similarly treated, with a frank recognition of the circumstances which withheld Lanier from taking rank with critics of the first order. It is a palpable advance in biographical writing, a palpable evidence of widening horizons, that biographers are learning not to claim too much for their subjects. Have not the readers of the Atlantic been reminded that human nature abhors a paragon ? Mr. Mims allies himself with the best modern biographical writers in trying honestly, and with apparent success, to tell what Lanier’s work was, not merely what it might or should have been. The dignity and clearness both of the narrative and of the critical portions of the book are in pleasant harmony with its spirit. The volume is a welcome and valuable addition to American biography.

If not in the columns of the Atlantic, where else, by the way, should it be asked why the Letters of Lanier, edited by Mr. W. R. Thayer and published in the Atlantic in 1894, are not included in the list of Northern recognitions of Lanier and other Southern writers ?

In Mr. Greenslet’s life of Lowell² we have the first considerable attempt by one of the generation to which Lowell must be chiefly an inheritance to reconstruct, explain, and estimate his personality and achievement. The book may be taken as a new-century view of the man who through the first Biglow Papers, the Fable for Critics, and The Vision of Sir Launfal, had, before the middle of the old century, established the name which has endured. How, then, does this production of the new period relate itself to the old, from which the divergence has been so rapid ?

If there is any more convenient and comprehensive way of dealing with the qualities of a book than by regarding first its substance and then its manner, that way has not yet come into common use. Let us look first at the substance of Mr. Greenslet’s Lowell. What is revealed is a thorough and sympathetic knowledge of its theme, an admirable grasp and mastery of the material and conditions with which it must deal. An external evidence of this mastery is the arrangement of the book. A true sense of proportion and values is shown in the mere divisions of the subject. The orderly grouping bespeaks an orderly mind and prepares one for the just weighing of critical considerations, the clear analysis of purpose and methods, by which the volume is really distinguished.

Though excellent criticism is to be found throughout the more strictly biographical portions of the book, one looks more narrowly for it in the concluding pages, devoted to Lowell’s Poetry and Lowell’s Prose. The limits of space forbid even a summary of the valid conclusions, the genuine appreciations both of shortcomings and of surpassing merits, with which these critical pages abound. A critic of the older generation might have hesitated to point so frankly at some of the weaknesses in Lowell’s poetic work, at some of his limitations as a writer of enduring prose. But the weaknesses and the limitations are there, and it is well to have them indicated by one who at the same time recognizes so quickly the qualities in Lowell’s work which have overtopped and, happily for most readers, obscured them. For the substance of the book, its structural plan, its unostentatious and effective use of new and illustrative material, for the abundance of clear and true thinking with which its outlines are filled, — for these things there are few terms of praise which would be excessive.

Regarding the manner of the book, one would be glad to make similar statements. It is hard to understand why one with so just a critical view of the whole body of another man’s work did not subject a single book of his own to a stricter discipline. Mr. Greenslet complains of Lowell’s “gargoyles of phrase,” and “the prodigious sesquipedalian . . . too obviously dragged in by its inky heels.” The biographer’s own offenses in this kind frequently color the warp and woof of his writing, and make it seem calculated to promote the sale of dictionaries. These catholic volumes hold many good words — albeit sometimes designated obsolete — which the writer for modern readers may not use too casually. Such words are revenants and katharsis, anglicized, and glamourie, velleity, caducity, cantillating, and florilegium. There are adjectives coined from proper names, in which a cautious indulgence may be permitted. But the multiplying of words like Popian and Lambish is perilous. The Boston Frog Pond surely has not a name so unfit for the ears of Mrs. Boffin that it must be called “Boston’s far-famed Batrachian Pool.” If space forbade to enumerate merits, it must hold the hand from copying specimen phrases and sentences which, like the single terms just cited, and like Lowell’s own enormities, are “too obviously dragged in” by “inky heels.”

It would be the height of unfairness to leave the impression that Mr. Greenslet’s writing is made up entirely of “gargoyles” and “sesquipedalians.” There are many genuine felicities of phrase, many accurate interpretations in words of acute perceptions in thought. There is a manifest danger that some of the merits of substance may be hidden by the tricks of manner. The genuine merits are so many and so positive that it would be the greatest of pities for the apprehensive reader too quickly to take alarm and lose the benefits of Mr. Greenslet’s searching study of Lowell the man and the writer.

When Mrs. Taylor and Mr. Scudder brought out, twenty-one years ago, their Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor, there must have been a considerable residuum of biographical material. It is apparently to this that Mrs. Taylor has now turned, for the substance of her book ³ gives no evidence of recent accumulation. One must admit that much of the volume, especially in its earlier portions, belongs to the class of intimate family reminiscence printed rather for private than for public circulation. The pleasant unAnglo-Saxon naïveté which makes this offering to the general reader, and perpetuates off-hand verses and personal episodes, quite disarms unfriendly comment. On the contrary, the reader may well be grateful for the glimpses of the New York group of writers with whom Taylor was affiliated, for the light that is thrown upon the strange American simplicity of an earlier generation in its reception of a lecturer with Taylor’s reputation, and for the record of his important part in holding the friendship of Russia for the Union cause in the Civil War. One carries away from the book also a definite notion of the German influences which caused the name of Taylor to be so honorably associated with that of Goethe. If the volume does not take its place with biographies of commanding importance, at least it will do its part in preserving the memory of a significant name and personality.

From the poets to names which owe their continuance to a poet’s work the transition is obvious. The significance of the two new biographies dealing respectively with Myles Standish⁴ and with Paul Revere⁵ is negative rather than positive. Here are two men whose present existence in the consciousness of the world is due in largest measure to Longfellow. Their portraits in prose are so drawn as to show that many of the familiar poetic outlines are mythical. The authors of the two books have been at considerable pains to search and select from the mass of contemporary record more or less directly connected with the names of Standish and Revere. Incidentally Mr. Jenks has produced what is virtually a brief history of the beginnings of the Plymouth Colony. Both have done their work with care and skill. But when all is said, the negative significance of the books lies in the fact that the familiar, perhaps partially distorted, figures of Myles Standish and Paul Revere as Longfellow depicted them are the enduring figures. The curious may wish to know what their outlines should have been; the many really prefer to have them retain the accepted shapes.

A volume which relates itself readily with the reminiscences of Bayard Taylor, with his foreign marriage and diplomatic service, is the new collection of letters ⁶ by a Diplomat’s Wife, Madame Waddington. More than twenty years ago Lord Dufferin is reported to have called the attention of one of the most communicative of London journalists to the extent to which the diplomatic corps of Europe had been Americanized by marriages with our country women. Since Madame Waddington’s marriage the tendency has increased rather than diminished. This second volume of her letters is a fresh illustration of the life which an American woman who makes the best of foreign marriages may under favoring circumstances find herself leading. It was not strictly as a diplomat’s wife that Madame Waddington wrote the letters forming the present collection. The first visit to Italy with which it deals occurred in 1880, immediately after M. Waddington’s resignation from the premiership of France, and before his appointment to the London embassy; the second visit was twenty-four years later, ten years after her husband’s death. Her own early residence in Rome fitted her peculiarly to enjoy the opportunities offered to the wife of so distinguished a husband. The letters reveal an honest enjoyment of social pleasures much more characteristic of the New York of Madame Waddington’s origin than — shall we say ? — of New England. This enjoyment is in a measure contagious, though one to whom Italian society and affairs are unfamiliar must be more nearly immune than other readers whose roads have led to Rome. For readers of whatever experience the letters are at their best when they have to do with the two latest occupants of the Quirinal, their queens, and their three contemporaries in the Vatican.

From Roman courts we turn to scenes and persons essentially American. Fresh contributions to the political history of the first half of the nineteenth century are The True Henry Clay,⁷ by Joseph M. Rogers, and The Life of Thomas Hart Benton,⁸ by William M. Meigs. The writers of “true” biographies lay themselves open to objections similar to those that certain early Unitarians urged against the term “liberal Christian,” by which some of their brethren designated their sect. There was in the one case an implied aspersion upon all other Christians, as there is in the other upon the whole body of biographers who omit to label their work “true.” If the Clay is true, must the Benton, lacking the label, be untrue? Both books recall the most important persons and conditions contemporary with Clay and Benton; yet neither seems to fulfill an imperative demand. It is more particularly the virtue of the Life of Benton that its author handles with a firm historical grasp the national events and tendencies with which Benton’s activities were associated. The man is shown behind and through these matters more than they are employed as a background for his life. In a word, the biographical appeal of the book does not quite bear the accepted relation to the historical.

Within a year from the appearance of these volumes, the one dealing with the victim of narrow escapes from the presidency, the other with the author of the Thirty Years’ View, a life of Blaine ⁹ is given to the public. The correspondences and contrasts in the three careers, two entirely preceding the Civil War, one entirely following it, would make a fruitful study in comparisons.

There could hardly be a more difficult task in the domain of American biography than, at this time, to write a life of Blaine. Mr. Stanwood has fully realized what he was undertaking. Let him speak for himself: “When one has to deal with a personage over whom controversy has raged as it did over Blaine, almost every man’s view will be distorted. His adherents exaggerated his virtues and powers no less than those who take another view of his character magnify every fault, and even discover some faults that others cannot perceive. Death does not close the controversies regarding such a man. Nevertheless, the material facts upon which a sure judgment, may be based are more abundant and accessible as soon as the life has ended than they are afterward; and consequently a truer estimate of the man, apart from his service and achievement, may then be made by one who is able to divest himself of partisanship, than at any subsequent period. It would be uncandid on the part of the present writer were he to pretend that he possesses the impartiality and the passionless judgment that qualify him to make the final estimate of this man and of his career. Such bias as a life-long friendship, sometimes amounting to intimacy, necessarily gives, must be frankly admitted.” Again, in approaching the episode of the Mulligan Letters, the author acknowledges without hesitation that any summary of the points at issue “ is sure to be unsatisfactory to every man who has engaged in the controversy.”

It is only fair, then, to consider such a book upon the terms it proposes for itself. And it must be said that, even if Mr. Stanwood’s friendliness toward his theme carries him occasionally near to the limits of special pleading, he has in the large performed his task with marked success and skill. Let us have done at once with perhaps the most conspicuous instance of a personal bias. This occurs in the treatment of the unfortunate correspondence with Fisher, especially the communication ending, “burn this letter.” Mr. Stanwood says: “His sending a draft letter and his request that the communication be destroyed is not inconsistent with absolute innocence of wrongdoing, and can therefore not be used even as cumulative proof that he was guilty of wrong-doing.” Admitting the validity of the first clause of this sentence, — a sentence framed with evident care, — does not the second part go farther than impartiality can follow ? The instance is an exception; the rule of the book is that of a fairness so manifest as at times to seem over-scrupulous.

Still another general consideration is whether the writer of a volume for the new American Statesmen Series is under the obligation of paying to the public life of his subject an attention far in excess of that which his private career and attributes receive. The brief final chapter, “The Man and the Statesman,” gives clear enough evidence that Mr. Stanwood has grasped and appreciated the personal characteristics of the man. Were it otherwise, there would be less regret that the “magnetism” which it is hard to dissociate from the name of Blaine does not make itself more constantly felt throughout the book. There are frequent references to its existence, but the quality has not quite woven itself into the fibre of the narrative.

Of Blaine’s public life, the record is most admirable and complete. The things he stood for, and the way in which he stood for them, are presented with a sure mastery of the matters in hand. The writer’s abundant knowledge of the political history of the period, and of that which preceded and determined it, is manifest at every turn. One result of this thorough research and effective presentation is, incidentally, that the book is much more than the record of any one man’s life.

For the bearing of the book upon present politics and policies, a few passages stand out with special distinctness. One of these discriminates between the party leader and the boss. Blaine appears as the former. The latter is a more recognizable contemporary type. Another passage of special present interest describes the beginnings of Blaine’s Pan-American policy and the related tendency of the United States to take its place amongst the “world-powers.” It requires no searching vision to note that the very forces which in recent years have most sturdily opposed “ imperialism ” are those which twenty and thirty years ago arrayed themselves most resolutely against Blaine and his policies.

In spite of the fact that the total portrait emphasizes the statesman more than the man, a final impression which one carries away from the book perhaps more definitely than any other is quite human in its quality. This is an impression of the sadness of the story, the pathos of a career which almost formed a habit of stopping short of its highest possibilities. If Blaine had been a smaller man, the pathos of this aspect of his life would have been materially less. It is just because his capabilities were so far beyond the common that one’s sympathy is touched as deeply as it is. And just because one feels this pathos with a certain poignancy, one is led at the end to reflect that the man himself must have been seen with some clearness through the windows of Mr. Stanwood’s biographical edifice in order to make so direct and personal an appeal.

If the part is to be taken for the whole, this Part of a Man’s Life,¹⁰ by Colonel Higginson, suggests a whole of remarkable variety. It is yet another collection of the author’s reminiscences, and its range of topics sweeps through Transcendentalism, Antislavery, and the Lyceum Lecture system, to Butterflies and Books Unread. It is when the recollections concern themselves more with specific subjects than with general conditions that they make their strongest impression. There are, for example, few survivors of the Lyceum system — survivors from the platforms, not the audiences — who could tell the new generation just what the system was, and probably none who could tell it so well as Colonel Higginson. Again, the chapter “Intensely Human,” dealing hopefully with the past and present problems of the liberated negro, has all the value of shrewd, if naturally partial, observation at first hand. In sheer biographical interest, not autobiographic, the chapter describing Una Hawthorne is of paramount value. From no other single source can the reader gain so definite a notion of what this first-born child of the Hawthornes really “came to.” There are letters of her own, bespeaking uncommon gifts of comprehension and expression, and—like the letters, printed for the first time — there is a brief sketch of Una Hawthorne by her frankly bewildered father. “ It is of itself deeply interesting,” as Colonel Higginson, without the least overstatement, re marks of this sketch, “even apart from its subject, as showing the minute personal observation which its author habitually applied to the few human types with which he came very closely in contact. Nothing else, as it seems to me, gives such a glimpse from original sources of the manner in which this shy and reticent man pursued his observations.”

If there are portions of the book less significant than those which have been mentioned, the balance is measurably restored by the portraits and facsimile letters with which the volume is richly equipped. The letters have to be read in the more or less legible handwritings in which Colonel Higginson received them. There are peculiar difficulties in the four pages of manuscript from Edward FitzGerald ; but the letter is worth deciphering, especially for its comment on the superiority of “ American Reviews of English Books” over “ English of English.” One word of special distinctness in the letter is intoxicated; and this, in Colonel Higginson’s quotation of the sentence containing it, is rendered astonished. It may be hoped and believed that this was a slip rather than an application of Kipling’s “Mellin’s Food” recipe. The handwriting of Froude is easier of interpretation. But, for the benefit of readers who run too rapidly to decipher manuscript, it is well worth while to reproduce in this place his remarkable words about Carlyle and the Reminiscences: “You will not misunderstand me when I say that I am not sorry myself that the rush of unmeaning adulation which burst out at his death was checked by the Reminiscences, for which I am responsible. That book is an exact picture of him, and when men begin to think seriously what he was, and what he did for the world, they will feel forever grateful that they have a genuine picture of him as authentic as it is beautiful. Nothing could have disgusted him more than a general agreement of England and America that he had been a great man and that he must have a statue, etc., while the lessons which he taught are repudiated or forgotten. A little before his death he said to me, ‘the world says now that I am this and that, and proposes to admire me, but they do nothing which I have told them, and they do not believe what I say.’ A statue will be raised to Carlyle bye and bye — many statues — but it will be when people are in a wiser state of mind and have learnt that he saw deeper into the spiritual and moral conditions of the modern world than any one of the false prophets whom they take as their practical guides.

“He was an extraordinary man, — extraordinary in his intellect and peculiar in his character. I should be false to him and false to my duty if I were to think of him as a painted idol, for the mob to put in their temples like their Christs and Virgins, while the ‘keeping the commandments’ they think as little of, with one as the other.”

May one more passage, of special interest to American readers, be quoted ? “I have come,” says Froude, “reluctantly to realize that the future of the AngloSaxon race is with you and not with us. We cannot assimilate our colonies, and without them we can now be nothing but a considerable commercial State. As an Imperial Power, our end is formidably near.”

The deeds of Colonel Higginson and the words of William Lloyd Garrison had their intimate relations. It was a happy thought to mark the centennial of the birth of Garrison by publishing the little volume¹¹ which brings the reformer vividly to life again. Nearly half of the slender bulk of the book is devoted to Garrison’s words in prose and verse upon the various topics of reform to which his life was given. The second portion contains a biographical sketch prepared by two of the sons whose filial service it has already been to issue the four-volume life of their father which is the chief repository of facts related to the antislavery movement. With what Garrison said and with what he did, admirably summarized, the reader is now provided with something worthy of the name of “ A Reformer’s Handbook.” A remarkable element of its interest is the applicability of many of the sayings to present conditions Garrison’s famous declaration, “I will be heard,” may thus, by the renewal of his message, be needed in our own day and generation. The message is still worth hearing and heeding.

It is not the least distinction of the latest life of Prescott¹²—a book demanded rather by the exigencies of a series than by absolute necessity — that it illustrates both the disadvantages and the advantages of committing a biographical subject to a writer whose sympathy with its background is inevitably limited. Mr. Peck on his fifth page declares that Mr. Barrett Wendell’s “critical bias is wholly in favor of New England,” and surrounds the statement with many pages which at least suggest that his own bias is in other directions. In the opening chapter of generalities the differentiation of early New England from the Middle and Southern states is drawn with exactness at many points, but at others with that partial truth which must characterize one who does not know all three of the regions under consideration. Certainly the next chapter, describing the early influences surrounding Prescott, gives quite a different impression of the intellectual impulses of New England in the years before its “Augustan age,” the years of Prescott’s boyhood. A typical illustration of the author’s attitude toward what may be called the local aspects of his theme occurs later in the volume. In describing Prescott’s English visit, the author says: “He chatted often with the Duke of Wellington, and described him in a comparison which makes one smile because it is so Yankee-like and Bostonese.” The comparison which “makes one smile” is Prescott’s allusion to the Duke as “a striking figure reminding me a good deal of Colonel Perkins in his general air.” Now if a New Yorker of the present day should write in a familiar letter that an English ecclesiastic he had just met reminded him of Bishop Potter, the analogy would be complete: the recipient of the letter would see precisely what the writer meant. And the Bostonian who sixty years hence should smile at the comparison would betray something of the provinciality of which even a metropolitan is occasionally guilty.

But the disadvantages besetting what may be called an outside treatment of a New England theme are offset by distinct advantages. When Mr. Peck takes up such specific subjects as Prescott’s personality and historical work, — the really important subjects of his book, — he handles them well. He pictures effectively the gayety of nature which really did distinguish Prescott from most of his associates. The heroic conduct of Prescott’s life stands out with a fresh brightness from the rather breezy treatment of his temperament. Though giving him a higher rank amongst American historians than that to which many critics of historical writing would agree, Mr. Peck argues his case with authority and skill. The evidences of first-hand, independent judgment are many. The author has weighed the statements of those who show that Prescott’s authorities were untrustworthy, and yet persuades the reader, as he has persuaded himself, that Prescott put them to a use which justified all his travail of research and composition. The upshot of the matter is that if this were the only existing life of Prescott it would leave much to be desired; taken in connection with the lives by Ticknor and Mr. Rollo Ogden it will serve a genuinely useful purpose.

Having looked at the latest life of one of our first historians, it remains but to consider the first biography, brief though it be, of John Fiske. This new accession to the Beacon Biographies,¹³ though a little slenderer than its fellows in the series, carries within its covers much that will be welcome to the multitude of Fiske’s readers. The inevitable limits of space have rendered it rather a summary than a comprehensive view of the man’s life and labors; and, because the theme was a man of letters rather than affairs, the qualities of an extended essay are more conspicuous than those of a biographical narrative. This is not to say that the essential facts of John Fiske’s life are slighted; they are effectively recorded. But the true achievement of the little book lies in its estimate of John Fiske’s historical and philosophical work. The fact that Fiske was a popularizer of science and history rather than an investigator is frankly accepted, and receives the full justification it deserved. The merely literary skill to which his work owed much of its vogue is analyzed by one who gives frequent evidences that he himself not only appreciates, but possesses, the genuine literary quality. There are, moreover, convincing tokens that Mr. Perry had a personal knowledge of John Fiske quite intimate enough to impart authority to all the personal comment and reminiscence. Besides this, one feels in the spirit and outlook which form the background of the little book the peculiar qualifications of Mr. Perry for undertaking what he has performed so well. The authoritative life of Fiske, announced so long ago and still awaited, will of course contain a wealth of original material to which there is no indication that Mr. Perry has had access. But it remains to be seen whether the full-length portrait in oils will yield a truer interpretation of the value and significance of what Fiske was and did than that which this sketch in crayon affords in advance.