The Life of General William Booth, the Founder of the Salvation Army
by Harold Begbie. New York: The Macmillian Co. 1920. Two vols. 8vo, xvi+446 and xvi+465 pp. With Illustrations. $10.50.
GENERAL BOOTH’S place in the history of modern England, and, indeed, in the Christianity of the on-going centuries, is so well assured that little or nothing can be done by way of literary retrospect to make or unmake it. But it is, nevertheless, a preëminently happy choice which fastens on Mr. Harold Begbie as the official biographer.
Mr. Begbie has been for years a raconteur of ultra-evangelical religious episode, and an apologist for the theory of supernatural and specially providential intrusions into human experience. He comes to this major literary task, therefore, with a predisposition in favor of the distinctly Salvationist faith and practice which makes him a sympathetic, if not always critical, appraiser of General Booth’s character.
He very wisely has not allowed himself to be drawn into the sloughs of controversy which bound both sides of this direct narrative of revivalism. General Booth’s interpretation of Christianity will always invite liberal criticism, and his ‘orgiastic’ (sic — this would be the correct psychological tag!) methods from the very first offended those chronically religious persons in the churches whose main spiritual passion is to have all things done decently and in order.
Mr. Begbie undertakes no apologia. He takes a leaf out of Mr. Wells’s method and simply ‘narrates.’ This is entirely as it should be; for the issues involved between the superheated dogmas of salvationism and the variously chilled hypotheses of liberalism cover areas of thought and conduct so wide, and as yet so ill-defined, that. they lie outside the scope of any single biography, particularly a life filled with such dramatic interest.
Moreover, Mr. Begbie has resisted with great fortitude the seduction waiting for him — the temptation to write a history of the Salvation Army rather than the inner history of a great soul. For all its inevitable prominence, the Army remains in these volumes as an outward episode in what is essentially a record of the divine unrest in the soul of a man. The William Booth of these pages is not a new type of ecclesiastic, but essentially a prophet . It is the simple narrative of a ‘God-intoxicated’ life, which early accepted its ‘woe’ to save men’s souls; which came to its own in Whitechapel amid ‘ the sorrows barricaded evermore within the walls of cities,’ and which to the end bore the burden of all maimed, battered, defeated, and outcast lives. The reader is left to ponder on the perpetual irony of things, whereby churches have no room for such imperious and prophetic natures as that of the General. A great human affection is the centre of personal interest. The lights and shadows of religious melancholy and rapture, of self-distrust and ambition, of loneliness and catholicity, play fitfully across these pages to the end.
Nineteenth-century England lies all to one side, simply because for years it treated William Booth as a pariah. If there is studied indifference to all its art, letters, science, polities, and philanthropy, this is because none of them were fired with the impatient passion which burned in and finally burned out the life of this strange man. History is made and unmade in these pages round this one central figure. Again, this is as it should be, for there was there the touch of that true spiritual imperialism which is the genius of all great religion in action. To the cosmopolitan mind the perspective must seem foreshortened and false. To those who value what William James calls records of ‘acute religion’ these volumes are a mine of thought-provoking suggestion.
A concluding chapter, in which Darwin and all his works are anathematized as the cause of the war, and Booth’s salvationism proffered as the healing for the nations, adds nothing to the value of the book. W. L. S.