Henry Adams
by
[A. & C. Boni, $2.50]
ORIGINALLY intended as the introduction to a collected edition of Henry Adams’s Works, this book had to be stretched and padded to make it cover two hundred pages; and it certainly is not what the publishers’ ‘blurb’ announces it to be — ‘the most important biography of the year.’ In length and technique, it is something between a ‘psychograph of the Bradford type and a well-documented, comprehensive study. It devotes, for example, only a few paragraphs to Henry Adams ’s voyage with John La Large to the South Seas — a trip which he barely mentions in his Education and which needs amplification. James Truslow Adams is always a skilled craftsman with an instinct for the right selection of material, and he has in this volume touched briefly, not without illuminating phrases and penetrating analysis, on Henry Adams’s course as amateur diplomat, journalist, historian, teacher, and philosopher. He points out that what Henry Adams wanted most was power— ‘a career which would lead in a dignified way to anything sufficiently big for a fourth-generation Adams’ —and, secondly, ‘social consideration and distinction.'
James Truslow Adams is, of course, more than a mere recorder. He is a thinker, gifted with the ability to generalize from facts. Hence comes the importance of his picture of the shy, fastidious, introspective, temperamental genius, who was called by his friends a strange combination of porcupine and angel. Mr. Adams, the biographer, could not help producing a book discriminating, often clever, and sometimes wise. But all the truth has not yet been revealed about Henry Adams, either by himself or by this latest biography.
CLAUDE M. FUESS