i
In the short preface to his Eminent Victorians, Mr. Lytton Strachey speaks of the great biological tradition of the French, of “their incomparable éloges, compressing into a few shining pages the manifold existences of men.” And he speaks of biography as “the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing.” The tribute of a distinguished master of biographical literature was recalled to me as I read André Maurois’s Ariel, The Life of Shelley, so ably translated by Ella D’Arcy. Here are a comparatively few, but gloriously shining pages. This biography has burst upon us with an effect as surprising and luminous as Shelley himself. It is written on gauze and its transparency shows opaline colors. The picture it gives us is of Matthew Arnold’s “beautiful and ineffectual angel beating his wings in a luminous void”; but I should delete the word “ineffectual.” If Shelley was ineffectual, then the soul goes out of the world.
It needed a Frenchman, perhaps, to do the subject justice. Mr. Strachey, as Aldous Huxley has remarked, is congenitally incapable of penetrating the mystical mind. André Maurois was already known to some English and American readers by the humorous and profound novels studying an inarticulate English army officer. No one who read The Silences of Colonel Bramble can have forgotten its delicate portraiture. But such fiction was a pastime beside Ariel.
I could, of course, quote the praise of Arnold Bennett and other acute judges, but it seems to me a lame thing to do. Nor is there space to quote from Maurois’s book, and it hurts me not to be able to transcribe some things he has written. Any attempt to convey the quality of his book reduces me to despair; and yet I am used—perhaps too well used—to such attempts. Maurois is gleeful, tender, ironical; he recalls in his delicate but firm art Mr. Strachey more than anyone else, but he is more sympathetic, and so more just, than Strachey. This perhaps is because he has that side which Strachey, with his Voltaire-like intellect, quite lacks. Shelley’s pathetic youth, his three-cornered marriage, his elopement with Mary Godwin, his few life-long friendships, his strange contacts with Byron, the brief happiness in Italy and the ultimate, tragic release of the captive soul to its flight in immortality—all these are told with a sense of proportion and an effect unsurpassable. The incidental portrait of Byron is more clear than any—yes, any!—of the ponderous biographies that have saluted his centenary.
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Besides the large number of sketches and impressions of Woodrow Wilson embedded in various recent books, there have already been published several biographies; but The True Story of Woodrow Wilson, by David Lawrence, seems to me distinctly the best of these, and probably the best immediate life of Wilson we shall have. Mr. Lawrence sat under Mr. Wilson when Wilson was professor of jurisprudence and politics at Princeton; he was with him at the time of nomination for Governor of New Jersey; he knew intimately the dissension at Princeton over the Wilson policies as President of the University; and from the time of Mr. Wilson’s nomination for the Presidency of the United States, Mr. Lawrence saw him continuously and at close range. For the younger man had quickly become one of the most brilliant of the Washington correspondents. His daily despatches then, as now, appeared in newspapers throughout America. He was in Washington, covering the White House, during Mr. Wilson’s terms; went with him on his campaign tours; went with him through Europe and watched him at Versailles; and finally was with him on the tour on which Mr. Wilson suffered the physical collapse leading to his death. The result of this prolonged contact is a book in which nothing relevant is omitted or evaded. Mr. Lawrence begins with a striking chapter summarizing the paradoxical qualities of the war President—in some respects the most satisfactory portrait yet painted. He continues with the same impartiality and a frankness which no one else has ventured; and not the least valuable feature is the correspondent’s ability to throw light on certain public acts of Wilson which have heretofore gone unexplained.
One or two other volumes in which the political interest is predominant deserve mention while our minds are on recent history. Maurice Paleologue was the last French ambassador to the Russian Court, serving about two years, from 3 July 1914 to mid-1916. The three volumes of his An Ambassador’s Memoirs constitute the most interesting account we have had of the imperial decline, chiefly because M. Paleologue, with all the genius of French writing, pictures the slow downfall with a kind of terrible fidelity. The despairing vividness of this history is mitigated by many delightful asides on aspects of Russian character and psychology, art and life, written with an equal brilliance and a keen enjoyment.
Twelve Years at the German Imperial Court, by Count Robert Zedlitz-Trützschler, is by the former controller of the household of William II., then German Emperor. Its predominant interest is its gradually built up character portrait of the ex-Emperor in the days of his power. I say “gradually built up,” for the book consists simply of private memoranda made by Zedlitz-Trützschler through the years of his service. It seems that the unhappy Count felt keenly the inability to say what he thought or to express his real feelings with safety to anybody. At first, like every one else, he was fascinated by his royal and imperial master. As he says in his preface: “There is a tendency today to underrate the intellect of the Emperor very seriously. There can be no dispute that his personality was a dazzling one.... He could, whenever it seemed to him worth while, completely bewitch not only foreign princes and diplomats, but even sober men of business.” The spell waned because William lost interest. Zedlitz-Trützschler’s book is the soberest and in some respects the frankest book about William that I have seen. Its publication has put the author in hot water with his family and all his class.
Charles Hitchcock Sherrill’s The Purple or the Red, based on personal interviews with Mussolini of Italy, Horthy of Hungary, Primo de Riveira of Spain and other statesmen, as well as most of the surviving European monarchs, contains much interesting material about after-war Europe. It is ultra-conservative in its political attitude, but General Sherrill makes an effective case for his idea that the Crown, in European countries, has served as a rallying point for patriotism and by its place above factions has been a bulwark against revolution with bloodshed.
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Two very exceptional autobiographies are Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Memories and Adventures and Constantin Stanislavsky’s My Life in Art. Both are ample, lavishly illustrated volumes; and far apart as are the lives they record, I hesitate to say that either exceeds the other in charm.
The creator of Sherlock Holmes is a big, amiable man, a person of great simplicity of manner and almost naïve in his enjoyment of people, places and events. His book is inevitably one of a very wide popular appeal, the more so as Sir Arthur is entirely without conceit. In Memories and Adventures he tells of his education at Stoneyhurst, in Germany, and in Edinburgh, where he got his doctor’s degree. He relates his early medical experiences and tells of his first attempts at writing. A memorable voyage to West Africa as a ship’s surgeon, his earlier religious ideas and beliefs and the changes they underwent, and his marriage are all dealt with.
Then comes the story of his first real success as an author, made with the novel, A Study in Scarlet. He had resounding subsequent successes with Micah Clarke, The Sign of the Four, and The White Company. The creation of Sherlock Holmes was a great milestone in Conan Doyle’s life. This is without question the most famous character in English fiction. Visits to America and Egypt and political adventures are chronicled. There are reminiscences and anecdotes of Roosevelt, George Meredith, Kitchener, Lloyd George, Balfour, Mr. Asquith, Henry Irving, Kipling, Bernard Shaw, Barrie and many others, living and dead, sprinkled through these extremely readable chapters. The closing chapter is devoted to the author’s amazing experiences in psychical research; and it must be said for him that he writes more persuasively of his experiences and beliefs in this affair than anyone else has ever managed to do. Altogether Memories and Adventures will engross anyone who opens it.
Very different, with its own style and an accent of enthusiasm throughout, is Constantin Stanislavsky’s My Life in Art. This man has been the stage director of the Moscow Art Theater since its establishment in 1898; and although that theater is now known throughout the world, and is frequently hailed as the world’s foremost playhouse, Stanislavsky’s reputation outside Russia has naturally been confined to the circles of dramatic art. His autobiography depended for its American publication wholly on the intrinsic interest of what he had to tell. You may infer that that interest is considerable. It is.
I spoke of the book’s style. It is peculiar, individual; sincere and unskilled, awkward and yet masterful; admirable because so evidently a part of the author. Born in 1863, the son of a wealthy Russian merchant family and the grandson of a French actress, Stanislavsky as a boy showed stage talents in family theatricals; and though he later slaved over accounts in his father’s counting-house, his nights were nights of feverish absorption in the theater. His birth placed him in the thick of the social and intellectual life of Moscow, for he belonged to the class which has created the arts of Russia. At twenty-five he became director of the Society of Art and Literature, a group of young people with serious ideas about the stage and a great dissatisfaction with the current Russian theater. When Stanislavsky met Nemirovich-Danchenko, the Moscow Art Theater was founded.
The first half of My Life in Art is therefore chiefly personal, a rich slice of Russian life with plum-like impressions and reminiscences of Rubinstein, Tolstoy, Tommaso Salvini the elder and other great artists of that time. The second half deals with the Moscow Art Theater, in which Stanislavsky made for himself a reputation as one of Russia’s greatest actors, particularly in the rôles of Othello, Brutus, and Ivan the Terrible. This part of My Life in Art is crammed with material of interest and value not only to those who follow the theater but to all whose great interest is art. Chekhov, Tolstoy, Maeterlinck and others in person are delightfully mixed with interpretative experience in their plays and in the plays of Shakespeare, Molière, Pushkin and other immortals. The book closes with a description of the present work of the Moscow Art Theater, including the Soviet régime in Russia and the visit to America.
At last we have a biography of Clyde Fitch, achieved in that most satisfactory of ways, by means of his letters. Mr. Montrose J. Moses and Miss Virginia Gerson, who edited the memorial edition of Clyde Fitch’s plays, have been engaged for some time in collecting the Fitch letters and the result of their labor is now published in one volume. Clyde Fitch and His Letters reflects well a personality which people never forgot, since meeting him was, as some one said, like meeting a figure in fiction. Fitch had a genius for friendship. His letters were always unstudied, without pretension to literary style, and brimful of a strongly impressionist reaction to the place or the event. He dashed them off as the spirit prompted—on board ship, by an open window of a Continental hotel, on the terraces of his country house; notes of appreciation, notes of invitation, long, impulsive descriptions of European festivities (some processional in Spain or some picturesque account of Venetian gondoliering). They breathe, these letters, of his warm association with the novelist, Robert Herrick; they show a light-hearted friendship with Maude Adams and Kate Douglas Wiggin; they show interchanges of appreciation between Fitch and William Dean Howells. Again, the reader sees the evidence of the personal concern and interest Fitch showed in the actors and actresses engaged for his plays. From the incipient idea of a plot for a play to the play’s first night, the letters enable the reader to follow breathlessly the climb of Clyde Fitch to the position of America’s most successful playwright. But he remained a simple, unaffected sort of person.
One cannot say more, I suppose, than that from the day when Richard Mansfield asked him to write “Beau Brummell” to the day of Clyde Fitch’s death, when he had taken “The City” abroad for a final polishing which death prevented, Clyde Fitch and His Letters is full of the live rush of the man. A very sane and fundamentally enthusiastic attitude was his toward American life, and those who read the book will not miss that part of it.
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Of two books by women, one, Sunlight and Song, by Maria Jeritza, is the great singer’s autobiography; while Frances Parkinson Keyes’s Letters from a Senator’s Wife is autobiographical only incidentally.
Mme. Jeritza is not only the foremost feminine personality in grand opera in America today, but by her concert tours she has become known throughout the United States. Her Sunlight and Song is a book pretty certain to interest everyone who has heard her—or heard of her. It is written with directness, in a thoroughly popular vein, and is utterly free from affectations or pose. An Austrian by birth, she sang in Olmütz while in her teens, living on the hope of an engagement in Vienna. At length she came to the capital and waited her turn in the trying-out of voices. She was engaged for the municipal opera and afterward for the Court Opera House. Her rôles from operas by Richard Strauss and Puccini were rehearsed under the personal direction of the composers; she met Caruso and dozens of other musical celebrities; she sang before and met the Emperor; and in 1921 she came to America. One of the most interesting bits of her book concerns a rehearsal of “Tosca” at which she slipped and fell. She sang “Vissi d’arte” where she lay, exciting Puccini’s enthusiasm. He exclaimed that always he had needed something to make the aria stand out and command attention; and this did it! When it was announced that Jeritza was to sing in “Tosca” in New York, there was a noticeable wave of hostility from those who associated the rôle exclusively with Geraldine Farrar. It vanished after she had appeared.
Among the photographs with which Jeritza’s book is illustrated are many extremely beautiful pictures of the singer in her various rôles. The chapters on “How an Opera Singer Really Lives,” “Studying with Sembrich,” “Singing for the Phonograph,” and “Some Guest Performances” will especially repay students of the voice.
The book by Mrs. Keyes, wife of the United States Senator from New Hampshire, is in a class by itself. Letters from a Senator’s Wife consists entirely of actual letters written to old friends who were some distance away from Washington and who had a full feminine curiosity about life there. Taken as they stand, Mrs. Keyes’s letters form a pretty complete record of social and political life in the capital as seen from the inner official circle. Beginning with her first impressions of Washington, Mrs. Keyes goes on to describe the Harding inauguration, the burial of the Unknown Soldier, the arms conference, the agricultural conference in 1922 and the industrial conference in 1923; the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial; the presentation of a gram of radium to Madame Curie; the diplomatic and New Year’s receptions at the White House; the convention of women’s organizations at which Lady Astor was conspicuous; dinners, teas, an afternoon cruise as Mrs. Harding’s guest on the Mayflower and social affairs innumerable.
The result is a picture of Washington exactly as a woman in Mrs. Keyes’s place would be privileged to see it; women readers will have a sense of participating in the things described. It is, I should say, exclusively a woman’s book; but no one who appreciates the average woman’s enjoyment of social detail will underestimate what Mrs. Keyes has accomplished. But in addition to telling the reader what she would have to do, whom she would meet, and what functions she would attend if she were in the Washington circle, the book does really constitute an attractive record of current history in the making and as made. Women who read it can scarcely fail to become more intelligent than before.
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Fortunately Maurice Francis Egan, one of the most beloved of Americans, lived to complete for us his Recollections of a Happy Life. The author of Everybody’s St. Francis, Ten Years Near the German Frontier, Confessions of a Book-Lover and other volumes had a scroll of memories which began in Philadelphia in the 1850s and which included political and social Washington in the Civil War period. In Recollections of a Happy Life the New York of the Henry George era is touched in with delightful anecdotes of Richard Watson Gilder and the group that surrounded him; there is a crisp picture of Indiana where Dr. Egan was professor of English at Notre Dame; and the book fairly launches itself with a full record of life in Washington and of the author’s close association with Presidents McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson, under the last three of whom Dr. Egan held the post of Minister to Denmark. Scholar, poet, critic, and most winning of companions, Dr. Egan’s autobiography reflects a good deal of America in the past half-century as well as his own varied experiences here and abroad.
Of even more definitely literary interest is C. K. S. An Autobiography, by Clement K. Shorter. An indefatigable book collector whose library is rich in first editions, original manuscripts, and autograph letters, Mr. Shorter is probably best known as an editor and dramatic critic. He has had thirty years in each rôle, and still writes weekly causeries which carry, on occasion, a provocative sting. George Meredith, Stevenson, Andrew Lang, Thomas Hardy, and Gissing each are the subject of a chapter founded primarily on personal impressions of the man.
Such personal impressions, mixed with estimates of the writer’s work, form the substance of The Literary Spotlight, edited, with an introduction, by John Farrar, editor of The Bookman. These anonymous literary portraits have been aptly called “Mirrors of Literature.” The anonymity has made possible a great deal of frankness, humor, and penetration worth having, and Mr. Farrar has added bibliographies, biographical facts and such data as make the volume handy for reference. Edna Ferber, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Floyd Dell, Mary Johnston, Edwin Arlington Robinson and others of high contemporary interest are presented.
The Truth at Last!
Robert Louis Stevenson: A Critical Biography, by John A. Steuart. Two volumes. This new biography, by an English writer, will throw much new light on Stevenson. From unpublished documents in Edinburgh and elsewhere, and from several people who knew Stevenson, Mr. Steuart has obtained facts never before printed—so the portrait he draws is somewhat different from those which have already appeared. This biography will be of much interest to the many admirers of Stevenson’s work who are not afraid to see the man as he actually was in his strength and his weakness, his gaiety and his gloom. Photogravure frontispieces.
The Truth at Last, by Charles Hawtrey, edited, with an introduction, by W. Somerset Maugham. The amusing, frankly self-revealing memoirs of a famous English actor, well remembered in America for his tours in “A Message from Mars” and “The Man from Blankley’s.” Illustrated.
Forty Years in Washington, by David S. Barry. Reminiscences of Presidents, Cabinet members, Senators and Congressmen, by the Sergeant-at-Arms of the Senate, who was Washington correspondent of The Sun, New York, when Charles A. Dana was its editor. Illustrated.
The Life of Olive Schreiner, by S. C. Cronwright-Schreiner. The biography, by her husband, of the brilliant author of Dreams and The Story of an African Farm, a woman of extraordinary personality who was not only a writer of genius but a pioneer advocate of woman’s freedom. Illustrated.
Remembered Yesterdays, by Robert Underwood Johnson. Mr. Johnson’s reminiscences are unusually entertaining and novel, and their diversity is exceptional. As a stripling he went to New York to join the staff of Scribner’s Monthly, afterward known as the Century Magazine, with which he was connected for forty years, as associate editor and as editor-in-chief. Highly interesting are his touch-and-go reminiscences of famous Americans and foreign visitors, his anecdotes of travel abroad, and the account of his service as Ambassador to Italy in Wilson’s second term. The portraits of American men of letters from the Civil War to the present are vividly drawn. No recent volume of American recollections keeps the reader in a more tolerant and gracious atmosphere. Illustrated.
Three Generations, by Maud Howe Elliott. A charming book of reminiscences by the daughter of Julia Ward Howe, covering the life and events of the past six decades. After her marriage to John Elliott, the artist, she lived for long periods in Rome, and to her salon came hosts of travelers and world-famous celebrities. It is a volume of memoirs of international interest and a fascinating account of the most interesting people in the world, in literature, art, drama, diplomacy and society, covering sixty years of “glorious life.” Illustrated.
Poincaré: The Man of the Ruhr, by Sisley Huddleston. Raymond Poincaré, twice French Prime Minister and wartime President of the French Republic, has been the storm center of Continental politics in connection with the French occupation of the Ruhr. The author gives a vivid account of his career, his strength and his limitations, brightly written, with a considerable spice of wit. Frontispiece.
A Woman’s Quest: The Life of Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D., edited by Agnes C. Vietor. The story of a woman whose courage and perseverance probably did more than was accomplished by any other single person to open the medical profession to women. Dr. Zakrzewska was born in 1829, of Polish-German ancestry, and came to America when she was twenty-four. She had already, in Germany, made her way against bitter and unceasing opposition; in America she was to find herself without any standing at all. After a period of struggle she met Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell who gave her encouragement and in the face of every imaginable difficulty, Marie Zakrzewska studied medicine at Cleveland. She was refused admission at Harvard, but met Emerson, William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Parker and other noted men and women. Eventually she founded the New England Hospital for Women and Children. Her autobiography is of profound interest and considerable historical importance.
The Life of Anne Boleyn, by Philip W. Sergeant. A full and carefully documented biography of the mother of Queen Elizabeth, written with charm of style and sincerity, and constituting a vindication of Anne. Its view of her is therefore exactly antithetical to the one advanced in the first essay in Post Mortem: Essays, Historical and Medical, by C. MacLaurin.
Robert Owen, by Frank Podmore. The incomparable story of the shop boy who became a rich and famous inventor of machines that revolutionized the cotton mills, a mill owner, and a business builder—but whose eager spirit caused him to found an Utopia in America, to work for labor betterment and world peace, to question religious creeds and to become a spiritualist. Few lives show so well the industrial and intellectual transformation that went on in the nineteenth century.
The Truth About My Father, by Count Leon L. Tolstoi. By the one son who sympathized with his father to the extent of accepting his doctrines and endeavoring to work them out. The author says that his mother was the source of his father’s greatest happiness and the real author of his greatness; in old age, a will, secretly made under the influence of Tchertkoff, came between the parents (more as a matter of deceit than of the alienation of property).
The Manuscript of St. Helena, translated by Willard Parker. This is the document mentioned in Napoleon’s will. He disavowed it as his work. It must, however, have been inspired if not dictated by him. It reads like a private diary, telling of Napoleon’s life and achievements in a terse, clear style and showing him as he saw and judged himself. The document was published in French in 1817 but has never before been translated into English.
The Letters of Madame, 1661-1708, by Elizabeth-Charlotte of Bavaria, edited and translated by Gertrude Scott Stevenson. “Madame” was the usual way of referring to Elizabeth-Charlotte, Princess Palatine, a sturdy, outspoken German girl who, at nineteen, was married to Philippe, Duc d’Orleans, only brother of Louis XIV. of France. Philippe was thirty-one, effeminate, extravagant, and debauched; suspected of complicity in the supposed poisoning of his first wife. “Madame” was the most prodigious letter writer of an age fond of correspondence, a keen observer, and much franker than most others dared to be. Her letters are not only a great source for historians but breath-taking reading in themselves. The picture of the court of Louis XIV. is unmatched except in the pages of Saint-Simon.
David Wilmot, Free Soiler, by Charles Buxton Going. At last we have an adequate account of the author of the Wilmot Proviso, offered in 1846 and barring slavery in territory acquired from Mexico—the chief political issue from then to the Civil War, and the chief instrument in creating the Republican Party. Lincoln wrote that he had voted for the Wilmot Proviso more than forty times while he was in Congress, and on becoming President he offered Wilmot a place in his Cabinet.
Servant of Sahibs, by Ghulam Rassul Galwan, with an introduction by Sir Francis Younghusband. Written in quaint English by a man who accompanied Younghusband and who has worked for many years in the service of English and American travelers in the Himalayas, Central Asia, and Tibet. An adventurous and novel book which will delight everyone who cares for Kipling’s fiction or for tales of India.
Nell Gwyn, by Lewis Melville. Her career from orange girl to King’s favorite; her youthful troubles, her lovers, her stage success, her rivals in royal favor, her vast popularity and later years in Pall Mall. Illustrated in color.