i

THE four lines, and, indeed, the twelve remaining lines of this one of Robert Browning’s shorter poems illustrate very well the man’s superlative faculty of drama. With a little of our Edwin Arlington Robinson, he mixed a little of our Eugene O’Neill; and, on occasion, expressed himself with point and passion. Such was his simplicity that he appeared (it is now laughable to remember) rather especially unintelligible. Not far distant yet are the days when we banded together to understand him. But the number of Browning Clubs now surviving must be very few. How curious that we never thought to try to understand the man himself! How queer that we didn’t concentrate, as he would have concentrated in a similar instance, upon the thirteen years that unlock his life; but we didn’t. We generalised about him concerning whom, of all men of his day, it was least safe to generalise. It has remained for Frances M. Sim in her Robert Browning, The Poet and the Man: 1833-1846 to do the thing that has so needed doing. She has very wisely avoided the form of the full biography and equally the form, which would be sterile in this instance, of a full-length critique. Her book is at once a freely-handled and intensive study of the years that lay between the publication of Browning’s first poem, “Pauline,” and his marriage with Elizabeth Barrett. She starts with “Pauline,” accompanies him to Russia and with him brings back “Paracelsus,” goes with him to Italy and recreates “Sordello.” Then, with almost no preliminaries, we are into the love affair. When that has been lived again to its fruition, we are in possession of “the poet and the man” in the only possible fashion apart from the body of his work. Frances M. Sim has given us a valuable and interesting study, and simply by obeying the wisdom in Arthur Waugh’s words: “Browning’s marriage, in short, was the last stage in his artistic education”—words that open a fascinating path of speculative insights into the lives of how many of the world’s artists!

Contrast, if you will, the temperamental difference between such a man as Robert Browning, who had his early and well-nigh fatal intoxication from reading the poetry of Shelley, and a fellow like Joseph Farington, the painter, whose death occurred when Browning was a lad of nine. No literary discovery in years has made half the sensation of the finding of The Farington Diary, and quite rightly, for what could be compared to the disclosure of a contemporary account in which Boswell, Burke, Goldsmith, Horace Walpole, the Thrales, Garrick, Mrs. Siddons, Nelson, Howe, Mirabeau, Marat, Napoleon, Hoppner, Turner, Pitt, Warren Hastings, Lady Hamilton and Robert Burns were intimately noted? And yet Farington, ruler of the Royal Academy though a most indifferent artist, came into touch with all these personages and was apparently never for one moment carried off his feet. I think it is quite true, as Robert Cortes Holliday suggests in a review of The Farington Diary (The Bookman, June, 1923) that Farington saw only the surface of that great age, that he was devoid of humour and lacked the malice which a diarist should feel. He was sane, not to say stupid; but as a conscientious accumulator of facts I can think of no one who is his equal. Amid riches and grandeur, intriguery and wars and revolutions, surrounded by a glittering society in which one knew not which to worship, genius or scintillance, Joseph Farington scrupulously set down all the diseases of people he knew, all the dishes served at a dinner, how much everything cost and the money that everyone made, inherited, bequeathed or borrowed. It was only accidentally, that matters touched with human interest flowed from the point of his pen; but in a fairly long lifetime the number of such leakages runs high, and the result, despite every exasperation and handicap, is to make a book of very great and most indubitable value. The first volume of The Farington Diary, covering the years 1793-1802, is the most complete portrait album we have of its time; the remaining volumes, which, it is understood, go on to Farington’s death in 1821, should not be less valuable.

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Great times, in producing great men, produce great books as well. In the lifetime of Walter H. Page, publisher, business man and American Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, the number of persons who had any comprehension of his greatness was singularly small. Those who had the fine fortune to be associated with him in the day’s work knew, of course, the stature of the man; but it was scarcely possible to impress their knowledge on others. When Mr. Page at last became conspicuous in the public service it was at a post where his work and the character enforcing it were necessarily almost completely obscured. An American Ambassador at the Court of St. James’s at the present time may conceivably bring himself into a good deal of notice; it is not impossible to be done and the opportunities for doing it legitimately are not infrequent; but Mr. Page was never one for that sort of thing, and I doubt whether, even if the war had not hidden him in its drifting mists as he steered the ship, he would have come in all his lifetime to our not always intelligently directed attention. There are some men, and among them our greatest, whom death alone fully discloses. Such was Walter H. Page, and in the magnificent biography wrought by Burton J. Hendrick, The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, the subject is handled with a justness and a careful proportioning for which praise should not be stinted, and has not been. Unquestionably this is one of the great American books in the biographical field; this life and these letters have something so vital that one hunts a ready comparison in vain. At times they seem to paint the man with rich colour and a splendid handling of light; at other times they carve and sculpture him in some detail of a rare personality; but the figure fails before the ruddiness, the mobile vigour and the unresting intellect which the book sets forth. In a day when the state of America is rather often canvassed and most often with pessimistic conclusions, it is significant that The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, a fairly expensive work in two volumes, has sold half a hundred thousand copies and now, a year after its publication, continues to lead in sales of non-fiction.

It is but one, of course, of a number of great books yielded by the times we have lived in. The Irish Guards in the Great War, by Rudyard Kipling, is surely another. Mr. Kipling has not always been regarded as a sympathetic and understanding friend of Irishmen. His son, John Kipling, was an officer of the Irish Guards and, as such, gave his life. The choice of Mr. Kipling as the historian of the regiment was one which only the resultant chronicle would justify; but to my mind there is no possible question that the work justifies and more than justifies. The reviewer for the London Times puts the matter pithily when he says: “The true gold of Mr. Kipling is to be found unalloyed in this memorial.” The temptation to embitteredness, the impulse to “handle” and fashion his material or to give it stylistic treatment and the natural inclination to fix the point of view have all been quietly laid aside; and we have a book of continuous vividness that results from the inner perspective to which Mr. Kipling rigidly holds his account. He constantly uses the sentences on the lips of his Irishmen and we are seldom conscious of a narrator—then only when some Kiplingesque epithet or phrase carries us above the trench and, as it were, above the battle. The London Times reviewer speaks of the “wealth of detail, varied, terrible, and sometimes grotesque, as in the best Gothic” in the presentation of which Kipling manages to preserve a clean simplicity of outline and a unity or totality of effect; but this is merely a way of saying that the book is epically written. Mere largeness of subject has nowadays a way of being taken for “epic” treatment, although the word should properly be confined to a treatment in which a great mass of detail is not allowed to obscure the simplicity of the whole. But I do not think anyone can fail in appreciation of The Irish Guards, and to any who may be tempted to forgo the reading of the history let me quote these closing words: “Of all these things nothing but the memory would remain. And, as they moved—little more than a company strong—in the wake of their seniors, one saw, here and there among the wounded in civil kit, young men with eyes that did not match their age, shaken beyond speech or tears by the splendour and the grief of that memory.”

The final distinction of Mr. Kipling’s book is, to be sure, that it is the work of a man who knows how to write. This distinction it shares with the fewest possible number of contemporary histories, but The World Crisis, by Winston Churchill, must be admitted within the slender group. Perhaps we had rather forgotten Winston Churchill, the young journalist in Africa during the Boer War (and the hero, incidentally, of one of the greatest prisoner escapes to be found in all history). There may also be some heredity in Winston Churchill’s literary gift, as in his other brilliant personal endowments. But that’s no matter. As a former British Home Secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty, 1911-15, and Minister of Munitions in 1917—above all, perhaps, as the man chiefly held responsible for the Gallipoli venture—Mr. Churchill’s account would be of the very first interest and importance were he never so unskilful among words. But The World Crisis makes apparent what some of us had suspected before, that among leading statesmen there has rarely been one whose ability to defend his course and make other courses appear small has equalled Winston Churchill’s. The sense of scale amid vastness in sums of money, tonnage of ships and lives of men that Mr. Churchill possesses is laid by some commentators to his American blood. “He savours hugeness like a dainty; and when he writes of carnage or battle he dips his pen in blood,” says Filson Young, adding, “But he never for a moment loses his grip of the subject, or his sense of ever-marching destiny; and he never fails to thrill the reader with the sense of the human tragedy lurking in its every step.” Mr. Young thinks The World Crisis places its author “in the very first rank of British historians; and I think it places him in very nearly the first rank of British statesmen.” The two most famous living British statesmen, Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Asquith, flank Mr. Churchill’s book with what went before and what may come after. The Right Honourable Herbert Henry Asquith’s The Genesis of the War contains, of course, many noteworthy pen portraits; no doubt these will make the most immediate appeal to readers; yet his disclosures regarding the British War Book, begun in 1910 and his exposition of “the purposes and methods of British policy” in the pre-war years are the book’s greatest justification and its strongest historical importance. Mr. Lloyd George, characteristically, is far less concerned about the past than about the future. In Where Are We Going? he moves alertly over troubled ground of European affairs, discussing the League of Nations, Russian republicanism, Socialism, national armaments, the Irish Treaty, the position of France, England’s war debt, prohibition, the disclosure of war secrets, “the next war” and many other topics. His preface is particularly interesting.

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Naturally, the climax of interest is reached when we can say: “This man has written of himself.” G. Stanley Hall’s Life and Confessions of a Psychologist is an autobiography of which one feels a keen anxiety lest the many whom it can reward may somehow miss reading it. “I am far older than my years”—he is seventy-seven—“for I have laid aside more of the illusions and transcended more of the limitations with which I started than most.” These simple and striking words define his attitude. The truly popular result of a work that has been undertaken and carried through in such a spirit ought to be emphasised. Dr. Hall is the author of important treatises on Adolescence and Senescence, exhaustive in character and highly technical in their bearing; but I have yet to read anything of his which was not to a very large extent “popularly written” as well as scientifically valuable. Certainly his Life and Confessions of a Psychologist deserves the wider audience. It begins on a New England farm with some chapters that reflect with ampleness and feeling and charm the life of New England in the 1850s; it continues through the various stages of an unusually rounded education; in its record of teaching and college executiveship the book constitutes a sort of history of the American college in the last half-century, and this is enlarged and given the value of ripened conclusions by a longer chapter near the close of the book. There is also a tremendous chapter covering “Process in Psychology” and practically constituting a history of the science in Dr. Hall’s long lifetime—one might almost say since psychology was recognised as a science at all. But these points, while they demonstrate easily enough that the book is one no teacher or psychologist can afford to omit attending, do not make the case for the book as a sample of autobiography or as a work of popular interest. Then let some of the contents make it! Here is the report of an American who has known Mark Hopkins, Charles Eliot Norton, Henry Ward Beecher, George Bancroft, Treitschke, Wundt, Helmholtz, William James, Lord Kelvin, Jowett, Pasteur and many others; an American who can write of his boyhood with something of the charm of W. H. Hudson and much the same feeling for nature; who can write with frankness of the vita sexualis in the New England of Emerson; who can—we fall back upon it—write!

A fellow-scientist of Dr. Hall’s though in quite another field has also written his autobiography, and the extraordinary circumstances of Michael Idvorsky Pupin’s life will be enough to attract popular attention to his From Immigrant to Inventor. Forty-eight years ago a Serbian boy who hadn’t a cent and who couldn’t speak a word of English landed in New York. Since 1901 this immigrant has been professor of electro-mechanics at Columbia University; he is the inventor of the Pupin coil, which, by reducing the necessary diameter of copper wire, has saved millions of dollars, and he also invented the device for tuning which many people use daily on radio sets. Michael Pupin was born at Idvor, Banat, Hungary, in a little community of Serbs rewarded for their services against the Turks by the gift of some land and political rights. In assessing his performance it must be borne in mind that he had the handicap of an utterly alien race and culture and speech to overcome in a far greater degree than Jacob A. Riis, who was Danish, or Edward Bok, who came from Holland. Pupin’s autobiography is of manifold interest; for one thing, he seems completely in sympathy with an American tradition which so many immigrants have never been able whole-heartedly to accept; for another, he traces the developments of electrical science by the bright thread of his interest and participation in them, and he does actually succeed in making some very difficult scientific achievements quite simple and beautifully plain.

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Very different, if possible more magical, has been the career of the Russian glovemaker whose adopted surname is now known everywhere that motion pictures are exhibited—Samuel Goldwyn. It is only about nine years since he paid ten cents to see a two-reel picture in depressing surroundings on Broadway, and came home to tell his brother-in-law, Jesse Lasky, that a fortune could be made in five-reel pictures! Samuel Goldwyn’s book, Behind the Screen, showing on every page the fine journalistic skill of his collaborator, Corinne Lowe, is less an autobiography than a personal record of the people of the screen. Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Garden, Pauline Frederick, Geraldine Farrar and plenty of others are here described with an intimacy and a frankness and a general wit and good humour that it isn’t easy to imagine will be soon surpassed. The popular appeal of such a series of “closeups” should be as limitless as the movie audience, but the book will serve a less immediate and more important purpose to the reader whose interest, not fervidly personal, goes into the general subject of the films—how they came about, what and why they are, what may come of them. I do not mean that Mr. Goldwyn concerns himself directly with any of these questions, for he scarcely touches them; and yet I think that the indirect light he throws may be more finally enlightening than anything else that has come out of Hollywood—certainly more so than would be likely to be got by any outsider who might go there in a direct search. But let that pass. The book, as a book, is irresistible reading.

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The boundaries between history, biography, autobiography, memoirs and the best journalism are often uncertain and are better so. It does not matter except to formal minds whether an interest begins with a person or an event, or in what direction it proceeds; for the mind, like the body, has its own system of nutrition, and within pretty broad limits should be allowed its own dietary. The suggestions below are additional to those books already discussed and the classifications need not be taken as anything more than a general convenience:

Historical.

More Purely Personal.

Unusual Biographies and Autobiographies.

Two Books About English Seats.