II
AUTOBIOGRAPHY

“Human life is not to be estimated by what men
perform, but by what they are.”

J. A. Symonds.

It is generally accepted that the relation which exists between autobiography and biography is so close that so far as purpose and quality of form and subject are concerned, the words are interchangeable; that is to say, the average person thinks the unique difference between the two is that one is written in the first person, the other in the third. No greater mistake could be made. One is first hand information, the other second, or even third. As Trudeau puts it: to recount the actions of another is not biography, it is zoology. Both have points in common, as all works of art must be founded on art and beauty, but the qualities that make biography great are not those that autobiography needs to achieve perfection.

In the first place, the chief merit of autobiography is to be found in veracity and sincerity; these qualities are more important than style or grammar. One of the most illuminating autobiographies of recent years is The Letters of Olive Schreiner; they are as devoid of style and as disdainful of grammar as an apache is of culture. Biography on the other hand must display literary qualities which are not indispensable in autobiography, provided truth is absolute. Cellini’s Memoirs which, in its original edition, showed the lack of literary culture of its author, is nevertheless one of the greatest books of its kind. It is not only the story of a man, it is the history of his time. Such a man and such times! If the style of the writing had been perfected by its admirable translator, it would have lost much of its charm. If the same style had been used by Boswell in his Life of Samuel Johnson, no amount of veracity and of sincerity would have redeemed it. We think of biographers as “littérateurs,” but there has never been a great biographer who was not a great artist. Autobiographers have something to say or to give to the world in the manner they know best.

The biographer must be objective; he must be able to perceive quickly, to understand readily, to grasp, gather and evaluate facts, to fuse his material into a homogeneous mass, to stamp it with style, and mix with his literary qualities a certain amount of hero-worship. Self-consciousness has no place in his work; he may efface himself as much as he wishes, and recent biographies have proved that the more he does it, the greater his achievement.

To use a well-known and often told legend, the biographer may be compared to the swan which Ariosto believed to be gliding on the surface of the river Lethe—the river for which Byron sighed and to which he called in one of his poems. Ariosto’s theory was that when man comes to the end of his life, Death cuts the thread. At the end of that thread is a medal which Time throws in the waters of the Lethe, where it disappears. Occasionally, it falls on a passing swan and nestles between its wings. Gracefully and swiftly the swan carries it to a temple where it is kept for ever. The swan of the allegory is the biographer who, by gathering the deeds and characteristics of his subject, carries them to immortality.

The autobiographer, on the other hand, must be subjective above all. His glance and his attention must be turned on himself; his critical powers and his gift of observation must be directed on his own character. As John Addington Symonds truthfully said: “Autobiographies written with a purpose are likely to want atmosphere.” A man when he sits down to give an account of his own life, from the point of view of art or accomplishment, passion or a particular action is apt to make it appear as though he were nothing but an artist, lover, reformer, or as though the action he seeks to explain were the principal event of his existence. To paint a true portrait, he must supplement the bare facts of his existence. He must reveal himself emotionally as well as intellectually. It is the emotional revelation that gives atmosphere to his story. Naturally such “atmosphere” should not exclude a certain amount of objectivity; if the writer is too introspective, his memoirs may prove stimulating and illuminating for the student of behaviour, but will scarcely interest the general reader who is not content with deductive and inductive ratiocination, but wants action mixed with sentiment.

The biographer is not a judge, but a witness; the autobiographer may be both. The former should have no preconceived idea of his hero. His efforts should be concentrated on presenting him to posterity as he appeared to his contemporaries, to himself and to those among whom he lived, acted, enjoyed and suffered. Such restrictions can not be imposed on the autobiographer who has a much wider field in which to push his investigations on personality; whatever he chooses to say or reveal must be accepted at its face value, and his judgment upon himself must be impersonal—and there are no judgments so fallacious as self-judgments. Biographies should study both sides of an individual; what he did and what he was, since his notions are determined by his personality characteristics; autobiographies need not deal with achievements which, if they are worth while, make their own publicity; the stress should be placed on the manifestation of personality—on motives, passions, experiences, failures, and accomplishments.

Long before it was the fashion as it is to-day to write the biography of men during their lifetime Voltaire said: “We owe consideration to the living; to the dead we owe truth only.” He foresaw with remarkable keenness the danger of such endeavour; and to-day, overwhelmed with biographies of living subjects, we deplore the fashion. There are certain truths that no one likes to be told, but that is what we must insist upon from the biographical art: truth, and more truth. Man is not big enough to look at his contemporaries without partiality, and he must allow a voice to his likes and dislikes. For instance, it would have been as unwise for Mr. Alexander Woollcott to write anything in his biography of Irving Berlin that might have made the composer appear in a light less brilliant than that of semi-genius, as it would be for a newspaper editor to write articles against the policy of his newspaper. We must agree with Sir Sidney Lee that “no man has ever proven to be fit subject for biography until he is dead.”

Finally the main difference between autobiography and biography, a difference which is a résumé of these reflections, is that the former works from within outwards, while the latter works from without inwards; and the autobiographer is successful only in proportion to the self-absorption he reveals; his is a selfish and personal work. The biographer, on the other hand, is successful only in proportion to the self-effacement he shows.

Amiel is perhaps the best example of introspection that can be found in a diarist, as Proust is of the novelist. They and Barbellion, the author of The Journal of a Disappointed Man, lived within themselves, and the outside world was for them merely an abiding place. A contrast of great interest could be drawn between Amiel, Cellini and Rousseau. Amiel’s diary would be a model of introspection, Cellini would head the list of Memoir writers whose principal quality is to be found in the wholesomeness of their objectivity. He was no student of inner nature. Life for him was a great battlefield, where one could garner beauty and trophies, achieve triumphs of art, and at the same time kill those who stood in the way; Jean-Jacques would hold a place between these two; he sought interior motives and the explanation of his sentiments, but the life he led was not especially conducive to reasoning and internal debate. So his Confessions are as far above those of Cellini as above the Journal of Amiel, in quality, in form and in subject, and are still the best example of autobiography that has ever been published.

Facts are as necessary to autobiography as they are to biography. Even when they are tampered with, as Marie Bashkirtseff tampered with those of her life, they have their importance and interest and nothing that is true should be allowed to remain in the darkness. Olive Schreiner wrote, “There can be no absolutely true life of any one except written by themselves and then only if written for the eye of God.” Marie did not write hers for the eye of God, but it is the closest approach to a true life since Jean-Jacques’.

If a life is worth writing at all, no consideration of personal feeling or convention should deter the writer from setting down the facts; for on them truth, the greatest quality of art, is founded. Marie’s Journal is a work of art in the full sense of the word; it reveals a soul and a personality, it shows the extraordinary gift of its youthful author for writing, painting and music, but it also shows the disequilibrium of an imagination untutored and untrained.

It is doubtful if any Anglo-Saxon will ever parallel the feat of Cellini, of Rousseau, of Bashkirtseff. There is a vein of reticence in the emotional nature of the Anglo-Saxon that the publicity drill can not penetrate, save in exceptional instances and even then the hole is never large enough to permit the implantation of sufficient dynamite to explode both the conscious and the unconscious, and thus reveal the entire personality. The autobiographies of these three did reveal the entire personalities of their authors. Marie Bashkirtseff’s Journal, though fictional in execution, impresses the reader as containing more forced draught, than Cellini’s or Rousseau’s. Marie is romanticism itself and her imagination is the battleground on which there is a perpetual struggle between the real and the fanciful. Early in life she created a picture of herself and her ambition was to live up to it to the end. Reality was not æsthetical for her, and life without the æsthetic element was not tolerable, so she set up a stage and as she was to be the central figure upon it, she must be the most eloquent, the most colourful part, the undeniable centre of attention. She could accomplish her object only by distorting facts and by weaving around herself situations which are highly improbable, but which are self-revelatory despite their distortion.

Her desire was for fame and her cast of mind made the sham, the mediocre, the ordinary things of life as hateful to her as beef gruel is to one whose taste turns naturally and by cultivation to chartreuse. She was equal to her desire, and her mental keenness and her emotional avidity demanded material which would satisfy her. Not always finding it in her surroundings, she created it and made it part of herself.

She displayed mental hunger early in life and sought to find the thing that would appease it. Through her literary interest and tastes, which were the result of thought and not of ready-made judgment, Marie reveals her mental life—a conscious life and yet unconscious. She is forever reaching toward a goal which will fulfil her intellectual hopes, and in the effort of reaching she improved her mind, added to her artistic talent and enlarged her vision. The reader who accompanies her in her journey through life must feel the restlessness of her youth, the sincerity of her demand for death rather than nonentity, the tragedy of her soul too big for her body. The inequalities and contradictions of her character could never be brought into harmony, and finally the soul won. But it is not the Marie of whom one reads that is convincing, but the creator of that Marie—just as any writer, when he shows himself as the force behind his characters—is more real than these characters.

Behind all her stage settings, her literary effects, her hunger for fame and her conscious effort to act always as one would in public, and a carefully chosen public at that—there is the writer tense, at times bored, restless, enthusiastic and depressed, giving a picture of herself, of her own sublimely dissatisfied spirit. The picture is successful in its large lines and in its small details; it reveals a mentality more than an existence, but all Marie’s real life was lived unseen by the eye, and nothing would really be true of her that did not take its source and find its origin in her unconscious self.

Some parts of her Journal are essentially biographical, and they are not the most entertaining parts. She writes with sincerity and quietness of the period which she devoted almost exclusively to work and painting; she was real enough in those days, but we miss the Marie who was neither peaceful nor fulfilled. We still feel, when we see her at rest or when we see her at work before her easel, the bond of æsthetic achievement between the creator and the created, between the writer and the Marie of the Journal; but we miss the charm of the Marie who flirts, dances, goes to balls where she looks like a Greuze shepherdess, who captivates every man and outshines every woman in the world.

Her response to life is such that we find it in every one of her moods: whether she is romantic, analytical, hysterical or self-possessed, she is always in a mood which is responsive to life and ready to give all she possessed to life. All she demanded, in reality, was constant change; no continuity of feeling or of sentiment was satisfying to her; joy was sorrow if long and level; sorrow barbed with keenness was joy, “... him whose strenuous tongue can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;” Marie the writer is expressed in this sentence; pain was welcome if it carried sharp sensations in its trend, if it gave her a life more full and heady, foaming from the cup.

Her idea of love was as imaginary and as unreal as her conception of life; no one but Marie could have been contented with the picture she made of her emotional response to love. She darted through her adolescent years rapidly and yet profoundly; she thought she knew all she was to know about love before she had had much teaching; her instinct and her intuition prompted her, inspired her conduct and decided her actions. Her susceptibility to impressions was such that on them she based her knowledge, and her flair for the dramatic and the unreal made her prostrate herself before the tall, blond phantom, and pretend to herself that this was love in its sublimest and most convincing expression. She reveals herself as completely in her dealings with love, as she does in her fierce demand for life; this demand became more and more tenacious as death came nearer, and her revolt and her despair as the final hour approached were coupled with the sense of futility that made it almost welcome. She asked herself the poignant questions that have troubled and upset mankind since its creation: she suffered the inevitable struggle between spiritual hope and intellectual denial. What has it all meant, and where is God? These questions were not to be answered; if her genius was nothing but a spent shadow, what was it? and why not prefer death to it? Strangely troubling questions to a young mind. Marie was one of those about whom Stephen Phillips wrote:

The present generation has produced three extraordinary autobiographies in the guise of fiction: James Joyce’s was entitled, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Dorothy Richardson called hers Pointed Roofs, and Marcel Proust’s is included in A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, which extends through several volumes, two of which, Swann’s Way and The Guermantes Way, have been translated into English.

They are valuable documents, for they set forth with great frankness the awareness and the development of consciousness, and the interplay of what is now called the unconscious and the conscious mind. Proust’s is the most elaborate and detailed, and when we shall have it in its entirety, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions may no longer be rated the greatest autobiography in existence. These books have had detailed consideration in The Doctor Looks at Literature.

Introspection and confession are unpopular to-day in this country. They do not fit the times. Man is so busy acting that he has little time for thinking, and if time were vouchsafed him, he would not have the inclination. If one needed proof of it the legislators of Tennessee could furnish it. This disinclination to thought and reflection may be one of the reasons why this country has furnished few great autobiographies. Another is that until recently we have been bound by tradition of reticence and we have always found self-estimation difficult. When Walt Whitman broke the convention and put a premium on himself we were outraged. Our reticence was a manifestation of self-consciousness incident to our youth and inexperience. The American autobiographies of recent years that came nearest to being satisfactory are The Education of Henry Adams and The Life of Doctor Trudeau, though Andrew Carnegie’s story of his life fulfilled some requirements. Had the second half of Henry Adams’ book kept the pace set by the first, it would likely be called the most satisfactory autobiography of the century. But the account of his life after 1900 shows occasional bewilderment, frequent discursiveness, and an inclination to profitless speculation. Henry Adams was a singularly sane individual, free from ancestor-worship; neither beholden to convention nor enslaved by tradition and environment; a potential antinomian of artistic temperament who devoted his life studiously to self-education from which he deduced a dynamic theory of history and an amorphous one of education. The account of his childhood and youth, of his early environment; of the people with whom he came into casual and intimate contact; of his attitude toward and his reactions to formal education, is an unusually brilliant personality study. His pilgrimages in search of knowledge to Germany, Italy and France and his experiences as a diplomat in England are precious human documents. It is doubtful whether any American has ever seen the English with clearer eye, and commented on their characteristics with rarer judgment than he did in the chapters “Foes or Friends” and “Eccentricity.”

The Education of Henry Adams is not only a revelation of a personality, a brilliant example of self-analysis; it is a treasure house of comment on and estimate of scores of individuals who wrote their names more or less large in their time. If a better description of Henry Cabot Lodge was ever written I have not encountered it, and any one who knew Theodore Roosevelt will admit that he merited this characterisation, “he more than any other man living within the range of notoriety, showed the singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter—the quality that mediæval theology assigned to God—he was pure act.”

No student of American history can escape study of this Memoir; no one interested in behaviour will neglect it; and no one seeking instruction and entertainment can afford to overlook it. Henry Adams is Boston’s asset that Washington made permanent.

Dr. Edward L. Trudeau had a powerful personality and his book reveals it. Fearlessness vied with honesty to be the predominant feature of his nature and the closing lines of one of Browning’s most popular poems, sung in his heart:

“With their triumphs and their glories, and the rest;
Love is best.”

Seized early in life with the disease that he did so much to make conquerable, he laboured for forty years burdened and often prostrated, in the Adirondack wilderness, and founded there a health centre which radiates his influence throughout the world and which will perpetuate his name.

Dr. Trudeau had an unusual gift, and he had it to an extraordinary degree: the gift of friendship. He had exceptional power to attract people to him, to interest them in his work, and in his play. He not only attracted them, but enticed them to participation whether it was building a church, equipping a laboratory or outwitting a fox. For a quarter of a century, he radiated a benign, salutary influence throughout the North Woods, and in the latter years of his life throughout the whole country. He spoked the wheel of the juggernaut tuberculosis as few save Koch have done. His presence inspirited thousands bending beneath their burden; his courage heartened even a greater number; and his conduct inspired countless colleagues who were working at the very problem he sought to solve.

He knew the ingredients that one must have to make life a success; he knew the amount of work and play, love and worship which must be used and he knew how to blend them to make them acceptable to the eye and to the palate; but what he knew best of all was that man can not live by bread alone. Any one who does not know it may learn from the least egotistic of autobiographies.

The most readable of recent autobiographies is Maurice Francis Egan’s Recollections of a Happy Life. But it is not a self-revelatory book. One gets vistas of life in Philadelphia as educated middle-class Catholics lived it three generations ago, glimpses of the society that politicians and a few men of letters made in Washington, a generation or two ago; and one gets the distinctive and agreeable literary and bohemian atmosphere of New York at about the same time. There are scores of pictures of people, famous and infamous, interesting and commonplace, and these pictures vary from trifling vignettes to carefully drawn and finished Gibsons. To justify the word infamous it is only necessary to remind that Egan was Minister to Copenhagen when Dr. Cook sold that government a gold brick. Egan knew every one; most of them he liked and they all liked him, Matthew Arnold excepted. After they had passed on and he had entered another field of activity, he re-invoked for his diversion the memories of the first half of his mature life and jotted them down. “God had given him memory so that he might have roses in December.” He was arranging and ordering them when his call came, but despite the fact that he did not have opportunity to finish them, they are charming and entertaining.

But the reader must be what is called very psychic who can understand the personality of Maurice Egan from his autobiography. The average reader will gather that he was cheerful, charming, courteous, companionable, kindly, generous, urbane—perhaps even a little vain. But these are secondary virtues of prime importance mostly acquirable. He had the cardinal virtues too: he had a good conscience and the urge to assist and benefit others was greater than personal ambition. He was gifted socially and intellectually; he was lucky and he had as much money as a poet should have. He escaped the accident called disease most successfully; he had a host of friends and he never put them to torture by asking them what they thought of his reviews or of his poems. Small wonder he had a happy life, and that now when it has taken other display, his work continues to contribute to the happiness of others.

Most autobiographies are written by individuals of artistic temperament: musicians, painters, actors, clergymen, whose conspicuous possession, after talent, is self-confidence which the average person often interprets as conceit. There are few better ways of obtaining a comprehensive idea of what is called the artistic temperament than reading such an autobiography, and the Life of Hector Berlioz, whose fame as a parent of music seems to be permanently established, is as good as any. Berlioz was weird, contradictory, unreasoning, improvident, impulsive, selfish, jealous, egocentric, amorous and inconstant. He was devoid of humour and he lacked all religious feeling. He was intemperate of speech and of strength. Despite all these he gained and kept the affection and esteem of many of the great men of his time. His book can scarcely be called an autobiography, although he planned it to be one. He gives the bare facts of his life up to the time he abandoned medicine for music, but after that, one must gain knowledge of his character and personality from his letters. They reveal them as no formal autobiography could, for here are his thoughts, feelings, aspirations and disappointments; his selfishness, shallowness, fickleness and unreasonableness; here is the record of his punishment by his disposition and disease. They show what a handicap to happiness such a temperament is. Any one who thinks of choosing parents from musicians should read the letters. Any one who doubts the existence of Dante’s Beatrice or Petrarch’s Laura should also read them, for Estelle Fournier was their sister.

A man of Berlioz’s temperament should not be judged according to any standard but his own; his soul was too sensitive to radiate happiness; his genius was of too fine a nature to leave place in him for self-appreciation and optimism; his tempers revealed his weariness of life and the extent to which life had conquered him; or rather they would in any one but Berlioz whose personality could suffer no comparison. M. Romain Rolland has attempted a parallel between Wagner and Berlioz—all the advantage of the former if common measures are adopted, but strangely contrasting in favour of Berlioz if we compare his solitude, his unceasing pain and “unspeakable weariness” to “the spectacle of Wagner, wrapped in silk and furs, surrounded by flattery and luxury, pouring unction upon his own soul.”

The artistic temperament and the reformatory or uplift-urge are antipodal. Those who possess the latter often write their lives. They are sometimes instructive, rarely interesting; as an example of this class, I select the Autobiography of Harriet Martineau who, after Mary Wollstonecraft, was the first doughty champion of “Rights of Women.” Florence Nightingale said of her that she was born to be a destroyer of slavery. It is an important historical document of social evolution in England, and it serves as the perfect example of what an autobiography should be, and should not be. In twelve pages appended to the two fat volumes, the author makes an estimate of herself and of her work which is quite ideal, but the descriptions of her nonsensical and childish recollections scattered through the first volume are fatiguing, and pages of irrelevant, inconsequent matter spoil the second. Withal, the work is interesting and will always remain so because of the brilliant thumb sketches it contains of famous persons, such as Margaret Fuller, Carlyle, Coleridge, Malthus, Macaulay and dozens of others; and because of the light it throws on what has come to be called psychotherapy.

When Miss Martineau was approaching what Rose Macaulay calls the dangerous age, she experienced a serious nervous breakdown. She found plenty of doctors, apparently, to tell her she would not recover. One meets them in literature so often and so rarely in the flesh! She contracted the opium habit and to cure that she consulted a mesmerist. He cured the habit and the disease, and she lived out the psalmist’s allotment. An everyday occurrence now, it created a great stir in England two generations ago.

Men and women who write their autobiographies are as a rule prompted to such achievements by considerations other than the desire to leave a legacy to the world or to attain immortality; some do it to clear up their own problems; others do it to facilitate or effect reform; a few like Benjamin Franklin do it altruistically.

Herbert Spencer wrote his autobiography to supplement his philosophical work; it shows chiefly the anxiety of its author to state anew the conclusions he had reached in his studies of ethics and sociology. It is the picture of a man, engrossed in mental efforts, disregarding the part played by emotions and affections, cold, didactic and impersonal. It forms a striking contrast to the autobiography of Darwin which, though not really a book at all, but a chapter included in his Life and Letters, reveals the modesty, effacement and simplicity which were the most lovable and conspicuous qualities of the epoch-making scientist. Far Away and Long Ago, the story of the early life of another English naturalist and one of the most delightful biographies extant, was written to liberate a shut-in personality. It is strange, in view of this book, that less was known about W. H. Hudson at the time of his death a few years ago, than of any writer in Great Britain. But he was the real “solitary-hearted.” Even to the small circle of his literary friends, he was not communicative about himself. Had he lived a half century earlier, he might have found Thoreau sympathetic.

Some autobiographies are written to purge the author’s conscience and mind of sins of youth or of hallucinatory memories. St. Augustine’s and Tolstoi’s Confessions are typical of this kind of self-history. St. Augustine dwells on the dissoluteness of his youth at such length that it is difficult to obtain constructive thought from the narrative. One would be tempted to believe that he found a certain pleasure in recalling the lusts and concupiscences he had left behind when he became converted, did not his later deeds and actions testify to the contrary.

There is no doubt that he was one of the greatest sinners and one of the greatest Saints of antiquity, but his Confessions which reveal exclusively his sins, are little help in aiding the conversion of a soul—unless that soul was of such nature that it would have converted itself; the Confessions are the result of an imagination stirred at the sight of sins and humbled by the telling of them. John Addington Symonds has given a comprehensive characterisation of their author in one of his letters:

The motive which prompted Huxley to write his autobiography is found in his desire to set the facts of his life as straight as he knew them, thus refuting what the malice, ignorance or vanity of others might construe them to be. Franklin, on the other hand, was desirous of showing how poverty could be overcome by thrift and shrewdness, and his autobiography has been a model for students of all ages. It is as valuable as a character-building book, as the autobiography of John Stuart Mill is valuable in showing the waste there is in modern education; the latter also wished to have his contribution serve as a tribute to Mrs. Taylor, but both Franklin’s and Mill’s can be classified under the heading of constructive writing, with an objective which embraces a large portion of humanity.

These two works differ widely from the autobiographies of General Grant and Trollope, both of which were prompted by personal motives: the former to pay his debts, the latter to make money. Such motives do not necessarily detract from the charm or merit of an autobiography. Literary merit is not in direct relationship to moral or æsthetical considerations, and an autobiography written in the hope that the world will be improved by its perusal may not be worthy of comparison with one written with obviously personal reasons as its motive.

Many men and women who have made a success of life have been inspired, helped or guided by reading autobiographies during their plastic years. It depends upon the individual’s outlook on life which one helps him. If he is “practical” and material things appeal to him, Franklin’s story does it; if he is beholden to ideals and the spiritual side of his nature is dominant, he finds aid and encouragement in Mark Rutherford’s Autobiography, and Father and Son, by Edmund Gosse; if he is ambitious to be a mighty hunter and slay the wolf called want, he may fortify himself by reading stories like Hamlin Garland’s A Son of the Middle Border, or Episodes Before Thirty, by Algernon Blackwood; if he is inclined to yield to the seductions of science and yet would avoid becoming a human monster like Gottlieb of Arrowsmith he would do well to familiarize himself with Memoirs of My Life, by Francis Galton; if he is “temperamental” and keen to know how the artistic temperament conditions behaviour and how devastating egocentrism may become, he can get enlightenment from My Life, by Richard Wagner. If Samuel Smiles’ book appealed to him in his youth, he will like Mr. J. J. Davis’s The Iron Puddler, or Mr. Roger Detaller’s From a Pitman’s Note-Book; if recutting and revamping the social fabric intrigues him, he will like Mr. Robert Smillie’s My Life for Labour, or the Autobiography of Samuel Gompers; if within his heart there are graved some lines setting forth that this is the land of the brave, the home of the free, the arena of the ambitious, then Professor Pupin’s From Immigrant to Inventor is the book for him; if he is a pessimist and wants to be cured, Sir Harry Johnston’s Story of My Life will help him accomplish it; if he is of a romantic turn of mind, Everywhere, the Memoirs of A. Henry Savage Landor may be tolerated, and if his vindictiveness has never been adequately appeased, Lady Oxford’s Memoirs and particularly those that she wrote when she was called Margot Asquith will be satisfying to him, especially if he is keen to attract and rivet the attention of all mankind: peer, superior and inferior.

Few men to whom one of the fine arts or any branch of the humanities appeal, escape pubescent inquiry concerning such things as the meaning of life, the soundness of traditional religion, the value of convention, the genuineness of the social fabric, the sincerity of morality: and the resulting apprehension and depression in sensitive natures amount oftentimes to despair and disorientation. John Addington Symonds and William Hale White—particularly the latter—are the doctors for such patients. The Early Life of Mark Rutherford, contrary to its deserts, has never been a popular book here or in England. It is a fine presentation of the artistic temperament trying to persuade itself to wear the garments of Puritan dogma, shedding them in moments of indignation and putting them on again when the voice whispered that Puritanism gives the closest expression of the truth about life; it shows the agony of the imaginative genius struggling with the problems of practicality, while in spiritual travail. It appeals especially to the sad and solitary; to those dazed by the glamour of the modern world; to those who, dismayed by its pretentiousness and disgusted by its speciousness, clamour for simplicity or belief. But it has a message for every one who thinks too much of himself, or who is out of alignment with his fellows and the world.