Engraved by Timothy Cole and reprinted by permission
of “The Century Magazine”

Keats is a fascinating figure and always will be. The son of a stableman, the doors of the best literary society in London were opened wide to him; though he had but few years of mortal life, and few months of literary activity, he has become one of the greatest English poets. It was not the pathos of his existence, the diseases that ravaged him, the hopelessness of his love, or the relative isolation in which he was morally steeped that focusses our interest. It is his conception of poetry, his flight into the world of dreams untinged by reality, and the wondrous rapidity with which he scaled the heights of imagery. They made him immortal. In “the Armour of Words and with the Sword of Syllables” he fought a great battle and won. His personality had many facets and they were nearly all made to arrest attention, enlist sympathy and inspire admiration; but poet though he was, he was a man, and his human side is as deserving of study as his poetical nature; in the latter, there is primarily genius, and genius is not to be explained or understood, still less studied. In the former, there is the weakness of a mere mortal and the strength of an intelligence; the misery of bad health, and the victory of will-power; the alleged resignation to death and the desire to live; the heart break of the man whose ambitions were never fulfilled, and the exaltations of the lover who believes his love to be reciprocated; the grimace of the lip which finds gall in the cup from which it drinks, and the satisfaction of the heart which has faith in the world and confidence in friendship. All these aspects of the poet Amy Lowell has followed day by day, almost hour by hour, with the persistency of a detective. From the slightest cue, she lays a course which soon leads her to the exact day and the approximate hour when Keats accomplished the action she describes, and with the support of a clear conscience and the encouragement of proofs, to her irrefutable, she opposes the judgment of other biographers, and fearlessly and categorically contradicts them. This scarcely justifies her assertion “We may say, with something like certainty, that we know everything he did; for which reason, it is safe to assume that what we do not know of, he did not do.” I have encountered many foolish statements in literature; the one quoted is not the least of them. It would be far truer to say that we know every thought he had, and how foolish that would be! His letters reveal his sensations, his emotions and his thoughts, but they are singularly silent about what he did.

It would take a thorough knowledge of all the documents Miss Lowell brings to light, and require a deep study of all that has ever been written about Keats either to refute or to accept all her conclusions. Many of them will seem to the average reader an aggregation of useless details rather than an approach to the subject from a new angle, having a bearing on Keats the poet, or Keats the man. The task of discussing the foundation of her conclusions must be left to other biographers or students of the poet, of whom there are legions; and it can not be attempted at all until after the publication of all the notes of the poet’s friend, Brown.

John Keats’ brief life was singularly full, and the best of his record is to be found in the letters he wrote to friends, and to his brothers and sisters. Written from the fulness of the heart and with no other object than to relieve his mind and convey news, these constitute the most complete and comprehensive characterisation of the poet. Keats was modest about his genius, but he had an insatiable appetite for praise and love. And every one who knew him loved him and believed in him. It was the public that failed him. And sensitive as he was, its disdain, and the scorn of Lockhart and other critics, caused him profound suffering. To say that it killed him, as has been said countless times the past three generations, is to utter an absurdity. He had two most serious infectious diseases, and he had the kind of temperament that facilitates the progress of both of them.

Amy Lowell thinks that had he lived, he would probably not have been as great a poet as Browning. There seems small foundation for such a statement, and in this prophetless age, such pronouncements are worthless. What Keats produced in three years of poetic work, and less than one year of real inspiration, suggests at least that he would have been all the greater had he lived. He might not have developed emotionally, nor intellectually, but there is very little question that he would have developed critically and that his sense of values would have taken on keenness and profundity. Even as he was, his creative faculty was considerable. He could turn an inspirational current on at will. When it stopped flowing, or when it began to flow feebly, he could turn it off; then, while the Olympic dynamo was generating, and the Parnassian battery storing the divine fluid, he could turn on the light of criticism. Not all great poets can do that.

Early in life Keats lost his mother, who, by her attachment, represented for him the ideal of motherly love. For such love, he unceasingly sought. He had what the Freudians call a mother-complex. He needed the constant watchfulness, the untiring devotion and the profound understanding that a mother alone can bestow on a man. In Fanny Brawne, he found youth and beauty, brains and brilliancy, but none of the fondness and constancy that his nature demanded.

It was Miss Lowell’s unquenchable thirst for justice and honesty that made her attempt such thorough rehabilitation of Fanny Brawne. The effort seems useless and rather irrelevant, without much justification or foundation. Fanny Brawne’s love for Keats was such that, had he not been under the stupefying influence of the little Greek god who blindfolds his victims, he would have seen that Fanny was of similar calibre to the other women whose lack of motherly feeling for him prevented them from taking a permanent place in his heart. Miss Lowell realised the limitations of Fanny when she wrote: “One of the many reasons for Keats’ failure in his relations with Fanny Brawne was that he sought in her a mother as well as a lover, and she had not yet grown up enough to stand to him in both capacities.” This is the judgment of a mind, not of a heart; the judgment of a critic, not of a psychologist; the judgment of one who believes that years bring in their trend qualities and characteristics that do not exist in the embryo of maturity. A woman need not be of mother-age to be maternal any more than a pianist need be able to play Russian music at first sight to be an artist. The maternal instinct, when it exists, is revealed in childhood, and a love like that which united John Keats to Fanny Brawne, should have been the spark which caused her love to blaze. The letters of Fanny which have been published do not help to build a shrine around her and to rehabilitate her, since they were practically all written after Keats’ death—when memories and remorse might have vied to make her appreciate what she had lost. Moreover Fanny, who pretended to love him, did little to prove it; and none of Miss Lowell’s arguments can convince one reader that, had she really been seized of the same passion that possessed Keats, she would not have married him, when marriage meant happiness and bliss for him. Of course, Keats was ill, very ill, but no one knew it to be a fatal illness, and it may be safe to assume that either of Shelley’s wives would have surmounted the obstacle. Miss Lowell says: “Fanny lived in an age when well-brought-up daughters in her class of life did not jump over the traces and marry offhand; and suppose Fanny had happened to do this, neither she nor Keats had the money to run away, and was it to be contemplated that Fanny should move next door and let Brown support the pair of them! The idea is absurd. Fanny was not Harriet Westbrook, and Keats was no Shelley. They each did the best they could, as I think any one not hoodwinked by an unreasoning love for Keats can see.”

It was lucky for Keats that Fanny was no Harriet Westbrook, but what a pity she had not some of the virtues and qualities that made Mary Godwin the exquisite creature and inspirer that she was! Furthermore, there is no indication in Miss Lowell’s book that the question of marriage had ever been brought up for family consideration. It seems just to say that Fanny, with her limitations and light-heartedness, did the best she could, and was no heroine; but what we would have liked to see would have been a Fanny “hoodwinked by an unreasoning love of Keats,” who combined pulchritude and intelligence with a magnificent heart.

The picture that Miss Lowell paints of Keats is idealised. He is not vulgar as Watson said, not a howler and a sniveller as Swinburne said, and not “unmanly” as many said and thought after reading the Brawne letters. We are ready to believe he was none of them, but it is too much to ask that we shall believe “that the pure poet is a pure poet because he is a pure man.” White-washing poets is the meanest occupation in the world next to census-taking.

However, she has interwoven and blended the man with the artist in such manner that the one overlaps the other constantly, and the result is a homogeneous and substantial whole. When the man dominates, Keats is delightful; when the artist has the upper hand, he is admirable. She has rendered exquisitely the humanity of the poet who had belief in nothing but what he learned for himself, and who could be himself always. What she failed to convey was his profound self-consciousness and sensuousness, and how they influenced, one might almost say shaped, his life and his poetry.

Keats underwent a religious experience, conversion one may call it, that influenced his life and his work; so that one may cite him as evidence that poetic comprehension can not be complete unless it includes religious comprehension. It is to be regretted that Miss Lowell did not discuss this episode.

However, she made the most of her documentation, and of her subject from an intellectual and objective point of view. She has written a biography which is as powerfully conceived as it is intelligently realised, and it can never be repeated too often that, above all, Amy Lowell was an intelligence. Her capacity for work was astounding; her painstaking and thorough study an achievement of labour that reminds one of the monks of the Middle Ages who spent their lives in cells and cubicles, illuminating prayer books with the most exquisite figures and colours, bringing to their task the patience of angels, the piety of saints and the skill of artists. But her industry was as naught compared with the tenacity of her opinion and the legitimacy of her judgment.

From a subjective and emotional point of view, John Keats is far from perfect; for the biographer has not made sufficient allowance for the fact that she was writing of a genius. She took his measurements with the same tape she would use if she were measuring William J. Bryan, and she would probably have approved of James Barrie’s Tammas Haggart and his ideas in regard to “geniuses.” She did not allow for the spread of Keats’ wings, or the aureole of his genius. She explained his motives and his achievements with everyday words, and she brought to bear on her task the illumination of medicine and the testimony of psychology. She achieved a work of the head, not of the heart, and John Keats was above all a heart. In several instances she is at a loss to understand her subject, especially toward the end of his life, which takes in centuries of achievements in a few months of actual life. Keats moves too fast for her; his feet are too winged, the empyrean too rarefied.

She can not understand how life could have been “painful” for him since he had almost everything he needed, and had not received more than his share of misfortunes; and unless one attempts to read in the heart of Keats, nothing in his external life can corroborate the statement that his life was a tragedy. Human and material blessings are not enough to make life bearable, and Keats had not an excessive amount of either. It may be a comfort to think that nothing on earth would have made him really happy—save perhaps to possess Fanny as wife, but it is safe to assume that, unless such a marriage accomplished the miracle, Fanny bound to Keats would have failed him. Better for him in this instance to live in hope than to realise it.

Few things are more convincing of Miss Lowell’s inability really to appreciate the heart of her subject than the comment on one of Keats’ letters to Fanny in which she says that few persons could endure much longer the agonies and uncertainties which she was “so peculiarly made to create.” Miss Lowell follows this quotation with “Nobody with a grain of medical sense can fail to see this is delirium.” Perhaps not, but to use medical sense to judge John Keats is a mistake. It was agony of a sort that no medicine could relieve, and which no amount of sense could subdue.

Miss Lowell said that “Endymion suddenly finding his empty uplifted arms clasped about a naked waist is a beautiful flight of imagination astringently absorbingly expressed.” Her John Keats is astringently absorbing, but its expressions are sometimes corrosive.

We may not know all Poe’s virtues and infirmities; time may be dealing too harshly or too leniently with him; it is possible that short-story writers do not acknowledge their indebtedness to him, and that students of style do not study him sufficiently; and it may be that some do not admit that he is one of a very small group constituting the world’s great writers. But none of these injustices of mind or heart will be remedied by Mr. Sherwin Cody’s book. The author may possess qualifications for writing a life of Poe, but his book does not testify them. The art of narrative has eluded him; style, which must give flavour and substance to all biography, seems to be beyond his reach, and he has no critical judgment in the use of the vast material that Professor Harrison and many other students of Poe have collected. The only qualification he would seem to have is “a confessed sympathy with Poe’s difficult personal character.” Even though this sympathy embraced Poe’s impersonal character, it would not suffice him as biographer.

It would be easy to characterize Mr. Cody’s book, but I shall refrain and call attention only to his intemperance of statement and his disregard of the rules governing grammatical construction. “Poe stood absolutely alone among American writers.” “It is probable that Poe has been the most venomously hated man of letters in the whole range of history. W. C. Brownell in his cold, impersonal way discusses Poe with a hatred as intense as Griswold’s.”

“Poe died of nervous breakdown rather than of the effects of over-indulgence in intoxicants.”

“Poe wrote but few poems the next fifteen years, but every one is a masterpiece.” There are scores of statements of similar texture, but none of them is true.

As an example of Mr. Cody’s lack of critical judgment and understanding, the following is offered: “The writer has in mind two young friends who, in recent times, struggling to attain literary recognition as Poe did, though with far less accomplishment than his, sank under the mental strain and died, one of paresis, one of apoplexy, and a careful study of literary history would reveal scores of such.” Paresis has one cause, and only one; apoplexy in early life has two, and one of them is the same spirochete that causes paresis.

There is a finality about the author’s statements that is at first irritating, then depressing. “No very excitable person, such as Poe was, could possibly give us calm and placid judgment that would harmonise with the crude impressions of common men and women.” Anatole France was a very excitable person, and he gave very calm and placid judgments, and it is up to “common women” to say whether such judgments harmonise with their “crude impressions” or not. Not all of Mr. Cody’s book is irritating. Some of it is amusing. Commenting on some of Poe’s well known lies (his personal mendacity he calls it) he says, “Possibly he regarded this romancing about himself as harmless in itself and of some value as advertising, but the thoughtful critic can not refrain from severely blaming him.” Here speaks the author of Business Correspondence and Advertisement Writing for Business Men and the critic who is not only thoughtful but moral!

The publishers say that Mr. Cody received a letter from Bliss Perry which contains the sentence, “You have done a real service to literature.” It is more difficult to believe, even, than many of the statements of his book.

Doctor Robertson says his study of Poe “contains something new which attempts to harmonise and to present in new aspects old and well established facts, and which further makes plain the neurosis from which he suffered.” The facts about Poe were stated temperately and judiciously forty years ago by a man whose labours have ornamented American letters, and few facts have been added since the time George E. Woodberry wrote:

To call his infirmity “dipsomania” and his genius a “neurosis” does not more securely enhance Poe in the hearts of his countrymen, or add to the lustre of his name.

The thesis of the psychopathic study is that Poe was the victim of a hereditary “neurosis,” which, the author claims, differs essentially from alcoholism; and that this neurosis rendered him at intervals non-responsible for his acts, at the same time giving him a personality as unlike his own in his normal condition as certain familiar forms of insanity are universally admitted to do. Entirely apart from the correctness of the author’s claims, they throw no additional light on the events of Poe’s life, nor do they add interest to his writings, either from the standpoint of literature or of psychopathology. It may be comforting to some of Poe’s admirers to think of him as a psychopath instead of a drunkard; an irresponsible victim of an inherited handicap, instead of a moral weakling who, under the influence of alcohol, sometimes committed dishonourable acts.

Dr. Robertson says: “Only those who are experienced in the study of patients thus afflicted, and who have had personal association with them, can fully understand and appreciate the nature of the neurosis from which Poe suffered and the difficulty in overcoming such obsessions.” A neurosis is a nervous disease not associated with or dependent upon alteration of the nerves demonstrable during life or after death. Dr. Robertson believes that Poe had such disease, that it was inherited, and that it was beyond his will or determination materially to influence or control it. What neurosis did he have? Was it periodic “spreeing,” called dipsomania? If so, one might legitimately, perhaps, call it a psychosis, if he is bound to give it a name. But “neurosis” seems to be wholly beyond justification. Just what he means by “the difficulty in overcoming such obsessions” is not evident, or to me conjecturable. Psychologists and psychiatrists use the term obsession to indicate a state of siege or torment which seeks to control the individual and to condition his conduct. I have never heard the word obsession used synonymously with impulsion to drink or compulsion to yield to the desire to drink.

“Dipsomania necessarily is an alcoholic inheritance.” It is to be presumed that Dr. Robertson means to say that individuals who have an uncontrollable desire to drink periodically are descended from stock who had similar desires and succumbed to them. But that does not advance us any further in our conception of what this so-called dipsomania is. The unwarrantable liberty the author of this book takes is that he speaks of dipsomania as if it were a definite disease which psychiatrists recognise and describe. Dr. Robertson is a bibliomaniac. I have Ruskin’s authority for saying if a man spends lavishly on his library, you call him mad, a bibliomaniac. If some of Dr. Robertson’s ancestry bought books when their more material neighbors thought they should have bought shoes, his neurosis might be called a bibliophilic inheritance. This characterisation would not particularly advance our knowledge of Dr. Robertson’s personality or aid us to interpret his conduct.

Alcohol plays an important rôle in the causation of mental diseases. Statistics seem to show that about 12 per cent. of the certified insane in this country were addicted to the intemperate use of alcohol. But it does not follow that their insanity was due to such addiction. It is but one of the many causes of insanity, and not the most important. “Dipsomania is a disease, and those suffering from it should be given such medical consideration as we give the insane.” This is purely a gratuitous assumption on the part of the author. Certainly dipsomania is Dis-Ease if you emphasise the etymology of the word (a thing which Dr. Robertson enjoys doing, as he is at some pains to point out to us that genius is derived from genere, to beget): but if the purpose is to convey that dipsomania is a mental disease, such as one of the manic-depressive psychoses, paranoia, or other recognisable and described mental diseases without anatomical foundation, it is both unjustified and misleading. Dr. Robertson quotes Spitzka, “one of our well-known authorities on insanity,” in support of some of his statements. The lay reader might legitimately infer that Spitzka was an authority of the present day, whereas in reality the science of psychiatry has been revolutionised since he wrote. The modern textbook of psychiatry has no chapter on dipsomania, nor does it recognise it as a distinct variety of insanity. Modern psychiatry recognises many forms of alcoholic insanity and it calls them alcoholic dementia, alcoholic pseudo-paresis, alcoholic pseudo-paranoia, alcoholic hallucinosis, etc. Dipsomania is used by the modern psychiatrist to indicate a periodical impulse to drink. So far as the writer knows, no one has ever denied that Edgar A. Poe had dipsomania. Why belabour this admission when he has been comfortably seated on Parnassus for half a century?

Again it might be asked, what medical consideration do we give the insane that dipsomaniacs should have? We deprive them of their liberty for their own benefit and for the benefit of the community, but that is a judicial consideration. We do not deprive dipsomaniacs of their liberty because we are not permitted to do so, though it is self-evident that it would be to their advantage and to the benefit of those dependent upon and associated with them. Dr. Robertson seems to think that it is not generally accepted that an uncontrollable inclination to drink is inherited, and that he must prove it. In order to prove it he feels that he must first prove that genius is inherited. The teachings of biology are against him.

How Dr. Robertson can possibly know that biographers know nothing of the Mendelian laws of heredity is beyond any surmise on my part. I should say that if a biographer like Woodberry should indicate in his writing or allow it to be inferred that the Mendelian hypothesis was known to him, it would be safe to lay a handsome wager on it. But when Griswold, Poe’s first biographer, wrote his appreciation, or as Dr. Robertson would prefer to call it, his calumny, Gregor Mendel, the Austrian priest and Abbot of the Augustine Convent of Brünn, was quietly working in his garden making those observations that permitted him to formulate a law which has revolutionised our view of the principles of fertilisation in plants, and which may eventually revolutionise our ideas of heredity in higher organisms. He published a paper about them in the Natural History Society of Brünn, but it was lost sight of for many years and not until the principles of it were rediscovered in 1899 by De Vries, by Corens and by Tschermak was the epoch-making work of Mendel recognised. Although Dr. Robertson does not say it in so many words, he leaves the reader to infer that the Mendelian hypothesis is accepted and that it is the foundation of our theories and facts of heredity. In reality, however, the theories of heredity that must still be reckoned with are those of Darwin, Cope and Weismann, respectively, or the theories of pangenesis, perigenesis and the theory of the continuity of the germ plasm.

Biographers may ignore the alleged fact, but in doing so, they are in the company of such biologists as Francis Galton and his pupil and successor, Karl Pearson, to whom we owe much of our knowledge of heredity, acceptable and accepted.

Dr. Robertson has a way of making an arbitrary statement which savours of arrogance. For instance, “Genius develops early and is characterised by precocity.” I suppose Pasteur was a genius. He was the founder of the science of bacteriology, the architect of a diseaseless world. There is every reason for believing that he was not precocious. Few people would deny that Thomas Edison is a genius. He certainly was not precocious. Though the names of youthful dullards in the roll of men of achievement are not legion, I recall those of Davy, Linnæus, Humboldt, Watt, Fulton, Schiller, Heine, Goldsmith, Beecher, Whistler, Patrick Henry and Rousseau.

“Precocity of necessity foretells early decline,” says the author. John Stuart Mill, for instance, who could read Plato and Demosthenes with ease when he was eight and began a thorough study of scholastic logic when he was twelve! J. St. Loe Strachey is still going strong, and any one who doubts that he was precocious is referred to The Joy of Living. “I view brilliancy in the child as an abnormal heredity that must pay the price of premature decay.” Shades of Beethoven and Alexander Pope! No one would deny artistic genius to Richard Wagner. At the age of thirteen he translated the first twelve books of the Odyssey for amusement; at seventeen his first production as a composer was performed at the Leipzig theatre; and at sixty-nine the music of “Parsifal” was completed.

Dr. Robertson is bound to show that Poe did not die of delirium tremens, and he characterises the statement of Dr. J. J. Moran, who was resident physician of the Washington University Hospital, where Poe died, as “an intelligent statement covering the details of a death due to brain inflammation or engorgement.” But brain inflammation or engorgement is the condition of the brain and its membranes that is found in every case of delirium tremens that comes to autopsy, especially when the delirium has occurred in an individual whose resistance to alcohol has been impaired by prolonged use of that intoxicant or of drugs. The plain truth is that our greatest poet used alcohol intemperately and opium indiscreetly; that he died of delirium tremens; that his father drank excessively; that his conduct, drunk or sober, did not meet with the approbation of all those who knew him, possibly even not of the majority. But he put the United States of America on the literary map and he put it there more indelibly than any individual who preceded him or who has so far followed him. This is not the opinion or judgment of the writer, but of countless students and critics who have written of him during the past half century. Why whitewash the crown that posterity has put upon his brow? Why not leave the golden shimmer of the original burnish?

Merely to expose the quality of the whitewash which Dr. Robertson has applied to the poet’s crown, and not from any desire to call attention to the weakness of the man who wears it, one incident may be cited of Poe’s action as a critic. This is his estimate of Estelle Anna Lewis, a Brooklyn poetess, of whom he wrote:

Such an estimate could only go to prove that critics often make mistakes and that Poe as critic was not the peer of Poe as poet and story-writer, were it not for the fact that this poetess, prior to the appearance of the notice in which the quotation appeared, had paid Poe one hundred dollars to review one of her books, and when she complained of his failure to do so he remarked that if he reviewed her rubbish it would kill him.

Such incidents could be multiplied. But to what purpose? Poe was a genius and he is immortal. As a man he was a pathetic figure, a moral weakling. It can not add to the lustre of his immortal genius to expose the pitiful skeleton of the man over whom the dust of time has spread a merciful veil and the radiance of his crown has cast an indulgent shadow. Nor can Dr. Robertson enhance the world’s estimate of the writer by piling up words to convince it that Poe, the man, was full of fine qualities only, but at times committed acts for which he could not be held responsible because he was under the temporary influence of a “neurosis”; and that this “neurosis” had no effect upon the quality of his writing.

Edgell Rickword’s biography of Arthur Rimbaud, the decadent, is too laudatory, too apologetic, too condoning; but it reveals penetrative insight, sympathetic understanding, and a measure of critical acumen.

Rimbaud was a contentious, bumptious, conceited, selfish, pigheaded, insensitive young hobo who in three years of his youthful life wrote the best poetry of France since Baudelaire. He printed only one book, Une Saison en Enfer, an epitome of his mind’s life. When he was eighteen he stopped writing and began wandering, scoffing at literature, regretting his part in its creation, and scorning recognition of a position among the writers of his country.

He tramped, he travelled with a circus, he was overseer in a stone quarry, and finally landed in Africa where he lived the last nineteen years of his life, pioneering, exploring, merchandising. Then, just as he was about to secure a modest competency and to see his dream of fireside and family come true, a parasite possessed him. When he reached Marseilles the surgeons amputated a leg, and he died soon after, in the odour of sanctity and in his thirty-eighth year. His devoted, pious sister, Isabelle, has told of his last days with fervid affection in a booklet Mon Frère Arthur, and Ernest Delahaye, who knew, understood, loved, and tolerated him perhaps more than any one, published in 1923 a volume which pleased both the critics and Rimbaud’s friends. About the same time an industrious critic of French letters, Maurice Coulon, published a volume, Le Problème de Rimbaud, Poète Maudit.

Rimbaud has been dead nearly thirty-five years. His literary output is the smallest on record. His poetry, although generally admitted to stand beside that of Hugo, Vigny, and Musset, has no human interest; he does not sing of love, he does not chant the virtues of his country or its people. Probably not one reader in twenty is touched by Les Illuminations, and not one in ten discerns his thesis or his philosophy in Une Saison en Enfer.

What then is the explanation of this sustained interest in him? Why does posterity extol him and neglect Gérard de Nerval, who brought to the light of day a long hidden pediment of literature: the æsthetics of symbolism? The answer is easily given. His “affair” with Verlaine is the human interest of Arthur Rimbaud. People like to read about him as they like to read Town Topics or Le Cri de Paris. Mr. Rickword is to be congratulated on rendering the theme with his foot on the soft pedal. Had he called his book The Taming by Time of an Antinomian, it would have been a comprehensive and a just title.

The wide dissemination of the Freudian theories is responsible in a measure for the keen interest of the reading public in sexual fixations, their manifestations and liberations. Rimbaud apparently got stuck on third base in the game of life, but there are many indications that he was stealing home when the bell rang.