Chapter X: Part II: Interpretations (7)

The writer is a man of opinions, most of them positive and difficult to dislodge, but the reader should keep in mind that they were written for a sympathetic, indulgent eye. This will suggest to him that many of the judgments may be discounted. “The theatre of the early nineties was dull as ditch-water.” That may be, but it was as sparkling and bright as a noisy brook compared with the theatre to-day. “The ideal training for an actor is no longer possible to obtain.” Was it possible ever to obtain? Certainly not since the days of Hellenic supremacy. “Garrick undoubtedly was a man of culture and accomplishment, a master of the social art and full of parlour tricks. His anecdotes, his imitations, his studies of various types of bumpkinhood were cameos of characterisation. As a mimic he was supreme, but he was a charlatan and he mutilated Shakespeare.” Posterity is even more tenacious of her opinions than is the Unsuccessful Actor, and they are better founded.

His pronouncements are not by any means all drastic and destructive. Many are mild, sensible and philosophic. “The greatest artist is he who obtains greatness in his portrayal of the greatest conceptions” is not original but it is felicitously expressed. Those who bemoan the decline of manners and morals will be likely to sympathise with him when he says: “With me manners were ever more important than morals.” I fancy all members of his profession will agree. “It is when immorality flaunts its bad manners that I won’t tolerate it.” Such intolerance would be becoming to nearly every one, and no one will dissent from his statement that “a good play is one in which a credible, an interesting story is unfolded by means of living characters, psychologically developed by incident.” If it were _either_ credible or interesting most of us would vote it good!

The author occasionally indulges in prophecies and some of them have already come true. In 1918 he wrote: “Once let the Germans get the Allies talking around a table, during an armistice and they, not we, will have won this War, and within a few years will start preparing for the next.”

He has something interesting to say about dramatic criticism, about democracy, about Lloyd George and about love. It is one of the most interesting books to pick up and read for a few minutes, that has emanated from the stage in a long time.

* * * * *

_Weber and Fields_ is not to be judged by biographic standards. It is not a biography at all. It is a torrid narrative of the triumph of two Jewish boys who, unaided by education, training or influence, went from a cellar in East Broadway to their own theatre on Broadway and who furnished during ten years wholesome amusement to more people of this city and country than any two men of their time, not even excepting William Jennings Bryan and Rev. John Roach Straton. No one could reduce to writing the genius of Weber and Fields. It defies verbal characterisation but Mr. Isman makes an excellent attempt. That he does not quite succeed in conveying how side-splitting were their conversations and antics, is not his fault. But he has succeeded in giving some good pictures of the time, and some excellent likenesses of many who were associated with the two comedians: of De Wolf Hopper as Hoffman Barr; of Lillian Russell as the Wealthy Widow, and of David Warfield as the Talking Doll. No one who knew Peter Dailey will fail to approve this thumb-sketch of him:

“Oh, rare Pete Dailey! Inimitable Peter! Born comedian,
the quickest-witted man that ever used grease paint;
splendid voice; an acrobat and agile dancer despite his
two hundred and fifty pounds; no performance ever the
same; needing neither lines nor business, but only to be
given the stage; convulsing his fellow actors as well as
the audience with his impromptu sallies; an inveterate
practical joker; a bounding, bubbling personality.”

Things have changed since the heyday of their success! When thugs want your money in New York, nowadays, they knock you down and take it; or if it is jewellery they fancy, they enter your house or shop and blackjack you if you seek to stay their quest. There was more finesse in the good old days. The man who guessed your weight--“No charge if I fail”--spoke in a code intelligible only to his accomplices. As he ran his hands over a candidate he talked, seemingly to no purpose, but his “I think your weight is,” translated, meant, “His money is in his right trousers pocket.” “I guess your weight to be” located the victim’s purse in the hip pocket, and “I say your weight is” the inside coat pocket.

If Chicago were articulate she would probably deny that she now harbours hostelries such as Joe Weber and Lew Fields were obliged to patronise.

“For the period of the Chicago stay Grenier boarded out
his troupers by contract. Joe and Lew were assigned to a
boarding house with the freaks. The bearded lady sat at
Lew’s left and drank her coffee from a moustache cup. The
fat man occupied the next three chairs on Joe’s right,
and never missed the middle one when Joe removed it, as
he did at every opportunity. Directly opposite, on a high
chair, sat the armless wonder. What that unfortunate
lacked in arms, he made up in prehensile cunning of
his feet. With these he helped and fed himself, and
manipulated knife, fork and spoon as matter of factly as
the elephants used their trunks. The bearded lady had a
reputation as a wit to uphold and it was her pleasure to
shout ‛Hands off!’ at least once at every meal when the
wonder reached for some dish. At the first breakfast Lew
asked that the biscuits be passed. They lay nearest the
wonder. He thrust forth a leg with a biscuit clutched in
his foot. Lew did his own reaching from then on. They ate
dinner sometimes at the Palmer House, Chicago’s pride,
where a jar of stick candy stood beside the catchup
bottle and the vinegar cruet in the center of each
table, and there were nineteen choices of meats on the
seventy-five-cent table d’hôte menu that read like an
inventory.”

The sun of Weber and Fields stayed in its zenith about five years. Then John Stromberg, their musical genius, died, and it set rapidly; and in the twilight, Hopper, Collier, Bernard, Mitchell and his wife, Bessie Clayton, strayed. Innocent slaughtering of the English language began to jar the ears of those who slaughtered it themselves; the quality of the Metropolis’ population changed rapidly; theatres began to spring up like mushrooms after a rain and music-halls made way for Follies. Numbered were the days of the Music Hall, which reserved the character of the Daudet heroine, and rechristened her Sapolio in token of her having consecrated her life to the task of making Paris a spotless town morally--the old Music Hall, where Dailey was Jean Gaussin, unwilling victim of Sapolio’s high moral purpose; Warfield, Uncle Cæsaire who ate moth balls to conceal his alcoholic breath; Fields, a comedy servant girl who, ordered to serve the capon en casserole, cooked it in castor oil; Joseph, Fanny Le Grand’s perfect little gentleman of a child, became in Weber’s hands, a kicking, brawling, tobacco-chewing brat; Harry Morey, now a Hollywood hero, a concierge with an Irish brogue.

And such dialogue! Foolish, oh, yes, but of such is the kingdom of real laughter.

A precious book for a melancholy mood, for an hour of convalescence, or for ten minutes of waiting while your wife makes obeisance to her mirror.

XI
STATESMEN

WOODROW WILSON, by _William Allen White_.
THE TRUE STORY OF WOODROW WILSON, by _David Lawrence_.
BRIGHAM YOUNG, by _M. R. Werner_.
THE LIFE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN, by _William E. Barton_.
SELECTIONS FROM THE CORRESPONDENCE OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT
AND HENRY CABOT LODGE.
LETTERS FROM THEODORE ROOSEVELT TO ANNE ROOSEVELT COWLES.

William Allen White has the qualities that fit him to write about Woodrow Wilson entertainingly for his contemporaries, illuminatingly for posterity. He is versatile and perspicacious; he has a sense of humour and he is colossally industrious; he is sensitive and sensible, and has been disciplined in the art of verbal expression, by intuition and experience. He is a man of ideals and ideas; the former are realisable, the latter not persecutory; and he has a tender spot in his heart for the Irish.

Posterity and its spokesmen will render the verdict on Woodrow Wilson that will endure. I do not agree with Mr. White that his place in the history of the world will not be determined by his character. It will be determined by his character, not by his characteristics, just as George Washington’s was and just as Abraham Lincoln’s was. Nor do I agree that “the relation between character and fame is not of first importance” though I am aware that “many good men live and die unknown.” They do, indeed, but many good men have very little character. “Character” and “good” are not synonymous. A “good” man is a man who does not disobey the commandments nor transcend conventions. A man with “character” frequently does both. Woodrow Wilson did and I have no doubt George Washington did, despite the cherry tree story.

The greatest of all commandments is, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” If he had affectionate feeling for Dean West, President Hibben, Senator Lodge and others “too numerous to mention” he successfully concealed it. He was undoubtedly a truthful man, but he said he had written the preface to Dean West’s publicity brochure without reading it, and later, when it was shown that he had read it, he said he had written it good-naturedly and offhand, which was again at variance with the truth, for it carefully and lucidly expressed his attitude to the school. He told the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations that he never had seen the secret treaties, though there is documentary evidence to the contrary.

He had character: he was firm, fearless and free, and he had vision. He showed these qualities in Paris. In his vision it was revealed to him that from the sanguineous and agonising travail of the war a child had been born; that it did not resemble its parents; that many called it monster, others Bolshevism; and that it subscribed to none of our rules of bringing-up or behaviour. He saw that it was lusty, growing like the traditional weed, that it threatened to shut out our sunlight and our source. He realised that we must deal with communism, and gradually, day by day, the world is realising it. Woodrow Wilson was “good” enough, but unfortunately for him, for his peace of mind and happiness, he had “characteristics” and they fettered him.

Mr. White bears heavily on Woodrow Wilson’s ancestry, too heavily some will think, or too indiscriminatingly.

It may have been the Woodrow in him that told Colonel Harvey that his advocacy of him as a presidential candidate was injuring his prospects and it may have been the Wilson in him that charmed the “bawling mob, hot, red-faced, full of heavy food and too much rebellious liquor” which nominated him for Governor of New Jersey; but it was Woodrow Wilson that met the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the White House in June 1919, when he made the misstep that lamed him for his remaining mortal days, and dislodged his country from the saddle of world-leader, in which it seemed to be riding a winning race.

Mr. White would have us believe that Woodrow Wilson got his intellect and obstinacy from the Woodrows, his emotions and charm from the Wilsons. What did he get from Ann Adams, his lynx-eyed grandmother whose mouth dropped at the angles and who neither saw nor forgave a daughter after she married beyond her approbation? From her, I suppose, he got the capacity to treat Colonel House, his polar star for the ten years of his fruition, as though he were a Judas, and Joseph Tumulty, who served him with dog-like fidelity and intelligence from the beginning of his political career to its zenith and beyond, as though he were not only mangy but had rabies as well?

The chapter entitled “The Miracle of Heredity” might more appropriately and truthfully be labelled, “Teachings of Heredity Exemplified by the Appearance, Conduct and Career of Woodrow Wilson.” The author would have us believe that environment had much to do in conditioning his limitations. He writes:

“If only there could have been in his life some
shanty-Irish critic with a penchant for assault and
battery, some dear beloved sweetheart to show his notes
around the playground, some low-minded friend to fasten
upon him the nickname ‛four eyes,’ calling brutal
attention to his spectacles, or some other nickname in
thinly veiled obscenity which would reveal a youthful
weakness and so make him truckle to the baser nature of
his gang that he might remove the black curse of his
sobriquet--what a world we should have to-day!”

Alas, that I should disagree again with one who has given me hours of pleasure from which enduring admiration has developed! Woodrow Wilson would have been the same had he budded in Hoboken, flowered in Montmartre and fructified in Tahiti.

If one can say there is a disappointing chapter in the book it is one entitled “The Development of Youth.” The study that will throw a penetrating light on Woodrow Wilson will be one that concerns itself chiefly with the years between 1874 and 1885, from the time he went to Columbia, South Carolina, until he left Johns Hopkins University, where “he was known as a friendly cuss in the American vernacular and never a grind.” In his school and college days he met, worked and played with other boys who were destined to become successful Americans. Perhaps there was a rule amongst them taking notes which he will print. If there was, he is the one to unleash the bridegroom “coming forth rejoicing as a strong man to run a race” better than his brother-in-law, Stockton Axson, whom Mr. White quotes.

Woodrow Wilson’s presidency of Princeton University has probably never been outlined more accurately and attractively than in the chapters, “The Lecturer Becomes the Administrator” and “Going Through the First Fire.” Not only is the chief leading actor sketched by the hand of a master, but there is a Hogarthian vignette of Dean West, and a portrait of Colonel House which is so perfect that I must quote it:

“A man of slight figure, perhaps five feet six in height,
of a thin, oval cast of countenance, adorned by a short,
grey, stubby moustache over a firm and yet sensitive
mouth which in turn is carved above a strong chin. The
whole countenance bursts into illumination with beaming,
kindly eyes below a rather higher brow than one expects
from the remainder of the face; and the voice, when it
comes from this gentle, interesting, and intelligent
face, is soft and low and modest. A certain almost
Oriental modesty, a Chinese self-effacement, abides with
the personality of Colonel House. He seems to be in
constant and delightful agreement with his auditor. And
this delightful agreement, as one knows him, expresses
itself in a thousand ways in an obvious and unmistakable
desire to serve. He is never servile, but always serving;
gentle without being soft, exceedingly courteous with the
most unbending dignity. He is forever punctuating one’s
sentence with ‛that’s true, that’s true’; and stimulating
candour among men, which is the essence of friendship.”

Mr. White is an impartial partisan, a pleading judge. These desirable qualities of the biographer are revealed most conspicuously in the narrative of Woodrow Wilson’s first great struggle with his most deforming limitation: inability to bear and forbear, to do team work, to play the game according to the rules. No doubt he felt that he had gained a moral victory at Princeton, but the trustees were glad to see him leave.

How he got the nomination for Governor of New Jersey, how he short-circuited the political machine, how he inoculated the Democratic party of his adopted state with liberalism and how, gradually but surely, the immunisation that resulted was felt throughout the country are told most interestingly. The chapters are interspersed with pleasant references to three women who influenced his life: he got understanding, loyalty, indulgence and devotion from Ellen Axson and from Edith Boiling; from Mrs. Peck he got appeasement of his latent hedonism, encouragement of his ambition, justification of his conduct, and praise which was to Woodrow Wilson what manna was to the Children of Israel. She, “of exquisite spiritual prowess and facile charm,” is supposed to have enjoyed his confidence to a remarkable degree. Her recently published story does not tend to prove it. Until his letters to her are published, I shall continue to believe he got nothing from her save what I have enumerated.

Woodrow Wilson’s nomination and election to the Presidency of this country and the accomplishments of his first administration are passed over rather briefly. All will not agree “that when his four years’ work are considered as a whole, when they are viewed retrospectively they may be seen as the fastest moving four years in our economic and social history.”

It was in 1916, when he was renominated by his party without opposition, and re-elected, that President Wilson became a world figure. His dealings with Germany, his restraint in bringing this country into the war, the way in which he developed public opinion to back him up when there was nothing to do save to join up with the Allies, are told with candour and simplicity. Then come the glad and the sad chapters: the President’s gestation of the League of Nations plan, and his abortive attempts to deliver himself; his European odyssey; his encounter with the sirens; his shipwreck; the shattering of the raft that he got together to take him before the people when the Republican Senators convinced him they would not accept the treaty; his final illness and his tiresome wait for the ring down of the curtain are told with gratifying impartiality and in satisfactory _résumé_.

The relation of Woodrow Wilson’s illness to his great failure: his inability to get his country to accept the League of Nations idea and membership in that product of his brain, has never been properly recognised nor publicly discussed. But it has a definite and a pathetic relation. Mr. White says:

“He brought with him to the White House a stomach pump
which he used almost daily and a quart can of some sort
of coal-tar product--headache tablets; they were giving
him incipient Bright’s disease until the White House
doctors took hold of him and stopped the tablets. The
tinkering with his intestines proved the frailty of the
man.”

Alas, how frail man is, and how many men and women are frail if “tinkering” with their intestines proves such frailty!

Before he went to the White House and while he was still governor of New Jersey, and possibly even before that, Woodrow Wilson showed distinct symptoms of the disease to which he finally succumbed: arteriosclerosis. The disease was detected first in his retinal blood vessels by a famous ophthalmologist of this country and he was instructed to a régime which, subscribed to and followed, is adequate frequently to bring about a cessation of the progress of the disease. Perhaps “tinkering” with the intestines does not felicitously or appropriately describe the essential features of that prophylaxis, but if it embraces what is meant by overcoming fermentation and putrefaction in the digestive tract, then “tinkering” is the word to use and it is to be regretted that “White House doctors” were not “tinkers” too.

One day, some one will point out that President Wilson’s irascibility, obstinacy, mental inflexibility and emotional inelasticity, which he displayed so frequently, painfully to himself and humiliatingly to his people while in Paris on his second European venture, and here when he took his plan to the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and finally to the people at large, were mainly due to the arteriosclerosis, which at that time had made great inroads on the nutrient channels of the brain. It accentuated his limitations and minimised his possessions. It immobilised him like a hephæstic fetter, and there was no one strong or courageous enough to break the links before the fibre of the web had annealed.

Mr. White’s concluding chapter is entitled “The Assessment,” and it contains these words with which every one must agree:

“If Fame does not come to him through the conjunction of
time and chance working upon the genius of the race to
preserve the structure which he previsioned in his hour
of trial, Fame will find a man here--a clean, brave,
wise, courageous man--ready-made for heroic stature.”

How unfortunate it is that Mr. White could not have interpolated the adjectives “understanding, kindly, compassionate, loyal!”

In another connection Mr. White says: “And we must not forget that from the bottom of his Irish heart always the motive which most surely moved Woodrow Wilson was the love of his kind.” Against this statement I set the following extract from my own writings:

“Woodrow Wilson does not love his fellow men. He
loves them in the abstract, but not in the flesh. He
is concerned with their fate, their destiny, their
travail en masse, but the predicaments, perplexities and
prostrations of the individual or groups of individuals
make no appeal to him. He does not refresh his soul by
bathing it daily in the milk of human kindness. He says
with his lips that he loves his fellow-man, but there is
no accompanying emotional glow, none of the somatic or
spiritual accompaniments which are the normal ancillæ
of love’s display. He does not respect his fellow’s
convictions when they are opposed to his own. He does
not value their counsel when it is adverse to his own
judgment.... In contact with people, he gives himself
the air of listening in deference, and indeed of being
beholden to their judgment and opinion, but in reality
it is an artifice which he puts off when he returns to
the dispensing centre of the world and of the law just
as he puts off his gloves and hat.... Woodrow Wilson
attempts to mask, with facial urbanity and a smile in
verbal contact with people, and with the subjective
mood in written contact, another deforming defect of
character; namely, his inability to enter into a contest
of any sort in which there is a strife, without revealing
his obsession to win. When he attempts to play any
game, his artificed civility, cordiality, amiability,
are so discordant with the real man that they become as
offensive as affectations of manner or speech always
are, and instead of placating the individual for whom
they are manifest, or facilitating the _modus vivendi_,
they offend and make _rapport_ with him impossible....
Mr. Wilson is a brilliant, calculating and vindictive
man; brilliant in conception, calculating in motive and
vindictive in execution.... Were he generous, kindly and
humble, it would be difficult to find his like in the
flesh or in history.”

That was my deliberate judgment after having studied Woodrow Wilson from the psychological point of view, and that is my judgment now after having read and re-read Mr. White’s book.

It is by his possessions, not by his limitations, that Woodrow Wilson will be estimated. The campaign is on. It is not a noisy one. No one can say what the outcome will be, but the straw vote now being taken suggests that his election to membership in the Academy of the World’s Immortals is assured.

* * * * *

Another journalist, David Lawrence, has written what he calls _The True Story of Woodrow Wilson_. Either the adjective should have been deleted from that title, or the indefinite article should have been substituted for the definite.

Mr. Lawrence was the correspondent of the Associated Press at Princeton from 1906 to 1910, the closing years of Wilson’s pedagogical life and the opening years of his political career. For the past fifteen years, he has done journalistic work in Washington which has brought him in close contact with the pattern makers of our national destiny. He has had therefore unusual opportunity to observe, and he is a trained and trusted interpreter of events. Small wonder that his book is readable, interesting and instructive. Were he as trustworthy an interpreter of souls as he is of events, his book would deserve high rating.

The satisfactory life of Wilson must be written from his letters, messages, memoranda and books after the disappearance of the emotional states engendered by his presence and personality, which are prejudicial to correct estimation and inimical to sound judgment. Such states of popular feeling never disappear in one generation. It is only now that we begin to realise the majesty of Lincoln’s mind, the harmony of his soul.

Mr. Lawrence’s opening sentence is “Woodrow Wilson died as he lived--unexplained and unrevealed.” He was more “explained” than any man of his time, and neither Mr. Baruch nor Mr. Bridges would, I fancy, admit that he was unrevealed. He may have been improperly explained, and insufficiently revealed, but there are thousands who saw and met him who will not believe it.

Mr. Lawrence states that his purpose was to put on record a dispassionate narrative of the man who, equipped only with the qualities of personal magnetism and intellectual power, made the unparalleled ascent from College Professor to Moral Leader of the world. Every unprejudiced reader must admit that success crowned his effort.

When Admiral Grayson shall publish his diary; when the archives of Colonel House’s mind are accessible; when all Walter Page’s letters are available, and when Mr. Robert Bridges, Mr. Norman Davis, and Mr. Bernard Baruch shall testify the qualities that the world denied him--qualities of heart--we shall be in position to estimate Woodrow Wilson and to assess his career. Had Mr. William Jennings Bryan shifted the focus of his mind from fundamentalism to fact, and told us of his intimacy with Woodrow Wilson, it would have served a useful purpose.

* * * * *

It was said of Brigham Young that he was a Cromwell in daring, a Machiavelli in intrigue, a Moses in executive force, and a Bonaparte in ruthlessness and unscrupulousness; and William H. Seward said that America has produced few greater statesmen. These testimonials and the universal admission that he gave Mormonism whatever permanency it has, and that he was the parent of its material prosperity prove that he was a man of uncommon personality.

Personality analysis and portrayal are the Elysian field of the biographer. Here is a man who was to the system of polytheism called Mormonism what Paul was to Christianity: preacher, organiser, administrator. A farmer lad without background or education, he supported himself by painting and glazing until he undertook the dissemination and direction of the doctrines revealed by God to Joseph Smith, Jr., who devoted all the succeeding days of his life, until his neighbours killed him, to their promulgation. Religion took the place of education in Brigham Young and aroused his latent qualities and power. It led him to the Governorship of Utah and to the Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; and before he died nearly a half a million people were convinced that he, like Christ and Mohammed, partook of divinity.

He has only recently been called to his reward; fifty years ago, he was a power in the land; for more than a quarter of a century every word that he said that was fit to print was printed and archived; his life is thoroughly documented. He should be a fascinating subject for a biographer. It would be fulsome praise to say that M. R. Werner has written a satisfactory or a successful biography of him. It reveals neither diligent research nor careful reflection; it is neither skilfully composed nor effectively told; there is scant evidence in it that the most important source of such a biography, _The Journal of Discourses_, has been deeply studied or adequately transcribed. But its most serious shortcoming as a biography is a possession, not a lack, and that possession is the engulfing, overwhelming background. Mr. Werner says it is impossible to write the life of Brigham Young without also writing the history of Mormonism, and it is impossible to write the history of Mormonism without writing the life of Joseph Smith, Jr. I fancy few will agree with him. I should go so far even as to say that no one can write the history of Mormonism and the lives of its author and proprietor and of its administrator and perpetuator, simultaneously. To do the first of these alone would be an interminable task. It would require a discussion of the religious instinct, explaining why this instinct is so rarely appeased by what the wisdom of God and the ingenuity of man have to offer. And a detailed, specific statement of the system of polytheism which the Book of Mormon professes to teach and the Book of Doctrine seeks to justify, would require examination of the status of prophecy, of miracles, of the imminent approach of the end of the world, of personal contact with God through sight or hearing at the present day, of liberty of private judgment in religious matter, and of scores of other tenets of the Mormon creed. Moreover, it would require an explicit statement of the Mormon hierarchy, an extremely complicated structure, and a summary of the Mormon’s form of government. No biographer, however facile, could interpret Joseph Smith, Jr., who is not familiar with the psychopathology and experienced in the ways of the psychic deviate. Concerning Mr. Werner’s apology regarding the necessary scope of this book, it would be just as legitimate to say that the life of Francis of Assisi could not be written without writing at the same time the history of the Catholic Church and the story of the life of Ignatius Loyola.

_Reprinted from “Brigham Young,” by M. R. Werner
Courtesy of Harcourt, Brace & Co._

In brief, Mr. Werner bit off more than he could chew. However, one gets more from a second reading of the book than from the first. That is a poor recommendation for a book these days when people are insisting that they be enlightened by electricity. By careful and persisting digging, the reader may get a notion, form a concept, of Brigham Young’s personality, particularly if he concentrates on the chapter entitled “Sinai.”

Brigham Young said with his lips that he believed in God, but with his heart he said he believed in himself. He was self-sufficient, but not self-satisfied.

He was about as fearless as man can be. His conduct all his life testifies that he was as devoid of fear as the words of Edward W. Bok testify that he is. Brigham Young and Theodore Roosevelt had the same brand of courage and about the same supply.

Young understood the primitive and the acquired urges of man as few understand them. He curbed those of others and indulged his own; and he was the only man of his country, save Benjamin Franklin, who really understood women.

He was ruthless, and he had a vein of cruelty in him that came to the surface with increasing frequency. He imposed his will and determination upon friend and foe; he brooked no denial, no contradiction. Cast in the mould of Joshua, he firmly believed every place the sole of his foot trod was his, for the Lord had given it to him.

With it all, he had a sense of humour and he loved children. Small wonder that orators in the throes of self-excitation liken him to Pericles and Cromwell, and frenzied preachers liken him to God.

One has but to study the various photographs of Brigham Young and to keep in mind one thing he said about his father in order to be able satisfactorily to solve the mystery and guess the secret of his personality: “It was a word and a blow with Father, but the blow came first.” And Brigham Young’s method was the same. He wanted to keep polygamy as the strong link in the chain of the hierarchal organisation that was such a brilliant economical success; he kept it there until the Government imprisoned him, and when he died, seventeen wives and forty-four children were at his funeral.

He had his own way in everything save with Amelia Folsom. To her determination not to bend the knee, he owes the preservation of his character. Another young woman whom he took to wife when he was sixty-six attempted to discipline him, but without success. Even if she had not failed, his character would have been safe; that possession can not be ruined after sixty.

Like Achilles, Brigham Young had one vulnerable spot, but it was his heart, not his heel. Women acted upon him as the lamp does upon the moth. It was not face or figure, intelligence or charm that lured him. It was sex. Casanova was to him what a candle is to a phare. The illusion that most men develop when they approach senility, viz., that they are still attractive to young women, seized him early. When he was fifty-six years old, he said, preaching to his flock: “You think I am an old man? I could prove to this congregation that I am young, that I could find more girls who would choose me for a husband than any of the young men.” His experience would seem to justify the boast, but with all his understanding of women he forgot that women marry for different reasons, some for position, some for protection, some for title. But what is Princess or Duchess compared to Goddess?

“I am a great lover of good women. I understand their nature, the design of their being and their work.” Had Brigham Young left out the only adjective in that sentence and added: “Once it mattered not to me that they were old or young, homely or plain, temperamental or indifferent, but now that I am old, I like them young and pretty,” it would have been an epitome of what women meant to him in the twilight of his life, as the following sentence epitomises his general estimate of them: “Let our wives be the weaker vessels and the men be men, and show the women by their superior ability that God gives husbands wisdom and ability to lead their wives into His presence.” After looking at the pictures of scores and more of Brigham Young’s wives, one is convinced that Mark Twain was right when he said the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitled him to the kindly applause of mankind, and the man who marries sixty of them has done a deed of open-hearted generosity so sublime that the nation should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.

The hiatus in Brigham Young’s personality was on the æsthetic side. He had no feeling for beauty in any form or display and he could not distinguish between vulgarity and refinement in conduct, thought or speech. Rabelais alone outranks him in putridity of speech, and his sermon of the first Sunday of September 1861, when he talked to his flock about how they should dress, is offered in evidence.

Shrewdness, cruelty and industry were his dominant possessions. They radiate from the daguerreotype made of him when he was fifty, like scent from a lily. He was hirsute, heavy-jawed, thin-lipped and the corners of a mouth, that seemed framed for an oath or an obscenity, dipped deeply into his cheeks. He was thick-necked, barrel-chested and his hands and feet did not fit him, but they were adapted to a man who ruled with a rod of iron. The secret of his success he said was “I am a Yankee. I guess things and very frequently I guess right.” If he had added, “I see straight; I know that original sin is fear and that all mankind is born in it; and that the real pleasure of life is in gratifying the fundamental urges,” neither his personality nor his success would be enigmatic.

It would help the searcher after explanation of Brigham Young’s success as proselyter, exhorter, guide, executive, lover and tyrant to know about his parents and his brothers and sisters. They were all steeped in seriousness and saturated with religiosity. His father, who became the right-hand man in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was an unreasoning Methodist, an uncompromising moralist. His brother Joseph “was solemn and praying all the time and he had not been seen to smile for four years or to laugh for two.” His brother Phinias was a preacher who saw visions and his sister who mediated him to Mormonism was the wife of the Reverend John P. Green. He lived in a recreationless community to which a new religion was what the County Fair, Circus and Cinema are to remote rural communities to-day.

It was as natural for Brigham Young to go into Mormonism as for a duck to go into water. When he got in, he soon found it was a quick and safe way to prosperity, power and posterity. He put his religious enthusiasm out at compound interest and in twelve years it made him a Prophet, a Seer, a Revelator and a Realtor. He pitched his economic tent in the desert plains of Utah and he directed his co-religionists to thrust fertility upon them through irrigation and bent backs. Having no capacity for spending money, he soon began to experience the feelings of Crœsus. He realised that the surest way to wealth is to be a big earner, a small spender, and a prudent investor. He urged his flock to those ends and said: “I am your avatar.”

There were two things he liked to do: to dance and to make love. He was strangely susceptible to rhythmical movement and he loved to marry women and to beget children. He acknowledged twenty-seven of the former and fifty-six of the latter.

The day Mormonism was purged of polygamy, it ceased to be an object of popular interest and likely it will remain so unless the Ku Klux Klan or the Fundamentalists can be persuaded to concentrate on it, when it shall have again its day in court, but there will never be such days as those of Brigham Young.

Mr. Werner says he is convinced that Mormonism is a perfect example of religion carried to its illogical conclusions. If he would only tell us what religion carried to its logical conclusion is, it might help us to fathom his meaning. But nothing will help us understand what he means by “demented frog” and “neurotic horse” or why one of Joseph’s sisters was _enceinte_ and not pregnant, or what there was about Brigham Young that made him “constitutionally, and by habit, incapable of languor,” for languor shall always mean for me feebleness, faintness of body, oppression from fatigue, disease or trouble. Brigham Young was a god, but he was also a mortal.

* * * * *

Dr. Barton’s reasons for writing another life of Lincoln are three: he has some new facts, he wishes to correct misstatements in extant biographies, and fifty years of clearing weather have added to the visibility and luminosity of the atmosphere through which the Great Liberator is to be seen. Moreover, fifty years is the gestation period of judiciality.

There are few more puerile chapters in biography than Chapter I entitled “The Birth of Abraham Lincoln,” with its trivialities and platitudes on the birthplace of eminent men, Christ included; discourses on log cabins, their shape and size and construction; homilies on the comfortlessness of Nancy Lincoln’s bed and the relationship of plains and woods to Presidents; reflections on the relationship of child culture to sanitation; the description of Nancy’s smile when she was told that she had brought forth a man child; and the astonishing statement that the author has ridden in the Kentucky mountains many miles side by side with a doctor who died soon after 1809. Any one who can get through the first chapter, brief though it is, will be able to read the book.

Abraham Lincoln held biographies in slight esteem and could scarcely be persuaded to read them. He wanted the truth about people. Hence he read the Bible. He would probably have found Dr. Barton’s three books about him far too eulogistic, but eulogy comes naturally to clergymen. “This book attempts to tell the truth about Abraham Lincoln.” So did Nicolay and Hay’s, so did Lord Charnwood’s, Miss Tarbell’s, Herndon’s, Josiah Holland’s, and others “too numerous to mention.” Dr. Barton has no corner on truth. His new facts are important, but not so important as he thinks. Aside from putting it beyond question that Abraham Lincoln was born to Nancy Hanks while she was wedded to Thomas Lincoln, there is nothing new of importance except perhaps certain emotional sidelights. He has unearthed some documents that bear directly on Lincoln’s ancestry, but we are no more interested in his grandfather than in his great-grandfather and in him no more than the grandfather who had eight or eighty grands before his father-appellation. He has had access to the diaries of Orville A. Browning, once United States Senator, but I should not consider his Excellency George Harvey’s diary a repository of facts about Woodrow Wilson. Although Senator Browning was reputed to have known Lincoln intimately, he and Judge David Davis, discussing the Nation’s loss the day after Lincoln’s death, agreed that no one knew him through and through. Moreover, Mr. Browning was a pious man and piety is a parent of prejudice.

The writer who has new facts about Abraham Lincoln should state them in plain language at the beginning of each chapter. Dr. Barton has written an enormous book, two volumes, 500 pages each, about America’s inspired statesman, of which the only interesting portion is that which treats of the parents of Lincoln, and he had already treated that subject in a book entitled _The Paternity of Abraham Lincoln_.

Dr. Barton writes that now for the first time he is able to give the true story of the Hanks family from which our greatest President descended. It has the hallmarks of a true story, and henceforth it must be accepted. The investigations that the author has made of the Sparrow family have been fruitful and they should forever close the controversy concerning Lincoln’s parentage. The records of Mecklenburg County, Virginia, and of Mercer County, Kentucky, have told Dr. Barton the truth about it. We could wish that he might have told it with more brevity, directness and felicitousness. He is far stronger in research than in narrative power. Digression, circumlocution, overtake him on every page.

Joseph Hanks’ eldest daughter was Lucy. She came to young womanhood in a period of license and revolt that followed the Revolutionary War, similar to that which followed the Great War. Dr. Barton thinks this explains, but does not justify her conduct. She bore a child when she was 19 and she called it Nancy. The father has been conjectured, but history does not name him. Seven years later she married, and though she “was behaving like a perfect lady when her father died, he disinherited her.” He could not forget her seven years of sin. After she had been indicted for fornication and branded publicly “with an unpleasant name,” Henry Sparrow made his beau geste. He married her and thus vested her with virtue. The indictment was quashed. From that time Lucy was known as Nancy’s Aunt. Readers of Edith Wharton’s _The Old Maid_ will know just how Lucy felt about it. Let us hope that Elizabeth Sparrow, the real aunt, was as good a vicarious mother as Delia Lovell, and let us also hope that some day Mrs. Wharton may write her story.

Discussing the parents of Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Barton takes occasion to say that Lea and Hutchinson’s book, _The Ancestry of Abraham Lincoln_ is not _always_ wrong. That is Dr. Barton’s idea of high praise.

Thomas Lincoln married Nancy Hanks and a photograph of the marriage certificate which adorns Dr. Barton’s book convinces us that it was a _bona fide_ marriage. Whether Nancy’s mother was there we are still in doubt. Dr. Barton concludes this chapter with two brief paragraphs:

“I wonder if she was there.”
“I wonder if she could keep away.”

When I read those lines, I found myself murmuring, “I wonder”; and then “I wonder why I wonder.” All readers of _The Old Maid_ will say “I’ll say she was there,” and indeed Dr. Barton says so in the fourth chapter, which is devoted to the Hankses and the Sparrows.

Dr. Barton strangles the Mary Shipley myth. The Shipleys now fade out of the Lincoln picture. Abraham Lincoln, the pioneer who went to Kentucky from Virginia, was alleged to have married twice; first in leisure to Bathsheba Herring; then in haste to Mary Shipley. It is not true. Bathsheba was his one and only wife. Everything that has been found out about her is to her credit. Her fourth child, Thomas, was selected by Providence to father him who was to purge the world of slavery. He had no idea that he had been selected, but had he known, he could not have improved on his selection of Nancy Hanks; from her, Lincoln got his heart and his humour. His other great possession, his capacity to learn by experience, he got from the Bathsheba. The Lincolns only passed on the chromosomes, but it is now forever settled that they did that and for it they shall be glorified eternally.

Dr. Barton gives Nancy and Thomas good characters. The former was serious, but emotional, industrious, a good housekeeper and a better mother. The latter was not the shiftless, improvident migratory vacillator that he has been reputed to be, but he liked water better than land. He did not have an uncontrollable urge for work, nor did he starve himself or his family to swell a savings bank account. “He accepted his situation, and when his day’s work was done, he rested and visited and took life as comfortably as he was able.” To be sure he was evicted from Knob Creek farm, but that was due to a failure which he had in common with many others: foresight inferior to hindsight. Of Abraham Lincoln’s childhood at Knob Creek little is known. Dr. Barton indulges in some pleasant conjectures and it is known that the future saviour of the Nation did write verse in his youth. So his biographer may also be right in these surmises.

An illuminating and convincing chapter is entitled “Lincoln’s Kentucky,” for it shows that the slavery question was brought frequently and dramatically to the plastic mind of Abraham, and it reveals a people of primitive prejudices, of intense antipathies, of violent intolerance, of cowardly superstitions. Abraham Lincoln may have laid the foundation of his fair-mindedness, tolerance, kindliness, sympathy and sanity in those years; built the structure in Indiana and furnished it in Washington. Lincoln was nine years old when his mother died, but he was of a maturer mind than many boys of fourteen. A year later, he was given a stepmother. “She transformed the home of the cheerless widower into a spot of pleasant associations and happy memories.” That epitaph should satisfy any stepmother. Lincoln’s schooling is an old story. Retelling it does not improve it. Mrs. Allen Gentry’s recollections that were given to Herndon are still the most interesting. It is safe to assume that the world will always be interested in Abraham Lincoln’s love affairs, but until the ideas of George Bernard Shaw are accepted and we have acquired, like the French, an acceptable sex language, we shall not be able to appease the interest. Even then the story will have to be told by some one who had limitations and experiences similar to Lincoln’s or by some one to whom privileged communications are made--and who is invested with the power of inspiring confidence.

Dr. Barton’s treatment of John McNamar, who was the first to fan Ann Rutledge’s amatory smouldering fire into flame, will be approved by his readers. John was a poor thing and it is a pity his path ever crossed Ann’s. Posterity has aureoled the love of Ann and Abraham and time does not tarnish it, indeed brightens it. The permanency of love is a lost illusion. Even had Ann lived to marry her lover, their love might not have lasted their years. I can think of few subjects that lend themselves to discussion with less grace than “did Abraham Lincoln love Mary Todd when he proposed to her and when he married her?” I do not know--nor do I know any one who does know, but reams have been written about it. I have an opinion, but like so many others it is valueless to any one but myself. If he was in love either with Mary Owens or Mary Todd, he had strange ways of showing it. His love letters to the former, especially those indicating willingness to marry, are masterpieces of frigidity and would put out any heart-fires that were ever ignited; and the person who, reading _any_ account of Lincoln’s conduct the day set for his marriage with Mary Todd, can say he was in love certainly never has been in love himself nor has he even observed at close range any one in the throes of the divine passion. Whether he “went crazy as a loon” when he bolted the expectant bride, as his friends alleged, or whether his heart failed him is beside the question. Sane men in love sometimes act as he acted. I doubt if there is a neurologist whose professional experience does not encompass an example of such conduct. It is astonishing the thoughts and convictions that come to sensitive, self-conscious men confronted with the obligation of obeying God’s first Command. Partisans of his head may say that he was not in love, of his heart that he was not sane.

He married Mary and his treatment of her indicates that he learned to love her, and no wonder if the account Dr. Barton gives of her is true. His conduct in this respect reflected his common sense and uncommon judgment. If Abraham Lincoln’s reputation had depended upon his knowledge of women and his proficiency in the _ars amandi_, it would not have outlasted his days.

Dr. Barton is a fine example of researcher: patient, industrious, indefatigable, determined. Certain investigations led him to frame a hypothesis about the ancestry of Abraham Lincoln. Then he set to work to prove that the assumptions of the hypothesis were facts. He succeeded to an astonishing degree. If Lord Charnwood will now make a few corrections, interpolate a few facts, it will be an almost perfect biography of Abraham Lincoln, and if Miss Tarbell will do the same and make a few deletions as well, it will be on the whole the most readable.

From the time Lincoln was elected President of the United States, he begins to elude his latest biographer, or perhaps it would be more just to say that Dr. Barton does not make his knowledge of Lincoln’s later motives and conduct so impressive or so convincing as he does when he writes of the twenty pre-and post-natal years. However the last chapter, most infelicitously entitled “Mr. Lincoln,” is a model of catholic taste, commendable restraint and good judgment. Deleted of its last sentence, it would be an ideal summary by a man who makes no claim to being a biologist, psychologist or personality expert and who is neither biographer nor historian by temperament. Here he pitches his pæan of praise in the right key, and he does not distract the listener with gossipy interpolation or jejune ejaculation.

* * * * *