Chapter XII: Part II: Interpretations (9)

James J. Corbett, whose dominant ambition was to make his conduct and appearance consonant with his sobriquet “Gentleman Jim,” has written as much of his life as he thinks the public should know and he calls it _The Roar of the Crowd_. Mr. Corbett learned the ninth letter of the alphabet first and after he had mastered it he convinced himself there was small need to bother with the others, and besides he had no time. He must go into training. He must develop his ego; he must make it go centripetally and centrifugally with equal facility and he must develop his muscles and increase his weight so that he might become “Champion of the World.” These things are not taught in school so he was expelled and took to fighting in a boxstall of his father’s livery stable. “I instinctively used my head even at that age.” That is the burden of Mr. Corbett’s story. He always used his head before, during and after the fight. Before, to put the fear of Corbett into his opponent; during, to knock him out and gain his respect, and after, to win his friendship. After he got his ego, his muscles and his weight behaving satisfactorily, he cogitated, “I mustn’t be modest; all successful prize fighters are arrogant, self-satisfied and noisy. I shall be arrogant and self-satisfied, but never noisy.” After he had fought several successful battles in livery stables, he knocked out Joe Choinyski in what Billy Delomey, “the most famous of all seconds,” said, was the fiercest battle he ever saw. And Corbett whipped him with one hand! He not only admits it but asserts it. “It is a remarkable feature of this fight that I fought this whole battle with my left hand.” Having done this, it was easy to convince himself he could whip Jake Kilrain with two hands, though his backer, Bud Renaud, who ran a gambling house in New Orleans and was “a splendid character” could scarcely be persuaded of the probability of it. But not so Gentleman Jim. He telegraphed his father, “Will whip Kilrain sure.” He did it, and then telegraphed, “Won with hands down.” Having gone on so well with his head, aided by one hand up, and both hands down, he determined to take on Peter Jackson, the great negro fighter from Australia, “a very clever man,” said Corbett to a friend, “but no cleverer than I am.” First he must make the negro angry, then get his goat, then whip him. That would lead the way to John L. Sullivan. Needless to say he did all these with decency and despatch. Then he “called” Sullivan. The latter was wont to restrict his challenge to those whose mothers had cuckolded their fathers. Naturally there were few takers. One evening when John and Jim were making a round of the saloons of Chicago, the latter tiring of the other’s boastfulness said, looking him right in the eye, “Mr. Sullivan, you are the champion of the world, and everybody is supposed to think that you can whip any ---- in the world.... I don’t want you to make that remark in my presence again.” And from what transpired in the next few seconds, Jim knew he had “got” his man. So it was comparatively an easy matter to go to Florida and give him the _coup de grâce_. Every one knows that he did. But he soon had a change of heart. It saddened him that those thousands who came to cheer the vanquished remained to fawn on the victor, and he said, “I will be immodest no longer, I will be magnanimous and just, I really did not whip Sullivan alone, J. Barleycorn and I did it together,” and then he went to the Southern Athletic, where he took a glass of milk. “This incident was wired all over the world and was published in many newspapers.” The _Christian Science Monitor_ and the _Dearborn Independent_ took no notice of the event. They might well have done so without involuting their obvious rôles, for here was the birth of virtue. John L. reformed soon after and James J. figures that “this moderation helped me to what success I have had.”

_Reprinted from “The Roar of the Crowd”
By permission of G. P. Putnam’s Sons_

Soon Mr. Corbett met Mr. Fitzsimmons, but the less said about that the better. It facilitated his way to the stage which is where he really belonged. He deserted it now and then to take on a fighter and finally met Jeffries, who stopped him plentifully and permanently. That permitted him to devote himself to his café and to his lines.

The most amazing chapter of this biographical narrative is entitled “My Actor Friends.” Here Mr. Corbett poses as a diagnostician in the field of psychiatry. “Come to think of it, I have had the misfortune to be present when six famous stars have lost their reason.” Men lose their reason as they do their purses or their umbrellas. They drop through holes in the pocket or they are left in street cars. Dr. Corbett’s procedure was original, but I find it difficult to believe he used his head as much in diagnosticating as in fighting. “What’s all this talk about your going crazy?” said he to a great comedian already advanced in general paresis who instantly countered with protestation of complete sanity. The slang comedian with whom he played pool at the Lambs during his last rational hour “laughed and kidded” in his familiar way, but Mr. Corbett distinguished the psychic output from that of irrationality.

A friend and admirer of Mr. Corbett, a journalist, author and literary promoter says, in a foreword to the book, that the ex-champion did the book himself. Few will ask Mr. Anderson to prove it. “Jim said he wanted it as it is, faults and all.” Jim is the man who got what he wanted. Did he want a biography, that is the question?

XIV
FICTIONAL BIOGRAPHY

ARIEL, by _André Maurois_.
THE DIVINE LADY, by _E. Barrington_.
THE NIGHTINGALE; A LIFE OF CHOPIN, by _Marjorie Strachey_.

Biography, like history, is often the most diverting and truest of all fiction; but when it is treated severely, it frequently lacks entertainment. We stand everything save boredom, even prohibition and fundamentalism. Some who would not read a book entitled _The Life of Shelley_ might be tempted by a novel called _Ariel_, which is a delightfully presented and rigorously accurate biography of a great poet. M. Maurois has not added an iota of imagination to his book; he has stated the facts with the order and precision of the _Dictionary of National Biography_. But he has coloured them with the art of the novelist and he has done it in pastel tone, with a light hand and warm heart. It seems the consensus of opinion that the hand has been too light, but one feels between the written words the power of a soul without a superior; the fascination of an intelligence liberated from all bonds, unfortunately at times trammelled by the dictates of a heart that was not liberated. Reading _Ariel_, some will wish that Shelley had been a Latin; yet, England of doughty prejudices and dour Puritanism is the country where such strange individuality phenomena are frequently displayed. One marvels at this, just as one who knows the Italian people and their profound scepticism, marvels that they had St. Francis and St. Catherine.

_Ariel_ has had a vogue and has received praise that would not be granted the _Dictionary of National Biography_. This indicates the appetite of humans for facts, when they are sugar-coated, disguised or made alluring by an attractive envelope. Biography presented in the shape of fiction is one of the best kinds of biography and the most interesting kind of fiction. Shelley’s life contains material that would seem exaggerated if found in a novel, and it reveals facts that would be denied if they were set forth in fiction. Before it appeared in English translation, the book took France by storm. It did more than popularise the name of Shelley, it revived an interest in biography generally and it added allure to retrospects of the past, the past that had been so neglected and depreciated by partisans of ego-analysis, and that has been pushed aside by the psychological novel.

The lives of great men contain an inexhaustible fund of invaluable material which is at the disposal of the novelist. If he does not choose to be as frank as M. Maurois has been about Shelley, he may do what Rose Wilder Lane has done in the novel entitled _He Was a Man_ which is a biography of Jack London. She has artfully disguised her subject while Maurois presents him to his readers with all the data of identification.

The charm of _Ariel_ resides in the manner in which the story is told; in the graceful characterisations; in the sobriety of the style; in the portraits of the women who made Shelley’s life happy or miserable; and in the brilliant contrast that the author has drawn between his hero and Lord Byron. The portrait of the latter, though sketchy, has such emphasis on the shading that the picture is complete and arresting.

_Ariel_ is not the most typical example of fictional biography, for though it is an account of Shelley’s life it is so faithful as to leave little room for imagination. Were it not told adroitly and gracefully, it would be no more picturesque than a record kept on index-cards. It creates a strange contrast with _The Divine Lady_, a biography of Lady Hamilton, true, but stamped with the hall-mark of fiction. E. Barrington (Mrs. or Miss) had the most romanesque subject at her disposal when she undertook to popularise the figure of Emma Hamilton, the Emma of Nelson, whose beauty, grace, talent and intelligence kept Europe astir for the better part of the late eighteenth century. She deviated from the strict truth in several instances, but it was to improve on the truth, and to give to her novel the epic quality that Lady Hamilton’s biographies had not heretofore displayed. _The Divine Lady_ is more closely allied to fiction than to history, and since the author has not only great narrative power and an exquisite style, but the qualities that permitted Théophile Gautier to make _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ a masterpiece, and genuine capacity for feeling and emotion, she presents Lady Hamilton in all her “divinity” with passionate need of admiration and achievement. Lord Nelson is likewise depicted with a sure hand. His reputation will suffer from the delineation, for in addition to the way he treated his wife, there was other conduct inconsistent with unqualified esteem. His _naïveté_ was the seal of his doom, and it is allowed to no one to condemn a passion such as that which united Lady Hamilton and Nelson. Those who have not known it are not competent to judge--and those who have can find apologies and excuses for it.

Lady Hamilton’s career was Napoleonic in its display, and, all proportions guarded, it followed the same cycle. Obscure birth, great qualities of mind (and in her case of body), rapid and miraculous ascent to high power and reputation followed by an increase of appetites and ambitions which blurred the straight path and made both her and Nelson want more than any human being can stand, a slow but fatal lowering of their stars, then hatred and scorn of the world, and finally, for her, death obscure even as birth. In a few years, Emma had run the gamut of all the ambitions and all the tortures; she had known the greatest ecstasies of love and happiness and the lowest and most degrading debauches; she had dispensed her favours and received praises; she had scrubbed kitchens and been worshipped by Queens and Kings; she had allowed a boor to make a public exhibition of her charms, and she had sneered at the homage of a monarch.

_From “The Divine Lady,” by E. Barrington
Courtesy of Dodd, Mead & Co._

E. Barrington has made Lady Hamilton come to life once more in the pages of her novel; she has caught her charm and her personality, understood her perfections and vices, and she has succeeded even in so grading her praise and disparagement that the reader is constantly aware of the scullery-maid masquerading as ambassadress, and of the demi-goddess hidden in the bosom of the protected _fille de joie_. Her real place was with the lowly, and she was never more at home than when she could shed her acquired English and her elegant manners and indulge in the language and activities that she had loved in her youth. E. Barrington has made all this clear, and she has given each startling contradiction in the make-up of the Divine Lady its proper emphasis--with the result that we wonder at such whims of nature, at such diversity of characteristics in the same person, without ever doubting the veracity of the author. It seems scarcely plausible that Lady Hamilton should have been as adaptable and sensitive to environment as she appears to have been--that she should have loved Greville with the loyalty and patient submission which she displayed, that she should have been so faithful and loving to Lord Hamilton until she met Nelson, and that she should have felt for the latter the irresistible passion which was the cause of her ruin. We marvel at the union of talents that occurred in her; the aristocracy of her singing voice, the vulgarity of her speaking voice, her mastery of wild horses and her inborn gift for the terpsichorean arts, her tact and diplomacy, and all the qualities which made her at the same time a divine lady and a prostitute.

Her most extraordinary gift was her power to feel the rôle she had to play in order to win hearts; and the diversity of her accomplishments made such conquest easy for her. She won hearts, and she lost hearts, but when we turn the last pages of the book, we have only admiration for the Lady who inspired Nelson, and carried the renown of her country beyond its confines at a time when international affairs were nearly as muddled as they are a hundred years after her death.

_The Divine Lady_ is the kind of biography which makes one care more for fiction--and the sort of fiction which makes one wonder why novelists do not write more about historical characters whose lives and personalities often surpass anything that imagination could dictate.

* * * * *

Miss Marjorie Strachey has written the latest word in the line of fictional biography: _The Nightingale; A Life of Chopin_. She has blended the facts of his life with the romance of fiction. By a series of sketches, of fugitive evocations, she has added to the permanency of Chopin as a man, and especially as an artist. She has made his genius permeate his actions, and she has endowed him with the dream-qualities of poetry and the realised qualities of practical life. Chopin is no longer an unapproachable genius; he is life itself seen through the veil of romance.

Miss Strachey has not done for her hero what E. Barrington did for Lady Hamilton; she has not called attention to his “amours,” not even the one with George Sand; her task lay, not in giving us the emotional understanding of the musician, but in creating a true portrait of him. This she did by interweaving his correspondence with his conversations; his friends with his surroundings. They all form part of the background on which he shines all the more brilliantly that it is never exaggerated, and his life was enough of a romance to impart to the biography its qualities of ethereal dream without addition or distortion of facts on the part of the biographer.

_The Nightingale_ is more to be praised for what it does not say than for what it says. It shows restraint, dignity and poise, which are the accompaniment necessary to a biography of Chopin.

XV
MISCELLANEOUS

EVERYWHERE, THE MEMOIRS OF AN EXPLORER,
by _A. Henry Savage Landor_.
WHAT THE BUTLER WINKED AT, by _Eric Horne_.

The title of this book should be _Everywhere, Everything, Everybody_, by I. K. It-All. When Mr. Landor was two years old, he fell through the air twenty feet and landed on his head. His head swelled, and later he had epileptoid attacks. The latter forsook him, the former remained. If one were to estimate him from his last book, one would have to rate him the vainest author in the world, the world which still numbers Mr. Bok and Mr. Ford Madox Ford.

Explorer, painter, lecturer, inventor, writer--and supreme in all! There can be no doubt about it; he says it and calls witnesses from kings to savages, from queens to chorus girls, to prove it. Garibaldi caressed him, Marchand of Fashoda embraced him, Wilbur Wright envied and feared him, d’Annunzio acknowledged that his book on Tibet inspired _Piu Che l’Amore_, the Cuirassiers of Victor Emmanuel III presented arms when he went to call on the King, Pope Pius IX said to him: “You are my beloved son”--and we have no doubt that he was very proud of him--Roosevelt shouted “Thank God” when he saw him in the reception room of the White House, and Maude Adams confided to him her great ambition, which was, “like all American visitors, to be taken to lunch at the Cheshire Cheese.” There need be no further curiosity about the retirement from the stage of this gifted actress at the height of her career; her great ambition was realised. All London worth knowing went to see Landor’s paintings and stayed to praise them; he was the first man to enter Pekin in the Boxer outbreak and the last messenger to get through Antwerp in the Great War; and he alone knows all the secrets of Tibet and its monasteries. He is strong and brave. He walked a Scotch gillie “who passed as the greatest walker in the world” off his legs, while his own remained so fit that later he was able to dangle them over a precipice six thousand five hundred feet high. In his spare moments from painting, exploring, inventing, and orienting, he gave lessons in courage to the lions in Africa. He is the man who has “run all possible risks from nature and human beings,” and his motto has ever been “Death or no death, we plunge once more into the unknown.”

Once only this admirable Crichton was stumped, and the experience shows how easy it is to trip a god when he is off guard. Once the house in which he was sleeping in London took fire. He was clad in his blue kimono which bore three huge white fishes on its surface. The temperature was twelve degrees below zero and the icy winds did blow. He watched the efforts of the fire-fighters “with the utmost concern and in attempting to keep the kimono well round me, as there were ladies present, the longitudinal seam behind, which had deteriorated in the laundry, suddenly split from head to foot. This compelled me to remain with my back against a wall until it would please the conflagration to stop.” A wholly unnecessary tarry or turn on the part of Mr. Landor. There probably is not a lady in his native land, or yet even in the whole world, who would not admire him from the soles of his feet to the top of his head.

Mr. A. H. Savage Landor is a modest violet and the various photographs of himself which adorn his book testify it. But the world is in his debt; he discovered General Pershing. When we erect a national monument to our great General, it is to be hoped that we shall not neglect his discoverer. In the meantime he is handed the immodesty medal.

* * * * *

The refrain of a song popular a few years ago was “Everybody’s doing it....” Were it sung to-day, “it” would mean writing biography. It is a good sign. The more we learn about others, the less repulsive is our thought, the less enigmatic our conduct. We should particularly encourage those who see us full-face and at short range, like valets, maids, nurses, secretaries, doctors, to write about us. M. Brousson throws more light on Anatole France’s personality than everything that has been written about him.

If _What the Butler Winked At_ was not written by a butler, the author had butler ancestors. Eric Horne does what he set out to do and he states his thesis clearly in the first sentence:

“Now that old England is cracking up, as far as
the Nobility is concerned, who are selling their
estates, castles and large houses, which are being
turned into schools, museums, hospitals, homes for
weak-minded--things entirely different from what they
were built for--it seems a pity that the old usages and
traditions of gentlemen’s service should die with the old
places, where so many high jinks and junketings have been
carried on in the old days, now gone for ever.”

He gives a picture of the “gentry” that is of real value. But the sentence quoted is more than sufficient cause for digression. It is a marvel. Who but a butler could be so ample and so involved. It is a fair sample of the book in many ways. The man can’t write any more than a babbling child, but he does it all so unconsciously and yet so purposefully that he arrives somehow. He gets things said--plenty of them, and that is more than many professional writers do.

His descriptions of the life he knows are real, but more real than anything else is Eric Horne. He does not try to “reveal himself,” but his book is a genuine self-revelation--or perhaps a dead give-away. Probably this man knows more of the form of living than most Americans dream of--no slight slip in etiquette would have evaded his trained eye. And yet if there is such a thing as a “middle class” mind, he has it. Nothing could have made him equal to an exalted position in the world. Not that he had not brains; he had, and real executive ability, but it was the texture of his thinking which marked him for his job. You can’t make chiffon from a meal sack.

Eric Horne was probably what generations of service and of strong class distinction made him. He was cast in a butler mould. No one thought of him in any other way. He himself did not aspire very high or long. The mould was too confining to permit of much moving around. In a thousand ways the quality of his mind is revealed. His jokes are cheap and flat and obvious. They are decidedly “back door” humour. He has absolutely no continuity of thought. He lived between door bells, telephones, electric buzzers. He thinks that way--jumps all over the place. He has no sense of getting to the point; he has to pack his master’s dress clothes first and instruct the under footman. The book shows a continuous dissatisfaction with the manner of living that the “gentry” imposed upon their servitors. At the same time, it displays a scorn of the modern democracy of England. The butler can not think through his problem or even at it. He knows he does not like them as they are, but can not reconcile himself to a change. It is all curiously contradictory, like the thinking of a child.

Yet the Butler is no child. He has a kind of precocious astuteness, all out of harmony with the general fibre of his mind. He is keen and clever at times in his writing, though one wonders if he knows it. His descriptions are enviable. This about a fellow butler: “A ‛mongrel’ I called him. We had to be very careful not to let him see or hear anything we did not wish to go farther. He put me in mind of a fellow behind a draper’s counter who measures out yards of elastic.” This last sentence is as vivid as Sherwood Anderson, only Anderson would have done it with conscious art; with Eric Horne it was spontaneous.

The book is valuable as a revelation of an individual, but more valuable as the show-up of an aspect of society largely neglected. It is like seeing the reverse side of the life that Wells, or even Galsworthy, writes of. The novel begins; the butler is bringing in the electric toaster. The mistress enters in an elaborate breakfast costume and a “pet.” But instead of remaining in her presence, you follow the butler into the pantry. That is new, and not altogether pleasant. It is cramped back there. Beds are “let down” in the pantry and there is not too much freshness about the atmosphere. The cook quarrels with the housekeeper; the housekeeper spies on the maids. The butler lords it over the footmen; the footmen cuff the grooms. But they like each other. They have their dinners and dances where social barriers are even more strict than among the “gentry.” Living is good--wine is plenty--if you have the keys.

Life here is quite like that on the other side of the picture, save that you have no subtleties, no nerves, no intrigues. Everything is out in the open, static, with a fist fight or so. At the same time there is a certain style to it. Things must be done properly. The silver is put in order--if you have to blister your hands--not because you are afraid of “the sack,” but because of respect for things as they should be and for the traditions of the house. There is a curious infiltration of champagne somewhat mixed with dishwater.

As to the pictures of the “gentry,” they are real, and at times touching. But they have been done before. We know the “gentry” better than we do their servants. The butler has, until Eric Horne spoke, been a sphinx to the world at large, so much so that one has been many times tempted to punch him to see if he is real. He _is_, and once having broken the traditional silence there is no stopping him. Words fall over themselves in their haste to get written. This reminds him of that, which has no connection with what came before it or what is to follow. The butler is avenged! He has said his say. Let the gentry writhe if they will, or smile if they can. The butler takes a long breath--his first--he pops the gold buttons off his braided waistcoat. Let them roll!

XVI
THE LADIES

MADAMA RÉCAMIER ET SES AMIS, by _Edouard Herriot_.
MY PORTION, by _Rebekah Kohut_.
NOON, by _Kathleen Norris_.
A WOMAN OF FIFTY, by _Rheta Childe Dorr_.
THE MOST FAMOUS BEAUTY OF CHINA, YANG KUEI-FEI,
by _Shu-Chiung_.

Few periods of French History have tempted the pens of biographers and historians more than that of the Directoire. It was then that political and literary passions clashed and in the effort to reconcile and unite them, expression of ideas was encouraged; _salons_ were formed where the craft of literature, art and statesmanship could be discussed; and freedom of speech ceased to be a myth. Society was no longer composed of the exclusive aristocracy; personal merit, intelligence and wit were now the passports for the man--and charm, vivacity, culture and kindness for the woman. All of them strove to be numbered among the élite of the fastidious _salons_. Those who succeeded have their names permanently written in the annals of the period. Many of them contributed enormously to the development and dissemination of literature among the upper middle class in France, and their influence is still felt among critics and writers. Only two generations separate us from them, and if Madame Récamier, Madame de Staël and Benjamin Constant seem like figures of another world, remote and dimmed, their younger contemporaries like Sainte-Beuve and Napoléon III belong to modern times. It is not the distance of the Directoire that makes it part of historical tradition; it is the extraordinary change that has taken place in manners, in customs and in society, since then.

Of all the names that come to mind when the time of the Directoire and the years following it are mentioned, none carries so much charm, mystery, fascination and meaning as that of Juliette Récamier. She personifies the early nineteenth century and as years go by motives become clearer, and understanding easier; as the vista of time improves judgment, biographers of Madame Récamier and her circle add to our knowledge and to our appreciation of the period.

The latest of these is Edouard Herriot, recently Prime Minister of France, a man of classical education, who attaches much importance to culture and who has always shown interest in literature. _Madame Récamier and Her Friends_ testifies to his quality. The mere mention of her name suggests a world of wit, of beauty, of romance and of achievement. M. Herriot has neglected none of the facets of her charm. Indeed he dwells upon them at length; yet he gives to the story of her life more significance than a mere record of herself; it reveals the world of the early nineteenth century, and it is through this world that we contemplate and admire his heroine.

As a study of character, M. Herriot’s attempt is not very successful. He has failed to make live one of the most living creatures of history; he has set up a statue which no Pygmalion could call to womanhood; he has modelled the effigy of a woman who remains cold and lifeless despite ample evidence of swarming life within. His biography is neither exclusively descriptive nor analytical. He has followed narrative order, and arranged his facts chronologically, but when it is necessary to the understanding of the heroine, he does not hesitate to anticipate actual events or to pass judgment on later actions. Obviously M. Herriot’s effort was to make Madame Récamier part of a whole; her friends, especially toward the latter part of the book, take the floor constantly and leave her out of our sight and away from our thought. If the author had succeeded in permeating his studies of her followers with her influence; if he had left her enough power to be felt throughout the book, whether or not he was dealing with Madame Récamier herself, his study would have been more successful. But, not himself inspired by her charm, viewing the whole period cold-bloodedly and critically, he has been unable to convey Madame Récamier to his readers. The advantage of such analytical examination is that it facilitates judgment.

The great merit of M. Herriot’s book is its judiciality; he often supports his own conclusions by those of others, qualified and sincere. Indeed, this is one of M. Herriot’s most distinguishing traits. Whenever opinions differ, when historians and biographers do not agree, and when interpretation depends upon personal reactions, the author effaces himself and allows events and facts to speak for themselves. The final word has not yet been said of the controversies that were waged in France after Madame Récamier first dazzled _le monde_, and M. Herriot does not propose to say it. He has set up the period of the Révolution, of the Directoire, the tentative monarchy, the Empire and second monarchy clearly, concisely, specifically. His style is substantial, unadorned and fluent.

A question of the greatest controversy has always been the non-conjugality of the Récamiers. M. Herriot devotes a fifth of his book to discussion of the reasons that have been suggested to explain it. He calls in physicians and psychologists to bear witness and pass judgment; he keeps his ears opened to gossip and to malicious chatter; and he keeps an eye out for any indiscretion behind the curtains of the _alcôve_, news of which might have trickled through the walls of time. Discussions of personal relations between husband and wife, post-mortem investigations and attempts at unveiling the mysteries that were savagely guarded in life by their participants are in doubtful taste. M. Herriot seems to uphold the thesis that Madame Récamier was her husband’s daughter--an opinion which is defendable since he defends it--but which is too monstrous to be advanced without irrefutable proofs. The idea does not seem to repel him, and he finds explanations and apologies for it. The few documents which are left that tell us how they lived under the same roof he interprets as he chooses. Yet, there is no suggestion of scandal; he is no bearer of oil to throw upon the smouldering embers of her marital fire; he gives the results of his efforts to elicit testimony, to obtain evidence and to submit it to the world’s jury. All that can be said of the situation which existed between Récamier and his wife was that, after all, it was their affair. The fact that they had no conjugal relation may have been due to her physical condition, or to his, or the result of mutual agreement. The only right the biographer would have had to dwell at length on it would be if it had had such bearing on the life of his heroine that it might be taken as the fulcrum of her reactions and behaviour. It did not, in Madame Récamier’s case, despite M. Herriot’s comment that, “perhaps from this medley of abnormal circumstances in which she had been placed, there remained in her suspicion, a leaning toward discouragement, fear of love, a sort of resigned serenity, and the first germ of the _coquetterie_ for which she was so often reproached by those who did not understand its causes.”

She was no more a coquette than any woman would have been in her position. She was not a beauty, but her charm and her finesse were such as to conquer hearts more effectively than any Juno might have done. She had intellectual powers which raised her far above her sex together with an unusual capacity for fidelity, tenderness and sympathy; she hesitated to wound her friends or to refuse them anything in her power and thus she gave permanency to the affection her charm engendered. She was wealthy, sought after and beloved; but her chief asset was goodness. Her admirers and friends, indeed all she admitted to her heart, were unanimous in praising her goodness, her tireless devotion to their pleasures, her constant preoccupation with their pains.

M. Herriot is at his best when he discusses Madame de Staël’s influence over her young friend Juliette. The ex-Premier is by nature and experience better fitted to understand Madame de Staël than Madame Récamier. Her political ideas were akin to his; her mind had many masculine traits, her culture was deep; her talent admitted; her influence sought. She supplies most of the background of the book, and many of the anecdotes with which fortunately the book is sparingly padded.

Now and then M. Herriot paints himself in the picture and all too rarely expresses his ideas of life and human nature. We like to be assured that “Women who are pretty and who can not but know it are neither flighty nor fanciful; they are always self-contained; a prudent reserve accompanies them even in their weaknesses, which are never unconscious.” When he defends Madame Récamier against possible criticisms, he admits that nowhere in her history is there anything that could be interpreted as unworthy of her situation, or that would justify her reputation as a woman given to intrigue. It can not be denied that she opposed at first to the attacks of her admirers a subtle and world-wise fencing; “but men have perhaps an unjustified tendency to label ‛_coquetterie_’ all that which, in a woman, obstacles their pride, or curbs realisation of their desires.”

Characterisations of the heroine are few, and it is obvious that her latest biographer has not sought to make her stand out particularly among her contemporaries. But she does, despite all; she was the shining light around which all the moths swarmed, dazzled by its brilliancy. Most of the characterisations are quotations from contemporary authors, particularly Benjamin Constant, who portrayed a side of Juliette which not all her admirers knew. Speaking of her conduct toward Lucien Bonaparte, he writes, “She was disturbed by the unhappiness she created, angry at her own disturbance, reviving hope unconsciously by the sole aid of her pity, and destroying it by her carelessness as soon as she had appeased the suffering that her passing pity had engendered.” Chateaubriand felt the truth here expressed and made use of most of Benjamin Constant’s material regarding Madame Récamier, but passed over this particular characterisation of the woman he had loved. Sainte-Beuve, far-sighted as he was and gifted with vision, expressed the same idea: “Lucien loves; he is not spurned, yet he will never be accepted. There is the nuance. It will be the same with all the men who will rush to her, and with all those that will follow.... She would have liked to remain in _April_, always.”

M. Herriot first modelled his heroine and after pedestalling her, proceeded to walk around his statue and survey it. He remodelled here, shortened there, smoothed this surface and softened that line. He treated it as photographers treat their plates. By giving it ample dimension, he has called attention more to the large lines than to the details. When he finished it he set it up in a vast plaza. This bigness of scope enabled him to group about her, as a rich background, the figures of those who were attached to her chariot with ribands of love and of admiration. The list of them is long; they were all intellectuals. Madame Récamier, though kind to every one, never attracted fools or bores, and her salon, which was the _chambre d’accouchée_ of romantic literature, never sheltered a shallow mind, a cold heart or an uninteresting soul.

Only once was Juliette really so consumed with love that she hoped a divorce would free her--to marry Prince Augustus. But there again her compassionate heart took pity on a husband who had lost his fortune and who, despite many gallant adventures, harboured tender feelings for her. Since she could not have Prince Augustus, she would have no one; and from the episode of Benjamin Constant and of Ballanche, whose love was most pathetic and devoted, to that of Chateaubriand, we see Madame Récamier, anxious to please, glad to be able to do it, avid of admiration which was directed to her mind more than to her body, and willing to make any sacrifice to insure the success of a friend, the accomplishment of a plan, the perpetuation of an idea.

The imprisonment of Madame Récamier, during the few days when she was suspected of plotting against the safety of the State, recalls other names whose possessors did not escape as gracefully as she did, but M. Herriot does not allow himself to be distracted. He is telling the story of Madame Récamier and her friends, and he is not hypnotised by the high spots of the tragedy. Neither discursive nor willing to pass judgment, he is the impartial historian, the unprejudiced biographer. That he admires and loves Madame Récamier there can be no doubt, but that is unavoidable, and his love is neither blind nor impetuous; it is a reasoned love, but it is not so engrossing as to exclude criticism and interpretation.

The merit of _Madame Récamier and Her Friends_ is founded in the soundness of its conception and the brevity of the narrative. There is repetition neither of words nor of effects. Few expressions could be deleted without taking something from the story. It neither offers suggestions nor makes startling discoveries regarding Madame Récamier. To write of Madame Récamier in her own spirit and in that of her time (which she was so influential in moulding) requires more graciousness than M. Herriot gives; it needs less matter-of-fact handling, and it should be softened by a great deal of poetry. Others have so described her and the pictures that they made reveal her idealistically. M. Herriot deals more with the matter than with the spirit, and what his biography lacks in poetry it makes up in reality.

The end of the book, which tells in detail of the death of Chateaubriand, is well rendered. Though filled with emotion, it does not overflow. Madame Récamier had moved into his apartment that she might be near him at the end. Blind and old, she showed herself equal to the demand that was made on her strength and courage; “she was constantly at the bedside of the dying man who seemed to be dragged for some time out of his drowsiness by the beautiful days of June. He was always silent. He could speak no longer; Madame Récamier could see no longer.”

On the day of his death, “every time Madame Récamier, overwhelmed with sadness, left the room, he followed her with his eyes, without calling to her, but with a look of anguish in which was painted the fear of never seeing her again. She was there at the last minute.”

Her death is related with the same simplicity, but the narrative has a touch of the grandiose. M. Herriot was wisely counselled to undertake the biography of Madame Récamier, and his wisdom was to hear and obey.

* * * * *

Rebekah Kohut, a Hungarian Jewess who has lived all her life in America and who has been closely identified with the Jewish intelligentsia of this country, believes that she has a story to tell, and that she should chronicle the emergence of the American Jewess into the communal life of the country. She has a story; it is an interesting one and she tells it convincingly. _My Portion_ is the expression of a personality that has had firm contacts with varied currents of a full and active life. The daughter of a rabbi of liberal views and the wife of another, a distinguished scholar, Mrs. Kohut is widely known to her co-religionists as a woman of heart and determination.

Her story is not a conscious attempt to analyse, dissect, propound, or in any way enlarge upon the “inner workings” of the intellectual and emotional elements that go to make the individual. A sentence at the end of the book conveys the spirit of the writing: “As I turn the leaves of the past, I find myself growing as interested as though some one in a book, _not myself_, were the active participant.” Marie Bashkirtseff would hardly have said that. She would have been interested because it _was_ herself. Mrs. Dorr would not have said it, and her reason would have been much the same, though she would have expressed it differently. Mrs. Kohut’s book is a self-forgetting autobiography.

Her account of her husband’s life is also the revelation of a personality. This man lives before us, both he and his work, the _Aruch Completum_. Of this Mrs. Kohut writes:

“... when I looked forward to the problems of married
life, I counted my future charges as a husband and eight
children. Soon I learned I should have counted them as a
husband, the _Aruch Completum_, and eight other children.
The oldest daughter called the Aruch her oldest brother,
and pretended to be jealous of it. Certainly it received
all the consideration and preference of the traditional
first-born. The rest of us at certain times felt our
secondary importance.”

And Mrs. Kohut was born amid the exactions of scholarship--this was no amateur’s point of view!

In her account of her husband’s life and work the writer reveals herself no less than in the parts more directly autobiographical. Here lay her deepest concerns and interests. As he came first during the years of her marriage, so he is the most prominent feature of her book.

_My Portion_ is so sincere, straightforward, and genuine that one is sure the glimpses one gets beneath the surface are true ones. A strong, active personality pervades every page. You get the revelation, not by a concentrated, but rather by a pleasantly diffused, light. Mrs. Kohut sums herself up very clearly in her last sentence:

“For a moment, I stop there and say: ‛That’s all. That
has been my portion.’ But no, life holds even more, and
in that more it has been my portion to share, too. Life,
above all, is a going on, a never resting. And I see
myself always going on, never pausing in the present,
always restless, always straining forward for something
that has not been but should be.”

Is such a book of service to mankind? Decidedly yes. To the unprejudiced it is a valuable picture of an ever-interesting people. To the prejudiced it can not fail to bring a feeling of respect by its dignity and direct dealing. Mrs. Kohut’s early struggle (was it worth while to be a Jew, frankly and openly, to face social ostracism and hatred) and her very definite stand can not fail to awaken admiration. She was born a Jewess, and took her place in the world as a power for the Jews. She did it very largely for religious reasons. The religious genius of her people was too strong, too vital, to be abandoned, whatever the cost. She gives an insight into the religious aspirations of such men as her father and her husband that is almost Biblical in its qualities.

Her picture of the family life of the finest Jewish types is eminently worth while, did the book contain nothing else. They worked for and with one another despite hardships and varied fates. The tribe still feels its call and its power in the response to that call. All through the book one is made to feel a spirit which must have come out very clearly in one of Mrs. Kohut’s talks. The quotation is long, but it seems to strike the keynote of the book:

“Later I was asked to address the pupils of the
fashionable and exclusive Ely School. I could see that
these lovely girl pupils giggled when I was presented as
a Jewess. I was determined to have my revenge, and in my
talk made them so homesick that they wept. Then I told
them part of Heine’s _Princess Sabbath_ and the _Rabbi of
Bacharach_, in which the ghetto Jew carries the burden
typical of his race through the ages. On Sabbath eve,
returning from the synagogue and entering his little
home, he finds the table set with snowy cloth and lighted
candles and the Sabbath bread, and becomes transformed,
not only in figure, but in face. The bowed shoulders
straighten, light enters his eyes. Is he not then a
Prince of Israel, and is not his home a palace? The girls
giggled no more at the mention of ‛Jew’.”

What Mrs. Kohut did for those pupils she will do for her readers: give them a better understanding of the Jews and therefore greater respect. And aside from the question of race, the book is of real value because of the wholesome attitude toward life that it constantly presents. It is an oasis amid the “glowing sands” of erotic literature, and affected scribbling where to-day we wander.

* * * * *

Of all the persons who have succeeded in attaining fame, wealth and happiness and who remember with kindliness their years of struggle, obscurity, poverty and misery, few harbour such tenderness in their hearts for their hard years of labour as Kathleen Norris shows in _Noon_, a little autobiographical sketch. It might as well be the story of all those she has loved and who have contributed to her self-fulfilment. They are numerous and exceptional--are they perhaps embellished and polished by love? Have they perhaps taken on a new aspect with the help of years? Were they really as worthy of admiration and as near perfection as Kathleen Norris makes them? We have no way of knowing, but we can make no mistake about one thing: the mother-theme is the predominant idea throughout the book. It is constantly repeated with different nuances and cadenzas, but it throbs with life and reality. The picture Kathleen Norris draws of her own youth reminds the reader of Miss Louisa Alcott’s _Little Women_. The atmosphere of the household is not soon forgotten.

They, Mrs. Norris and her husband, suffered the inevitable torments of young people who come to New York, with twenty-five dollars a week for all support, and who expect to take the city by storm and climb to the top of the literary ladder. The way they did it was made easy and beautiful through love, understanding, good friends, a little planning, much effort and mutual concessions. Luck was not always with them, but Kathleen Norris had the good heart not to be discouraged, and she refused to believe that success was not a natural sequence of work. She had much to be thankful for, and she knew it.

_Noon_ may not display either genius or much profundity, but it is like a ray of sunshine; it brightens up a life that too many are tempted to find futile and unjust and it leaves no room for pessimism.

* * * * *

Mrs. Dorr’s _A Woman of Fifty_ is about as introspective as an account of a very active king in a chess game might be. It is, in truth, an account of feminism poured into an autobiographical mould by a clever reader of the trend of the day toward that form of literature. There is much in it that is personal, no doubt, but certainly the motive is in the direction of a “movement” rather than toward an analysis of individual reactions to that movement. If Mrs. Dorr’s purpose had been unmixed self-revelation, I have the feeling she would have done it in a more up-to-the-moment manner; in the hair-splitting, soul-dissecting fashion of the hour.

As biography, I don’t think it holds water. As a summing up of the struggle of women toward recognition as entities, it is vigorous, rather dashing, well put together with a perception of essentials, and valuable as a record.

The writer becomes more likeable as the book progresses, but the reader is satisfied that fate has not made his and her paths cross. At times, he wishes she would either get out of the picture or add something vital to it. She has made a “go,” but at the same time, in trying to write a double header, a so-called personal narrative with a purpose that is far from personal, she has now and then failed; the individual gets in the way of the subject up for discussion--feminism. But the book is readable and this is a quality of which not all biographies can boast.

* * * * *

Chinese ladies have had their day in literature. They have served the same purpose as European women in building or destroying Empires when such existed. Reading about them, we do not anticipate that we shall deepen our knowledge of personality, but we know that we shall be convinced anew of the potency of pulchritude; of the inconstancy of man.

Yang Kuei-Fei, who lived in the eighth century, was one of a quartette of famous beauties whose tradition is still alive in the Celestial Empire; one was known for her beauty, another for her patriotism; a third for her virtue, but Yang Kuei-Fei, who was the most beautiful of all, is known to fame for her artfulness. She held, in her lily-white hand, the fate of the Empire, and, aided by her beauty and her ambition, she climbed to the high position of Emperor’s favourite concubine. That she was not successful in steering the ship of state into a safe harbour may have been partly due to woman’s alleged and accepted incapacity in political matters--but the story of her life as told by Mrs. Shu-Chiung shows plainly that it was largely due to her falling in love with a young Tartar. The Emperor loved her--and his love was of the sort that blinds its victims so completely as to make them absurdly credulous--but he was unable to resist the charm of his former favourite and of the sister of Yang Kuei-Fei. Yang Kuei-Fei was in love with the Emperor, because he was Emperor, and incapable of withstanding the ardent love of the Tartar. Orgies and debauches culminated in tragedy, downfall and death--but as in all Chinese stories there must be a tenuous element of dream, of etherealness, of mysticalness--and it relieves the horror of the story and its pathos.

BOOKS CITED

ARIEL, THE LIFE OF SHELLEY
André Maurois, trans, by Ella d’Arcy. _D. Appleton and Company_

THE DIVINE LADY, A ROMANCE OF NELSON AND EMMA HAMILTON
E. Barrington. _Dodd, Mead & Company_

GLORIOUS APOLLO
E. Barrington. _Dodd, Mead & Company_

HE WAS A MAN
Rose Wilder Lane. _Harper & Brothers_

LIFE AND CONFESSIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST
G. Stanley Hall. _D. Appleton and Company_

THE PILGRIMAGE OF HENRY JAMES
Van Wyck Brooks. _E. P. Dutton & Company_

SAINTE-BEUVE
Lewis Freeman Mott. _D. Appleton and Company_

JOHN DONNE, A STUDY IN DISCORD
Hugh l’Anson Fausset. _Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc._

ANATOLE FRANCE, THE MAN AND HIS WORK
James Lewis May. _John Lane, The Bodley Head, Ltd._

ANATOLE FRANCE HIMSELF Jean-Jacques Brousson, trans. by John Pollock. _J. B. Lippincott Company_

ANATOLE FRANCE AND HIS CIRCLE
Paul Gsell, trans. by Frederic Lees. _John Lane, The Bodley
Head, Ltd._

ANATOLE FRANCE À LA BÉCHELLERIE
Marcel Le Goff. _Léo Delteil, Paris_

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A MIND
W. J. Dawson. _The Century Co._