American nights entertainment
especially unintelligible. Not far distant yet are the days when we
banded together to understand him. But the number of Browning Clubs
now surviving must be very few. How curious that we never thought
to try to understand the man himself! How queer that we didn’t
concentrate, as he would have concentrated in a similar instance,
upon the thirteen years that unlock his life; but we didn’t. We
generalised about him concerning whom, of all men of his day, it
was least safe to generalise. It has remained for Frances M. Sim
in her _Robert Browning, The Poet and the Man: 1833-1846_ to do the
thing that has so needed doing. She has very wisely avoided the form
of the full biography and equally the form, which would be sterile
in this instance, of a full-length critique. Her book is at once a
freely-handled and intensive study of the years that lay between the
publication of Browning’s first poem, “Pauline,” and his marriage
with Elizabeth Barrett. She starts with “Pauline,” accompanies him to
Russia and with him brings back “Paracelsus,” goes with him to Italy
and recreates “Sordello.” Then, with almost no preliminaries, we are
into the love affair. When that has been lived again to its fruition,
we are in possession of “the poet and the man” in the only possible
fashion apart from the body of his work. Frances M. Sim has given us
a valuable and interesting study, and simply by obeying the wisdom in
Arthur Waugh’s words: “Browning’s marriage, in short, was the last
stage in his artistic education”--words that open a fascinating path of
speculative insights into the lives of how many of the world’s artists!
Contrast, if you will, the temperamental difference between such a man
as Robert Browning, who had his early and well-nigh fatal intoxication
from reading the poetry of Shelley, and a fellow like Joseph Farington,
the painter, whose death occurred when Browning was a lad of nine.
No literary discovery in years has made half the sensation of the
finding of _The Farington Diary_, and quite rightly, for what could be
compared to the disclosure of a contemporary account in which Boswell,
Burke, Goldsmith, Horace Walpole, the Thrales, Garrick, Mrs. Siddons,
Nelson, Howe, Mirabeau, Marat, Napoleon, Hoppner, Turner, Pitt, Warren
Hastings, Lady Hamilton and Robert Burns were intimately noted? And yet
Farington, ruler of the Royal Academy though a most indifferent artist,
came into touch with all these personages and was apparently never for
one moment carried off his feet. I think it is quite true, as Robert
Cortes Holliday suggests in a review of _The Farington Diary_ (The
Bookman, June, 1923) that Farington saw only the surface of that great
age, that he was devoid of humour and lacked the malice which a diarist
should feel. He was sane, not to say stupid; but as a conscientious
accumulator of facts I can think of no one who is his equal. Amid
riches and grandeur, intriguery and wars and revolutions, surrounded
by a glittering society in which one knew not which to worship, genius
or scintillance, Joseph Farington scrupulously set down all the
diseases of people he knew, all the dishes served at a dinner, how much
everything cost and the money that everyone made, inherited, bequeathed
or borrowed. It was only accidentally, that matters touched with
human interest flowed from the point of his pen; but in a fairly long
lifetime the number of such leakages runs high, and the result, despite
every exasperation and handicap, is to make a book of very great and
most indubitable value. The first volume of _The Farington Diary_,
covering the years 1793-1802, is the most complete portrait album we
have of its time; the remaining volumes, which, it is understood, go
on to Farington’s death in 1821, should not be less valuable.
ii
Great times, in producing great men, produce great books as well. In
the lifetime of Walter H. Page, publisher, business man and American
Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, the number of persons who
had any comprehension of his greatness was singularly small. Those
who had the fine fortune to be associated with him in the day’s work
knew, of course, the stature of the man; but it was scarcely possible
to impress their knowledge on others. When Mr. Page at last became
conspicuous in the public service it was at a post where his work and
the character enforcing it were necessarily almost completely obscured.
An American Ambassador at the Court of St. James’s at the present time
may conceivably bring himself into a good deal of notice; it is not
impossible to be done and the opportunities for doing it legitimately
are not infrequent; but Mr. Page was never one for that sort of thing,
and I doubt whether, even if the war had not hidden him in its drifting
mists as he steered the ship, he would have come in all his lifetime to
our not always intelligently directed attention. There are some men,
and among them our greatest, whom death alone fully discloses. Such
was Walter H. Page, and in the magnificent biography wrought by Burton
J. Hendrick, _The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page_, the subject is
handled with a justness and a careful proportioning for which praise
should not be stinted, and has not been. Unquestionably this is one
of the great American books in the biographical field; this life and
these letters have something so vital that one hunts a ready comparison
in vain. At times they seem to paint the man with rich colour and a
splendid handling of light; at other times they carve and sculpture
him in some detail of a rare personality; but the figure fails before
the ruddiness, the mobile vigour and the unresting intellect which
the book sets forth. In a day when the state of America is rather
often canvassed and most often with pessimistic conclusions, it is
significant that _The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page_, a fairly
expensive work in two volumes, has sold half a hundred thousand copies
and now, a year after its publication, continues to lead in sales of
non-fiction.
It is but one, of course, of a number of great books yielded by the
times we have lived in. _The Irish Guards in the Great War_, by Rudyard
Kipling, is surely another. Mr. Kipling has not always been regarded
as a sympathetic and understanding friend of Irishmen. His son, John
Kipling, was an officer of the Irish Guards and, as such, gave his
life. The choice of Mr. Kipling as the historian of the regiment was
one which only the resultant chronicle would justify; but to my mind
there is no possible question that the work justifies and more than
justifies. The reviewer for the London Times puts the matter pithily
when he says: “The true gold of Mr. Kipling is to be found unalloyed
in this memorial.” The temptation to embitteredness, the impulse to
“handle” and fashion his material or to give it stylistic treatment
and the natural inclination to fix the point of view have all been
quietly laid aside; and we have a book of continuous vividness that
results from the inner perspective to which Mr. Kipling rigidly holds
his account. He constantly uses the sentences on the lips of his
Irishmen and we are seldom conscious of a narrator--then only when
some Kiplingesque epithet or phrase carries us above the trench and,
as it were, above the battle. The London Times reviewer speaks of
the “wealth of detail, varied, terrible, and sometimes grotesque, as
in the best Gothic” in the presentation of which Kipling manages to
preserve a clean simplicity of outline and a unity or totality of
effect; but this is merely a way of saying that the book is epically
written. Mere largeness of subject has nowadays a way of being taken
for “epic” treatment, although the word should properly be confined to
a treatment in which a great mass of detail is not allowed to obscure
the simplicity of the whole. But I do not think anyone can fail in
appreciation of _The Irish Guards_, and to any who may be tempted to
forgo the reading of the history let me quote these closing words: “Of
all these things nothing but the memory would remain. And, as they
moved--little more than a company strong--in the wake of their seniors,
one saw, here and there among the wounded in civil kit, young men with
eyes that did not match their age, shaken beyond speech or tears by the
splendour and the grief of that memory.”
The final distinction of Mr. Kipling’s book is, to be sure, that it
is the work of a man who knows how to write. This distinction it
shares with the fewest possible number of contemporary histories,
but _The World Crisis_, by Winston Churchill, must be admitted within
the slender group. Perhaps we had rather forgotten Winston Churchill,
the young journalist in Africa during the Boer War (and the hero,
incidentally, of one of the greatest prisoner escapes to be found in
all history). There may also be some heredity in Winston Churchill’s
literary gift, as in his other brilliant personal endowments. But
that’s no matter. As a former British Home Secretary, First Lord of
the Admiralty, 1911-15, and Minister of Munitions in 1917--above
all, perhaps, as the man chiefly held responsible for the Gallipoli
venture--Mr. Churchill’s account would be of the very first interest
and importance were he never so unskilful among words. But _The World
Crisis_ makes apparent what some of us had suspected before, that among
leading statesmen there has rarely been one whose ability to defend
his course and make other courses appear small has equalled Winston
Churchill’s. The sense of scale amid vastness in sums of money, tonnage
of ships and lives of men that Mr. Churchill possesses is laid by some
commentators to his American blood. “He savours hugeness like a dainty;
and when he writes of carnage or battle he dips his pen in blood,” says
Filson Young, adding, “But he never for a moment loses his grip of the
subject, or his sense of ever-marching destiny; and he never fails to
thrill the reader with the sense of the human tragedy lurking in its
every step.” Mr. Young thinks _The World Crisis_ places its author
“in the very first rank of British historians; and I think it places
him in very nearly the first rank of British statesmen.” The two most
famous living British statesmen, Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Asquith,
flank Mr. Churchill’s book with what went before and what may come
after. The Right Honourable Herbert Henry Asquith’s _The Genesis of the
War_ contains, of course, many noteworthy pen portraits; no doubt these
will make the most immediate appeal to readers; yet his disclosures
regarding the British War Book, begun in 1910 and his exposition of
“the purposes and methods of British policy” in the pre-war years
are the book’s greatest justification and its strongest historical
importance. Mr. Lloyd George, characteristically, is far less concerned
about the past than about the future. In _Where Are We Going?_ he moves
alertly over troubled ground of European affairs, discussing the League
of Nations, Russian republicanism, Socialism, national armaments, the
Irish Treaty, the position of France, England’s war debt, prohibition,
the disclosure of war secrets, “the next war” and many other topics.
His preface is particularly interesting.
iii
Naturally, the climax of interest is reached when we can say: “This
man has written of himself.” G. Stanley Hall’s _Life and Confessions
of a Psychologist_ is an autobiography of which one feels a keen
anxiety lest the many whom it can reward may somehow miss reading it.
“I am far older than my years”--he is seventy-seven--“for I have laid
aside more of the illusions and transcended more of the limitations
with which I started than most.” These simple and striking words
define his attitude. The truly popular result of a work that has been