American nights entertainment
undertaken and carried through in such a spirit ought to be emphasised.
Dr. Hall is the author of important treatises on _Adolescence_ and
_Senescence_, exhaustive in character and highly technical in their
bearing; but I have yet to read anything of his which was not to a very
large extent “popularly written” as well as scientifically valuable.
Certainly his _Life and Confessions of a Psychologist_ deserves the
wider audience. It begins on a New England farm with some chapters that
reflect with ampleness and feeling and charm the life of New England
in the 1850s; it continues through the various stages of an unusually
rounded education; in its record of teaching and college executiveship
the book constitutes a sort of history of the American college in
the last half-century, and this is enlarged and given the value of
ripened conclusions by a longer chapter near the close of the book.
There is also a tremendous chapter covering “Process in Psychology”
and practically constituting a history of the science in Dr. Hall’s
long lifetime--one might almost say since psychology was recognised
as a science at all. But these points, while they demonstrate easily
enough that the book is one no teacher or psychologist can afford
to omit attending, do not make the case for the book as a sample of
autobiography or as a work of popular interest. Then let some of the
contents make it! Here is the report of an American who has known Mark
Hopkins, Charles Eliot Norton, Henry Ward Beecher, George Bancroft,
Treitschke, Wundt, Helmholtz, William James, Lord Kelvin, Jowett,
Pasteur and many others; an American who can write of his boyhood with
something of the charm of W. H. Hudson and much the same feeling for
nature; who can write with frankness of the _vita sexualis_ in the New
England of Emerson; who can--we fall back upon it--write!
A fellow-scientist of Dr. Hall’s though in quite another field has
also written his autobiography, and the extraordinary circumstances
of Michael Idvorsky Pupin’s life will be enough to attract popular
attention to his _From Immigrant to Inventor_. Forty-eight years ago a
Serbian boy who hadn’t a cent and who couldn’t speak a word of English
landed in New York. Since 1901 this immigrant has been professor of
electro-mechanics at Columbia University; he is the inventor of the
Pupin coil, which, by reducing the necessary diameter of copper wire,
has saved millions of dollars, and he also invented the device for
tuning which many people use daily on radio sets. Michael Pupin was
born at Idvor, Banat, Hungary, in a little community of Serbs rewarded
for their services against the Turks by the gift of some land and
political rights. In assessing his performance it must be borne in
mind that he had the handicap of an utterly alien race and culture and
speech to overcome in a far greater degree than Jacob A. Riis, who was
Danish, or Edward Bok, who came from Holland. Pupin’s autobiography is
of manifold interest; for one thing, he seems completely in sympathy
with an American tradition which so many immigrants have never been
able whole-heartedly to accept; for another, he traces the developments
of electrical science by the bright thread of his interest and
participation in them, and he does actually succeed in making some very
difficult scientific achievements quite simple and beautifully plain.
iv
Very different, if possible more magical, has been the career of the
Russian glovemaker whose adopted surname is now known everywhere that
motion pictures are exhibited--Samuel Goldwyn. It is only about nine
years since he paid ten cents to see a two-reel picture in depressing
surroundings on Broadway, and came home to tell his brother-in-law,
Jesse Lasky, that a fortune could be made in five-reel pictures!
Samuel Goldwyn’s book, _Behind the Screen_, showing on every page the
fine journalistic skill of his collaborator, Corinne Lowe, is less
an autobiography than a personal record of the people of the screen.
Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Garden, Pauline
Frederick, Geraldine Farrar and plenty of others are here described
with an intimacy and a frankness and a general wit and good humour that
it isn’t easy to imagine will be soon surpassed. The popular appeal
of such a series of “closeups” should be as limitless as the movie
audience, but the book will serve a less immediate and more important
purpose to the reader whose interest, not fervidly personal, goes
into the general subject of the films--how they came about, what and
why they are, what may come of them. I do not mean that Mr. Goldwyn
concerns himself directly with any of these questions, for he scarcely
touches them; and yet I think that the indirect light he throws may
be more finally enlightening than anything else that has come out of
Hollywood--certainly more so than would be likely to be got by any
outsider who might go there in a direct search. But let that pass. The
book, as a book, is irresistible reading.
v
The boundaries between history, biography, autobiography, memoirs and
the best journalism are often uncertain and are better so. It does not
matter except to formal minds whether an interest begins with a person
or an event, or in what direction it proceeds; for the mind, like the
body, has its own system of nutrition, and within pretty broad limits
should be allowed its own dietary. The suggestions below are additional
to those books already discussed and the classifications need not be
taken as anything more than a general convenience:
Historical.
ADMIRAL SIMS’S _The Victory at Sea_ (World War).
BRAND WHITLOCK’S _Belgium_ (World War).
RAY STANNARD BAKER’S _Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement_.
_Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story_ (World War).
_Memories of a Turkish Statesman_, 1913-1919, by DJEMAL PASHA. A
very spirited account, well-written; almost unique as a book from the
Turkish side. Interesting in its contradictions of Morgenthau.
_An Ambassador’s Memoirs_, by MAURICE PALEOLOGUE. By the last French
Ambassador to Russia. Volume I. covers July 3, 1914-June 2, 1915;
Volume II. continues to August 18, 1916.
LAURANCE LYON’S _The Pomp of Power_ and his _When There Is No Peace_,
both published anonymously. The author is in close touch with French
policy.
_Old Diplomacy and New: 1876-1922: From Salisbury to Lloyd George_, by
A. L. KENNEDY.
_The Drama of Sinn Fein_, by SHAW DESMOND. A new and pretty complete
history.
_The Life of Sir William Harcourt_, by A. G. GARDINER. Harcourt was
born before Victoria ascended the throne and he outlived her; Mr.
Gardiner brings unusual talents to what becomes less a biography of one
man than a portrayal of an era.
_Memoirs of the Empress Eugenie_, by COMTE FLEURY. Here likewise the
historical interest is as strong as the biographical.
_Lady Palmerston and Her Times_, by MABELL, COUNTESS OF AIRLIE. Of
value for its picture of the period from George III. to the middle of
the Nineteenth Century.
PAUL VAN DYKE’S _Catherine de Medici_, in two volumes, now in its third
printing, is distinguished by lucidity, an avoidance of easy ornament
and floridity, and by great literary charm.
More Purely Personal.
_The Letters of Lord and Lady Wolseley_, edited by SIR GEORGE ARTHUR.
The intimacies of a great soldier and his brilliant wife, with many
glimpses of British society from 1870 to 1911.
_Margot Asquith: An Autobiography._ Volumes III. and IV., although
dealing with British war politics, are chiefly personal in interest.
_Memories of Later Years_, by OSCAR BROWNING. By a much-travelled
Englishman, a friend of Queen Mary, Lord Curzon and Lloyd George, now
past eighty. He deals principally with persons and events since 1897.
Arthur Bartlett Maurice, reviewing the book in the New York Herald,
speaks of the book as “a narrative which gives the flavor of Europe of
yesterday, of a world that is gone.” The volume is a mine of anecdotes
of the great.
_Post Mortem_, by C. MACLAURIN, M.D., somewhat resembles Dr. Joseph
Collins’s _The Doctor Looks at Literature_--only in this case
historical figures are the persons dissected. Henry VIII., the
historian Gibbon, Joan of Arc, and Samuel Pepys are some of the
subjects.
_A Nineteenth Century Romance_, by MAJOR C. H. DUDLEY WARD. A love
story in two generations based on authentic letters and beginning in
the days of Napoleon the Great with the love letters of Dora Best to
George Brett and continuing with the love affair of their son who, in
1897, became Viscount Esher.
_Lady Rose Weigall_, by RACHEL WEIGALL. Lady Rose was the favourite
niece of the great Duke of Wellington. Her long life (1834-1921)
brought her in contact with Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn, Rubenstein, Jenny
Lind, Bismarck, Browning, Disraeli, Lord Palmerston, Dickens, the
Empress Eugenie and many royalties. Not the least interesting things
are her letters exchanged with Germany during the World War.
_“Indiscretions” of Lady Susan_, by LADY SUSAN TOWNLEY. Entertaining
and well-edged gossip by the wife of a diplomat who was stationed in
many countries.
_The Literary Spotlight_, with an introduction by JOHN FARRAR. Personal
portraits of contemporary American writers, first published in The
Bookman, and anonymous to permit greater candour. Louis Untermeyer,
Mary Johnston, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Floyd Dell, Sinclair Lewis, Owen
Johnson, Edna Ferber, Amy Lowell and others are included.
Unusual Biographies and Autobiographies.
_Thomas Nelson Page: A Memoir of a Virginia Gentleman_, by ROSWELL PAGE.
_All in a Lifetime_, by HENRY MORGENTHAU.
_My Life and Work_, by HENRY FORD in collaboration with SAMUEL CROWTHER.
_My Boyhood_, by JOHN BURROUGHS.
_Lord Northcliffe: a Memoir_, by MAX PEMBERTON.
_Fourteen Years a Sailor_, by JOHN KENLON. The Chief of the New York
Fire Department in a naïve and pleasing account of his Irish boyhood.
_The Life of an American Sailor: Admiral William Hemsley Emory_, from
his letters and memoirs edited by ADMIRAL ALBERT GLEAVES.
_Mr. Lloyd George_, by E. T. RAYMOND.
_The Americanization of Edward Bok_, by EDWARD W. BOK. One of the most
widely read of American autobiographies and still in strong demand.
_A Man From Maine_, by EDWARD W. BOK. A biography of Cyrus H. K.
Curtis, head of the Curtis Publishing Company of Philadelphia.
_From McKinley to Harding: Personal Recollections of Our Presidents_,
by H. H. KOHLSAAT. The political interest is strong.
_The Print of My Remembrance_, by AUGUSTUS THOMAS. For all who are
interested in the theatre and its people.
WALTER DAMROSCH’S _My Musical Life_ begins with a childhood in Germany
and aside from its autobiographical interest constitutes to some extent
a history of orchestral music in America.
_My Memories of Eighty Years_, by CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. About evenly
personal and political in interest.
_Letters of James Gibbons Huneker_, edited by JOSEPHINE HUNEKER, and
MR. HUNEKER’S _Steeplejack_ (autobiographical). The record of one of
our most brilliant critics, versatile in all the arts.
_John H. Patterson: The Pioneer in Industrial Welfare_, by SAMUEL
CROWTHER. Of a similar interest with HENRY FORD’S _My Life and Work_.
_The Editorials of Henry Watterson_, edited by ARTHUR KROCK. They
complete his own account of himself in “_Marse Henry_.” The political
interest is naturally the main thing and is exceedingly vivid
(1868-1921).
_The Life of Lord Rosebery_, by E. T. RAYMOND. Analytical biography.
_C. K. S., An Autobiography_, by CLEMENT K. SHORTER. The author is a
veteran English critic and writer.
_The Life of William Schwenk Gilbert_, by SIDNEY DARK. Gilbert of
Gilbert and Sullivan, “The Mikado,” “H. M. S. Pinafore,” etc.
FRANK SWINNERTON’S _George Gissing: A Critical Study_, and his _Robert