Chapter XI: Part II: Interpretations (8)

Physicians whose concern it is to estimate and adjudge their fellows’ mental balance find frequently that they get more information from the writings of the individual whose sanity is in question than from his speech. It is more self-revelatory especially if it is thrown off in emotional white heat. Theodore Roosevelt was an intensely emotional man and he was the most prolific letter-writer of his time; and perhaps of all time. His biographer, Mr. Joseph B. Bishop, estimated that he wrote during his public career more than 150,000 letters--an average of more than 10 letters a day. It seemed beyond belief when we were first told, but gradually one gathers credulity as volume after volume of his letters are published. “Writing is horribly hard work to me,” he wrote in a letter dated March 26th, 1887. He liked hard work. He loved few people and it was essential to his happiness and welfare that, with these few, he should share his emotional states and discuss his intellectual preoccupations. Hence, the number of his letters. His friendship with Henry Cabot Lodge did not date from school or college days. In the Spring of 1884, when he was a member of the New York State Legislature, he was addressing him as “My dear Mr. Lodge”; in the Summer as “My Dear Lodge” and telling him he is one of the very few men he really desires to know as a _friend!_ in the Autumn as, “Dear Old Fellow” and assuring him he is the salt of the earth whose people shall one day become cognisant of his savour, and by Winter as “Dear Cabot” and testifying his admiration, affection and spiritual intimacy. A quarter of a century later he wrote “from the Spring of 1884 Cabot Lodge was my closest friend personally, politically, and in every other way, and occupied toward me a relation that no man has ever occupied or ever will occupy.” In his entire political career he maintained that he had never formulated a policy or made an appointment without seeking the counsel and guidance of this friend. The letters in the volumes entitled _Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge_ give ample proof of this friendship and intimacy. Roosevelt poured out his heart and his mind to Lodge and thus furnished us material for estimating the kind of man he was; his conscience, morality, patriotism; his sincerity, affection, hypocrisy; his imagination, intellect, culture; his idealisms and realisms; his body and his soul. Here is first-hand information, awaiting indeed inviting interpretation. Perhaps no one ever better illustrated the fact that basically every mood is the mental transformation of a bodily state than Theodore Roosevelt.

The beginning of any understanding of him must be made in his “stunts”: cow-punching, cross-country riding, big game hunting, endurance tests, soldiering, exploring. It is generally known he was a delicate youth and it is alleged he went West seeking invigoration. He went West for the same reason the Sun goes: it was a part of the divine order. Chains could not have thrust inactivity upon him. Physical activity was as fervently in his blood as lust in the blood of a normal man; no one can read his letters from Little Missouri, from Elkhorn Ranch, Dakota, or his account of participation in a fox-hunt with battered head and broken arm, and need further proof of his indomitable energy. He knew minutes of physical peace, but they were thrust upon him by mental activity; he had hours of bodily rest, but they were stolen from his urge that he might display or convey his emotional state. He had to a singular degree the capacity to concentrate all his energies on the job in hand, the task undertaken; to do it and fulfil it with all his might and main, to tolerate no distraction, to suffer no interruption, to brook no interference. Whether he was playing tennis, orienting the Civil Service Commission, directing the New York Police Department, scorning Mr. E. L. Godkin, organising the Rough Riders, framing the policies and administering the affairs of his country, or reading a book, he did it with all the punch there was in him and when his punch-exchequer got low he sought the services of a trainer. He liked to drink the wine of life with brandy in it, he says in one of these letters, and the brandy he used is now not even outlawed. As Henry Adams says, “Roosevelt more than any other man living within the range of notoriety showed the singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter--the quality that mediæval theology assigned to God--he was pure act.”

The next most characteristic feature of Theodore Roosevelt is that he took himself, his beliefs and convictions with great seriousness. Early in life he convinced himself that he had come upon a brand of honesty that he must popularise and persuade his fellow-citizens to use. If they would not use it after they had been appraised of its quality and source they were perfect asses like Vilas, malicious and dishonest scoundrels like Godkin, demented mugwumps like John Fiske, dogs like Carl Schurz, hypocrites like George W. Curtis and accessories to the deeds of the German governmental murderers both before and after the facts like Woodrow Wilson. G. W. Smalley’s attitude was contemptible, he would like to put the editors of the _Evening Post_ and of the _World_ in prison. President Eliot made himself ridiculous by his stand on civil service and ballot reform; and it would be a pleasure to shoot or thrash his colleague Parker. Only he and Cabot were right: straight talkers and hard hitters.

Theodore Roosevelt had a keen and profound sense of duty to his country, to his community, to his family and to his friends and he had a superhuman facility for conveying recognition of it to every one who saw him or heard him. To that and to his reputation for fearlessness he owed a popularity which has never been equalled in this country. He was the embodiment of the American ideal: fearless, impetuous, resourceful, self-confident, ready to throw his hat into any ring and to follow it up with a smile on his face and the exclamation, “This is bully,” escaping from his lips. He could inoculate his fellow-citizens with his ideas more quickly than any man of his time and he could galvanise them into greater activity and more sustained determination than any President we have ever had. His qualities may outlive the children of those who knew him. One of the astonishing confessions of these letters is that he had few friends and fewer intimates. I have had friends who were convinced they knew him fundamentally and were in close communion with his thought and determination. From their conversation I could readily believe that he rarely made decisions without consulting them. Their names are not even mentioned in his correspondence.

Any one who has been inclined to doubt Roosevelt’s sincerity, _i.e._, to consider that he sometimes affected an enthusiasm which he did not feel, will have his doubts appeased by reading this correspondence. He believed in himself but he was not vain; he rated his abilities high, but his conduct displayed no arrogance; he valued his mental and physical possessions, but he was not proud. If he ever doubted his ability to do any job that presented itself, his most intimate correspondence does not betray it. What he doubted was that the opportunity would not be vouchsafed him.

The man to whom these letters were written was vain. It flattered his vanity that he had seen Theodore Roosevelt on the road to the White House while he was Police Commissioner, and that he had told him so with assurance; thus discharging in advance the obligation he was to incur by receiving such evidences of trust as the letters betray from so great a man as Roosevelt. He saw his own thoughts disseminated and his convictions popularised by his friend who knew how to gauge the feeling of the people and to raise their temperature; and in some inexplicable way there steals upon the reader a thought that when Lodge made up his mind that Roosevelt was going to the top he also made up his mind that he would link his name with that of the rising star in a correspondence that the world would not let perish.

Roosevelt was a many-sided man. He was gifted with foresight and hindsight. There has never been a President save Lincoln who had such capacity for learning by experience. For a man so emotional, he was a good judge of men and he could do team work. These qualities distinguished him from the man upon whose head he poured the vials of his wrath the last few years of his life and who may get from posterity both the laurel and the oak-leaf crowns. Scores of instances could be cited from this correspondence in support of his power to size up men, but none serves better than his letter to John Hay urging him to persuade the President to appoint General Wood to the command of all Cuba. “Wood is a born diplomat, just as he is a born soldier. I question if any nation in the world has now or has had within recent times any one so nearly approaching the ideal of a military administrator of the kind now required in Cuba.” No recorded prophecy has ever come truer than that.

Roosevelt was not a modest man, but he had a sense of propriety and fitness that was very becoming. His letters to Lodge about the hesitation on the part of the War Department to recognise his military service in Cuba by giving him the Medal of Honour, are dignified and straightforward. There is no pumped up humility. He did a good job and the labourer is worthy of his hire. In the same way his letters, when he was being groomed for the nomination of running mate to McKinley, are full of good sense and sound reasoning. He is satisfied with what he has accomplished as Governor of New York, and so were the people. What he would really like, would be to be re-elected Governor with a first-class Lieutenant-Governor, and then be offered the Secretaryship of War for four years. He knew what he wanted, and he got it, the Presidency, but the letter that describes his visit to Buffalo after McKinley had been shot should be ample testimony to convince any one that he did not want it the way it came. Any one keen to learn the tricks of the political game will be aided by perusal of the letters written from the New York State Capital. They may also observe how statesmen develop. Roosevelt’s letters from the White House are just as frank, intimate and revealing as were those from New York Police Headquarters and from Albany: full of praise for Lodge’s potential and actual accomplishments; of proffered suggestions and requests for counsel; of enthusiasm about exhausting rides and the fording of turbulent streams, “altogether it was great” or “bully fun,” full of vigorous comment and of plain characterisation of men. Discussion of literary matters which was so conspicuous in the early letters has now practically disappeared, though occasionally he makes brief comment when relating his diversions. In September, 1903, he writes, “I have been reading Aristotle’s politics and Plutarch’s miscellany and as usual take an immense comfort out of the speeches of Lincoln.” It is extraordinary how his partisanship determined his likes and dislikes even in literary matters. “The more I study Jefferson the more profoundly I distrust him and his influence.” Lodge writes to him on returning the proof of his first inaugural address, “Literary form is after all the salt that keeps alive the savour of the thoughts we would not willingly have die.” Indeed his “form” had improved enormously since he wrote the life of Thomas H. Benton in 1887, when he stated “my style is very rough and I do not like a certain lack of _sequitur_ that I do not seem able to get rid of.” That sentence alone is proof of the first allegation, but he bettered it before he reached the White House, and the lack of _sequitur_ disappeared forever.

Though his letters to Lodge are chiefly concerned with his political activities, realisations and prospects; with justification of his conduct, refutation of the allegations of their opponents, and comment on their sinister motives and malign trends--there is much sentiment in them and not a little play. Commenting on something Lodge wrote about the death of John Hay, he says: “It should not make us melancholy. He died within a very few years of the period when death comes to us all as a certainty, and I should esteem any man happy who lived till sixty-five as John Hay has lived, who saw his children marry, his grandchildren born, who was happy in his home life, who wrote his name clearly in the records of our times, who rendered great and durable services to the Nation, both as statesman and writer, who held high public positions, and died in the harness at the zenith of his fame. When it comes our turn to go out into the blackness, I only hope the circumstances will be as favourable.” His hope was realised, save that he was four years younger when his turn came to go.

There are many high spots in the correspondence that reveal Roosevelt’s character; one of them is his appointments to ministerial and ambassadorial positions and the comments on the appointees; they are all scratch men; he never nominates a man with a handicap and he submits the name first to his friend. Another is the genesis of the thought that led to his bringing Japan and Russia to the council table at Portsmouth, the development and maturity of it, and its success. A third is his break with Lodge that came when he decided to seek the nomination of the Republican Party, and when that was shown to be not available to the Progressive Party--his own creation. Lodge’s political conduct in the last ten years of his life alienated many admirers, but it is in a measure offset by his conduct in the trying year of 1912. He was opposed to the constitutional changes advocated by Roosevelt, therefore he could not support him; “but as for going against you that I can not do. There is very little of the Roman in me for those I love best.” There was a lot in him for those he did not love! Finally the student of political events misses the inside story of the Progressive Party. It is likely there is a series of letters to some one else on that subject.

Another thing that he misses is an explanation of his break with Taft. There is a strange and inexplicable absence of any illuminating reference to it in these letters, the place where it should be. Unquestionably our Chief Justice has hundreds of Roosevelt’s letters which will one day be published. Until then we must curb our curiosity; but there has been something in Taft’s conduct since he became ex-President and in his speeches, that leads one to believe that, when the facts are submitted to the public, it will be seen that he was not responsible for the break or for the hard feeling it engendered.

Some day also the President of Columbia University, who was once a “bully fellow,” will publish the scores, perhaps hundreds, of letters he received and they will throw a revealing light on Roosevelt’s loyalty. Mr. Bishop in a recent book, _Notes and Anecdotes of Many Years_, has given some personal recollections of him and his humanness which are illuminating.

If one asks men conversant with public affairs of the past thirty years, “What specifically did Roosevelt do while President that entitles him to be classed with the Immortals?” they find it very difficult to be specific in their responses. They will mention the taking of Panama and the organisation of the Commission to construct the Panama Canal, his interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine when Germany was pressing her claims on Venezuela, his vigorous enforcement of the Sherman anti-trust law, and the Peace Conference at Portsmouth. These were most creditable accomplishments, but scarcely epoch-making. It was a beautiful gesture to bring Japan and Russia to the Council table, but it takes from the glamour to know that the suggestion came from the Japanese. And the breaking up of interlocking directorates, the unloosening of the hold of corporate influences on the government, required courage, judgment and self-reliance; but the historian of the future will be puzzled when he reads that Congress was insisting in 1924 that the railroads should do what they were prosecuted for doing twenty years before. Victory in the Northern securities case may prove finally to be the equivalent of defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt was essentially a great actor, but he wrote his own lines and submitted them to Cabot Lodge for deletion, addition and correction. Stunts of every kind appealed to him. He had a natural talent for accomplishing them which was enormously enhanced by practice. He got away with nearly everything he undertook. Had he given permanency to the Progressive Party, history would credit him with few failures. He knew how to make acquaintances feel that they were friends, and friends that they were loved.

Taken all in all, the features of his personality that attract me most are those revealed in the letters published by Mr. Bishop in the volume called _Theodore Roosevelt and His Time_, in the letters to his children and in the letters to Anne Roosevelt Cowles. This is possibly because he does not there reveal so much bitterness, so much contempt, it must indeed be said, so much hatred, as he reveals in the last letters to his dearest friend: hatred of his successor in the Presidency. Possibly the word “hatred” is not the right one. He despised Wilson, he commiserated the country that was obliged to suffer him, it was a disgrace to continue him in office; he knew less about the conduct of War than he knew about anything, and he knew nothing save academics. Wilson could do no right. But he did one thing which took the check-rein off Roosevelt’s inhibitions. He ignored him; he took no heed of his counsels, his detractions, his desires.

Roosevelt was just as sincere in this belief as he was in others, and he had a legion of sympathisers and supporters, at the head of which stood the man to whom the letters were addressed. Every one is entitled to, and has, his own opinion of the merits of the two Presidents as men and statesmen. Those to whom the one appeals are repelled by the other; but every one will agree that one was more lovable than the other; that he understood the heart of man and that he had one himself. Theodore Roosevelt was one of Nature’s wonders and he should take a place among the great Presidents because of what he was rather than what he did.

It must be admitted that the Roosevelt-Lodge letters leave a taste--not quite bitter, not quite acrid, but slightly disagreeable. It can be removed quickly by reading for a few minutes the volume entitled _Letters from Theodore Roosevelt to Anne Roosevelt Cowles_. Here he is revealed as the affectionate brother, the indulgent father, the sympathetic friend of children, especially those of Roosevelt blood. Loyalty to his family and confidence in himself radiate from most of the letters. Fancy a civilian of thirty writing, “‛La Guerre et La Paix,’ like all Tolstoi’s works, is very strong and very interesting. The descriptions of the battles are excellent, but though with one or two good ideas underneath them, the criticisms of commanders, and of wars in general are absurd.”

On the eve of declaration of war with Spain, when McKinley seemed bent on peace, he wrote: “I’d give all I’m worth to be just two days in supreme command ... I’d have things going so nobody could stop them.” And that was what Theodore Roosevelt always wanted to do, to get things going so that nobody could stop them.

He always wanted to start something. He never disclaimed the children of his brain; they were all legitimate. He never mistrusted the potency of his brawn, it never failed him. Courage, self-confidence, self-belief, facilitated the conviction that he was a man of destiny. Though he was not such actually, he scaled the flaming ramparts of the world more gracefully and successfully than any man of his time.

I have never been able to convince myself that Southey was right when he said, “A man’s character can more surely be judged by the letters his friends address to him than by those he pens himself, for they are apt to reveal with unconscious faithfulness the regard held for him by those who knew him best.” If Theodore Roosevelt’s character were estimated from Cabot Lodge’s letters one would have to call him a god, not a man--a god who nodded once, in 1912.

XII
EDUCATORS

THE LIFE OF SIR WILLIAM OSLER, by _Harvey Cushing_.
LIFE AND CONFESSIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST, by _G. Stanley Hall_.

Sir William Osler occupied a unique position; he was the most widely known and best beloved physician in the world. He made an indelible impression on the teaching and practice of medicine in three countries--Canada, the United States and England. He lived the number of years allotted to man by the psalmist, and each succeeding year of his life he added to his mental stature by taking thought, and to his emotional profundity by doing deeds of kindliness.

He was the son of an Anglo-Saxon pioneer parson, Featherstone Lake Osler, and of Ellen Free Pickton, a Celt who went from Cornwall to the Province of Ontario in 1837. His spiritual parents were Hermes and Minerva, and he had three godfathers--a parson, Arthur Johnson; a physician, James Bovell, and a professor, Robert Palmer Howard--to them he dedicated the most widely read textbook on the practice of medicine ever written.

He had a genius for friendship that was nearly unique; he had a capacity for quick and accurate observation which is not vouchsafed to one man in a thousand; he had a prehensile mind to which synthesis and logic appealed; he had a liking and a capacity for work that resembled those of Theodore Roosevelt; he had an inborn understanding of humanity; and he loved his fellows. When they were ill, he added great tenderness to his love. He was playful, prankful and guileless, with the face of a sphinx and the expression of an ascetic. He was a scholar without pedantry, a scientist without pretension, a wit without venom, a humanist without scorn. Small wonder that he was the man without an enemy.

One of his most beloved friends and esteemed colleagues has written his biography and at the same time achieved one of the most difficult of all tasks: he has kept himself out of the book and refrained from eulogising the subject. There are many biographies of physicians that merit the designation “great”; among them, Henry Morley’s _Life of Jerome Cardan_, René Valléry-Radot’s _Vie de Pasteur_, Stephen Paget’s _Life of Victor Horsley_, Agnes Repplier’s _Life of William White_ and to the list must be added Harvey Cushing’s _Life of William Osler_.

Osler did three great things for medicine: he conceived and effected bedside teaching; he demonstrated the value of history as a pedagogical agency and of culture as a humanising one, and he succeeded in making the medical world heed that cure meant prevention. He had but one fundamental dislike: chauvinism; one abiding disdain: insincerity; one supreme contempt: pretence. He could not abide a faker, unless he were feeble minded; then pity facilitated tolerance.

On his seventieth birthday his former pupils and intimate colleagues of this country sent to Oxford two memorial volumes made up of contributions to the science and art that he had fostered and developed. Replying to his fellow Regius professor of medicine in Cambridge, who made the presentation, he said:

_Reprinted from “The Annals of Medical History”_

“Among multiple acknowledgment I can lift one hand to
heaven that I was born of honest parents, that modesty,
humility, patience and veracity lay in the same egg, and
came into the world with me. To have had a happy home in
which unselfishness reigned, parents whose self-sacrifice
remains a blessed memory, brothers and sisters helpful
far beyond the usual measure--all these make a picture
delightful to look back upon. Then to have had the
benediction of friendship follow one like a shadow, to
have always had the sense of comradeship in work, without
the petty pinpricks of jealousies and controversies,
to be able to rehearse in the sessions of sweet, silent
thought the experiences of long years without a single
bitter memory--to have and to do all this fills the heart
with gratitude. That three transplantations have been
borne successfully is a witness to the brotherly care
with which you have tended me. Loving our profession,
and believing ardently in its future, I have been
content to live in and for it. A moving ambition to
become a good teacher and a sound clinician was fostered
by opportunities of an exceptional character, and any
success I may have attained must be attributed in large
part to the unceasing kindness of colleagues and to a
long series of devoted pupils whose success in life is my
special pride.”

There is the man, modest, grateful, appreciative. He attributes his material success to what others have done for him; his spiritual to his inheritancy. Had he added that, early in life, he had a vision and had striven heroically and worked laboriously to make it concrete for the benefit of mankind, and that extraordinary success had attended his efforts, he would have explained William Osler and his career.

What more need be said of his parents? They struggled successfully with the virgin soil in a primitive civilisation; the father ornamented his profession, and the mother fulfilled bounteously her destiny; she mothered eight children, four of whom became famous. The youngest, the subject of this biography, was in nowise remarkable as a child or boy:

“I started in life with just an ordinary everyday stock
of brains. In my schooldays I was much more bent upon
mischief than upon books, but as soon as I got interested
in medicine I had only a single idea: to do the day’s
work that was before me just as faithfully and honestly
and energetically as was in my power.”

And this he did to the day of his death.

He was steered into medicine by a strange mixture of scientific and pietistic ardour, James Bovell, and he studied and graduated at McGill Medical School, then a proprietary institution at the head of which was R. Palmer Howard, who by possessions and conduct influenced Osler’s life, for he said of him thirty-five years later: “I have never known one in whom was more happily combined a stern sense of duty with the mental freshness of youth.”

Osler went abroad and while increasing his knowledge of medicine laid the foundation of friendships and intimacies which years later, after he had become a famous teacher, facilitated a call to one of the most ornamental professorships in Great Britain. At twenty-eight he had a chair in his alma mater. In ten years he went to the top. Then began that series of calls to colleges and universities here and abroad which did not cease so long as he lived. He refused them all save those of the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins. In the former he stayed five years; in the latter fifteen. The temptation to respond favourably to the call from New York was very great, and greater still that from Edinburgh. But temptation for Osler was created to be resisted and there was a star that guided him as it guided the Wise Men of the East; he had but to follow it at night, and to be counselled during the day by the voice that once had counselled Socrates to reach his goal, viz., a true knowledge of himself and of his relations to his fellows, and, having reached it, to plant there his banner bearing the masterword in medicine: work. And he worked industriously, honestly, patiently, persistently.

Then came the call to Oxford. He had been in the harness actively for thirty years and the load had begun to drag; the burdens that he had not only willingly borne, but sought, had begun to bend him, and the unfinished literary material of many years clamoured for academic leisure and favourable environment. Oxford was the place and Osler was the very man! Going for good meant farewells, and out of one of them flowed a stream of notoriety which, for a time, threatened to drown him. He took leave of his students, colleagues and trustees in an address in which he discussed many problems of university life; particularly the danger of staying too long in one place, and the danger of not thrusting opportunities and responsibilities upon young men--and at this point he inadvertently remarked that he was not sure whether it was Anthony Trollope who suggested that there should be a college into which men of sixty retired for a year’s contemplation before a peaceful departure by chloroform, but there was much to be said in favour of it. The journalese rendering of this was “Osler recommends chloroform at sixty.” The storm gathered during the night. It broke in the East the following morning and by the evening it had spread throughout the country.

Every man and woman above sixty, or approaching it, would seem to have been affronted. Following the acrimonious discussions of the newspapers and the caustic cartoons, came the studied magazine articles proving that Enoch not only begot Methuselah after he was sixty, but walked with God; that Edison was in the heyday of his inventive activity; that Ford would practicalise flying after the chloroform age and that Clémenceau would save the world for democracy, perhaps for socialism. For a short time it looked as if the man without an enemy had lost his distinction. Again, his inner voice counselled him wisely. He did not attempt to explain; he could not be persuaded to refute the alleged statement. He had said the truth, and the truth sufficed William Osler to the end.

Of the many extraordinary things in Dr. Cushing’s adequate and appealing biography, none is more arresting than the account given of the birth of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and the part that Osler unconsciously played in it through his textbook. A young man who had access to the ear and the purse of John D. Rockefeller read it and was appraised of the fertile field awaiting planting by preventive medicine. The crops that have been harvested have been enormous, but they are as naught compared with those about to be garnered. How little it is generally appreciated that the colossal success of the Panama Canal was due as much to Gorgas as to Bunau-Varilla, and that Osler mediated his appointment to the Commission, and still less is known of the leading part Osler played in decapitating the gorgon typhoid fever in this country thirty years ago.

In England, Osler added to his cultural fame. He was made president of the Bibliographical Society, of the Ashmolean Society and, to cap them all, of the Classical Association, an honour which probably pleased him as much or more than any that had ever come to him. His address of acceptance, which embodied the whole spirit of his ideal, cost him the greatest labour of his life.

He found great joy in England, but he found also his greatest sorrow, for his son, a singular combination of his mother’s suaviter and his father’s fortiter was killed in the war. It did not kill Osler, it only killed his desire to live. Like his master, Sir Thomas Browne, he knew that oblivion is not to be hired and that the night of time suppresseth the day. He had lived every moment of his day, and every hour had been joyous save one, and he had never stopped to compute his felicities. He died as he had lived, like a marathon runner taking the hurdle.

Dr. Cushing’s biography is documented and detailed. It is the kind of biography of Osler that should exist, but there should be another made from it: the story of his life and the charm of his personality in narrative form followed by interpretation, characterisation and estimation. The present one will be received gratefully by his former pupils and colleagues, by his connections and associates, and by libraries; but the general reader, the one who wants to find out without reading hundreds of letters and without wading through 1,500 pages, what Osler was like, how he acquired primacy of the medical world, how he made himself a savant in literature while climbing to the top of his own profession, will seek a book where these are told informatively and entertainingly.

Such a biography of William Osler is bound to come in time. I venture to say that, when it does come, it will dwell at far greater length on the first half of his life. Those who knew Osler intimately will be astonished to find scant reference in Dr. Cushing’s book to the interesting Francis family, with whom he lived for so many years in Montreal, or to Nancy Astor, to whom he was legal guardian. There is almost no allusion to the playful side of his nature. To make a man into a saint, though he deserves it, does not always do him justice. William Osler had extraordinarily great qualities, but he was passionate in his likes and dislikes; he was often indiscreet, sometimes tactless to an unbelievable degree; he could not and would not suffer fools; and he exacted unqualified devotion, while preserving the freedom to go his own way. He loved practical jokes, but he was not at all happy when they were played on him. For all this, his feet were less of clay than those of most men. One of the great charms of Osler was that he was so human, and had so much love and understanding of humanity. It is as a man that his friends remember him, and it is as man and teacher that he shall be known to posterity.

* * * * *

Thirty-five years ago a Yankee wagonmaker, who had gone to California as a “forty-niner” and piled up a fortune, thought to immortalise his name by founding a university in Worcester, Massachusetts. This University should be a beacon light to other educational institutions, the object of their emulation and envy. Realising that he was lacking concrete pedagogical ideas, that he was devoid of, even antipathic to the principles of organisation and co-operation, and, at least, suspicious of his prejudices, Jonas Gilman Clark was persuaded by his counsellor and friend, the late Senator Hoar, to ask a young professor of psychology at Johns Hopkins University, a froward, self-confident, energetic man of promise, to plan and steer his venture. In the book which he called _Life and Confessions of a Psychologist_ G. Stanley Hall tells us how he did it, and how his forebears and parents, his education and environment, permitted him to do it.

The story is an interesting one, and besides revealing the personality of Dr. Hall, as it was meant to do, no doubt that he might better understand himself, it throws a light upon the road that education has travelled in this country the past third of a century, a light that is illuminating though not dazzling. Stanley Hall often filled the lamp that generated it, and he swung the reflector with great skill. It is possible that the coming generation will say that he was the soundest psychologist of his time and that he broke more virgin soil than William James. He was an important and tireless worker in the field of pedagogy and he was extremely articulate. When he had passed his seventieth birthday he believed he would yet do “a few things which shall be better than I have ever yet been able to do.” He was one of those countless old men who go about repeating “I feel just as I did when I was forty.” It was not vouchsafed him to do any of them. Dr. Hall prided himself on being a straight, hard hitter. It pleased him enormously to be called “_l’enfant terrible_” of psychology. He had not always been able to speak out what had been in his mind, so he determined to do it in his book. There will be much diversity of opinion as to whether his reputation shall profit by his frankness.

Solomon was unquestionably right about many things, but Dr. Hall does not agree with him that humility should go before honour. “In the view I have attained of man, his place in nature, his origin and destiny, I believe I have become a riper product of the present stage of civilisation than most of my contemporaries; have outgrown more superstitions, attained clearer insights, and have a deeper sense of peace within myself. I love but perhaps still more pity, mankind, groping and stumbling, often slipping backward along the upward path, which I believe I see just as clearly as Jesus, or Buddha did.”

Though not for a moment would I appear to be either a champion of the use of the word “some” as an adjective, or an habitual user of it, I maintain that this is _some_ statement. And why leave out Mohammed? Most of us, subject to hours and days of self-depreciation, inadequacy, unworthiness, will envy the self-satisfaction and self-complacency of this retired pedagogue. But in reality it does not suffice him: “As I advance in years there are few things I crave more, and feel more keenly the lack of, than companionship.” Even review of successes and contemplation of accomplishments do not shut out loneliness. There is no record that Jesus or Buddha was lonely.

From his earliest days Dr. Hall had what the Freudians call an inferiority complex. His childish self-consciousness, his juvenile aloofness, his mature bumptiousness, his senescent strenuousness all testify it. He became aware of it early in life and strove hard to overcome it. But like the fetters of Hephæstus it could neither be snapped nor loosened. Like them, its substance was as subtle as spider’s web and so cunningly contrived that none might see it even of the blessed gods. The statement quoted above may be construed as a last effort to extricate himself from the crafty net.

Dr. Hall was an ardent Freudian. “Nothing since Aristotle’s categories has gone deeper, or in my opinion is destined to have such far-reaching influence and results,” was the characteristic way he estimated the Freudian mechanisms. It mattered nothing to him that psychoanalysis and the study of the unconscious have made small appeal to the majority of trained psychologists of this or any other country. He attributed this to the prudish reluctance of his colleagues to face the momentous problems of sex life. They deny it; at least, his successor at Johns Hopkins, the professor at Columbia, the successor to William James at Harvard, and many others do. But the momentous problems of sex life did not balk Dr. Hall. He confessed to “a love for glimpsing at first hand the raw side of human life,” and he records the unique thrill he experienced at the numerous prize fights that he attended “unknown and away from home.” Moreover the seamy side of life seemed to him as valuable in some respects as the psychological laboratory. “In many American and especially in foreign cities, Paris, where vice was most sophisticated, London, where it was coarsest, Vienna, which I thought the worst of all, I found, generally through hotel clerks, a guide to take me through the underworld by night to catch its psychological flavour.” Some reader, low-minded and altogether contemptible, will be base enough to believe that there were other motives. It is a dangerous business anyway. Even Dr. Hall says he had a narrow escape once--his life, not his morals--in a den of Apaches in Paris. About the year Dr. Hall was called to Clark University, a clergyman in New York and a pious vice hunter visited such places and their motives for doing so were publicly questioned. The clergyman stood the shock, but his reforming friend went off his head. The reformatory urge, though not a fundamental one, often needs to be curbed, especially when it is entangled with a lust of curiosity.

Dr. Hall always had a weakness for new, bizarre, hybrid words, and he found difficulty in giving adequate vent to his emotions and cognitions in one language. Therefore one is not astonished to find the present volume constellated with French, German, and Latin words and phrases. He frequently speaks of his _éclaircissements_. He had various kinds: religious, social, political, economic, and even ethical. He has been very fond of giving _aperçus_, of being irreverent to the _ipsissima verba_; and he can never quite forget the _hegira_ from Clark University after the visit of a certain Harper; he still hears the echo of the _vox clamantis in deserto_; and he will talk of the _vita sexualis_. It is to be presumed that any one lured by an autobiography of one of our leading educators will be able to translate these words. At any rate he is not likely to have any more trouble with them than he is with some of the sentences in English. For instance, the Professor, speaking of the necessity of educating the will and the heart as well as the intellect, says:

“Nothing else can save us and I shall live, and hope to
die when my time comes, convinced that this goal is not
only not unattainable, but that we are, on the whole,
with however many and widespread regressions, making
progress, surely if slowly and in the right directions.”

And again when saying a good word for the “seminary”:

“The rabulist, the sophist, the debater, the man of
saturated orthodoxy, the literalist, and the dullard will
all be held in check if the seminary is rightly pervaded
with the phenomena of altitude.”

Yes, indeed, but what will save the bromide, the smart Aleck, the hard-shelled--that’s the question. Is there any phenomenon or altitude that will accomplish that?

I have always understood it was Worcester, not Webster, who said: “It is I who am surprised; you are astonished,” when he returned home and saw his mother-in-law being kissed by the butler. I must have been mistaken, for Dr. Hall says that he was surprised and delighted when he got an invitation, after some lean years as a tutor, to deliver a course of lectures in Baltimore. The sensation of the butler and of Dr. Hall must have been the same, only on the reverse side of the shield.

Dr. Hall wrote this book to find out more about himself than he knew before. I hope he was successful. I know more about him than I did before, though I have been fairly familiar with his life in the open the past quarter of a century. He says many interesting things about himself. With some of them I find it hard to agree: for instance that he was a mixture of masochistic and sadistic impulses. It may be so, but they were not fifty-fifty. One predominated.

Somewhere in the _Tale of a Tub_ Swift says that happiness is a perpetual possession of being well deceived. Were it true, the writer of this autobiography rarely experienced happiness save perhaps in Berlin, where he learned “how great an enlightener love is, and what a spring of mind Eros can be.”

XIII
PRIZE FIGHTERS

JOHN L. SULLIVAN, by _R. F. Dibble_.
THE ROAR OF THE CROWD, by _James J. Corbett._

The most diverting biography of the year is that of John L. Sullivan, the man who shared with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson the widest popularity of all Americans of their times. Mr. R. F. Dibble does not tell us so much about John L. as a personality, but what he tells of him as a pugilist and drunkard is amusing and amazing, inspiring and instructive. John L. Sullivan and Jean de Reszke were the two artists on whom America concentrated its attention during the closing years of the nineteenth century. They had no superiors or peers until Mr. Corbett and Sig. Caruso came along and dislodged them, the one aided by alcohol, the other by _anni domini_. Their contemporaries will always believe they had no equals and should posterity perpetuate that belief, perhaps it will not be far wrong. If the anti-alcohol league needed a tract to further its cause--but now that it has the law, it does not need it--one could be made from Mr. Dibble’s book. Never was the downfall of a great figure so directly traceable to rum as John L. Sullivan’s and there are few more striking examples of the efficacity of grace than that furnished by his abstinence and reform. Regrettably that saving visitation did not come to him until alcohol had wrought his ruin physically, and in a smaller measure spiritually.

John L. Sullivan was the greatest pugilist of his time--perhaps of all times. He has been called a brute, but he was not, because he had a sense of humour; he has been called a moron, but he did not deserve it because he refused to run for Congress; it has been alleged that he was tough, but his reverence for the ideal of womanhood contradicted the slander. He was a strange combination: proud that he was Irish and fearful lest people should not know that he was a Bostonian. He had the same reverence for the city of his birth that his biographer has, and his sincerity was less doubtful; for it will occur to some that Mr. Dibble had his tongue in his cheek when he penned this sentence: “And this Boston, the Hub of the Universe, the source of everything excellent in American manners and customs, the originator of all moral and literary endeavours, became unwittingly, but most appropriately, the cradle of modern pugilism.” Most Bostonians are likely to find “Hub of the Universe” somewhat intemperate and will think that he should have said hub of the U. S. A. In any event, they were proud of John L. Sullivan, justly so, for as his friend Theodore Roosevelt said: “Old John has many excellent qualities, including a high degree of self-respect ... he never threw a fight ... he has been the most effective temperance lecturer I have ever known of,” and he might have added that he possessed supremely a quality that all men are one in admiring: courage.

Some of Mr. Dibble’s descriptions of the champion’s early battles are nearly as thrilling as movie reels; some of the narrative of chance encounters, such as with the bully of Mount Clemens, are most picturesque; and occasionally quotations of the master’s own words give spice and substance to the descriptions: “The longest scrap I ever had went about twenty minutes, and that fellow was on the floor most of the time. I was never learned to box. I learned myself from watching other boxers. My style of boxing is perfectly oracular--no, I mean original--with me.” As all devotees of the art of self-defence know, John L.’s first great fight was with Paddy Ryan and what Mr. Dibble has to say about it is interesting, particularly the part about Ryan’s explanation of his defeat. “The defeated champion burst into print with a series of statements which insisted that his rupture and his truss had so crippled him that he was unable to fight with his customary ferocity.” If Dr. John A. Bodine, one time surgeon in New York, were still alive, he would be able to say that a similar statement would be true if Sullivan had made it about his bout with Corbett. There can be little doubt, I believe, that Sullivan’s trainers made him enter that contest without a truss. And though alcohol had conditioned the weakness of the abdominal muscles which promoted the hernia, the immediate cause of the champion’s fall was due to a condition that should have been remedied surgically.

Now that the technique of the art known as self-defence has become elaborate and complicated, it is interesting to hear what it was for the champion of champions: “His technique was simplicity itself: he merely kept hammering with ruthless atavistic ferocity at his opponents until the opponents became insensible.” In view of the legend, current for a while at least, that John L. had first learned to fight by whipping his father, “atavistic” does not seem to be particularly a felicitous adjective. It is a small matter, but Mr. Dibble is not perhaps as careful of his adjectives as an Instructor in the Department of English in the University of Columbia should be. Laborious search would have provided a more appropriate epithet than “cutest” for Charlie Mitchell.

It is sincerely to be hoped that some of John L.’s retorts and remarks were not of staircase engendering. Take for instance the following anecdote:

A policeman, surrounded by an enthusiastic audience, said to him: “You are drunk, you are under arrest.” “That ain’t true,” snapped John, “but even if it was I’ll be sober to-morrow while you’ll be a damn fool all your life.” It must occur even to his greatest admirer on reading this tale that he may have heard the retort on the stage where it has been bandied about for generations. However, it is quite true that he may have stopped in the middle of a fight when he was urged by a bloodthirsty creature in the audience to “go in and mop up” his adversary. According to the story, he stepped to the front of the platform, raised his hand and said: “Gentlemen, this affair to-night is just a friendly set-to. Some day I may oblige you by killing a man.” The vernacular may not be Sullivan’s, but the sentiment likely is.

The distressing part of the book is the account of his contest with John Barleycorn. No one who has not himself a thirst for strong drink, or who has not lived and laboured with those who had it and succumbed to it, will be touched by it. But all drunkards, potential and actual, and all doctors who have witnessed the devastating results of the intemperate use of alcohol will sympathise with John L. and will venerate him for the fight he finally made and the battle he won. Had he been able to exercise a similar control of his appetite for food, he might still be the living example of reformation. Apparently there were plenty of friends to tell him that he drank too much, but no one dared run the risk of making an enemy of him by telling him that he ate too much, and so he went on adding to his avoirdupois until Fat Men’s Club elected him to membership and even called him to office. This offended him enormously and hurt him deeply, for even after he went far beyond three hundred pounds, he was unwilling to admit that any one was justified in calling him fat.

He was proud of his strength which was colossal and of his oratory which was Lilliputian. But if his biographer is to be trusted, and I think he is, his speeches were often reflective of common sense, or perhaps it might better be said of common experience: “This talk of tainted money is all rot. In all my years of wild spending I never heard of nobody refusing to take the money of John L. Of all the money I gave to churches, schools and other charities, I can’t remember a single cent being flopped back to me because it was earned by biffing some unlucky chap on the jaw. There is no such thing as tainted money, and I have handled about every kind there is. The preacher’s hadn’t ought to object to it. They ought to be on the level in their professions just like us prize fighters always is. If any of you here has got what you think is tainted cash in your pockets, just drop it in my hat before you pass out. I thank you one and all very kindly, yours truly, John L. Sullivan.” Preachers, moralists, uplifters, will find food for reflection in these words.

Mr. Dibble’s biography is, as I said in the beginning, interesting and diverting, but he would have been well advised had some one suggested to him that he delete the epilogue; it is neither worthy of his scholarship nor of his sensibility.

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