Chapter VIII: Part II: Interpretations (5)

Such an estimate could only go to prove that critics often make mistakes and that Poe as critic was not the peer of Poe as poet and story-writer, were it not for the fact that this poetess, prior to the appearance of the notice in which the quotation appeared, had paid Poe one hundred dollars to review one of her books, and when she complained of his failure to do so he remarked that if he reviewed her rubbish it would kill him.

Such incidents could be multiplied. But to what purpose? Poe was a genius and he is immortal. As a man he was a pathetic figure, a moral weakling. It can not add to the lustre of his immortal genius to expose the pitiful skeleton of the man over whom the dust of time has spread a merciful veil and the radiance of his crown has cast an indulgent shadow. Nor can Dr. Robertson enhance the world’s estimate of the writer by piling up words to convince it that Poe, the man, was full of fine qualities only, but at times committed acts for which he could not be held responsible because he was under the temporary influence of a “neurosis”; and that this “neurosis” had no effect upon the quality of his writing.

* * * * *

Edgell Rickword’s biography of Arthur Rimbaud, the decadent, is too laudatory, too apologetic, too condoning; but it reveals penetrative insight, sympathetic understanding, and a measure of critical acumen.

Rimbaud was a contentious, bumptious, conceited, selfish, pigheaded, insensitive young hobo who in three years of his youthful life wrote the best poetry of France since Baudelaire. He printed only one book, _Une Saison en Enfer_, an epitome of his mind’s life. When he was eighteen he stopped writing and began wandering, scoffing at literature, regretting his part in its creation, and scorning recognition of a position among the writers of his country.

He tramped, he travelled with a circus, he was overseer in a stone quarry, and finally landed in Africa where he lived the last nineteen years of his life, pioneering, exploring, merchandising. Then, just as he was about to secure a modest competency and to see his dream of fireside and family come true, a parasite possessed him. When he reached Marseilles the surgeons amputated a leg, and he died soon after, in the odour of sanctity and in his thirty-eighth year. His devoted, pious sister, Isabelle, has told of his last days with fervid affection in a booklet _Mon Frère Arthur_, and Ernest Delahaye, who knew, understood, loved, and tolerated him perhaps more than any one, published in 1923 a volume which pleased both the critics and Rimbaud’s friends. About the same time an industrious critic of French letters, Maurice Coulon, published a volume, _Le Problème de Rimbaud, Poète Maudit_.

Rimbaud has been dead nearly thirty-five years. His literary output is the smallest on record. His poetry, although generally admitted to stand beside that of Hugo, Vigny, and Musset, has no human interest; he does not sing of love, he does not chant the virtues of his country or its people. Probably not one reader in twenty is touched by _Les Illuminations_, and not one in ten discerns his thesis or his philosophy in _Une Saison en Enfer_.

What then is the explanation of this sustained interest in him? Why does posterity extol him and neglect Gérard de Nerval, who brought to the light of day a long hidden pediment of literature: the æsthetics of symbolism? The answer is easily given. His “affair” with Verlaine is the human interest of Arthur Rimbaud. People like to read about him as they like to read _Town Topics_ or _Le Cri de Paris_. Mr. Rickword is to be congratulated on rendering the theme with his foot on the soft pedal. Had he called his book _The Taming by Time of an Antinomian_, it would have been a comprehensive and a just title.

The wide dissemination of the Freudian theories is responsible in a measure for the keen interest of the reading public in sexual fixations, their manifestations and liberations. Rimbaud apparently got stuck on third base in the game of life, but there are many indications that he was stealing home when the bell rang.

VI
WARRIORS

LORD WOLSELEY, by _Maj.-Gen. Sir Frederick Maurice_ and
_Sir George Arthur_.

ROBERT E. LEE THE SOLDIER, by _Sir Frederick Maurice_.

The biographies of men who make history are as a rule more remarkable for the “action” they display than for the thought they invite. History is not made by thinking about it: it requires the combination of thought and deeds. When a man is endowed with the capacity for both; when he lives at a time in which his country needs the intelligent effort of its children to carry on its traditions, and when fate has been kind enough to call one of them to service at such a time, the story of that man’s life must be inviting, instructive and inspiring. All this is true of Lord Wolseley. Early in his career, at the time of the Civil War, Wolseley was sent to Canada to prepare for a possible war with the United States, which Abraham Lincoln, in his wisdom, prevented. Garnet Wolseley, from the time of his ensign’s commission in 1852 a diligent student of warfare, availed himself of the opportunity to study it first-hand which a visit to General Lee offered him. He rated Lee’s military ability very high and from this meeting dated a friendship between the two, founded on admiration, which lasted until Lee’s death. The biographer of Lord Wolseley is also the biographer of Robert Lee and some of the unqualified praise of Lee with which Sir Maurice sprinkled his book had its origin in Wolseley’s admiration of the Southern leader.

But Sir Maurice is not alone responsible for this biography of Lord Wolseley; he collaborated with Sir George Arthur, and the combination of a military man with a literary student seems to have been a happy one.

It is perhaps unjust that the present generation should know Kitchener better than it does Wolseley; that it should place the one on a high altar of martyrdom and sacrifice, and practically ignore the other. Kitchener had all the odds in his favour; he was _the_ man when the World War started; his death or disappearance reacted on popular imagination in extraordinary fashion, and the mystery of his end appealed to our taste for the fantastic and the incredible. But what Lord Kitchener did for the British Army, was started by Lord Wolseley; Kitchener put together the stones that his predecessor in the highest military rank in Great Britain, had assembled, and he built on the foundations which Lord Wolseley dug and prepared. At least, this is the statement of his biographers who surveyed the subject with apparent impartiality and integrity. Some authoritative authors have already passed judgment on the quality of the British Army during the days of the Boer War, and it may not be in all points favourable to the memory of their Chief; but if the courage and efficiency of the Army as these qualities were displayed in the Great War, were the result of Lord Wolseley’s love for, and intelligent attention to, the needs and ethics of the Army which fought under the Union Jack, all our gratitude, our admiration and our praise should go to the man whose influence was still felt in 1914. Never could an Army, got together with the rapidity with which the British Army was formed in those days, as untrained as it was, and as large as it grew, have done what it did, in the way it did it, if some great heart and illumined mind had not been present at its early formation and at its origin. Lord Wolseley reorganised the British Army, he fought with all his power the “wicked” practice of buying commissions in the Army, he prepared a real system of mobilisation; he remodelled the machinery for supplying the Army with food and munitions; he gave a stirring impulse to military education and practical training, and he directed the attention of statesmen to the problems of national defence and made them, as well as the soldiers and sailors, concentrate on it. His activities were incessant; his public life was long in years and rich in deeds.

Lord Wolseley was the typical example of the velvet glove covering a hand of steel. His outward appearance was that of a dandy, of a man more occupied with the cut of his clothes than with the fate of the world. Judged by his photographs he was precious and self-conscious, outwardly complaisant, inwardly arrogant; but his actions belied his appearance, although he harboured within himself a sort of dual personality. He had a keen inward sense of world-strangeness with a great desire to be in communion with the world; he had the tenderness of a woman, a devotion to and dependency upon his wife that was balanced by his happiness when he was at war; he had the strength of a lion in a frail body; the tenacity and obstinacy of a bull-dog and an indomitable courage; and withal he possessed the qualities of the thinker. He was neither boastful nor honour-seeking, yet he had taken his own measure early in life and without humility; he knew what he was worth to his country and to history, but he could not find it in him to push himself save by his own merit. He had one of the most important offices in the British Government, when he was still a very young man, and he did not attempt to use power or influence to raise himself to any undeserved honours.

The book takes in most of the great historical events of the fifty years that saw Wolseley active in his career, and as a survey of British history, no achievement could be at once more entertaining and more instructive. But what his biographers did not do was to explain some of the contradictions that Wolseley’s personality displayed. They leave the reader with the impression that he had great powers, but also great limitations. The latter may have been a puzzle to those who were intimate with him, but his biographers should have studied and explained them if they could. He may have inherited his “prettiness” from the grandmother “whose face was her only fortune” and his strength not only from the Wolseley side of his family which boasted of many a good officer, but also from his mother who had never been ill in her life and whose death left a gap in Wolseley’s heart that nothing could fill. She was strong, but she was pious too, and she brought up her son in such fervour of the Church that his biographers say he never spent a day without reading the Psalms. He found a second mother in his wife, Louisa Erskine, to whom he was profoundly beholden. “When they were parted the hours were carefully counted until he should hold her hand again.” All these made for manifold contradictions in his nature. Deeply religious, he thirsted for blood and war; adoring his wife, he accepted long periods of separation in the name of service; pre-eminently a man of action, he was capable of deep thought and vision.

Years before the War, he foresaw the power of Germany and he warned against it; he advocated the adoption by his country of some of Germany’s methods which, interpreted with the common sense of his people, would have minimised fear of the growing Teutonic power and enabled them successfully to deal with it. But his voice was not always heard and his perception of the future not often heeded.

The biographers of Lord Wolseley have mixed a good dose of hero-worship in their book; but they have done it with a sure hand, and with so much discrimination and taste that it is never offensive. Sir Frederick Maurice was his companion for several years, his _alter ego_ during the campaign of Africa, and his devoted friend when sickness and trouble came to Lord Wolseley. Thus, Sir Frederick’s information was obtained directly, went through no deforming, exaggerating or reshaping process. Despite the gaps that occur now and then in the mental and moral formation of the hero, the book is invaluable to the student of modern English history. It should prove illuminating to military men and diverting to the general reader. But the story is of a soldier not of a man. There must have been something particularly interesting to say about him as a man; there is about all childless husbands. And the foundations of his admiration for the novels of Rhoda Broughton might have been unearthed and re-pointed.

Some day we shall have a book on the religiosity of great warriors. Lee, Wolseley, Gordon, Cadorna, de Castelnau, will figure in it conspicuously.

* * * * *

Major General Sir Frederick Maurice has given a firm grip to the hands across the sea. His book does not purport to be a life of Lee but an appreciation of his generalship. Regrettably, however, he paints a picture of him as son, husband, parent and citizen, which his kin will perhaps not recognise, and which I believe is not a good likeness.

General Maurice has been studying for more than twenty years the military life of Lee, the campaigns he conducted and the battles he fought. Therefore it can not be said that he has indulged in hasty conclusions or snap judgments. For a soldier of his distinction, a student of military science of his information to say that the name of Robert E. Lee must be added to the roster on which are inscribed the names of those who guessed the secret of the art of war: Alexander, Hannibal, Cæsar, Gustavus, Turenne, Eugène and Frederick is praise indeed. A British soldier who places Lee above Wellington as a commander must be sure of himself and of his facts. Appreciation and estimation of this sort is food that nourishes the _Entente Cordiale_. It is so much more palatable and assimilable than the “one blood, common language” variety.

After a brief chapter on the Lees of Virginia, the burden of which is that the family had all the virtues save humour and the immortal descendant all save the one that Hermes had to a superlative degree, he takes up at once Lee’s training as a soldier, stressing his experience in the war of 1845. “No matter how sure a man may be of his nerves, he is the better soldier when those nerves have been tested under fire and found reliable and the better leader from the confidence in himself which such experience provides.” Lee’s nerves were tested and found perfect at Chapultepec. He returned from Mexico at the age of 42 with a reputation established. “And it was not confined to his own country. Representatives of the Cuban junta offered him the command of an expedition to overthrow the Spanish control of the island. Instead of accepting, he hastened to inform the Secretary of War of the proposal and his reasons for declining it.”

Commenting on trained and untrained commanders, General Maurice writes, “Courage, physical and moral, common sense, readiness to accept responsibility, the power to grasp quickly the essential of a situation, and to form speedy decisions, these are not gifts which are confined to regular soldiers nor have many regular soldiers possessed all or even most of these gifts. The possession of them will make any man a leader whether in peace or in war.” He quotes with fullest approbation General Forrest’s explanation of his successes: “I get there fustest with the mostest men,” and adds, “We have in those eight words the gist of many volumes of Jomini and Clausewitz.”

Discussing John G. Nicolay’s explanation of Lee’s action in April, 1861, in resigning from the army and accepting command of the Virginia troops, an action which, according to Nicolay, came from selfish motives, General Maurice comments, “It would be difficult to compress into a similar number of words a greater misrepresentation of fact.” His latest biographer says of Lee’s decision and conduct, “He had but one thought, ‛What is my duty?’ No motive of self-interest entered his mind. He was prepared to make any and every sacrifice.”

He takes up briefly the problems of the Confederacy. In the author’s opinion the Civil War throws valuable light on what should be the nature of the relation between the statesman and the soldier in a modern democracy at war. The claim that the soldier should be left in free and complete control is ridiculous. The general direction of a war should be in the hands of one man, and in democratic countries that man must be a statesman and his supreme qualification should be the ability not only to co-ordinate military, naval and air forces but to develop and co-ordinate all the physical and moral resources of his country. Lincoln, after he had been taught by experience, was the model of such a statesman. Lee was the model of the perfect soldier. General Maurice then proceeds to prove the latter statement by describing the Defence of Richmond, the first offensive, the first Maryland campaign, the battle of Chancellorsville and the second invasion of Maryland.

Before recounting Lee’s catastrophe, General Maurice interpolates a most interesting chapter on Delay as a Weapon of War. After Lee had given up hope that the defeat of the Army of the Potomac on Northern soil was possible, his strategy sought new aim. He no longer attempted to thrust battle on the enemy, on the contrary he sought delay that he might exhaust their patience: “If the campaign of 1862, from Richmond to the Potomac, is a model of what an army inferior in numbers may achieve in offence, the campaign from the Wilderness to Cold Harbour is equally a model of defensive strategy and tactics. Some commanders have excelled in the one method, some in the other; few in both and amongst these few must be remembered Robert E. Lee.”

Pleasant reading for an American, this book by Britain’s foremost military writer. Some will shrug their shoulders and say: “The English were always sympathisers with the South,” but this book is not the product of a biased mind. It was not conceived in emotion, generated by bitterness, or prompted by prejudice. It is the deliberate judgment of a man temperamentally adapted to the task he set himself and intellectually fitted for it by his training and experience. So long as he sticks to the field in which he is expert he is persuasive and convincing, but when he goes into history or psychology he is neither.

General Maurice would have been wisely counselled had he confined himself to Lee, the Soldier, as the title of the book intimates was his intention. He may have taken his measure correctly as a warrior, but I am sure there is little justification for “Lee was never what is called a man’s man. He did not drink, he did not smoke, he had no taste for the ordinary amusements and weaknesses of the male sex.” If he were that sort of a man, the less said of it the better. It is a man’s human side that testifies his godship. Some one should enumerate the “weaknesses of the male sex” that there may be no doubt in readers’ minds what they are.

General Maurice would have us believe that Lee was a studious, serious, silent, solitary, superman who devoted his nights to study and contemplation, his days to action and prayer. He was probably not so playful as Osler and more of an anchorite than Anatole France; it is likely that he was more abstemious than Grant and that he had less humour than Lincoln; but he had some of all their qualities in miniature and it is a pity he was not more liberally endowed for then he would have had imagination or vision. That was the great hiatus in the personality of Robert E. Lee; he lacked vision. He could run a complicated machine, he could get great efficiency out of it, he could keep it going even when it seemed to be worn out, but he could neither design nor assemble it.

Many will seek to fathom the process of reasoning, or find the source of information that led General Maurice to write: “He not only espoused but was the main prop of a cause history has proved to have been wrong. That is the tragedy of his life, and his conduct after the war makes it clear that he realised that it was tragedy ... the whole tenor of his life from the surrender of Appomattox to his death is evidence that he believed in his heart of hearts that his State was wrong in seceding.” This is neither evidence nor testimony. It is merely rhetoric.

His country has already selected Lee for its greatest military executive and it is pleasant to witness a General of another great nation laying the oaken crown on his tomb, and it is gratifying that he can write: “Distinguished as was Lee’s conduct while an officer of the Army of the U.S.A., splendid as was his career in the field, nothing in his life became him more than its end.” He heard Lincoln’s charge to bind up the Nation’s wounds and he hearkened to it.

VII
EDITORS

MEMOIRS OF AN EDITOR, by _Edward P. Mitchell_.
TWICE THIRTY, by _Edward W. Bok_.
THE RIVER OF LIFE, by _J. St. Loe Strachey_.
JOSEPH PULITZER, HIS LIFE AND LETTERS, by _Don C. Seitz_.

Editors and publishers of powerful newspapers have unique opportunity to make their lives interesting. Many of them do. Some of them, like Henry Watterson, Wickham Steed and Georges Clémenceau write about their experiences, when they no longer take the world’s pulse, shape public opinion and re-order society. Their memoirs and lives are of the most entertaining of all biographic literature; they know the art of writing; all their lives, they have been observing and studying character, heralding and shaping events; it has been their self-imposed duty to sit in judgment and the self-advancement urge of their fellows brings them into intimate contact with the important persons of their period. Small wonder they write entertainingly when their sun begins to set.

Few have reviewed their experiences more delightfully than Edward P. Mitchell, for many years Editor-in-Chief of _The New York Sun_.

When I read Mr. Mitchell’s _Memoirs of an Editor_ every page made firmer the conviction that I was companioning a great mind and a kindly heart. I recalled something that Mark Twain said of Anson Burlingame: “His outlook upon the world and its affairs was as wide as the horizon, and his speech was of a dignity and eloquence proper to it. It dealt in no commonplaces, for he had no commonplace thoughts. He was a kindly man, and most lovable. He wrought for justice and humanity. All his ways were clean; all his motives were high and fine.” That is Edward P. Mitchell if I may estimate him from his autobiography. If he has any fault, it is that he is too affable. He is a tiny bit too polite. There have been proprietors of the _New York Sun_ within the memory of man who did not have _all_ the virtues, but no one would suspect it from Mr. Mitchell’s book. The _Sun_ that he writes about most entertainingly and instructively is the _Sun_ for which Charles A. Dana got all the credit. Mr. Mitchell does not hint that the credit was unjustly allotted, but no one can read the chapters “How I Went to the Sun” and “The Newspaperman’s Newspaper” without being convinced that it was. The _Sun_ could not have been what it was in the days of its ascendency: a beacon light of newspaperdom, a stimulus and a joy to thousands, a scourge to scores, had it not been for Francis P. Church, Fitz Henry Warren, and William D. Bartlett.

But it is not the story of the _Sun_ that Mr. Mitchell set out to write. His colleague Frank M. O’Brien did that, and any one who believes he could improve on it would be as daring or demented as the artist who believes he can improve on the Mona Lisa. O’Brien’s story reflected the spirit of that newspaper as the portrait mentioned above reflected the soul of her who reminded Pater of Leda. However, Mr. Mitchell could scarcely tell us of himself without telling the story of the _Sun_ too.

The volume is replete with personality studies of sages and cranks, philosophers and buffoons, experts and amateurs. Any one who is interested in the spirit of the Puritan, the pioneer, the pathfinder; any one who is intrigued by guessing at the truth, will be helped by reading the pages on Goldwin Smith. Any one who would like to clarify his hazy notions of paranoia will be aided by perusal of the pages on George Francis Train; any one who would make the acquaintance of a critic of letters to whom his countrymen should have accorded the esteem that the French accorded Rémy de Gourmont and the British George Saintsbury, should read what Mr. Mitchell says of Mayo W. Hazeltine; any one who would learn of the forces that did more than anything else to deliver us as a nation from the spirit of parochialism should read his pages on Bunan-Varilla, the French engineer, who made possible the Panama Canal.

It is a book for a rainy day and a starry night; a book to be read in Watchapey and Washington; to accompany one on Lake Louise or the Atlantic. The author’s wish has come true. It was that here and there some kind friends unknown might find in his book something as interesting for them to read as it was for him to remember. If he had as much pleasure in writing it as they have reading it, Edward P. Mitchell is a giant joy-creator.

* * * * *

Mr. Mitchell is a modest man. That can scarcely be said of Mr. Edward W. Bok. He is proud of his accomplishment as editor, prouder of his success as uplifter and proudest of the masterfulness which he displayed in piloting his ship of life through troubled waters and adverse currents to a safe port and serene haven. A few years ago he told about these various successes in a fat volume entitled _The Americanisation of Edward Bok_. Now he rewrites his autobiography and calls it _Twice Thirty: Some Short and Simple Annals of the Road_. Simple is a more appropriate adjective than short. Mr. Bok is pleased with himself. He was well born; he is of a nation that has been a parent in most things. It invented golf; it was the founder of the modern school of music; it furnished us with our fundamental institutions; our Federal Constitution; the Declaration of Independence; our State constitutions; our freedom of religion; our free public schools; our free press; our written ballot; our town, county and state system of self-government; the system of recording deeds and mortgages; the germinal idea of the _Ladies Home Journal_, New York City and the Hudson River. In fact, it would be difficult to name anything or any one save the Ku Klux Klan and Mayor Hylan that the Netherlands did not originate. And it contributed a man who never knew fear: Mr. Bok.

Thomas Carlyle wrote that he could get a far more penetrating insight of a writer’s personality from a portrait of the man, photographic or oleographic, than from his writing. I was never convinced that the sage of Chelsea was in the right until I saw the frontispiece in the book under consideration. It is labelled “At Twice Thirty.” The legend could be replaced by “Self-Satisfaction” and beneath it, this quotation from the text might be pasted: “I have had too distinct a leaning toward looking for and discovering the faults in persons and then of becoming possessed with a mad desire to correct those faults.” But neither from gazing at the portrait nor from reading the text am I moved to objurgation similar to that of the Apostle: Mr. Bok is not a hypocrite; though he believes it is the beam that is in his brother’s eye and the mote that is in his own. Nevertheless it will occur to some that at times he goes dangerously close to hypocrisy; for instance, “This book is written for my two sons.” If Mr. Bok’s pineal gland were opened and the day book diary of his soul extracted, it is safe to assume that the magician who could read it would find there an entry, “October 9th, 1924. Decided to publish _Twice Thirty_ so that the world might have my four pages of biographical data from a reliable source.” Then there is that chapter entitled “My Most Unusual Experience,” in which Mr. Bok relates how he rescued a young American girl from the jaws of the lion and dragged her from the Coliseum, the jaws being a salacious Frenchman and the coliseum the promenade of the Empire in London. The _beau geste_ reflects great credit on Mr. Bok, and he intended it should. That is the reason he published it. There can be no other. He does not cotton to axioms even though they are of divine origin. His right hand has always known just what his left was doing.

Mr. Bok quotes Henry Ward Beecher as saying to him that wisdom comes at sixty, not before. Job said it before Beecher. Storing up treasure in Heaven has always been considered an indication of wisdom. Even in Heaven, I fancy, you can’t have your cake and eat it. You can not insist upon having your reward now and also having it put to your credit in the hereafter. In fact we have the word of the Master to that effect.

I recall some years ago when I was in London Mr. Bok was much concerned about the street walkers of the Strand. A more vulturesome variety swarmed in Piccadilly Circus, but if my memory serves me it was those addicted to London’s most famous street that engaged his reformatory urge at the time. I have looked in vain for some account of it in this book and in the “Americanisation.” I am disappointed, for it would make an interesting companion chapter to “My Most Unusual Experience.” The same title might have been used were the prefix lopped from the third word.

This matter of hypocrisy and Edward Bok intrigues me; indeed I may say it engrosses me, for the moment. In one of the most _naïf_ chapters that adult ever penned, the author points out that the Edward Bok, Editor of the _Ladies Home Journal_, and Edward W. Bok, “creator of the American Peace Award of $100,000, Donator of a window in The Nieuwe Kerk at Delft, and Knight of the Netherland Lion” are two different personalities. The tastes, outlook, and manner of looking at things of the former were totally at variance with those of the latter. In fact, the two personalities waged incessant warfare. “My chief difficulty was to abstain from breaking through the Editor and revealing my real self. Several times I did so, and each time I saw how different was the effect from that when the editorial Edward Bok had been allowed sway. Little by little I learned to subordinate myself and let him have full rein.”

Mr. Bok (the present one, for Editor Bok “has passed out of being as completely as if he had never been”) says it was a case of dual personality, and cites the notorious Miss Beauchamp sponsored by Dr. Morton Prince to support his contention. It won’t wash. Edward W. Bok knew that the things that Editor Bok did were oftentimes cheap, sensational, undignified, unworthy of his heritage, birth, nationality, accomplishments, ideals. But he knew also that when the Bok that was worthy of them dominated the _Ladies Home Journal_ for six months and its sales dropped eighty thousand, that it was up to him to let some yellow into his lily-white character, or else lose his job. And he turned on the saffron spigot. No, Mr. Edward W. Bok, that is not dual personality, and I who say it gave as many years to the study of double personality and cognate subjects as you did to journalism. Some will say it was hypocrisy. I say it was expediency, and it was your contribution to popular hedonism. You and another great journalist, Dr. Frank Crane, had found out what “the people” want and you gave it to them good and plenty. By so doing, you and he have set back the clock of culture in this country about a hundred years.

The average reader, with a mind of his own as to what constitutes good and bad literature, does not have to be warned as to the danger of books like Mr. Bok’s _Twice Thirty_. As a matter-of-fact, it is so unmeaning as to leave the reading public indifferent, but there is a latent danger in taking such writings indifferently. The same can be said of Dr. Crane’s books. They are harmless in themselves, but the public is already too much inclined to take short cuts to every goal of life; short cuts to fortune, to health, to taste and to culture. It is the duty of the critics to show the hollowness and the danger of taking Mr. Bok’s _Twice Thirty_ seriously; of taking Dr. Crane’s Talks as guides in life; and of taking radios, victrolas and pianolas as forms of high art. Feeding the public what it wants is not always working for its best interest.

Diligent, careful reading of _Twice Thirty_ has sufficed to convince me that Mr. Bok has never done anything that merited his disapproval. He may be sorry that he had a big head when he was born for it cost his mother a year on crutches, but he is not sorry he has one now. He is as satisfied with himself, his accomplishments and potentialities as was Nick Bottom, the weaver of _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_. In truth Mr. Bok reminds me of Mr. Bottom. He could play Pyramus, and Thisby, and the roaring lion, and like Bottom he can take pains, be perfect.

There is a certain amount of irony in the quotations Mr. Bok has chosen to put at the head of each chapter, possibly to give the book an atmosphere of culture. The most irrelevant one, the least _à propos_, is Plutarch’s sentence, “Oh, that men would learn that the true speaker is he who speaks only when he has something to say.” If Mr. Bok had written this as an epitome at the beginning of his book, and if he had meditated the advice of Plutarch and applied it to his own case, we would certainly have been spared _Twice Thirty_.

Occasionally, an amusing experience, an interesting anecdote, or a touching remembrance form a high spot in the book, but they are few and far apart. What interest or originality is there in “There must be a to-day before there is a to-morrow.” “Life may depart, but the source of life is constant.” Or, “To-day I can and do sleep the clock around once and sometimes twice a week”? Most of the incidents in his book are of the sort that ask to be forgotten, and when they are related with a lack of style which makes them flat, with a lack of humour which makes them pathetic, and when they all tend to moralise and preach--the case is hopelessly lost. In fact, it may be true to say that, had Mr. Bok a spark of humour or a particle of wit, he would never have written _Twice Thirty_, nor would he have published the “Letter that his father slipped Tom when he left his mother for ‛Somewhere in France’.” This letter is the most ludicrous and ridiculous thing that ever was done in a sober mood. It is meant of course to be touching, elevating, inspiring and to serve as a _vade mecum_ to the young soldier, as an exorcism in time of temptation, and as a reminder of the “home-spirit” when the flesh should show itself weaker than the will. As it is, coming seven years after the end of the War, when the memories of the way in which the American soldiers understood the meaning of the word “leave” and the way in which they got acquainted with “life” is not yet gone, it is the most out of place document in the book.

It must be a satisfaction to know that, throughout his life, with only one exception, he has stood on the right side of it; that he has pointed out the right way; that he has been the good Samaritan to abandoned women, the successful prophet in his dealings with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the man of good judgment in his editorship of the _Ladies Home Journal_, the paragon of domestic qualities and the ideal father; yet, for our part, we feel that although Mr. Bok may be sincere in what he says, he does not say all, and what he does not say is exactly what we would like to know. There again we can point to the lack of harmony between his quotations and his achievement. “The author,” wrote Tolstoi, “who succeeds in his work is he who describes the interesting and significant things which it has been given him to observe and experience in his own life.” But the successful author is also he who reveals a soul to his readers, and that is where Mr. Bok fails lamentably. He reveals well enough the man a photograph would reveal, providing the photograph were taken at a time when he was ready to moisten his lips and look pleasant.

Mr. Bok has recorded his struggles and successes with evident veracity and truthfulness, but how much more interesting they would have been to us if he had transplanted them a notch higher in the field of the emotional and intellectual efforts. The price he paid for the plot of land on which his house stands, and the seven bath-rooms he had built in it mean much less than the development of his ego from the point when a ride on a truck which saved him a five-cent fare constituted happiness for him, to that he reached later when he wanted the best of everything and was in a position to demand it. It is a common occurrence to be born in poverty and it is an achievement to rise above it, especially when the advance has been made honestly and in the open; but the soul should develop in proportion as the opportunities afforded by better connections and associations increase, and that is just what Mr. Bok does not reveal in his book; his mind is still on the same level as that of the young messenger boy in the Telegraph Company and his soul is still contented with a ride on a truck, as it were.

Bok’s motto was “The good that I would I do; but the evil which I would not, that I do not,” a drastic revision of Paul’s confession.

The last chapter of _Twice Thirty_ bears the heading, “Is It Worth While?” “Scarcely,” is the answer, “if _Twice Thirty_ is the antecedent of the pronoun.”

* * * * *

A few years ago it would have been said that a career such as Joseph Pulitzer’s could not have been staged anywhere save in this country. M. Coty, Lord Rothmere, Sig. Bergamini are examples of similar careers in France, England and Italy. Joseph Pulitzer galvanised the New York _World_ into life, made it a power in the land and gathered about him a group of clever men, one of whom has written his life.

_Painted by John Singer Sargent
Courtesy of “The New York World”_

Mr. Don C. Seitz’s book is not a satisfactory biography, but it is readable and it engenders thought and reflection. It neither reveals nor suggests the mystery and secret of a dominant personality. He calls Joseph Pulitzer the Liberator of Journalism. For many years he was called the Libertine of Journalism, and worse than that. He deserves the one as richly as he deserved the other, no more so. The biographer, like the witness in court, should state facts, not conclusions. Joseph Pulitzer was an unusual man and he had an extraordinary career. Hungarian emigrant, without background or adventitious aid, he acquired within a quarter of a century, power, influence and wealth that were felt not only throughout this country but in Europe as well. Politics was his passion, property his obsession and power his ambition.

He was vouchsafed twenty years of public influence; he moulded minds, shaped opinions, conditioned decisions, germinated ideals; and they were twenty years of personal misery and decrepitude. Dying, he perpetuated his name by the establishment of the School of Journalism at Columbia University. It can scarcely fail to be interesting to learn about such a man. Mr. Seitz with the instinct and experience of the expert journalist, gives the information in the first chapter, which he entitles “Characteristics.” He moulds the clay, then animates it. As he hurls virtues into the receptive mass, he calls out their names loudly; as the limitations and defects steal in, he whispers or remains silent. Joseph Pulitzer had a genius for journalism and he was saturated with belief in liberty, equality, and opportunity; he was courageous, affectionate, hospitable, generous, indulgent and just; but he was also vain, arrogant, domineering, verbose, bulimious, tyrannical, self-sufficient, personally hypersensitive but insensitive to others’ feelings; he was devoid of humour, and he wore a mask that fell off on the slightest encounter. He had acquired a dexterity in regaining it which often prevented adversaries from seeing that it had fallen. The sea of his life was always turbulent. When he was on the crest of the wave, his speech and conduct were hypomaniac; when in the trough, he was taciturn, unapproachable, uncommunicative, inert. He had a firm intellect and an infirm temper; firm energy and an infirm body; a keen æsthetic sense and a contempt for his fellow man because he would not make himself in Joseph Pulitzer’s image. “I have no friends,” said he to one of his secretaries. “And this was in a great measure true,” adds his biographer. He has friends now, and he will have more in the future; Mr. Seitz’s book will make hundreds for him, and the institutions he founded, thousands.

* * * * *

It is natural enough that editors should like to talk about their doings. They have been compelled to be impersonal so long that they are impelled to gambol and frolic, to shout and sing, when they burst the barriers of their sanctums and do not have to return to them. John St. Loe Strachey has not ceased to be editor of “The Spectator,” but then he was never impersonal. The volume devoted to himself, published a year or so ago, called _The Adventure of Living_, amply testified it. Now he has published a new volume about himself called _The River of Life_. He does not give a portrait of himself, and he eliminates as far as possible enumeration of facts, positive statements, sequence, logical or chronological, and conclusions. His diary is of the sort that might have been written for the pleasure of the soul and the contentment of the heart, with no further motive. He tells of his likes and dislikes, as they are brought to his mind by travel and reading; he does not indulge in ratiocination or in plans for the future. He is content to see life as a river, flowing constantly, everlastingly the same, everlastingly different, and his diary leaves the impression of a walk through a flower garden. One stops at interesting points, picks here and there a flower which will be kept as a memento, and which, being seen again, will recall a pleasant day.

In an antescript, Mr. Strachey writes: “If I am not careful, some votary of the New Psychology will get busy on my Diary and prove that I am suffering from an inferiority complex.” Not a chance of it! A lot of derogatory things about the Freudians may be said; yet though they are deluded, they are not imbecile; they are priority fanatics, but not blind. They know a superiority complex when they see it.

VIII
CLERGYMEN

WHY I AM A CHRISTIAN, by _Dr. Frank Crane_.
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A MIND, by _W. J. Dawson_.

An editor once said to Dr. Frank Crane, who spent the first twenty-five years of his adult life as a Methodist and Congregational minister and the next twenty-five as a journalist: “If you will write a book on _Why I Am a Christian_ and tell the truth it ought to be mighty interesting.” Dr. Crane says he has told the truth. I say it is not interesting. Dr. Crane is a Christian because it is pragmatic, because it is usable. That is not a good or sufficient reason. One may be a Mahommedan or a Jew for the same reason. His species of Christianity is, he says, one hundred per cent practical. Mr. Ghandhi’s or Mr. Tagore’s species of Hinduism has a similar percentage. “I am a Christian simply because I like it and I find it conducive to my happiness and my general welfare.” That is a good reason for being a Jew.

Dr. Crane prides himself on his large-mindedness; he is beyond pride or prejudice. “If you should ask me whether I am a Trinitarian or a Unitarian, a Catholic or a Protestant, Fundamentalist or Methodist or Baptist, you might as well ask me whether I am a Guelph or a Ghibelline.” When a man is omnipotent and omniscient he is all these, and none. He is not only the trunk of the tree of which these are branches (some of them gnarled, others withered), but he is the roots as well. In one of his daily sermons he says he left the church in search of adventure. Fortunately for him he left it while the going was good.

“I am happier here and now when I follow the principles of Jesus. I am wretched here and now when I reject them or doubt them.” Does Dr. Crane think that any of his 25,000,000 readers believe that he practices the principles that Christ enunciated to His disciples on the mountain? If he does, such readers are incredibly credulous even for feeders on denutritionised mush. He took thought for the morrow when he shifted to a profession that pays him more in a week than he got in a year labouring in the Lord’s vineyard. I am not contending the right to shift was not his. I am pointing out the obvious hypocrisy of his boast.

His reasons for being a Christian have very little to do with Christ. Indeed, for him Christianity is a point of view, an attitude of mind. It needs no God and very little divinity. His idea of Christianity is so largely matter-of-fact and so little emotional that his confession--which he wants us to remember is not an argument--can not make much appeal.

Reading _Why I Am a Christian_ is like listening to a lawyer who has a fluent, persuasive vocabulary and who knows how to obtain the best effects from his argument. He carries his auditors along and they want to agree with him, but when he stops his monologue, rationalism claims its rights and the case is decided against him.

It is evident that a church which has had some of the greatest minds of the world at its head, which has lasted through centuries and wars, is based on a foundation more solid than one which could be destroyed by the argument of one of its members. Dr. Crane is a member of the church, but he refuses to recognise the authority of an organised religion. The fear of eternal punishment or the hope of never-ending beatitude have no bearing, he maintains, on his decision, because he finds the former foolish, the latter boring. Dr. Crane thinks he is the first man to shudder at the thought of an eternity spent in heaven, in a state of semi-stupor, singing forever to the music of harps. The church itself encourages no such belief, but since the real meaning of paradise is unknown to man, a symbol has been adopted which no one tries to offer as dogma.

It is not because Christ is God that Dr. Crane believes in Him. It is because He has shown the author what sort of a person God is. It is malicious and pernicious for “a man with a million friends” to express such doubts as to the divinity of Christ. The world does not need a superman, the world needs God, and the figure of Christ is more important as a foundation for the church than any other doctrine of Jesus as a man could be. And there is no denying that the world needs a church.

It is the personality of Christ, what He represents as a man, the idea He gives of what God should be, what He has made of Christianity and the energy He has put into it, the universality of His doctrine and of His appeal and the beautiful story of His life which make Dr. Crane a Christian. He does not ask Christ to help him, to succour him, to save him and to give him happiness; he asks Him to give him enough force to help himself, enough energy to resist falls and enough strength to fight for his own happiness; he does not follow or wish to follow Christ and imitate Him, but he wishes Christ to show him how to get along on his way in the manner which is most pleasing to Him and of which He would approve.

Dr. Crane has made a note of most of the standardised beliefs of the world, of their ideals and fears. He labels them “delusions” and proceeds to smash them in their very foundation. That human nature is evil is a delusion of which reflection has purged him. Punishment and reward are delusions; goodness to be real must be positive; the fact that a man never lies, cheats nor hurts any one, never deceives his wife in thought or act, never does any of the things he should not do, is no proof that he has any goodness in him. The belief that competition is necessary to progress, which has been proved time after time, amounts to naught in Dr. Crane’s estimation; there is no superior class and the idle members of the community, those who have no need of working for a living, have been accursed by God. Dr. Crane thinks also that it is a delusion to believe that happiness resides in riches or in high positions; he advocates looking for happiness every day, as we go along, instead of storing up treasures on earth or happiness for the morrow.

All this leads us to wonder how much of the “Confession” is Dr. Crane’s and how much has been gathered from the wisdom of centuries. Most of his arguments are old and familiar; he writes a long chapter, for instance, on the text of Abraham Lincoln: “God must have liked the common people, He made so many of them.”

Dr. Crane has been writing pontifically so many years that he has come to believe that whatever he says is true. It is true because he says it. There is no discussion or argument about it; he knows. He is a gushing fountain of knowledge and adjectives. He is an oracle whose truth is not to be tested, but accepted.

“To be good, according to Christ’s program, is to fight here; to take up one’s cross daily; to fear not; to love much; to hold on, and to put forth vigour in every way.” Had Dr. Crane added “and to get the money for doing it” it would be his own programme, admitting that writing four hundred words of twaddle daily is the equivalent of taking up one’s cross. To fight here, indeed! “Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink, nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on.”

His reasons for belonging to a church are naïve to the point of childishness. They are: because it is imperfect; because its purpose is to disseminate the most important idea in the world; because he likes it and likes the kind of people that belong; because it is the oldest, most imposing and most beautiful of all the institutions of humanity. “It is in the church that we must seek the origin of every great movement for human welfare.” I suppose it is universally admitted that the French Revolution and the English industrial revolution were the two great modern movements making for human welfare. My information is the church did not have much use for the encyclopedists, and if Hargreaves, Arkwright, Crompton, Cartwright and Watt were of the church, history does not say anything about it. The church had nothing to do with Pasteur’s discovery, which was the origin of a movement for human welfare which has lengthened the span of life nearly twenty years.