Part 5
Miss Martineau’s life was in the main a successful one. It is natural that she should have liked to think about it, and write about it. But Mrs. Oliphant, a far more brilliant woman, was overburdened, overworked, always anxious, and often very unhappy. Arthur Young was a melancholy, disgruntled man, at odds with himself, his surroundings, and the world. The painter, Haydon, lived through years so harassed by poverty, so untempered by discretion, so embittered by disappointments, that his tragic suicide was the only thing which could have brought his manifold miseries to an end. Yet Mrs. Oliphant took comfort in setting forth her difficulties, and in expressing a reasonable self-pity. Arthur Young relieved his mind by a well-worked-out system of intensive grumbling. Even Haydon seems to have sought and found a dreary solace in the recital of his woes. The fragment of autobiography is painful to read, but was evidently the one poor consolation of its writer’s life.
That George Sand’s “Histoire de Ma Vie” afforded its author more than her proper share of contentment is evidenced by its length, and by the relish which is stamped on every page. Sir Leslie Stephen pronounced it the best autobiography he had ever read. It seems to have delighted him as Rousseau’s “Confessions” delighted Emerson; which goes to prove that intellectual kinship need not necessarily be accompanied by any similarity of taste. “If we would really know our hearts,” says Bishop Wilson, “let us impartially review our actions.” George Sand and Rousseau reviewed their actions with the fondest solicitude; but were biased in their own favour. Gibbon reviewed his actions, and such emotions as he was aware of, with an impartiality that staggers us; but his heart, at no time an intrusive organ, gave him little concern. Franklin, with whom truth-telling was never an “ecstasy,” but a natural process like breathing and eating, reviewed his actions candidly, if not altogether impartially, and left the record without boast, or apology, or the reticence dictated by taste, to the judgment of coming generations. He was a busy man, engaged, like Sully, in making history on a large scale. It pleased him, not only to write his recollections, but to bequeath them, as he bequeathed so much else, to the young nation that he loved. He never sought to patent his inventions. He never sought to publish his autobiography. His large outlook embraced the future, and America was his residuary legatee.
John Wesley kept a journal for fifty-five years. This is one of the most amazing facts in the history of letters. He was beyond comparison the hardest worker of his day. John Stuart Mill, who knew too much and did too much for any one man, also wrote an autobiography, which the reading world has been content to ignore. But Mill’s failing health compelled him sometimes to rest. Wesley never rested. It is estimated that for over thirty years he rode, on an average, eight thousand miles a year. He preached in his lifetime full thirty thousand sermons--an overwhelming and relentless figure. He wrestled with lagging Churchmen of the Establishment no less than with zealous Antinomians, Swedenborgians, Necessitarians, Anabaptists and Quakers. Other records of human endeavour read like the idling of a summer day alongside of his supernatural activities. Yet so great is the compulsion of the born diarist to confide to the world the history of his thoughts and deeds that Wesley found time--or took time--to write, in a minute, cryptic short-hand, a diary which fills seven large volumes. He not only wanted to do this; he _had_ to do it. The narrative, now bald and itemized, now stirring and spirited, now poignant and terrible, was part of himself. He might have said of it more truly than Walt Whitman said of “Leaves of Grass,” that whoever laid hold upon the book laid hold upon a man.
To ask that the autobiographer should “know himself as a realist, and deal with himself as an artist,” is one way of demanding perfection. Realists are plentiful, and their ranks are freshly recruited every year. Artists are rare, and grow always rarer in an age which lacks the freedom, the serenity, the sense of proportion, essential to their development. It has happened from time to time that a single powerful and sustained emotion has forced from a reticent nature an unreserved and illuminating disclosure. Newman’s “Apologia pro Vita sua” was written with an avowed purpose--to make clear the sincerity of his religious life, and to refute a charge of deceitfulness. The stern coercion which gave it birth, and which carried it to a triumphant close, was remote from any sense of enjoyment save such as might be found in clarity of thought and distinction of workmanship. The thrust of truth in this fragment of autobiography has carried it far; but it is not by truth alone that a book lives. It is not by simple veracity that minds “deeply moralized, discriminating and sad” have charmed, and will always charm, the few austere thinkers and fastidious critics whom a standardized world has spared.
The pleasure derived by ordinary readers from memoirs and reminiscences is twofold. It is the pleasure of acquiring agreeable information in an agreeable way, and it is, more rarely, the pleasure of a direct and penetrating mental stimulus. “The Education of Henry Adams” has so filtered through the intelligent public mind that echoes of it are still to be heard in serious lectures and flippant after-dinner speeches. We can, if we are adroit borrowers, set up intellectual shop-keeping on Mr. Adams’s stock-in-trade. We can deal out over our own counters his essentially marketable wares.
The simpler delight afforded us by such a charming book as Frederick Locker’s “Confidences,” which is not confidential at all; or by John Murray’s well-bred “Memoirs of a Publisher”; or by Lord Broughton’s “Recollections of a Long Life,” is easy to estimate. We could ill spare Lord Broughton’s volumes, both because he tells us things we do not learn elsewhere, and because of his illuminating common sense. The world of authorship has of late years so occupied itself with Lord Byron that we wince at the sound of his name. But if we really want to know him, we must still turn to Broughton for the knowledge. The account of Byron’s wedding in the “Recollections” is as unforgettable as the account of Byron’s funeral in Moore’s diffuse and rambling “Memoirs.” It is in such narratives that the eye-witness eclipses, and must forever eclipse, the most acute and penetrating investigator. Biographers cannot stand as Broughton stood at the door of Seaham, when the ill-mated couple drove away to certain misery: “I felt as if I had buried a friend.” Historians cannot stand as John Evelyn stood on the Strand, when the second Charles entered London: “I beheld him and blessed God!” Or at Gravesend, seven years later, when the Dutch fleet lay at the mouth of the Thames: “A dreadful spectacle as ever Englishmen saw, and a dishonour never to be wiped off!”
Ever since that most readable book, “An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, Comedian,” was given to the English world, actors and playwrights have been indefatigable autobiographers. They may write about themselves alone, as did Macready, or about themselves and the world, after the fashion of Frances Kemble. They may be amusing, like Ellen Terry, or discursive, like Augustus Thomas, or casual, like John Drew. But they fall into line, and tell us what dramas they wrote, what companies they managed, what parts they played, and when and where they played them, together with any scraps of theatrical gossip they may be fortunate enough to recollect. All, at least, except the once celebrated Mrs. Inchbald. She recollected so much that the publisher, Phillips, offered her a thousand pounds for her manuscript; and her confessor, a wise and nameless Catholic priest, persuaded her to burn it unread. Yet there are people so perversely minded as to disapprove of auricular confession.
The golden age of the autobiographer has come, perhaps to stay. Mr. Howells, observant and sympathetic, welcomed its dawning, and the fullness of its promise. He was of the opinion that this form of composition represented “the supreme Christian contribution to literature”; and, while admitting that there were bad as well as good specimens of the art, he stoutly maintained that one more autobiography, however indifferent, was better than one less--a disputable point.
The question which confronts the reading public is this: “How far should the law of kindness, which we all profess to follow, influence us in allowing to our fellow creatures the happiness of writing books about themselves?” There is no use saying that it would be impossible to stop them. Nothing in the way of inhibitions is impossible to the United States. “There is no country,” says the observant Santayana, “in which people live under more powerful compulsions.”
Americans have so far been inclined to tolerate the vanity of the autobiography, because mankind is naturally vain, and to forgive its dullness, because life is frequently dull. Moreover, they are well disposed towards any form of art or letters that lays claim to the quality of truth; and it is generally conceded that a man knows himself better than others know him. He does not know, and he never can know, how he appears to his acquaintances. The sound of his own voice, the light in his own eye, his accent, his mannerisms, his laugh, the sensations, pleasurable or otherwise, which he produces by his presence--these things, apparent to every casual observer, are unfamiliar to him. But his _naturel_ (a word too expressive for translation) which others must estimate by the help of circumstantial evidence, he can, if he be honest, know and judge.
This, at least, is the theory on which rest the lucidity of art and the weight of conscience. Yet George Sand, who was given to self-inspection, self-analysis and self-applause, admitted the dimness of her inward vision. “The study of the human heart,” she wrote, “is of such a nature, that the more we are absorbed by it, the less clearly do we see.”
Strayed Sympathies
It is probably more instructive to entertain a sneaking kindness for any unpopular person than to give way to perfect raptures of moral indignation against his abstract vices.--ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
It is not only more instructive--it is more enlivening. The conventionalities of criticism (moral, not literary, criticism) pass from mouth to mouth, and from pen to pen, until the iterations of the press are crystallized in encyclopædias and biographical dictionaries. And from such verdicts there is no appeal. Their laboured impartiality, their systematic adjustments, their careful avoidance of intuition, produce in the public mind a level sameness of misunderstanding. Many sensible people think this a good result. Even a man who did his own thinking, and maintained his own intellectual free-hold, like Mr. Bagehot, knew and upheld the value of ruts. He was well aware how far a little intelligence can be made to go, unless it aspires to originality. Therefore he grumbled at the paradoxes which were somewhat of a novelty in his day, but which are out-worn in ours, at the making over of virtue into vice, and of vice into something more inspiriting than virtue. “We have palliations of Tiberius, eulogies on Henry the Eighth, devotional exercises to Cromwell, and fulsome adulations of the first Napoleon.”
That was a half-century ago. To-day, Tiberius is not so much out of favour as out of mind; Mr. Froude was the last man really interested in the moral status of Henry the Eighth; Mr. Wells has given us his word for it that Napoleon was a very ordinary person; and the English people have erected a statue of Cromwell close to the Houses of Parliament, by way of reminding him (in his appointed place) of the survival of representative government. The twentieth century does not lean to extravagant partialities. Its trend is to disparagement, to searchlights, to that lavish and ironic candour which no man’s reputation can survive.
When Mr. Lytton Strachey reversed Mr. Stevenson’s suggestion, and chose, as subject-matter of a book, four people of whom the world had heard little but good, who had been praised and reverenced beyond their deserts, but for whom he cherished a secret and cold hostility, he experimented successfully with the latent uncharitableness of men’s minds. The brilliancy with which the four essays were written, the keenness of each assault, the charm and persuasiveness of the style, delighted even the uncensorious. The business of a biographer, said the author in a very engaging preface, is to maintain his own freedom of spirit, and lay bare events as he understands them, “dispassionately, impartially, and without ulterior intentions.”
It sounds fair and square; but the fact remains that Mr. Strachey disliked Manning, despised Arnold, had little sympathy with Gordon, and no great fancy for Florence Nightingale. It must be remembered also that in three cases out of four he was dealing with persons of stubborn character and compelling will, as far removed from irreproachable excellence as from criminality. Of such, much criticism may be offered; but the only way to keep an open outlook is to ask, “What was their life’s job?” “How well did they do it?” Men and women who have a pressing job on hand (Florence Nightingale was _all_ job) cannot afford to cultivate the minor virtues. They move with an irresistible impulse to their goal. It is a curious fact that Mr. Strachey is never so illuminating as when he turns his back upon these forceful and disconcerting personages, and dallies with their more amenable contemporaries. What he writes about Gordon we should be glad to forget; what he writes about Sir Evelyn Baring and Lord Hartington we hope to remember while we live.
The popularity of “Eminent Victorians” inspired a host of followers. Critics began to look about them for other vulnerable reputations. Mr. J. A. Strahan, stepping back from Victoria to Anne, made the happy discovery that Addison had been systematically overpraised, and that every side of his character was open to assault. The result of this perspicuity is a damning denunciation of a man whom his contemporaries liked and esteemed, and concerning whom we have been content to take the word of those who knew him. He may have been, as Mr. Strahan asserts, a sot, a time-server, a toad-eater, a bad official and a worse friend; but he managed to give a different impression. Addison’s friends and neighbours found him a modest, honourable, sweet-tempered gentleman; and Steele, whom he had affronted, wrote these generous words: “You can seldom get him to the tavern; but when once he is arrived to his pint, and begins to look about him, you admire a thousand things in him which before lay buried.”
This seems to me a singularly pleasant thing to say about anybody. Were I coveting praise, this is the form I’d like the praise to take.
The pressure of disparagement, which is one result of the cooling of our blood after the fever-heat of war, is lowering our enthusiasms, thinning our sympathies, and giving us nothing very dazzling in the way of enlightenment. Americans are less critical than Englishmen, who so value their birthright of free speech that censure of public men has become a habit, a game of hazard (pulling planks out of the ship of state), at which long practice has made them perfect. “The editor of the ‘Morning Post,’” observed Mr. Maurice Hewlett wearily, “begins his day by wondering whom he shall denounce”; and opposing editors, as nimble at the fray, match outcry against outcry, and malice against malignity.
I doubt if any other than an Englishman could have written “The Mirrors of Downing Street,” and I am sure that, were an American able to write such a book (which is problematic), it would never occur to him to think of it, or to brag of it, as a duty. The public actions of public men are open to discussion; but Mr. Balfour’s personal selfishness, his parsimony, his indifference to his domestics, are not matters of general moment. To gossip about these things is to gossip with tradesmen and servants. To deny to Lord Kitchener “greatness of mind, greatness of character, and greatness of heart,” is harsh speaking of the dead; but to tell a gaping world that the woman “whom he loved hungrily and doggedly, and to whom he proposed several times, could never bring herself to marry him,” is a personality which “Town Topics” would scorn. “The Mirrors of Downing Street” aspired to a moral purpose; but taste is the guardian of morality. Its delicate and severe dictates define the terms upon which we may improve the world at the expense of our neighbour’s character.
The sneaking kindness recommended by Mr. Stevenson is much harder to come by than the “raptures of moral indignation,” of which he heard more than he wanted, and which are reverberating through the world to-day. The pages of history are heavy with moral indignation. We teach it in our schools, and there are historians like Macaulay who thunder it rapturously, with never a moment of misgiving. But here and there, as we step apprehensively into historic bypaths, we are cheered by patches of sunshine, straight glimpses into truths which put a more credible, because a more merciful, construction upon men’s actions, and lighten our burden of dispraise.
I have often wondered why, with Philippe de Commines as an avenue of approach, all writers except Scott should deal with Louis the Eleventh as with a moral monstrosity. Commines is no apologist. He has a natural desire to speak well of his master; but he reviews every side of Louis’s character with dispassionate sincerity.
First, as a Catholic: “The king was very liberal to the Church, and, in some respects, more so than was necessary, for he robbed the poor to give to the rich. But in this world no one can arrive at perfection.”
Next, as a husband: “As for ladies, he never meddled with them in my time; for when I came to his court he lost a son, at whose death he was greatly afflicted; and he made a vow to God in my presence never to have intercourse with any other woman than the queen. And though this was no more than he was bound to do by the canons of the Church, yet it was much that he should have such self-command as to persevere firmly in his resolution, considering that the queen (though an excellent lady in other respects) was not a princess in whom a man could take any great delight.”
Finally, as a ruler: “The king was naturally kind and indulgent to persons of mean estate, and hostile to all great men who had no need of him.... But this I say boldly in his commendation, that in my whole life I never knew any man so wise in his misfortunes.”
To be brave in misfortune is to be worthy of manhood; to be wise in misfortune is to conquer fate. We cannot easily or advantageously regard Louis with affection; but when Commines epitomizes history in an ejaculation, “Our good master, Louis, whom God pardon!” it rests our souls to say, “Amen!”
We cannot easily love Swift. The great “professional hater” frightens us out of the timid regard which we should like--in honour of English literature--to cherish for his memory. But there is a noble sentence of Thackeray’s which, if it does not soften our hearts, cannot fail to clarify our minds, to free us from the stupid, clogging misapprehension which we confuse with moral distaste. “Through the storms and tempests of his [Swift’s] furious mind the stars of religion and love break out in the blue, shining serenely, though hidden by the driving clouds and maddening hurricane of his life.” One clear and penetrating note (“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came”) is worth much careful auditing of accounts.
The picture of John Wilkes drawn by Sir George Otto Trevelyan in his “Early History of Charles James Fox,” and the picture of Aaron Burr drawn by Mr. Albert J. Beveridge in his “Life of John Marshall,” are happy illustrations of unpopular subjects treated with illuminating kindness. Wilkes was a demagogue and Burr a trouble-maker (the terms are not necessarily synonymous), and neither of them is a man whose history is widely or accurately known. Both historians are swayed by their political passions. An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting. To Trevelyan all Conservatives were in fault, and all Liberals in the right. Opposition to George the Third is the acid test he applies to separate gold from dross. Mr. Beveridge regards the Federalists as the strength, and the Republicans as the weakness, of the young nation. Thomas Jefferson is _his_ test, and a man hated and hounded by Jefferson necessarily wins his support.
Nevertheless, Wilkes and Burr are presented to us by their sympathizers in a cold north light which softens and conceals nothing. Men of positive quality, they look best when clearly seen. “Research and fact are ever in collision with fancy and legend,” observes Mr. Beveridge soberly; and it is to research and fact that he trusts to rescue his accomplished filibuster from those unproved charges which live by virtue of their vagueness. Writers of American school histories, remembering the duty of moral indignation, have played havoc with the reputation of Aaron Burr; and American school-children, if they know him at all, know him as a duellist and a traitor. They are sure about the duel (it was one of the few facts firmly established in my own mind after a severe struggle with American history); but concerning the treason, they are at least as ill-informed as their elders.
British children do better, perhaps, with John Wilkes. Little Londoners can gaze at the obelisk which commemorates his mayoralty, and think of him as a catless Whittington. The slogan “Wilkes and Liberty” has an attractive ring to all who are not of Madame Roland’s way of thinking. No man ever gave his partisans more to defend, or his opponents better chances to attack; and friends and foes rose repeatedly and fervently to their opportunities. A century later, Sir George Trevelyan, a friend well worth the having, reviews the case with wise sincerity, undaunted confidence, a careful art in the arrangement of his high lights, and a niceness of touch which wins halfway all readers who love the English language. Wilkes was as naturally and inevitably in debt as was William Godwin, and Wilkes’s debts were as naturally and inevitably paid by some one else as were Godwin’s; but when Trevelyan alludes softly to his “unambitious standard of solvency,” this sordid detail becomes unexpectedly pleasurable. So easily are transgressions pardoned, if they provoke the shadow of a smile.
Lord Rosebery’s “Napoleon: the Last Phase” is a work nobly conceived and admirably executed; but its impelling motive is an austere resolve to make what amends a single Englishman can make for an ungenerous episode in English history. Its sympathy for a fallen foe bears no likeness to the sympathy which impelled Théodore de Banville, broken in health and hope by the siege of Paris, to write a lyric in memory of a young Prussian officer, a mere boy, who was found dead on the field, with a blood-stained volume of Pindar in his tunic. Lord Rosebery’s book is written with a proud sadness, a stern indignation, eminently fitted to its subject; but he is not so much kind as just. Napoleon is too vast a figure to be approached with benevolence. It is true, as Mr. Wells asserts, that, had he been unselfish and conscientious, he would never have conquered Europe; but only Mr. Wells is prepared to say that a lack of these qualities won him renown. He shares the lack with Wilhelm the Second, who has had neither an Austerlitz nor a Waterloo.