Wives

by Gamaliel Bradford. New York: Harper and Brothers. 1925. 8vo. xiii+289 pp. Illustrated. $3.50.

NINE years ago, in Portraits of Women, Mr. Bradford complained that, because of the limitations of material, he was forced to consider queens and saints when he would rather be studying shopgirls. In his new book he has not presented shopgirls, but he has come closer to the ordinary woman than ever before. Unlike Portraits of American Women, which concerns personalities themselves distinguished, Wives deals largely with women who would probably never have been heard from save for the fortuity of marriage with either famous or infamous men.

The volume interweaves itself with earlier work. Readers of Damaged Souls will recall Mr. Bradford’s striking tribute to the wife of Benjamin Butler, his wish that he were writing a portrait of her instead of one of him. He has now been able happily to fulfill this wish, adding papers on Margaret Arnold and Theodosia Burr, whose husband and whose father were also among the ‘damaged souls,’ and on Mrs. Blaine, whose husband appeared in American Portraits. Dolly Madison, Mrs. Jefferson Davis, and Mrs. Abraham Lincoln had husbands who have not ‘sat’ to Mr. Bradford, but two of them are mounted against the Civil War background that he knows so well.

It will be seen that Wives stands in sharp contrast to Bare Souls. This latter was quite the best of the Bradford books because of the amazing richness of its material — the matchless revelation of a group of writers, several of whom touched genius. The material for Wives, on the other hand, has been scattered, sometimes exasperatingly scanty; and the problem, in some cases, became that of reconstructing a soul from the barest hints, often incidental, in the references of others to others. Love of home and husband, care of sick children, social futilities and domestic duties — such interests here take the place of the passion for beauty, the longing to embrace and to create it, the old heroic straining at the prison-bars of life, so conspicuous in last year’s collection. Thus, while Bare Souls presented the challenge of superb material, the psychographer had here a totally different task, for it is undeniable that it is far more difficult to draw interesting pictures of ordinary than of extraordinary persons, of normal than of abnormal. For a man also it is harder to probe women’s souls than those of men. Here Mr. Bradford succeeds where others have failed, because, unlike many of his contemporaries, he is not obsessed by the mystery of sex. To him a woman is first of all a human being, and it is as such that he presents her.

To me the most fascinating portrait in the book is that of Mrs. Butler. She had incomparably more soul to reveal than any of the others, except Theodosia Burr, and her self-revelation is keener and fuller than Theodosia’s. For a very different reason, I admire the portrait of Mrs. Lincoln, which is, as Mr. Bradford says, ‘delightfully inconclusive,’ simply because the material is not there. This very incompleteness is the seal of his trustworthy honesty as a biographer: he has not been tempted unwarrantably to fill in the picture. Structurally, the paper on Mrs. Blaine is most interesting: the author surrounds her with ever-narrowing circles, considering in order her relation to society, to her family, to her husband, and to her own soul.

For several years, the growing strength of Mr. Bradford’s style has been for me a source of great admiration. To-day, when you speak of his writing, you mean more than his gift of epigram, more than his power of weaving into one seamless fabric varied materials drawn from the most diverse sources. When he is at his best, his words flow easily, rhythmically, without strain. Frequently in Wives there are crystal passages of fresh, limpid beauty. All in all, the volume presents one more interesting variation of an immensely suggestive and individual biographic and literary method.