Causes and Their Champions

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M. A. DeWolfe Boston: Little, Brown and Co. 1926. Svo. xii + 304 pp. Illustrated. $4.00. An Atlantic Monthly Press Publication.

MR. HOWE is commonly thought of as a biographer, but this book is biography and a good deal more. As the author suggests in his comment on the title, his subject is really the idealism and the idealists of the nineteenth century, and he displays before us, in their varied and brilliant intensity of enthusiasm, such ardent advocates of human progress as Clara Barton, representing Red Cross beneficence; Phillips Brooks, tolerance; Frances Willard, temperance; Rockefeller, the broad and intelligent use of wealth; Samuel Gompers, the improvement of labor conditions; Susan Anthony, woman suffrage: Booker T. Washington, the elevation of the Negro; and Woodrow Wilson, the effort for universal peace.

Only one who had made an honest and conscientious endeavor to provide a broad and substantial background for biography can appreciate the extent of Mr. Howe’s work upon the material for these brief studies. The subjects are so diverse that it was necessary to familiarize one’s self with all the aspects of nineteenth-century philanthropy in order to deal with them properly, and also to grapple with endless and not always very illuminating books bearing upon the central figures. The bibliography which ends the book shows how careful and painstaking the research was, and many minor details, like the reproduction of the rare and curious broadside in favor of temperance, signed by three of our early presidents, illustrate it vividly.

But it is not enough to grub and drudge widely for material —in fact, this goes but little way. What counts is the instinct for using it after you have got it. Mr. Howe’s gift in this direction is

everywhere manifest. Bits of letters, bits of journals, turns of reported phrase, are picked out with delicate, discerning skill, and employed in the connection which will give their full bearing and significance. What a light is thrown upon Frances Willard in her own definition of herself: ‘Dr. Fowler, the president of the institution, has the will of Napoleon. I have the will of Queen Elizabeth. When an immovable body meets an indestructible object, something has to give way.’

But what I like best in Mr. Howe’s book is his general attitude toward the varied idealisms with which he is dealing. It is so usual to-day to treat the champions of higher causes merely as cranks, or, with more superficial politeness, as specimens of pathological psychology. Even Mr, Strachey’s profound insight into the heart of Dr. Arnold or Florence Nightingale is rather patronizing than sympathetic. Mr, Howe is in no way duped. He knows an extravagance when he comes across it. He recognizes weakness as well as strength in his heroes and heroines. The ill-judged financial management of Clara Barton is made plain to us, and the intense personal ambition of Frances Willard. The delicate grace of humor, lacking in these idealists themselves so often that one almost wonders whether the lack of it is not essential to their power, is never absent in their biographer, and is applied with the utmost skill to cover extravagances and smooth over hitches and jolts. But with the humor and the just criticism there are a profound, instinctive sympathy with all elevating effort and the most earnest and stimulating appreciation of all these men and women who gave their time, their strength their thought, their lives, to make the world a little more habitable and to make life not only a more tolerable but a richer and a nobler thing.

GAMALIEL BRADFORD