Forever Free, a Novel of Abraham Lincoln
by . New York: William Morrow & Co. 1927. 12mo. viii+402 pp. $2.50.
THE professional biographer is apt to rebel against the historical novel. After he has taken unlimited pains to disentangle fact from fiction, it is exasperating to have an artist come along and deliberately, purposely, mingle fiction with fact, so that neither reader nor critic can have any sure knowledge upon what sort of ground he is treading. Yet this protest is unreasonable, at least in what regards the treatment of character. For with the biographer, as with the artist, such treatment must be in the end largely a matter of divination and creation. The novelist must take life as a basis, exactly as the biographer does, and with both the final presentment of character is a synthetic process, personal, individual, succeeding or failing as the mysterious element of genius enters into it.
The dramatic basis of Mrs. Morrow’s story is not of a very original or distinguished quality. A Southern female spy gets into the White House, with the object of discovering, betraying, and finally wrecking the President’s plans. As was to be expected and predicted, she falls in love with him, and her own plans are wrecked instead. This sort of melodrama was popular thirty years ago, but it is now, fortunately, for the most part confined to the movies. Mrs. Morrow’s strength is not in action, however, but in character. She fills her pages with familiar names and figures, who move and speak with sufficient lifelikeness, and every American who has been educated in the public schools feels so much at home with Seward and Stanton and McClellan and Burnside, not to speak of the great President, that to walk about among them and hear them talk and argue and quarrel is like an afternoon on Main Street. Among these various figures Mrs. Morrow’s greatest success is with Mrs. Lincoln. Having dealt with her myself at some length, in the rather vain endeavor to make her human and lovable, I appreciate fully that in these pages she is both, and some skill was required to accomplish this.
Yet somehow all these figures, even Mrs. Lincoln, and still more that strange, shadowy, elusive personage of Lincoln himself, fail to seize me, to touch me, to hold me, and I ask myself, in some perplexity, why it is. Mrs. Morrow’s research has been vast. She has explored an immense amount of material, and explored it wisely and fruitfully. But the characters do not quite live. I think there is first a deficiency of the profoundest insight. The author does not probe deep enough into human motive or human passion. And even more marked is the defect of style. To make characters live in literature, you have got to have the great literary touch: nothing else will do it. The curious thing is that style and human insight are so intimately bound up together. What makes Shakespeare’s characters live is the interpretation of the human soul with the supreme magic of words. When the poor, flighty, trivial, wayward Beatrice of Middleton’s Changeling cries out, ‘I am the deed’s creature, she makes herself immortal, or her creator makes her so. It is perhaps setting a high standard to require that the historical novelist should possess these gifts. Yet it seems to me that nothing less will really justify his intrusion into the domain of history. What professed scholar has ever done for English history what Shakespeare has?
GAMALIEL BRADFORD