A Group of New Biographies
THERE are two great divisions of biography: one contains the raw materials for a life; the other, by a special art, models a portrait ’in time’ as the painter does in space. Once in a century, a Boswell will give us both the materials and the portrait.
Forster’s Dickens belongs to this limited class, although it was written in the presence of a watchful family and a susceptible public. Now that Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens, edited and annotated by J. W. T. Ley, has corrected Forster’s great document and, in particular, has cleared up Dickens’s early infatuation for Maria Beadnell and his Inter domestic griefs, there is little left for anyone to say — except by way of interpretation. Mr. Ralph Straus, in his Charles Dickens: A Biography from New Sources, does not do much to relate his hero to our own day: his is still the standard portrait, more or less, in cabinet size. Charles Dickens is too fascinating a subject, and his life was too full of the typical Victorian dilemmas, to be left in this state; what he needs is a biographer like Mr. Matthew Josephson, whose study of Zola and His Time is one of the soundest and most distinguished works of biography that has recently appeared in America.
Mr. Josephson has precisely the right touch of skepticism for dealing with his subject: his Zola is a real man, who lives, starves, slaves, fights, produces, and Mr. Josephson portrays his career with fidelity and tact, without for a moment accepting the values and ideas his hero cherished. Aware of a certain shallowness that characterized the realism and positive science for which Zola stood, Mr. Josephson nevertheless achieves a portrait that Taine and Zola would. I am sure, have applauded. While the biographer does historic justice to both a great figure and a brave man, he does not conceal the grotesque and repulsive aspects of his theme: Zola’s gluttony, his relentless ambition, or the somewhat jerry-built character of that vast industrial city of novels Zola erected almost overnight. Mr. Josephson’s book, with its keen documentation and nice analysis, is a proof that a warm, intelligent understanding of a man’s life is not incompatible with an ironic aloofness which may sometimes mount into positive distaste.
What Mr. Josephson does with a character and a time near enough for familiarity, Mr. Lytton Strachey achieves in the even more difficult period of Elizabeth and Essex. His task is to give life to that stormy tapestry of an age when only a step separated the gilded lords at the playhouse from the rough and turbulent crowd in the pit; an age when everyone played a part and might at any moment throw off the disguise of royalty, birth, culture, and disclose a snarling animality; in short, the age of Elizabeth, who was competent in five languages and could swear, on occasion, like a fishwife. In his latest biography Mr. Strachey’s art reaches its most complete development: his delicate psychology, his rich historic knowledge, his pliant and accurate and finely measured style, all are present, without undue sacrifice to his irony. His characters come very close to us, as a play of Shakespeare’s does when it is well presented; and yet something about them remains peculiar and unfathomable, and Mr. Strachey never for a moment lets us fancy that we have a final key to their enigmas.
The beautiful, blundering Essex, the vain, sensible, intelligent Elizabeth, whose instinct for the right gesture would never permit her to hasten its eventuality — both the romance and the history are portrayed with something like finality. Through this drama, the too cunning and too subtle figure of Francis Bacon threads in and out, serpentlike. Mr. Strachey’s sublimation of his hatred for Bacon is a model of deadly restraint; he scotches the poisonous fellow again and again, but, like the snake, Bacon does not die till sundown, when the drama itself is over. It is a beautiful and memorable book. When one considers it one sees the meaning of Whitman’s pregnant words: ‘There is no more need for romances; let history and truth be properly told.’
If Mr. Strachey’s book is a biography with a wide historic background, Mr. Van Loon’s Pieter Stuyvesant and His Times is rather a history of the rise and fall of New Amsterdam, with a single figure, Stuyvesant himself, to focus and complete the story. In this narrative, Mr. Van Loon returns to familiar ground; and his old humor, his old ease, his old memories, come back and enrich the picture. It is the most satisfactory work Mr. Van Loon has written since The Story of Mankind; and one trusts it will prosper sufficiently to encourage him to go on in the same vein. Mr. Guedalla is another historian who has taken to biography; but his sketches in Bonnet and Shawl: An Album, of such Victorian women as Catherine Gladstone and Emily Tennyson, are shallow rather than delicate; M. André Maurois at his worst rather than Mr. Guedalla at his best; the planished commonplace. Mr. Guedalla is capable of genuine wit and no little intellectual penetration; but when he parades as he does in this latest book, one is tempted to fall upon him heartily and not leave a rag on his back.
One of the events of the season is surely the publication of The Early Life of Thomas Hardy by Florence Emily Hardy. In outline we know something about his development; but there are vast stores of detail to be brought down from the attic; and the present volume by the novelist’s wife is a welcome beginning. Here we see Hardy s excellent preparation for his Wessex tales, in his youthful experience as a fiddler at country weddings and dances, and in his later apprenticeship to a church restorer and architect. In London Hardy had the good luck to be introduced to the literary world by Morley and Alexander Macmillan, but this was counterbalanced by the fact that his first novel was all too helpfully criticized by George Meredith, who was probably the worst editor that ever sat in judgment over other authors’ novels. Meredith told Hardy, who was his junior, that he should improve his plots; and this advice was probably responsible for those dreadful transformations in Hardy’s novels which suddenly turn living human beings into rustyjointed manikins, blindly obeying some external condition in the plot. The conflict between Hardy’s architectural and his literary career was sharper than one had fancied, for success, or at least a livelihood, impended in both spheres at the same moment; Hardy’s choice of literature was probably abetted by his fondness for the Wessex countryside and his distaste for London. The present volume carries Hardy as far as Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
The volume called William Dean Howells: Life in Letters, edited by Mildred Howells, is a book for the admirer of Howells rather than for the general reader. The letters have all his virtues, his good humor, his geniality, his conscientiousness, his sureness of perception; but, except for adding a little local history and documentation, this material does not affect the established picture of Howells’s personality. One realizes again, however, how much Howells was bound to his immediate circle and how much he wrote for them — how impossible it was, without a spiritual overturn, to have written on themes which might have caused blushes or frowns in this domestic group. The notion of progress gave Howells a mechanism for rationalizing his dislike of the sordid and the indelicate and his overemphasis of the family virtues: we were ‘getting beyond’ the lewdness and animality of the eighteenth century. While this belief did not, in Howells’s case, involve any such vast hypocrisy as Dickens carried with him, we can see how absurd the attitude was,even as a reaction, to say nothing of a positive creed. Mr. Struchey’s straight forward interpretation of Elizabeth’s sexual anomalies, in terms of the shock of being brashly handled and almost seduced during adolescence, shows that there is no subject that the biographer cannot handle openly, if his hands are clean. Whereas Forster’s complacent revelation of Dickens’s attitude toward his wife and growing family discloses something that now seems to us indecent and low in Dickens’s scheme of life — and one ironically questions the genuineness and the beauty of the domesticity he stood for. Such biographies as Mr. Strachey’s and Mr. Josephson’s, which conceal nothing and exaggerate nothing, leave a pleasanter taste in one’s mouth, and certainly a sounder impression of life in one’s mind, than works in the more mealy-mouthed tradition. So long as human nature has two sides, no intelligent person will be satisfied with only one of them.
LEWIS MUMFORD
Life of Charles Dickens, by John Forster. Edited and Annotated with an Introduction by J. W. T. Ley. New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co. $10.00.
Charles Dickens: A Biography from New Sources, by Ralph Straus. New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corporation. $5.00.
Zola and His Time, by Matthew Joseph - son. New York: Macaulay Co. $5.00. Elizabeth and Essex, by Lytton Strachey.
New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. $3.75. Pieter Stuyvesant and His Times, by Hendrik Willem Van Loon. New York: Henry Holt & Co. $4.00.
Bonnet and Shawl: An Album, by Philip Guedalla. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. $3.50.
The Early Life of Thomas Hardy: 1840— 1891, by Florence Emily Hardy. New York: Macmillan Co. $5.00.
William Dean Howells: Life in Letters. Edited by Mildred Howells. Doubleday, Doran & Co. 2 vols. $10.00.