The Intimate Letters of Archie Butt

TAFT AND HIS BOSWELL

[Doubleday, Doran, 2 vols. $7.50]

AN unfriendly critic might call Archie Butt the Ward McAllister of the White House. He was never quite free from the foppishness of the dandy whose personal superiority is a matter of conviction. But, part dude as he was, Butt was more than half a hero, and it is this odd conglomerate which gives especial interest to his unusual character. A large element of the feminine was in him; the rest was purely masculine. Pepys and Creevey, combined, could not beat Butt for news. He was bursting with it, and tiie reader feels that the buttons would have jumped off his coat except for the deflation from those almost daily letters to his brother’s wife, with whom he was on terms of intimate and confident affection.

Jealous of his rivals, and a very unfriendly critic of the President’s secretary, Charles Norton, who threatened to divide his Chief’s affections, Butt was the incarnation of loyalty to his antithetical masters. Roosevelt he adored; Taft, he revered. When the cataclysm came which splintered the most famous friendship in our modern history, Butt clung passionately to his divided loyalties. It is written that a man cannot serve two masters. Major Butt gallantly and honorably struggled against an immutable law of human nature. He fought till happiness was gone, and health after it. Then a fate which we cannot call unkind drove him to his death on the Titanic, it was better so.

In speaking, however briefly, of these remarkable volumes, no critic must omit the incontestable fact that the little garrulous happenings of day to day gradually build into a figure of living blood and tissue — the genial, lazy, big-limbed, big-hearted, and not unheroic figure of Mr. Taft. Cruelly miscast for a part he never wished to play, and for which he was utterly unfit, he did his country disservice, forever thinking that he was following his duty. What an unspeakable comfort it would have been to him in those harassed days to know that for ten years he would ultimately have an opportunity to serve his country to the utmost of his mind and strength in the place of places for which Nature had intended him from the start.

Too often we think of history as a panorama, and view the landscape from a height where details sink to insignificance. The thousand little ’unremembered acts of kindness and of love’; of unkindness and of dislike as well, petty squabbles, chicaneries, luncheon, tea, and dinner, parlor talk and office conference — these are the stuff of reality. Who can appreciate the England of the decadent Stuarts without Pepys, or know the Second Empire without the De Goncourts, or understand the Great War without Repington? The age of Taft has found its private chronicler, and that chronicler has done history a large, perhaps an invaluable service.

ELLERY SEDGWICK