The Life of Andrew Carnegie
THE MAN of the MONTH The Life of Andrew Carnegie [Doubleday, Doran, 2 vols., $7.50]
IF the desires of a long and vivid life printed a word on the heart of Andrew Carnegie, that word was Immortality. The little man who lived by intuition knew, or thought he knew, that there was an end of things, and the idea of curtailing the most delightful of existences, of ceasing to hobnob with the great, of surrendering forever the purse of Fortunatus, of stopping his ears against his own world-wide notoriety, of parting from friends he really and dearly loved, never again to hear the pipes of Skibo, was outrageous to his soul. And so it was, I think, that he invented his New Gospel of Wealth, and spent his own upon a monument vaster than the Pharaohs’. He carved his name on the stones of countless libraries, and endowed huge corporations that they might spread his dollars and his fame forever. Always it comforted him to think that though immortality were denied to his canny Scotch soul, the name of Andrew Carnegie should live in men’s minds world without end.
What a contradiction of a man he was, this diminutive immigrant who stole away the commercial primacy of the old country and sold it to the new at a price which seemed big, but was little indeed! This detester of gambling played for the highest stakes in the world, euchring Rockefeller and mating Morgan, yet he was forever swept by gusts of sentimentalism. This quizzical student of human nature, who knew that the art of working lies in making others work for you, grew to unparalleled power, yet he never quite grew up. The best of him was charming: his hero worship, his vitality, his bubbling spirits, his love of nature, his adoration for Shakespeare, his capering delight as he danced to the jingle of the guinea. No wonder Mr. Hendrick, who has spent five years in daily companionship with his memory, has fallen under the spell. He loves to paint the redoubtable little man with his delicate little hands and feet, declaiming his Watty Scott and Bobby Burns; the ironmaster coaching through England with the most fastidious of poets, the most stoical of philosophers, and God knows who besides, perched up as his companions behind the driver; the Aladdin tossing one of the great collections of the world to a friend as a pleasant mark of esteem; pouring upon his old Lowland mother a devotion literally too deep for words; casually suggesting to a future Prime Minister that it was high time he should come out for the British Republic; out crowing all the native cocks of Yankee Doodledum, and reminding the King what rascals his forbears were. After all, there are degrees of bumptiousness; the topmost row takes its place among the sublimities, and to a very engaging degree Mr Hendrick’s canvas has caught the rhythm and tints and tones of it.
When it comes to telling a story, Mr. Hendrick is a practised hand. As the reader meanders through 800 and more pages he might at times grow aweary of the exploits of the world’s greatest salesman, but Mr. Hendrick introduces with marked skill a series of romantic histories of the characters with whom the Carnegie saga is intertwined. Scheherazade never had a more magical tale to tell than the story of Sir Henry Bessemer’s discovery of the little devil Phosphorus lurking in iron ore, who must be exorcised it steel is to be steel. The drama of Henry Frick, Lord of Coke, is another natural interlude which at once relieves and intensifies the central narrative. The hideous tragedy of the Pinkertons is still another. Many more there are, giving color and variety to the Midas story, while the biographer is fully alive to the piquancy of a list of dramatis personœ which couples Captain Bill Jones and Herbert Spencer, Gladstone and Charlie Schwab, Matthew Arnold and Pierpont Morgan, Uncle Tom Morrison and Lord Rosebery, John Morley and Henry Phipps, Jr., and other incongruities in abundant measure. It is a star cast, and Mr. Hendrick sees to it that all the big parts have their share of the limelight.
The fat volumes are too fat, perhaps, to be made up quite without padding (how many heroes really live through a double-volume life?), but, after all, every substantial dinner has its extras and its ‘on the sides’ to eke out the regular courses, and who shall say that Mr. Hendrick has not given us our money’s worth? This reviewer laid down the Life with the sense that here is the finished portrait of a man whose like shall not be seen again: this commercial traveler whose little legs bestrode the Atlantic; who began as a bobbin boy at $1.20 a week, and before he grew old had $300,000,000 to give away if he were to avoid the disgrace of dying rich; who, without the arts or the cultivation of Mæcenas, yet loved learning and felt with a tingling instinct of reality the presence of greatness within a man; who loved nothing more than friends, unless it were power; nothing more than power, unless it were fame; nothing more than fame, unless it were a chance (though Mr. Hendrick does not quite admit it) to fight against a rival whom it was better to beat than buy, to fight until his blue eyes sparked fire and his voice took on the measured intensity of a judge pronouncing sentence. These were the supreme satisfactions of his life — these and the carving of his name where it would be plain for men to read forever.
ELLERY SEDGWICK