The Journal of Gamaliel Bradford
edited by
[Houghton Mifflin, $4.50]
‘SPIRITUAL remains, for dissection by those who shall come after me.’ So Gamaliel Bradford described this Journal, by virtue of which he enters that company of ‘self-dissectors,’ from Pepys to Amiel, who were for fifty years the comrades of his spirit. In this, his own portrait, he has given us the work by which he will perhaps be longest remembered, a book which may take its place, with the Journals of Thoreau and Emerson and The Education of Henry Adams, as source-material for the history of the American mind.
In an admirable Preface, Van Wyck Brooks gathers up the facts of Bradford’s ancestral connection with the New England cultural tradition, of his spiritual kinship with that European literary tradition that Goethe symbolized and Arnold was interpreting. Yet it seemed that this rich heritage might be wasted because of physical frailty. It was an heroic struggle — with the constant dread of the terrible lurking vertigo, with thirty years of failure as poet, novelist, dramatist. When in his fiftieth year the longed-for success came, beginning with Lee, the American, it was the fruit of all Bradford’s superb equipment, his amazing powers of memory and concentration, his mastery of language, his strivings to portray character, his intense concern with human personality.
No single review can do more than suggest the paths of adventure recorded in this book — about one seventh of the whole Journal, Mr. Brooks tells us, There are — first and last— his adventures with books, the joys of reading and rereading, the timeless joys of the Athenæum. Bradford was a rare critic. A volume of essays in criticism could be compiled from the Journal: on the Elizabethan dramatists, whom he loved with the devotion of Lamb and Hazlitt: on the Greek dramatists, the French critics. Even his passing comments, from Tennyson to Sinclair Lewis, show the keen thrust and play of his mind. To the theatre he turned eagerly for color and sense allure; to the moving picture, eagerly and disappointedly, for the art as yet smothered in commonness. In his love of music — the music that he constantly played and sometimes heard at symphony concerts — there emerged his deep sense of mystery and his ceaseless search for God. And always he turned to nature for restoration; the Journal overflows with exquisite glimpses of his beloved fields and woods. Most fascinating of all — throwing new light on his work — are the studies of his own method, his revelations of a questioning, despairing, ever-creating spirit, seeking to penetrate through others’ lives ‘to inexhaustible depths of human passion and suffering and joy and hope.’
FRANCES W. KNICKERBOCKER