It is this circumstance that makes Miss Kite’s book a valuable contribution to the cause of patriotism. Every American who reads it will have a deeper sense of obligation to France; and in the trying days that are coming to America, this inestimable debt to France requires restatement, and this book thus renders a timely and patriotic service.
Apart from this consideration, Miss Kite’s book is a very interesting contribution to the portrait gallery of biography. It tells us of one of the most fascinating personalities that history has ever known. It reads like a romance of Dumas. Indeed, I always think of Beaumarchais as a D’Artagnan in the flesh. If the facts were not so well
authenticated they would be regarded as the wildest romance.
Beaumarchais was a true child of the Renaissance. I sometimes think that in the lengthening vista of the centuries to come, the Renaissance—that indeterminate period—will be regarded as having ended with the coming of the steamship and the railroad. Until the dawn of the present industrial era, men still differed but slightly from the wonderful children of the golden Renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci was reincarnated in Benjamin Franklin. The stupendous genius of such men as Da Vinci and Michael Angelo can have no parallel in present times, for the industrial era is the age of specialization.
Similarly Beaumarchais was an Eighteenth Century reincarnation of Benvenuto Cellini, and like him, was a strange mixture of genius and adventurer. Unlike Cellini, Beaumarchais with all his failings had a certain nobility of character, which will endear him to all, who follow in this notable biography his extraordinary career.
In some respects a camoufleur, he yet played the part of a hero throughout his trying and arduous career, and rendered a great service to the coming of the democratic era. As a litterateur, he was as brilliant as Richard Brinsley Sheridan; as a publicist, he was another Junius; as a financier, something of a Harriman; as a secret emissary of the French Government, something of a Sherlock Holmes; as a diplomat, as clever as Talleyrand.
A farseeing statesman, he was one of the extraordinary characters of an extraordinary era. His influence in precipitating the French Revolution was recognized by Napoleon himself, when he said that the memorials of Beaumarchais in his great struggle against the corrupt judiciary of France, which in their destructive force are nothing under-valued to the polemics of Junius, was “the Revolution in
action.”
There is no need to commend Miss Kite’s book to the reader, for even though she had not treated an exceptionally interesting subject with literary skill, yet the subject matter is of such fascinating interest that the story tells itself.
The only limitation will be that the average reader, because of the intensely dramatic character of the story, will wonder whether the book is romance or fiction. It is only necessary to refer such doubters to the French archives where it will be found that all that Miss Kite has told is as well authenticated as any biography, and thus again the ancient adage is vindicated that “truth is stranger than fiction.”