Her response to life is such that we find it in every one of her moods: whether she is romantic, analytical, hysterical or self-possessed, she is always in a mood which is responsive to life and ready to give all she possessed to life. All she demanded, in reality, was constant change; no continuity of feeling or of sentiment was satisfying to her; joy was sorrow if long and level; sorrow barbed with keenness was joy, “... him whose strenuous tongue can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;” Marie the writer is expressed in this sentence; pain was welcome if it carried sharp sensations in its trend, if it gave her a life more full and heady, foaming from the cup.
Her idea of love was as imaginary and as unreal as her conception of life; no one but Marie could have been contented with the picture she made of her emotional response to love. She darted through her adolescent years rapidly and yet profoundly; she thought she knew all she was to know about love before she had had much teaching; her instinct and her intuition prompted her, inspired her conduct and decided her actions. Her susceptibility to impressions was such that on them she based her knowledge, and her flair for the dramatic and the unreal made her prostrate herself before the tall, blond phantom, and pretend to herself that this was love in its sublimest and most convincing expression. She reveals herself as completely in her dealings with love, as she does in her fierce demand for life; this demand became more and more tenacious as death came nearer, and her revolt and her despair as the final hour approached were coupled with the sense of futility that made it almost welcome. She asked herself the poignant questions that have troubled and upset mankind since its creation: she suffered the inevitable struggle between spiritual hope and intellectual denial. What has it all meant, and where is God? These questions were not to be answered; if her genius was nothing but a spent shadow, what was it? and why not prefer death to it? Strangely troubling questions to a young mind. Marie was one of those about whom Stephen Phillips wrote:
“The departing sun his glory owes
To the eternal thoughts of creatures brief
Who think the thing that they shall never see.”
The present generation has produced three extraordinary autobiographies in the guise of fiction: James Joyce’s was entitled, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Dorothy Richardson called hers Pointed Roofs, and Marcel Proust’s is included in A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, which extends through several volumes, two of which, Swann’s Way and The Guermantes Way, have been translated into English.
They are valuable documents, for they set forth with great frankness the awareness and the development of consciousness, and the interplay of what is now called the unconscious and the conscious mind. Proust’s is the most elaborate and detailed, and when we shall have it in its entirety, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions may no longer be rated the greatest autobiography in existence. These books have had detailed consideration in The Doctor Looks at Literature.
Introspection and confession are unpopular to-day in this country. They do not fit the times. Man is so busy acting that he has little time for thinking, and if time were vouchsafed him, he would not have the inclination. If one needed proof of it the legislators of Tennessee could furnish it. This disinclination to thought and reflection may be one of the reasons why this country has furnished few great autobiographies. Another is that until recently we have been bound by tradition of reticence and we have always found self-estimation difficult. When Walt Whitman broke the convention and put a premium on himself we were outraged. Our reticence was a manifestation of self-consciousness incident to our youth and inexperience. The American autobiographies of recent years that came nearest to being satisfactory are The Education of Henry Adams and The Life of Doctor Trudeau, though Andrew Carnegie’s story of his life fulfilled some requirements. Had the second half of Henry Adams’ book kept the pace set by the first, it would likely be called the most satisfactory autobiography of the century. But the account of his life after 1900 shows occasional bewilderment, frequent discursiveness, and an inclination to profitless speculation. Henry Adams was a singularly sane individual, free from ancestor-worship; neither beholden to convention nor enslaved by tradition and environment; a potential antinomian of artistic temperament who devoted his life studiously to self-education from which he deduced a dynamic theory of history and an amorphous one of education. The account of his childhood and youth, of his early environment; of the people with whom he came into casual and intimate contact; of his attitude toward and his reactions to formal education, is an unusually brilliant personality study. His pilgrimages in search of knowledge to Germany, Italy and France and his experiences as a diplomat in England are precious human documents. It is doubtful whether any American has ever seen the English with clearer eye, and commented on their characteristics with rarer judgment than he did in the chapters “Foes or Friends” and “Eccentricity.”
The Education of Henry Adams is not only a revelation of a personality, a brilliant example of self-analysis; it is a treasure house of comment on and estimate of scores of individuals who wrote their names more or less large in their time. If a better description of Henry Cabot Lodge was ever written I have not encountered it, and any one who knew Theodore Roosevelt will admit that he merited this characterisation, “he more than any other man living within the range of notoriety, showed the singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter—the quality that mediæval theology assigned to God—he was pure act.”
No student of American history can escape study of this Memoir; no one interested in behaviour will neglect it; and no one seeking instruction and entertainment can afford to overlook it. Henry Adams is Boston’s asset that Washington made permanent.
Dr. Edward L. Trudeau had a powerful personality and his book reveals it. Fearlessness vied with honesty to be the predominant feature of his nature and the closing lines of one of Browning’s most popular poems, sung in his heart:
“With their triumphs and their glories, and the rest;
Love is best.”