Seized early in life with the disease that he did so much to make conquerable, he laboured for forty years burdened and often prostrated, in the Adirondack wilderness, and founded there a health centre which radiates his influence throughout the world and which will perpetuate his name.
Dr. Trudeau had an unusual gift, and he had it to an extraordinary degree: the gift of friendship. He had exceptional power to attract people to him, to interest them in his work, and in his play. He not only attracted them, but enticed them to participation whether it was building a church, equipping a laboratory or outwitting a fox. For a quarter of a century, he radiated a benign, salutary influence throughout the North Woods, and in the latter years of his life throughout the whole country. He spoked the wheel of the juggernaut tuberculosis as few save Koch have done. His presence inspirited thousands bending beneath their burden; his courage heartened even a greater number; and his conduct inspired countless colleagues who were working at the very problem he sought to solve.
He knew the ingredients that one must have to make life a success; he knew the amount of work and play, love and worship which must be used and he knew how to blend them to make them acceptable to the eye and to the palate; but what he knew best of all was that man can not live by bread alone. Any one who does not know it may learn from the least egotistic of autobiographies.
The most readable of recent autobiographies is Maurice Francis Egan’s Recollections of a Happy Life. But it is not a self-revelatory book. One gets vistas of life in Philadelphia as educated middle-class Catholics lived it three generations ago, glimpses of the society that politicians and a few men of letters made in Washington, a generation or two ago; and one gets the distinctive and agreeable literary and bohemian atmosphere of New York at about the same time. There are scores of pictures of people, famous and infamous, interesting and commonplace, and these pictures vary from trifling vignettes to carefully drawn and finished Gibsons. To justify the word infamous it is only necessary to remind that Egan was Minister to Copenhagen when Dr. Cook sold that government a gold brick. Egan knew every one; most of them he liked and they all liked him, Matthew Arnold excepted. After they had passed on and he had entered another field of activity, he re-invoked for his diversion the memories of the first half of his mature life and jotted them down. “God had given him memory so that he might have roses in December.” He was arranging and ordering them when his call came, but despite the fact that he did not have opportunity to finish them, they are charming and entertaining.
But the reader must be what is called very psychic who can understand the personality of Maurice Egan from his autobiography. The average reader will gather that he was cheerful, charming, courteous, companionable, kindly, generous, urbane—perhaps even a little vain. But these are secondary virtues of prime importance mostly acquirable. He had the cardinal virtues too: he had a good conscience and the urge to assist and benefit others was greater than personal ambition. He was gifted socially and intellectually; he was lucky and he had as much money as a poet should have. He escaped the accident called disease most successfully; he had a host of friends and he never put them to torture by asking them what they thought of his reviews or of his poems. Small wonder he had a happy life, and that now when it has taken other display, his work continues to contribute to the happiness of others.
Most autobiographies are written by individuals of artistic temperament: musicians, painters, actors, clergymen, whose conspicuous possession, after talent, is self-confidence which the average person often interprets as conceit. There are few better ways of obtaining a comprehensive idea of what is called the artistic temperament than reading such an autobiography, and the Life of Hector Berlioz, whose fame as a parent of music seems to be permanently established, is as good as any. Berlioz was weird, contradictory, unreasoning, improvident, impulsive, selfish, jealous, egocentric, amorous and inconstant. He was devoid of humour and he lacked all religious feeling. He was intemperate of speech and of strength. Despite all these he gained and kept the affection and esteem of many of the great men of his time. His book can scarcely be called an autobiography, although he planned it to be one. He gives the bare facts of his life up to the time he abandoned medicine for music, but after that, one must gain knowledge of his character and personality from his letters. They reveal them as no formal autobiography could, for here are his thoughts, feelings, aspirations and disappointments; his selfishness, shallowness, fickleness and unreasonableness; here is the record of his punishment by his disposition and disease. They show what a handicap to happiness such a temperament is. Any one who thinks of choosing parents from musicians should read the letters. Any one who doubts the existence of Dante’s Beatrice or Petrarch’s Laura should also read them, for Estelle Fournier was their sister.
A man of Berlioz’s temperament should not be judged according to any standard but his own; his soul was too sensitive to radiate happiness; his genius was of too fine a nature to leave place in him for self-appreciation and optimism; his tempers revealed his weariness of life and the extent to which life had conquered him; or rather they would in any one but Berlioz whose personality could suffer no comparison. M. Romain Rolland has attempted a parallel between Wagner and Berlioz—all the advantage of the former if common measures are adopted, but strangely contrasting in favour of Berlioz if we compare his solitude, his unceasing pain and “unspeakable weariness” to “the spectacle of Wagner, wrapped in silk and furs, surrounded by flattery and luxury, pouring unction upon his own soul.”
The artistic temperament and the reformatory or uplift-urge are antipodal. Those who possess the latter often write their lives. They are sometimes instructive, rarely interesting; as an example of this class, I select the Autobiography of Harriet Martineau who, after Mary Wollstonecraft, was the first doughty champion of “Rights of Women.” Florence Nightingale said of her that she was born to be a destroyer of slavery. It is an important historical document of social evolution in England, and it serves as the perfect example of what an autobiography should be, and should not be. In twelve pages appended to the two fat volumes, the author makes an estimate of herself and of her work which is quite ideal, but the descriptions of her nonsensical and childish recollections scattered through the first volume are fatiguing, and pages of irrelevant, inconsequent matter spoil the second. Withal, the work is interesting and will always remain so because of the brilliant thumb sketches it contains of famous persons, such as Margaret Fuller, Carlyle, Coleridge, Malthus, Macaulay and dozens of others; and because of the light it throws on what has come to be called psychotherapy.
When Miss Martineau was approaching what Rose Macaulay calls the dangerous age, she experienced a serious nervous breakdown. She found plenty of doctors, apparently, to tell her she would not recover. One meets them in literature so often and so rarely in the flesh! She contracted the opium habit and to cure that she consulted a mesmerist. He cured the habit and the disease, and she lived out the psalmist’s allotment. An everyday occurrence now, it created a great stir in England two generations ago.
Men and women who write their autobiographies are as a rule prompted to such achievements by considerations other than the desire to leave a legacy to the world or to attain immortality; some do it to clear up their own problems; others do it to facilitate or effect reform; a few like Benjamin Franklin do it altruistically.