Her most extraordinary gift was her power to feel the rôle she had to play in order to win hearts; and the diversity of her accomplishments made such conquest easy for her. She won hearts, and she lost hearts, but when we turn the last pages of the book, we have only admiration for the Lady who inspired Nelson, and carried the renown of her country beyond its confines at a time when international affairs were nearly as muddled as they are a hundred years after her death.
The Divine Lady is the kind of biography which makes one care more for fiction—and the sort of fiction which makes one wonder why novelists do not write more about historical characters whose lives and personalities often surpass anything that imagination could dictate.
Miss Marjorie Strachey has written the latest word in the line of fictional biography: The Nightingale; A Life of Chopin. She has blended the facts of his life with the romance of fiction. By a series of sketches, of fugitive evocations, she has added to the permanency of Chopin as a man, and especially as an artist. She has made his genius permeate his actions, and she has endowed him with the dream-qualities of poetry and the realised qualities of practical life. Chopin is no longer an unapproachable genius; he is life itself seen through the veil of romance.
Miss Strachey has not done for her hero what E. Barrington did for Lady Hamilton; she has not called attention to his “amours,” not even the one with George Sand; her task lay, not in giving us the emotional understanding of the musician, but in creating a true portrait of him. This she did by interweaving his correspondence with his conversations; his friends with his surroundings. They all form part of the background on which he shines all the more brilliantly that it is never exaggerated, and his life was enough of a romance to impart to the biography its qualities of ethereal dream without addition or distortion of facts on the part of the biographer.
The Nightingale is more to be praised for what it does not say than for what it says. It shows restraint, dignity and poise, which are the accompaniment necessary to a biography of Chopin.
XV
MISCELLANEOUS
Everywhere, the Memoirs of an Explorer, by A. Henry Savage Landor.
What the Butler Winked At, by Eric Horne.
The title of this book should be Everywhere, Everything, Everybody, by I. K. It-All. When Mr. Landor was two years old, he fell through the air twenty feet and landed on his head. His head swelled, and later he had epileptoid attacks. The latter forsook him, the former remained. If one were to estimate him from his last book, one would have to rate him the vainest author in the world, the world which still numbers Mr. Bok and Mr. Ford Madox Ford.
Explorer, painter, lecturer, inventor, writer—and supreme in all! There can be no doubt about it; he says it and calls witnesses from kings to savages, from queens to chorus girls, to prove it. Garibaldi caressed him, Marchand of Fashoda embraced him, Wilbur Wright envied and feared him, d’Annunzio acknowledged that his book on Tibet inspired Piu Che l’Amore, the Cuirassiers of Victor Emmanuel III presented arms when he went to call on the King, Pope Pius IX said to him: “You are my beloved son”—and we have no doubt that he was very proud of him—Roosevelt shouted “Thank God” when he saw him in the reception room of the White House, and Maude Adams confided to him her great ambition, which was, “like all American visitors, to be taken to lunch at the Cheshire Cheese.” There need be no further curiosity about the retirement from the stage of this gifted actress at the height of her career; her great ambition was realised. All London worth knowing went to see Landor’s paintings and stayed to praise them; he was the first man to enter Pekin in the Boxer outbreak and the last messenger to get through Antwerp in the Great War; and he alone knows all the secrets of Tibet and its monasteries. He is strong and brave. He walked a Scotch gillie “who passed as the greatest walker in the world” off his legs, while his own remained so fit that later he was able to dangle them over a precipice six thousand five hundred feet high. In his spare moments from painting, exploring, inventing, and orienting, he gave lessons in courage to the lions in Africa. He is the man who has “run all possible risks from nature and human beings,” and his motto has ever been “Death or no death, we plunge once more into the unknown.”