The merit of Madame Récamier and Her Friends is founded in the soundness of its conception and the brevity of the narrative. There is repetition neither of words nor of effects. Few expressions could be deleted without taking something from the story. It neither offers suggestions nor makes startling discoveries regarding Madame Récamier. To write of Madame Récamier in her own spirit and in that of her time (which she was so influential in moulding) requires more graciousness than M. Herriot gives; it needs less matter-of-fact handling, and it should be softened by a great deal of poetry. Others have so described her and the pictures that they made reveal her idealistically. M. Herriot deals more with the matter than with the spirit, and what his biography lacks in poetry it makes up in reality.
The end of the book, which tells in detail of the death of Chateaubriand, is well rendered. Though filled with emotion, it does not overflow. Madame Récamier had moved into his apartment that she might be near him at the end. Blind and old, she showed herself equal to the demand that was made on her strength and courage; “she was constantly at the bedside of the dying man who seemed to be dragged for some time out of his drowsiness by the beautiful days of June. He was always silent. He could speak no longer; Madame Récamier could see no longer.”
On the day of his death, “every time Madame Récamier, overwhelmed with sadness, left the room, he followed her with his eyes, without calling to her, but with a look of anguish in which was painted the fear of never seeing her again. She was there at the last minute.”
Her death is related with the same simplicity, but the narrative has a touch of the grandiose. M. Herriot was wisely counselled to undertake the biography of Madame Récamier, and his wisdom was to hear and obey.
Rebekah Kohut, a Hungarian Jewess who has lived all her life in America and who has been closely identified with the Jewish intelligentsia of this country, believes that she has a story to tell, and that she should chronicle the emergence of the American Jewess into the communal life of the country. She has a story; it is an interesting one and she tells it convincingly. My Portion is the expression of a personality that has had firm contacts with varied currents of a full and active life. The daughter of a rabbi of liberal views and the wife of another, a distinguished scholar, Mrs. Kohut is widely known to her co-religionists as a woman of heart and determination.
Her story is not a conscious attempt to analyse, dissect, propound, or in any way enlarge upon the “inner workings” of the intellectual and emotional elements that go to make the individual. A sentence at the end of the book conveys the spirit of the writing: “As I turn the leaves of the past, I find myself growing as interested as though some one in a book, not myself, were the active participant.” Marie Bashkirtseff would hardly have said that. She would have been interested because it was herself. Mrs. Dorr would not have said it, and her reason would have been much the same, though she would have expressed it differently. Mrs. Kohut’s book is a self-forgetting autobiography.
Her account of her husband’s life is also the revelation of a personality. This man lives before us, both he and his work, the Aruch Completum. Of this Mrs. Kohut writes:
“... when I looked forward to the problems of married life, I counted my future charges as a husband and eight children. Soon I learned I should have counted them as a husband, the Aruch Completum, and eight other children. The oldest daughter called the Aruch her oldest brother, and pretended to be jealous of it. Certainly it received all the consideration and preference of the traditional first-born. The rest of us at certain times felt our secondary importance.”
And Mrs. Kohut was born amid the exactions of scholarship—this was no amateur’s point of view!