All biographies consist of prevarications and all autobiographies of fiction. That summing up of a mass of literature over which industrious students have ruined their eyes, held good until after the War, when things changed. Then Mr. Lytton Strachey, at one fell blow, and with one magnificent masterpiece, hurdled the old idols and established a new standard of deliberate accuracy in print. In his "Eminent Victorians" he set the pace for the host of those who have been stimulated by his good example, like Lady Margot Asquith.
Of the four Victorian respectable worthies Strachey has dissected as ruthlessly as the anatomist a post-mortem, his portrait of Florence Nightingale, the founder of the modern science and art of nursing, is most interesting because it provides data of the utmost value to the student of the endocrine basis of human personality. In the conventional two-volume biography of this superwoman, she is pictured as an intellectual saint, stepped from a stained glass window upon her wonderful visit to a clay-smeared earth. The biographer, presenting all the ins and outs of her body and soul as he has, makes her live before us with a fresh vitality that is startling.
The species of life Florence Nightingale lived, involving as it did struggle with a masculine world, and conquest of it, implies the existence in her of certain masculine traits and marks, for the normal feminine psyche is submissive rather than aggressive toward its environment, human and otherwise. Belonging to a family in the highest circles, it was upon the table d'hôte of her destiny that she should become a regulation debutante, careeristina, and successful wife and mother. Instead, she chose to question the whole routine of the life of her class, and in her diary she records her doubts and cravings, and her revolt against what is assumed by her family and friends to be the normal course of existence for her. The attitudes and questionings in these passages, the religious feeling displayed, are distinctly masculine. Most easily could the following, for instance, pass as having been written by a man: "I desire for a considerable time only to lead a life of obscurity and toil, for the purpose of allowing whatever I may have received of God to ripen, and turning it some day to the glory of His Name. Nowadays people are too much in a hurry both to produce and consume themselves. It is only in retirement, in silence, in meditation that are formed the men who are called to exercise an influence upon society." In a note-book she puts May 7, 1852, as the date upon which she was conscious of a call from God to be a saviour. Now the vast majority of women who have remained spinsters at 32, in spite of considerable personal attractions and high natural ability, are visited by waves of emotional fervor for a de-personalization of the self. But in the case of the subject, as Strachey has so well shown, the call was pursued with a self-willed, pitiless, unscrupulous determination, worthy of Satan himself upon the most ferocious evil bent. In its pursuit indeed she became what her latest biographer has called a "woman possessed by a Demon." All necessary, not alone because if she had been meek and mild she would have existed in futility, but because of the high percentage of the masculine endocrines in her composition. It is most regrettable that we have no statement of the findings of a gynecologic examination of her. That she was almost consciously masculine may be inferred not only from the way she bullied Lord Pannure and worked to death her dearest friend with the angelic temper, Sidney Herbert, who was so amiable that he could be driven by one who wrote: "I have done with being amiable. It is the mother of all mischief." She could also write, "I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took an excuse. Yes, I do see the difference now between me and other men. When a disaster happens, I act, and they make excuses."
Lytton Strachey has painted superbly all this in his essay. But for us his most significant passage is the following: "When old age actually came, something curious happened. Destiny, having waited patiently, played a queer trick upon Miss Nightingale. The benevolence and public spirit of that long life had only been equaled by its acerbity. Her virtue had dwelt in hardness, and she had poured forth her unstinted usefulness with a bitter smile upon her lips. And now the sacredness of years brought the proud woman her punishment. She was not to die as she had lived. The sting was to be taken out of her: she was to be made soft; she was to be reduced to compliance and complacency. The change came gradually, but at last it was unmistakable."
"There appeared a corresponding alteration in her physical mould. The thin, angular woman, with her haughty eye, and her acrid mouth, had vanished, and in her place was the rounded, bulky form of a fat old lady, smiling all day long. Then something else became visible. The brain which had been steeled at Scutari was, indeed, literally growing soft. Senility—an ever more and more amiable senility—descended."
We have here an absolutely typical pituitary history, with another case of pituitocentric natural ability. What happens when pituitary hyperfunction or superiority becomes underfunction or inferiority is precisely as Strachey has described so cleverly of the "ministering angel": the acrid, thin and keen degenerate every time into the amiable, fat and dull. Just as Napoleon was transformed by the mutations of his pituitary, so was the Saint with the Lamp. And in both instances the contrasting modifications, from one extreme of glandular function to the other, supply us with the clue to the secret hand of their inner being and becoming, which worked upon the twists and turns of circumstance about them as a sculptor upon clay.
The official biography by Sir Edward Cook contains three portraits, representing three different stages, which bear out the pituitocentric thesis of her personality and life history. One as she was at 25, and pictured by Mrs. Gaskell: "She is tall; very straight and willowy in figure; thick and shortish rich brown hair; very delicate complexion … perfect teeth … perfect grace and lovely appearance … she is so like a saint." The face is long and oval, of the post-pituitary kind. Then gradually the ante-pituitary gained an ascendency in the concert of her internal secretions, so coloring her life with its masculine tints, and altering her face as well as her disposition. The photograph of her taken when she was 38 shows a quadrangular outline, and all the acridity that impressed Strachey. The last picture of her, a water color drawing made in 1907, shows a round visaged old dame, who might be the peasant grandmother of two dozen descendants. Little patches of red over the cheek bones remind one of myxedema and indicate that toward the very end of her life her thyroid failed her as well as her pituitary. So that our biographer relates: "Then by Royal Command, the Order of Merit was brought to South Street, and there was a little ceremony of presentation. Sir Douglas Dawson, after a short speech, stepped forward and handed the order of the insignia to Miss Nightingale. Propped up by pillows, she dimly recognized that some compliment was being paid her. 'Too kind—too kind!' she murmured; and she was not ironical." In the days of pituitary and thyroid hyperfunction we may be sure she would have been caustically and penetratingly ironical.
THE EXPLANATION OF OSCAR WILDE
The case of Oscar Wilde, as one of the high tragedies of English Literature and Life, attracted the attention of the whole world in its heyday, and even today evokes controversy. As a literary figure and artist, the poet of the Portrait of Dorian Gray, and "De Profundis," belongs without a doubt to the immortals. As a convicted criminal, who served for two years at hard labor in Reading jail, and afterwards, a prey to chronic alcoholism, died in obscurity in Paris, he still remains a subject of whispered conversation in private, and his crime a taboo to the public, mentionable only at the risk of arousing the terrible odium sexicum of the prurient majority. Oscar Wilde was a homosexual of a certain type. In view of the previously laid down considerations concerning the endocrine genesis of homosexuality, how are we to explain him, and his natural history?
As with the other exemplars of genius examined we need here, too, to gain some insight into his "internal secretion heredity." His father, Sir William Wilde, was a surgeon. Photographs of him show the long and broad face of a pituito-adrenal centered individual, with a corresponding duplex incarnation in the face, the upper half strikingly spiritual, the lower curiously animal.