For the purposes of the bookseller, nothing could have been happier than the publication, within a few months after the death of Mr. Choate, of such a book as this promised to be. Throughout the country his name had been generally accounted the synonyme of all that was most original, mysterious, and fascinating, in the arts of the advocate and the scholar. Perhaps we have none of us ever known a man in regard to whom a greater degree of curiosity existed among his countrymen. Those who saw him every day never ventured to believe that they quite ever understood him, so various and so peculiar were the aspects he exhibited even here at home. Those who attempted to study him were as much perplexed as charmed. The avidity with which a cheap book, easily read, professing to give personal recollections of such a man, would be seized upon by the mass of reading people, was not overestimated.
It is not the purpose of this notice to discuss Mr. Choate,—his eloquence, his wit, his scholarship, or his personal characteristics. Our office is simply to examine the manner of Mr. Parker's performing what he set out to perform. Our business is with the book, not with the subject of it. And, in our judgment, the book is the very worst that could well be written on such a subject. It is done with bad taste, bad judgment, bad style, It is precisely the book to mortify and disgust Mr. Choate's admirers, and to fix more firmly than ever such unfavorable notions of him as may have existed in the minds of others.
Mr. Parker does not appear to have considered what he undertook, when he stepped so lightly into the position of the biographer of such a man. We will not dwell upon the fact, that a really just and discriminating account of him demanded, as it certainly did, much acuteness of perception and dexterity of delineation, together with a high degree of scholarship. What we are now specifying against the author is, that he took no care whatever to set any wise or modest bounds to his enterprise. He did not bear in mind how much had been said, as well as how little was known about Mr. Choate; what wonderfully loose and idle notions of him had got abroad; how the most essential and notable points of his character and genius had been so clumsily handled by flippant or careless critics, that the popular impression of him was, to a great degree, extravagant and absurd. Remembering all this, and properly respecting the subject in which he appears to have interested himself so ardently, Mr. Parker should have applied to his task a somewhat gentle hand; gratifying, if that must be done, the curiosity of his readers as far as he safely could, but refraining altogether from those aspects of Mr. Choate's mind and character which he must have known could not be intelligently discussed in a book so swiftly and lightly executed. No such notion seems to have occurred to him. He has rattled off his "Reminiscences" with a confidence which may be justly called indecent and impertinent. The result is what might have been expected. We have so many pages of voluble, superficial, and exceedingly tedious talk about Mr. Choate,—and that is the whole of it. For our own part, we have been not at all profited by the reading, and the little amusement it has afforded us was probably not exactly designed by the author.
We would fain be excused from the duty of remarking upon the merely literary character of the book, but that may not be. As we said before, the book is somewhere in the literature of the day, and its place must be ascertained. The following gems of rhetoric it will be useful, for that end, to notice:—"With me, as with every young man of a taste that way, he talked," etc.; "he was always booked up on all the fresh topics," etc.; "the sparkle and flash produced by a battle of brains"; "newspaper topics of erudition and magnificence"; "convulsive humor"; "severity sweetening all the courts through which he revolved"; "the maiden-mother,"—alluding to an unfortunate female witness who was a mother, though never married; "two names, chiefs at the bar, facile princeps"; not to forget an extraordinary quotation from the title, which the author says he found at the head of one of Mr. Choate's manuscript plans for daily study, in these words, "faciundo ad munus nuper impositum." Now it must really in justice be said that to write a biography of Mr. Choate in such a lingo as this is an insult to the subject. We believe we are fair with Mr. Parker's style. Indeed, where it is not relieved by such barbarisms as we have quoted, it purls along with a certain weak smartness which is inexpressibly tiresome.
A much more tolerable book, however, would be spoiled by such arrant egotism as our author displays on every page. We are never rid of Mr. Parker for a moment. Wherever Mr. Choate is visible, Mr. Parker is strutting by his side. He exhibits, indeed, all the intrusiveness of Boswell, without any of that honest, self-forgetting, simple-hearted admiration of his distinguished friend which makes Boswell positively respectable. A single illustration of this weakness is so apt that we quote it. "Mr. Choate said, 'Some one should write a History of the Ancient Orators. There is no book in all my library where I can find all there is extant about any ancient orator.' He earnestly advised the author to undertake it. In pursuance of the idea, an article on 'Hortensius' appeared in a Review as a beginning. He spoke with enthusiasm of the satisfaction it gave him; saying it was a new revelation to him, for he never knew Hortensius before."
Again, Mr. Parker is continually assuring us, in more or less direct terms, of the intimacy which existed between himself and Mr. Choate. In a matter of this sort, once telling is enough; and then it should be done with modesty, and so as simply to assure the reader of the genuineness of the reminiscences. All beyond that is vulgar. One more remark upon Mr. Parker's behavior as an author. He permits himself to speak of individuals of decided personal and public dignity with quite too much familiarity. This is, of course, nothing more than an offence against good taste. But it is so prevalent in his pages that we cannot omit it from anything like a summary of the faults which they display. And none of our young authors, actual or potential, can find anywhere else a more striking and salutary example of the harm which such a one can do to himself by indulging in this very unbecoming practice.
We have yet to notice Mr. Parker's book in respect to its success as an attempt at biography. We suppose he intended to draw the portrait of a man of wit, eloquence, and scholarship. He constantly assures us in terms that Mr. Choate was such a man; an assurance which certainly was not necessary to so extensive and brilliant a reputation. If he had stopped there, he would at least have done no harm. But the illustrations which he gives us are so very far from satisfactory, that, unless Mr. Choate's reputation in these particulars be surrendered, for which we are not quite prepared, it must be upon the ground that his biographer has failed entirely to appreciate him. That Mr. Choate was, for instance, a man of singularly keen and delicate wit, everybody knows. But we believe that any brother advocate who ever sat at the same courtroom table with him for three days, or any cultivated person who ever passed an evening in his company, was likely to hear from his lips, in that space of time, more real wit than Mr. Parker repeats in his whole book. A few old jokes of his, current in Court Street any time in the last twenty years, and some odd and extravagant expressions which Mr. Choate may have permitted himself to use in the courtroom to divert a sullen juror,—such turns of speech as he certainly never thought were witty, though they raised the desired laugh at the time,—to which he resorted only as a necessary, but to himself unpalatable part of the business of carrying the verdict, and which he of all men would desire to have forgotten,—make up pretty much the sum of Mr. Parker's illustrations in the matter of wit. One faculty which Mr. Choate possessed in a remarkable degree, that of ready, elegant, and telling quotation, of which many interesting instances will occur to every one, and which in the hands of an appreciative biographer would have furnished a topic of rare entertainment, Mr. Parker scarcely mentions. As he regards, or at any rate describes, Mr. Choate's oratory, it would seem to have consisted altogether in "unearthly screams," "jumping up and down," tangled hair, sweating brow, glaring eyes, etc., etc. Upon these things, which his discriminating admirers were glad to overlook as mere matters of temperament and constitution, and in spite of which they were charmed with his graceful and truly vigorous speech, his biographer loves to dwell. He has much to say of the length and complexity of the sentences, but nothing of the often exquisite elegance of their structure; much of the number and size of the words of which they consisted,—nothing of the extreme delicacy and dexterity of their use, the wonderful completeness with which they were made to express every particle of the orator's meaning. As to Mr. Choate's scholarship, we certainly learn nothing satisfactory from this unfortunate book. In the conversations which the author, clumsily, indeed, but, we are bound to believe, faithfully, details, we should expect to find something of the rich fruitage of a life-long cultivation in letters. But so poor a result does Mr. Parker show in this part of his work, that he drives us to the dilemma either of placing Mr. Choate in quite an unworthy rank as a scholar, or of concluding, that, in the case of these conversations, he bestowed upon his listener very little of any particular preciousness, or that what else was bestowed was not understood or remembered so as to be recorded.
We cannot dismiss this book without noticing the extremely unhappy treatment which the personal and professional character of Mr. Choate has received at the author's hands. That he should have introduced into it, as he has done, such stories, or jokes, or anecdotes, or whatever else they may be called, as the commonest good taste or good sense should have told him to exclude, we suppose ought in charity to be attributed to mere uncontrollable garrulity. But he has also completely missed some of the most obvious and familiar characteristics of Mr. Choate, and his description of others which he professes to have perceived he spoils by unseemly and unintelligent illustration. We have not the patience to follow him through this part of his performance. It is enough to say that none who knew Mr. Choate would ever recognize the portrait.
We regret extremely that Mr. Parker felt himself called upon to write and print his "Reminiscences." He has done himself no credit whatever; but that is comparatively a small matter. The book is in every way an injurious and indecorous one. And if he really respects the fame of the distinguished man whom he has attempted to describe, he must agree with us in the hope that his own work may be forgotten as soon as possible.
A History of the Whig Party. By R. Mc KINLEY ORMSBY. Boston: Crosby Nichols, & Co.