A Course in the Department of Biography
In this number and in a few successive numbers the MAGAZINE will present for the benefit of Alumni certain popular courses explained by the faculty members who give them and containing also a list of the books used in each course. Just what response the alumni will make to this experiment is of course problematical, and yet the idea is in the direction of "college after college"; it is another attempt to make'the alumni realize that the college does wish closer intellectual relations with its men after graduation. The professors who will present these courses do so at the request of the MAGAZINE and to them the editors wish to express their gratitude.
THE half-year course entitled Representative Menof the Middle Ages and of the Modern Era makes no attempt to portray any considerable number of the men who, in art, science, religion, philosophy, statecraft, the life of action, or the learned professions have been typical of the greatest achievements in such spheres of endeavor. For a really significant study of any truly representative character, under the given conditions of the college student's program, not less than two or three weeks are required. In upper class courses, therefore, we devote two, three, or even four weeks (three class meetings per week) to each man and we confine ourselves, of necessity, to five, six, or seven characters in one semester.
The characters are selected by reason, first, of their individual significance; their lives must be of some general or permanent interest either because they have achieved greatness or because, with capacities promising greatness, they somehow missed it. They are chosen, also, to give the student an opportunity to study several very different characters, to obtain a glimpse of very different ages and lands, and to become acquainted directly with several varieties of biographical literature.
We will begin with Saint Augustine. His career, the early part of which up to his conversion to Christianity is vividly described in his Confessions (Everyman's Library, No. 200), raises many interesting questions. Here are a few, on any three of which the student is asked to write.
(1) Trace as fully as you can, on the basis of the Confessions, Augustine's development through an eager and independent search for truth into a submissive acceptance of beliefs prescribed by an institution;
(2) estimate the part played in his life by his early studies, his association with Manicheeism, the influence of Ambrose of Milan, and the teachings of Neoplatonism; (3) make a study of the story of his conversion and of Augustine's own estimate of the importance of the event; (4) select twelve of the most striking sentences used by Augustine in describing his inner life.;
(5) illustrate from the Confessions his powers of observation; (6) what do you infer regarding his character from his relations with his mother, his mistress, his son, and his friends?
For interpretations that differ the student may turn to works on Augustine by Joseph McCabe, Louis Bertrand, and (recently published) Papini. But several portions of the Confessions should be read side by side with these Lives. (In the edition referred to such passages will be found on pages 21-26, 32-38, 46-59, 70, 74, 78-88, 91-93, 94-117, 159-172, 184-200.)
The conclusions reached by careful readers on such questions as are outlined above will certainly vary. The course does not aim at inculcating any one "correct" answer but at developing the student's capacity for independent thought, his ability to express his own conclusions cogently, and his willingness to revise them critically in the light of further evidence. The life of St. Augustine, traced through successive stages of his quest for a satisfying intellectual and moral position, is peculiarly suited to this purpose. At the same time, it brings before us vividly the character of the Roman Empire in its last years. Further, his teachings, which formed the basis for the structure of Catholic Christianity for a thousand years, involved two elements whose mutual opposition he could not see and these existed side by side in the Church, as they had in his mind, until in later centuries they came into open conflict. These two aspects of religion were mysticism and personal religion on the one hand, and organization, supported by systematic doctrine, on the other. When the conflict came, both sides claimed the support of his writings!
Turning to the Renaissance in Italy we confront the enigmatic genius of Leonardo da Vinci, whose versatility is suggested when it is related that he was artist, engineer, mathematician, poet, musician, student of the mechanics of flight, and architect. He reflects the multitudinous interests of his age. In Merejkowski's Romance of Leonardo (Modern Library, No. 138) he is portrayed against the colorful background of Milan, Florence, Rome, and France under the Sforzas, the Borgias, and the Medicis. This "historical romance" (a form of biography in which known facts are illumined by the author's imaginative reconstruction of scenes and personalities) can be supplemented by the study of Leonardo's Notebooks (edited by McCurdy), and by the analysis and appreciation of the few great works of art for which Leonardo is chiefly famous. If the reader is brave, and already acquainted with the age and its characters, he may turn to that remarkable prose-poem, as it may fairly be called, which Rachel Annand Taylor has written under the title Leonardo the Florentine. The last section of this long and important book, dealing with the personality of the artist, is a searching piece of work. This volume contains a good bibliography which will indicate other literature on the man and the age.
Questions which will compel the reader to follow Leonardo's career carefully may be worded thus: What accounts for Leonardo's failure to complete so many of his projects? Was it his critical sensitiveness that led him to despair of carrying out to perfection his own exalted ideals? Was it his scientific curiosity that impeded his creative art? Was it that environmental conditions were not conducive to permanence of patronage? Or was it, as an almost contemporary commentator, Vasari, says, his "instability of character"?
Coming to the early nineteenth century, we now try to understand another renaissance and the heart of a poet. John Keats, born into a family of low station, small in stature to the point of humiliation, enmeshed while a mere boy in circumstances depressing in the extreme, but under the encouragement of Leigh Hunt and a few other discerning spirits turning from medicine to poetry, challenging the venom of the critics, conceiving a "vast idea" which his poetry was to embody in forms of pure beauty, living and dying tragically, and leaving us a few works that give him a place forever with the great—can he throw light for us on what it is that makes a poet, and on the relations between Beauty and Truth? His Letters (Buxton Forman edition, especially nos. 10, 19, 21, 23, 32, 35, 49, 59-69, 78, 85, 89, and all those written to Fanny Brawne) and the Lives by Hancock, Sir Sidney Colvin, and Amy Lowell (two monumental volumes) give us probably all the facts we can ever need to know. In J. Middleton Murry's Keats and Shakespeare we have a brilliant interpretation of the poet's genius. The poems themselves, though not autobiographical in the ordinary sense, are essential to an understanding of his inner development, and Hancock's book just referred to will assist the reader to find what the poems can reveal.
The life of devotion to science and its serviceable applications can be well studied in Pasteur. In him we see nineteenth-century science at its best—thoroughly empirical, resolute in face of great obstacles to investigation, reverent before mysteries that cannot be subjected to laboratory analysis, fruitful in application to human need. Vallery-Radot's Life of Pasteur is one of the great modern biographies. Its method is that of photographic detail, leaving little to the reader's imagination; it is as eulogistic as the work of a disciple and son-in-law might be expected to be; but it reveals a man of great nobility accomplishing in his own lifetime, in the face of innumerable obstacles, victories over microscopically minute enemies of mankind which increase greatly the security of human life. The relations between science and sentiment in the experience of this man of science are of great interest. There is also interest for the student in the question as to the merits of Vallery-Radot's type of portraiture as compared with the other kind of biography which may be compared with the artistry of the studio and its purposeful control of light and shade. Here are the questions on which students are asked to write in this case without choice. Estimate in turn (a) the family relationships of Pasteur; (b) his friendships with contemporaries; (c) his relations with older and with younger men; (and) his attitude to opponents; (e) the obstacles he met and his response; (f) his motives; (g) his satisfactions. List half a dozen of the most dramatic situations described or referred to in the Life. Trace the establishment of Pasteur's greatest contribution to applied science, carefully analysing the significance of the successive studies of crystallography, organic acids, silkworm diseases, fermentation of wine and beer, and hydrophobia.
There is still the man of social leadership to consider, raising the question of the relation between personal ideals and public service or statecraft. We can draw our examples from such men as Clemenceau, of the practical West, full of an energy that refuses to surrender to "vague ideals," and Gandhi, of the new East, whose achievements represent an idealism far removed from our Western glorification of organization, conquest, and self-assertion.
Clemenceau's stormy career as a radical journalist, long powerful in making and breaking governments, his exercise of the highest office in the gift of his people during the greatest crisis in their history, and his philosophy of life, formulated in his post-war retreat (or virtual exile) from public life, may be studied in his own volumes, France Facing Germany, The Grandeur andMisery of Victory, and In the Evening of My Thought; in Martet's Clemenceau (a record of conversations with his secretary on many matters); Hyndman's Clemenceau, the Man and his Time; in comments on the Peace Conference such as Lansing's The Big Four, Lansing and Seymour's What Really Happened at Paris, Huddleston's Peace Making at Paris, and in ContemporaryPortraits by Harris.
It is a strange contrast, symbolic of the irreducible differences between East and West, that confronts us when, fresh from a study of Clemenceau and the Western theatre of nationalistic development and diplomatic intrigue, determined by economic rivalries, we turn to Mahatma Gandhi and review his experiments in the use of "soul-force," his life of self-abnegation, his ideal of non-violence, his amazing personal influence in a and where millions are demanding freedom from Western dominance.
Difficult to obtain outside of India, Gandhi's twovolume autobiography entitled The Story of My Experiments with Truth, is of great value and interest. Romain Rolland's Mahatma Gandhi sympathetically tells the story in brief compass and is used by the class as the basis of the reading. Mahatma Gandhi's Ideas, by C. F. Andrews, is an interpretation of the saint's convictions by an Englishman who (as a disciple for many years) has come to be a close friend of the Mahatma. The use of this book has especial interest for those students who heard Mr. Andrews on his four-day visit to Dartmouth last spring. Another visitor who came especially to help interpret Gandhi was Edward Thompson, lecturer in Bengali at Oxford University, who has just spent a year teaching at Yassar College. Recent periodical literature and a volume composed of editorials written by Gandhi in his paper YoungIndia gave further insight into his mind and his movement.
To gather together the fruits of this course of reading, the student should face some such test as this: Prepare a list of questions the answers to which would, in your opinion, give a comprehensive account of a personality now known to us only through the testimony of others. List in order of their value such sources of information as you might expect to draw upon in answering these questions.
Professor of Biography
