CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS JR. 1835-1915: THE PATRICIAN AT BAY.

Edward Chase Kirkland '16. Cambridge,Mass.: The Harvard University Press,1965. 220 pp. plus notes and index. $5.95.

The other day at a Modern Language Association meeting in Chicago someone deplored the fact that one Edward Kirkland had admitted in the first line of his biography of Charles Francis Adams Jr. that he admired his subject. The remark was made with such a spinsterish air of virtue unassailable that one wished that Jurgen had somehow found occasion to "deal fairly" with the speaker. How in the name of history should we expect that any historian whose productive burrowings in American economic history of the late 19th Century have revealed to him the facts of life might escape admiration for yet another able and ornery Adams who left his mark upon that history? Why should a historian-biographer deny what motivates his arduous and skillful labors? This admiration which Professor Kirkland avows is not permitted to suggest, however, that he has found a scion of that family cuddlesome.

Carlyle remarks in his Essay on Burns that the biographer must tell us of his subject "what and how produced was the effect of society on him; what and how produced was his effect on society." This Professor Kirkland has undertaken to do for a complicated man and a dynamic society. It is too pat and simple to say that he lets his subject tell his own biography merely by quoting him copiously. He does so quote him, but has taken infinite care for the selection and the intellectual tact of placement of those self-revelations in the scene.

It is a spare performance with no fat on it. In fact, a man as sparsely informed about the detailed history of those items as this reviewer confesses himself to be can occasionally miss an important allusion. Historians will be rewarded, however, by the documentation and scrupulous historicity without diffusion. But those and others of us are even more indebted to Professor Kirkland for the judgment and skill with which he focuses light on one big fact of that history wherein he has discerned something to excite the human admiration of an old hand at history - the vivid and working personality of Charles Francis Adams Jr.1835-1915: The Patrician at Bay.

Professor of Biography