Two Heroes and a King
THE craze for biography makes strange bedfellows, and causes books to be reviewed together that have almost nothing hi common, save that they are biographies. Fortunately the fashion for white-washing villains and finding holes in heroes, set by the imitators of the late Lytton Strachey, i4 bCgilMillg to go out, and all three of the volumes before us are honest and serious attempts to present the picture of a num. Miss Emma M. Denkinger is the author most inclined to hero- worship, but then her subject is Sidney and it is probably difficult not to be carried away by Sidney after a year or two spent in investigating his life. Miss Detdcinger sees, quite rightly, that his actual accomplishment was small, His " reputation did not hang on his power as a scholar or soldier, nor yet as a statesman - . . Nor—though he left behind him the loveliest of sonnets, and composed the first great romantic talc in the language—was his glory in literature." His fame, during his lifetime and since has depended on a certain shining quality of soul which it is as difficult to define as impossible to deny. This quality the authoress brings out clearly, and her contention that he had to thank the Queen for it is probably sound, for Elizabeth certainly set herself to try his patience and curb his " mounting Dudley pride."
The book is a good one, and would be better if the authoress could have restrained the over-luxuriance of her style. Whole passages arc written in a kind of pseudo-Elizabethan, stiff with Shakespearean tags ; but to some this may prove the book's attraction. Miss Denkinger is a scholar—she has been Professor of English Literature in an American University —and it is, therefore, the more regrettable that she has given no list of her authorities, and that there is nothing to indicate the provenance of the majority of her plates. In one of her plates she has gone badly astray. " The Lady Penelope Rich who was Stella" (reproduced opposite p.178) is, unfortunately, dressed in the costume of about 1635. Penelope, Lady Rich (for that is the correct form) died in 1607 I The dust-cover is in the worst style of cheap magazine illustration, which is a pity, for it may divert the sensitive from a book well worth reading.
Mr. Norwood Young's style is the antithesis of Miss Den- kinger's, and his temperament is no less different. He is no hero-worshipper, and although his work is quite free from irony and carping criticism, he has no hesitation in pointing out' Washington's failures as a general as well as his (very few) departures from the highest standards of personal rectitude. The figure that finally emerges is all the greater for his bio- grapher's frankness. Washington's pm-eminence was essen- tially one of charaeterone is inevitably reminded of the position occupied since the lust War by Hindenburg—and it was his character, even, more than the incompetence of the English generals, which brought the War of Independence to a successful issue. " It is doubtful," says Mr. Young, " whether France would have sent an army to America but for the confidence felt in Washington's integrity and honour. The French even proposed to send their financial succour to him personally," but Franklin assured them that Congress would never allow it. Washington's constancy in defeat and his unshakable faith in the righteousness. of his cause provided the backbone of American resistance. Such a man has every right to the proud title of the Father of his Country. The book is well documented, and the reader must be profoundly grateful for the unusual mercy of maps. It would be impossible to make a hero out of King William IV, but he emerges from Miss Thompson's study as a bluff, engaging figure, with a sailor's vigour of language and a sailor's good humour. Unfortunately, so much of his life was passed in private retirement that the authoress would have had little to write about if she had not boldly decided on a Life and Times of the old-fashioned kind. It is a large canvas crowded with picturesque figures, and Miss Thompson has sketched them in with a skilful hand. In her bibliography she has hit on the admirable notion of distinguishing her authorities, especially memoirs, by their political bias. Her summing up is a model
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